For years now I’ve written stories about my father. Now, once again on this Father’s Day that is suddenly upon us, it falls upon me, the last father, to tell my splendid daughters to pay homage to their grandfather.

The full truth? I didn’t really know my father that well. I could see that he was very tall and imposing, and I was always very small and hidden from sight in the grass near him.

He met my teenage mother, young Veronica Conlon, daughter of “Big Jim,” the builder of Mississippi show boats, in a candy store in old St. Louis, and from that day on he held her arm until he went to sea, leaving her on the beach with eight crazy Irish kids waving goodbye.

There was Matt Jr., his oldest, who followed him into the Navy, survived Pearl Harbor, fought the bloody Pacific War and was buried in the sea in San Diego Harbor. He left her as well with fraternal twins Kermit and Ken, good soccer players and splendid fathers who looked like him. He left her to raise Jim the opera singer and house painter, and artist Eileen, who, despite crippling arthritis, became a published painter. They all lived together, fought together, loved one another in a big brick house.

Then suddenly, when I was 9, he was gone. I knew from the constant scary phone calls throughout those days and nights, from the visits from friends, family and shipmates, that he was gone. The “Old Man” left us all behind to weep and comfort one another when he met Jesus on a sidewalk in Holly Hills in front of the First District police station.

I watched him with loving boyish eyes as he would put on his white linen suit that resembled his beloved uniform and stand, after his retirement, with his political friends from City Hall who made him an engineer in charge of the old huge Post Office on Market Street in downtown St. Louis.

I learned from family and friends that he hated walking on dry ground away from his crew and the waves and guns of the old S.S. New Orleans, a heavy cruiser that fought World War I in the Atlantic. This was his real and sacred life.

That left me in saddle shoes and white socks held tightly by Veronica Conlon, the black-haired beauty who after that fortuitous candy store encounter married and forever held my father’s arm tightly at every Navy ball for 29 years.

And there he is, father of the Devine clan, the stern captain of the seas, the old man of five boys, sailors all, except for the littlest who joined the Air Force in the Korean War.

I remember with a few tears how we all stood respectfully when he came to the supper table each evening, to the night he died, still dressed in summer whites, still large and imposing as if he just came down from the bridge.

He left behind men who each became fathers to me, and the women they loved, new mothers. All are gone now to the “other side,” leaving this writer I’ve become to tell one last time, the stories, endless ballads, few truthful, some dressed in Navy whites, of my “Old Man.”

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.