The day my dad really was No. 1

Some weeks after mailing my letter, I was sitting at our dining-room table when the phone rang. My dad moved to answer it, wincing with each step. Something in his voice caught my attention. His face wore an expression of confusion, skepticism, and something else I hadn't seen in weeks: hope.

After asking the person on the end a slew of questions, he hung up the phone and looked at my beaming face.

"What did you do?" he asked.

I showed him the letters I had hidden away from the Father of the Year committee notifying me that he was a semifinalist and then a finalist.

Now he was a winner. For the first time in his life, he was a winner.

His mother, my Nana, was as proud as only a mother could be. She knew he didn't own a suit, so she pulled $100 from a teapot she kept in her china cabinet and pressed it into his hands as tears slipped down her cheeks. She wanted her son to shine when he accepted his award before Hollywood's stars.

It was a time for firsts. Our first plane ride, our first time in a limousine. But when we arrived at New York City's Sheraton Center Hotel, nothing could have prepared us for our first press conference. My father wrapped a protective arm around my mother and me as a wall of bulbs flashed and cameras rolled. He smiled graciously throughout, though the straight-back hotel chair must have been torture against his already-pained back.

Then the doors to the room were thrown open, and we were led to a ballroom filled with more than 1,500 people, cheering as we made our way to the dais. We weren't expecting this. An award, a small ceremony, perhaps lunch, but this....

We were sitting alongside the likes of Bert Parks, Sam Levinson, and Robert Merrill - men who were receiving awards for their philanthropic efforts. My father was receiving an award simply because he was a dad.

When it was his turn to speak, my father limped to the microphone and talked about his family. A gruff man, he spoke eloquently of the commitment between a father and his children. About getting back more than he could ever give, though he gave his all. And for the first time in my young life, I heard his voice catch and then break when he said, "You have to know that each loves the other. You have to trust in that."

As we sat in that crowded ballroom with New York's glitterati applauding, my father wondered howhe, instead of one of a million other men who worked so hard and loved their families beyond all else, could be America's Father of the Year.

The answer was simple. It was because I believed my father wasn't like millions of other fathers; I knew him to be one in a million.

It wasn't a Cadillac, but it would do.

• P. Amy MacKinnon, a former congressional aide, is working on her first book.

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