“‘I wish the world wasn’t the way it is and that things didn’t have to happen to brothers.’

“‘I do, too,’ Thomas Hudson said. ‘You’re an awfully good boy, Tommy. But please know I would have stopped this long ago except that I know that if David catches this fish he’ll have something inside him for all his life and it will make everything else easier.'” — from “Islands in the Stream,” by Ernest Hemingway

In “Islands in the Stream,” the protagonist, Thomas Hudson, has married, fathered children with, and divorced two women, and lives comfortably alone on a Bahamian island.

But, in the opening chapters, Hudson revels in the disruptions caused by a summer visit from all three of his sons — a rare pleasure, because he usually can’t get the two mothers on the same schedule.

In my favorite scene, Hudson takes all three of his boys deep-sea fishing and his middle son, Davy, hooks a big swordfish. Davy sweats and struggles for hours in the chair on the stern of the boat, pressing his bare feet against the gunwale until they blister and fighting at the rod until his palms bleed.

Watching their brother abused by the fish, Hudson’s other sons ask their father to let someone else take over and bring the animal in. At other points, Hudson himself considers taking the fish, hating to see his son suffer.

But he knows he can’t.

“I know what I was gambling for,” Hudson tells his friend the morning after the fish fight. “It wasn’t a fish, either.”

I don’t think Hemingway ever speaks directly of fatherhood or what it means to be a son in that chapter or anywhere else in “Islands in the Stream”. Still, he says so much more about those subjects than anyone else ever could by telling a story every father and son has lived, even if they’ve never fished.

I know that passage with the big fish affects me — makes me weep every time I read it — as my father’s son and as father to a son, but I struggle to describe exactly why. I’ve typed and deleted four different paragraphs trying to explain, but none of them seemed exactly right.

See, a part of me wants to save my son from any kind of pain, the way Hudson debates pulling his son off the fish and giving the animal to his older boy or to one of the other men on the boat. When my son’s up at bat, striking out after striking out, or he misses that bouncing grounder in center field and his teammate’s ridicule comes hollering out of left field, I want to pull him in and tell him it’s OK and to hell with those other boys.

But another, equal part of me knows what good that pain could do him, what just being able to say he’d fought would mean to him someday after his wounds have healed. That, even if he wanted to go in that moment, he’d resent me someday for taking away his chance to fight.

My mom did that to me when I was a young boy.

I was a big Jean-Claude Van Damme fan, and I forced her to sign me up for a karate class when I was 7 or 8 or so. For some reason, when we got to the class and I learned I had to do it barefoot, I chickened out. I begged her to take me home. And she did, and I feel like I’m something less because of it.

I’ve had plenty of fights since then, like the first time I got up on stage to sing and play with my band or the first time I gave a speech or the handful of real fistfights I had as a boy and young man. But I feel robbed of that one fight in that karate class.

Mom thought she did me a favor, and she pushed in plenty of other ways over the years. I wouldn’t be a newspaper columnist without her pushing.

But I never had the chance to fight that one fight, and it still troubles me three decades later.

Maybe that’s a universal thing, affecting mothers and daughters and mothers and sons, too.

But it feels like a father-son thing.

Fathers know sons have to fight, because fighting — win or lose — somehow makes everything easier in the long run.

Happy Father’s Day.

Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-354-3112 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.