If you haven’t noticed by now, what with all the advertisements and commercials, Father’s Day coming up Sunday, and if you’re a dad, I hope you get what you deserve.

I know what you’re thinking, and no, I’m just talking about a bit of recognition or appreciation or at least some kind of credit. For better or worse, fathering can be challenging, confusing, and certainly an exhilarating job, and you’ve earned this one day to feel extra special.

Some will treat their father to a big meal out or give him a necktie or socks. Some of us – myself included – will post an old photo of Dad on Facebook. Whatever it is, just try not to forget to do something nice for him, because you will never really know the sacrifices, big and small, he has had to make for your sake.

Like most guys I know, I’ve experienced fatherhood both ways. Being a father and having a father. When you’re little, your father sets the standard, and after you’re grown up, you might use your father as a template. But after that, you’re on your own, and you have to sort out how to do it right.

Take my father, the only one I ever had. He was a veteran of World War II, but although he spent most of his enlistment in Taft, California and Marfa, Texas, he didn’t let that stop him from regaling us kids with war stories he made up. He ‘fessed up later, but by that time, it didn’t really matter because we remembered having fun listening to his heroic accounts, all acted out in the living room.

So yeah, some dads aren’t the perfect person, always upright and honest and story-book, but at the same time, they get the job done of raising their kids somehow without an instruction book.

Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I learned to relate just about everything in my life with something on TV. And that was when there were only three channels, more or less.

Although my dad was “my” dad, I remember thinking the best fathers were on TV when I was a kid. There was Ward Cleaver and Ben Cartwright, and Steve Douglas and Rob Petrie. Weirdly, I must admit the best TV fatherly advice was from Lucas McCain, the dad in “The Rifleman.”

And, of course, Sheriff Andy Taylor. But my dad wasn’t Andy, and I sure as heck wasn’t Opie.

Those TV dads had common sense and were understanding and patient (thanks to the time and trouble the writers of those shows put into it), making me a little envious. But in a way, they made me appreciate my own dad because they weren’t living inside our house with my mother and brothers and sisters.

Those TV fathers didn’t give me the love of words, either, or teach me the power of conversation.

They didn’t read me passages from “The Iliad” at bedtime like my father did or act out scenes from Macbeth like my father liked to do.

They didn’t whip out the 8mm movie camera every Christmas morning and every one of our birthdays like our daddy did. Only one’s own father – and feel free to insert step-father, father-in-law, surrogate father or whatever here – can do these things.

But on the other hand, I imagine, for a great many of us, there were times when things weren’t all rosy with our dads. Times like, for instance, ahem  …  puberty, when Mom and Dad both seem a little weird, and I know that now because I probably seemed a little weird to my own kids during those years.

For all the good times and bad times, though, our fathers do the best they know how to do, and that’s what makes them a million times more real than those TV dads who have a scriptwriter to be the way they are.

If you’ve lost your dad, you know how short life seems. I think of my father when certain things remind me of something he said or did. For instance, when I first became a father and had to deal with discipline. I had to wing it. My father wasn’t so much a disciplinarian as a parliamentarian. If you did everything within Robert’s Rules of Order, you were OK.

My dad is no longer around, but I find myself thinking about him, his ways, and his corny expressions more than ever. That stuff stays deep inside and pops up unexpectedly, probably at those moments when we need it.

So whatever the case may be, this Sunday, don’t forget to tell your dad you love him or forgive him or thank him. Because I’m sure, he’s doing the best he knows how to do.

John Larson, El Defensor Chieftain