Father’s Day is Sunday, followed by summer solstice on Wednesday.

Having a dad in your life is a bit like having summer at hand. You settle into a certain groove, and you think they’re going to be around forever. They will not.

Somehow, just a few weeks past the lingering clenches of winter/spring (aka “sprinter”), I seem to have forgotten the transience of summer and those months I pined for sun and warmth to align. Forgotten how the days stubbornly refused to lengthen, and then, BAM, all at once, they got plenty long.

Almost too long: I am tired of waking up at 5:15 a.m., but I usually go ahead and get up. They say the early bird gets the worm, but perhaps the bird would prefer to sleep in and has no choice in the matter. (I know the worm doesn’t).

It feels like summer could go on forever. It will not. After a few weeks of warmth and lingering sunshine, summer solstice pops by for a quick hello, and like that, the days are going to get shorter again. It’s like a balloon slowly deflating.

But I was talking about dads, wasn’t I? Like I tend to do with summer, I thought my dad would be around forever.

My dad was my earliest role model. I remember as a young boy emulating his confident, purposeful gait out in public. I remember his great laugh. He loved puns and had a dry wit. He was an adventurous soul tempered by responsibility and family.

At the University of Miami, where my parents met, he’d been a history major with a minor in Spanish. After working in the bookstore all year, he took one summer to bum around the Caribbean, living on canned ham and sleeping on park benches — his destinations included Cuba, just prior to Fidel Castro taking power.

How wide and mysterious the world must have seemed then, its details not just a few clicks away.

He had been obsessed with the ocean from a young age in landlocked Iowa. He joined the Navy at 17. He never got to set foot on a ship in the Navy, after which he attended college on the GI Bill. He’d picked Miami because he was interested in learning to scuba dive in its clear, warm waters after reading about diving in National Geographic.

On their many days off, he and his firefighter friends built houses and did other construction work. He and his best friend dived off Miami Beach for sand dollars which said friend sold to tourist traps and shell shops after bleaching.

When he wasn’t reading a paperback on the couch, my dad was usually outside and active. He ran the first-ever Orange Bowl Marathon in 1978 and continued to run it annually for a total of 12 years. I remember running with him for the first time as a fairly little boy, and when we got home, his telling my mom how well I’d done keeping up. Oh, so that’s what pride feels like.

Never did sunscreen enter into the above activities. Dad got the sunscreen memo late, in his 50s. He became a regular at the dermatologist, where he was zapped frequently with liquid nitrogen to freeze off growths. In 1994, a surgery left him with a major scar on the left side of his neck. In 2003, he had surgery to remove his left ear.

From his early 60s, his handsome face drooped on one side. Bell’s palsy was the initial diagnosis, but it never got better, and cancer was believed to be the culprit.

His smile broken, he became less happy, more sullen and quiet. Phone calls were awkward and short. But he and my mom grew closer. In early 2010, I visited him for the last time. He put his arm around my mom and told me how she’d taken care of him. He died later that year at 76.

At his memorial service at Charles Deering Estate on Biscayne Bay, I threw a scoop of his ashes toward the water and hoped the wind didn’t land any on me. When it was my turn to speak to the assembled family and friends, I told them through tears how I appreciated he never once told me boys don’t cry.

It’s poetic and a shame that what he loved so much, being active in the sunshine, is what killed him. It was perpetual summer in Miami, and we had suntan oil in our beach bag. At least now I apply sunblock regularly — an inadvertent lesson I got from my dad.

After he died, I had a dream about him. All I remember is that something in it made him laugh. It was his distinct laugh, which woke me up. I sat up breathless and crying.

It was wonderful, and devastating, to hear him laugh again.

And as the days shorten and the light grows longer, I know I’m going to miss summer like I miss my dad’s laugh.

At least summer will return.