After bringing a dog home for my kids, I realized we can never escape being like our parents even if we try

• My room in my parents' home faced the entrance, and I heard my dad come in after work every day.
• I didn't notice I had become like him until one day, I whistled for my family's dog decades later.

They call them office parks, but most of the places I worked were more office than park.

So when COVID-19 hit the US in March 2020, I was sequestered in my suburban home office and marveled at what was outside my window: Tall trees filled with birds, scampering deer, and squirrels scrambling to find their treasures.

In the morning, the sounds of the birds were pleasantly deafening. I wondered why the birds sang at sunrise, and with some half-brained internet research, I learned that in the morning, the birds sing as a way to tell their family and friends that they are alive. They'd made it through the perilous night.

If I listened closely, I could hear them responding to each other: "I'm OK, you OK?" "I'm OK."

The birds learn the songs in the nest while cuddling up to their parents and siblings. It wasn't something they heard with their ears but with their hearts.

I heard my dad every day after work

For the first 18 years of my life, I was in the small bedroom facing the front of my parent's house. It was also closest to the front door. So at night, I could hear my dad pulling in at 11:00 p.m. after closing the drugstore. I recognized the rattle of his keys as he tried to unlock the door while carrying a bag of items my mother had asked him to bring home.

At the time, it was background noise, but now, those sounds are the soundtrack to thousands of nights lying awake in that bed in that room.

I didn't know what I'd learned all those nights until some 20 years later when I had a family of my own, and I brought home our first dog. I did it just like my dad, in my pocket, surprising the kids with this little fur ball. At night I would go outside and let the dog do her business. And when it got too cold, or I grew too tired, I would whistle for the little mutt to come in.

My whistle was my dad's

On that first night, I whistled a tune that had no name. No one else in the world would recognize it, even my dad. It was a sound that was as familiar to me as the sound of my own breathing, yet it was anonymous.

I stood for a moment, trying to place it. For days I would go outside at night and whistle this tune that flew out from between my lips, but I didn't know where I'd learned it.

And then I realized it was my father's whistle, a sound he made when he was calling in our dog, Charlie. It was a tune I'd heard in my sleep over those thousands of nights. In those days, he probably did it with a cigarette in his mouth and a watch on his wrist, while I do it plugged into my earbuds while working through the online crossword puzzle.

A consistent refrain in the waning episodes of "Succession" is that the children just want someone to tell them: "You're just like your father." Whether your father is Ward Cleaver or Logan Roy, their image looms.

And we spend most of our youth running from it.

In our 20s and 30s, we don't want to be like them or to look too much like them because they are old and we are independent. And then, when we reach our 40s with kids and a house of our own, we go outside to let the dog in and realize their handprint is on us, just like the morning birdsong.

And now I stand here in my 50s in the cold driveway, wondering if anyone in my house is hearing my whistle. The commercials for Progressive Insurance try to teach a series of witless adults that we can un-become our parents, yet I know there are things we can't unlearn.

There are songs inscribed on our hearts that we don't even know are there.