My father died in 1991. He was 77 and had been diagnosed with a form of Alzheimer’s about six months earlier, although the doctor suspected that, since Dad was an intelligent man, he had been masking the symptoms for a long time. The sad thing of the ailment is the peeling away of the subject’s past and personality. I had been living in Los Angeles for about seven years when my father passed away, so I had not witnessed his decline. My memories of him are thus not filtered through the stain of the disease.
I don’t want to come across as all glum and gloomy, however. Especially since I feel fortunate in knowing what a special man my father was.
My dad was a tall man, 6′ 4″ I believe. To any small child of course, all fathers are tall. But when I was still small enough to be swung up on his shoulders, it was thrilling to be so high. He was also quite the walker. He walked to work most days when we lived in Jackson, Michigan (it was a distance of about two or three miles, I think). He would arrive home, even in winter, having had some good exercise.
I loved spending time with him, and so when he’d go for a walk on weekends, I sometimes went with him. It always amused me to try to keep up with him as he strode along. I even tried to match the length of his stride, pace for pace — which resulted in me having a long loping walk which my mother called my “lumberjack stride.”
There were other ways of spending time with him, though. He often was working in the basement, making things. These mysterious activities intrigued me and so I would go down the concrete stairs. It was in this place where I learned how to handle tools. He taught me how to use a hammer and a hand-saw. He even taught me how to hold boards against the guide for his power saw. I was not allowed to operate that saw unsupervised, but he taught me the basics of the machine. It never occured to me that this was unusual, for never once did he say anything like “Girls don’t do this.” Of course, this oddity continued in that it was my father who taught me how to thread a needle and hand sew.
That was my participation in his activities. But he also took an interest in my activities, certainly my artistic endeavors. Even though I had an allowance and so had the money for my art supplies, if I was with Dad when I was shopping for such, Dad often paid for my supplies. I remember always being a bit perplexed by that, for after all, wasn’t the allowance supposted to be for such things? Of course, I was not so foolish as to insist on paying for my own art supplies if he offered: a dollar not spent on art supplies was a dollar I could spend on books.
I think I never quite valued just how attentive Dad was, while he was alive. I had read my first Sherlock Holmes story in fourth grade (by chance starting with the last collection of stories, His Last Bow). I became so enamoured of Holmes that he bought me an abridged edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Then later, there “just appeared” a complete edition of Sherlock Holmes. A few years later, after I finally read The Hobbit, he bought the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings for me for Christmas.
All these things I took in stride growing up. That’s the way things were, wasn’t it? It wasn’t until I was in college and then out in the world on my own that I came to realize how blessed I and my siblings were to have such an attentive father.
Bocce ball games on our lawn (or in some road-side park on a picnic), being taken sledding or kite flying, taken camping. All those things were things Dad did with us.
But there are special memories, too.
One evening, the family decided to enact Peter and the Wolf. I think my father was the one who actually suggested it. We had a recording made by the New York Philharmonic with Leonard Bernstein narrating. My brother David made such a convincing wolf that he overloaded my usually logical brain (I was Peter). I froze, crouched on top the wooden table we were using as the tree. (Dad was the grandfather, my older sister Char was the bird, Mom was the cat and Joan, the doomed duck.) I felt so … ashamed at getting so caught in the story even though I knew it quite well, and that it was just my brother on his hands and knees snapping away. Looking back, that precious family evening would not have happened without Dad playing along.
Another memory …. Dad liked to drive. When we travelled across country, if we had “made good time,” my father liked to get off the main highway and do a bit of exploring. I don’t think my father ever met a dirt road he didn’t like. He also had a knack for finding dead ends – to such a degree that we called them “Daddy’s Dead Ends.” One special dirt road led through farm land, and clouds and clouds of small yellow butterflies flew up all around us for what seemed like several miles. On and on it went … and ended in the yard of a farmhouse. I always considered it the Ultimate Daddy’s Dead End.
His professional specialty was power station design, and so when we were out and about, substations on the power grids had a fascination for him. To me, they were squads of short ugly towers, strangely shaped, clustered behind chain link fences, with power lines leading in and out. But to my father, they sang some mysterious song. Their configurations and order meant something to him. The contrast between his fascination and my terrible disinterest became a family joke. Whatever it was that attracted him in those structures I could not (still cannot) see. But I understood that it did mean something to him.
He gave his children the gift of understanding that even adults needed to play and that there was nothing to apologize for in that need. He was not a man for discussing such things. He simply did them.
All these are precious memories. But perhaps my favorite is of my brother’s wedding reception, as dance music was played. My very tall father glided around the dance floor with my 5′ 4″ mother with wonderful ease and confidence – the picture of partners happy with each other and greatly comfortable and confident in their movements. They outshone the other dancers, sweeping by everyone with amazing grace. Yes, they even outshone my brother and his bride.
