(A tale of perception)
If, indeed, Shakespeare was right and “all the world’s a stage,” in the theater of my growing-up life my mother was the leading player, my father an extra. True to those 50’s times, Mom was in charge of the meals, the household, the religious education, the children, the relationships and the emotions. Daddy worked. As the one of us four kids most like my mother, the people person, I felt strongly bonded with her and not quite whole when we were apart. My dad worked six days a week, had meetings many nights and stayed out of the emotional life of the family. I regarded him as a benign, peripheral figure who had little influence on who I was or who I would become.
Or was he? This year on his March birthday, I got to thinking about my memories of me ‘n my dad. The list grew long. Here are a few.
I’m ten years old. Me and my dad are on an overnight outing to scout out the territory for the upcoming deer hunting season. We stay overnight in a small miner’s cabin with two iron frame cots and a little black wood-burning cook stove in the corner. It feels odd to be here with just my dad and I feel lonely as I fall off to sleep. The sunshine in the morning and the aroma of the best bacon ever sizzling in the iron skillet chase away the lonely feelings and after breakfast we set out to explore. We walk through the early fallen leaves for awhile when my dad stops and hands me the 22 pistol he’s been carrying (for varmits). I don’t ask and he doesn’t say what I’m to do with the gun, but he tells me to walk over that way, while he goes this way, and we will meet up over there. I set off alone carefully holding the gun (I know about the safety and stuff); the crunching leaves are loud in the silence of what now seems like a very big world. I walk along in fear, scared that I won’t find my dad again. Then, there he is, like he said.
I’m in my bed and my dad is playing his guitar, singing all our favorites to us kids. Ghost Riders in the Sky, Anne Boleyn (“with her head tucked underneath her arm”), that song about the Cannibal Maid, the sad, sad Whiffenpoof Song…
I’m 16 years old. I wake up out of a dead sleep and vomit on the floor. As I start to clean up the mess, my dad comes in to see if I’m all right.
I’m six years old; my dad teaches me to ski. I’m eight years old; my dad teaches me to fish. I’m fifteen years old; my dad teaches me to drive.
Clearly, my perception that my dad was a bit player in my life was skewed. True, he played a distant role in the overt emotional life of the family, but there are so many more facets of my person that I see in retrospect are the influence of time spent with him.
A few weeks before he died from throat cancer at age 69, I traveled from California to Eastern Oregon for a last visit. I was helping him do something, maybe eat. He couldn’t talk because of the tracheotomy and our gestures were not creating a clear line of communication. I was polite but getting tense and frustrated. So was he. He reached for his pencil and paper and wrote something. The note said, “The good lord wouldn’t give us tribulation if he didn’t want us to tribulate, would he?” We laughed, me ‘n my dad, tension gone, hearts open.
