If there’s one thing you should know about my father, it’s that he left college when his father
died, his mother was in the tuberculosis sanitarium and my dad had to support his younger sister
and brother so they wouldn’t be put in foster care.
My father worked at Ford and he had a friend from work, Hal Erickson, who lived in our neighborhood. One time we were visiting their family and the oldest son, Craig, who was at least five years older than me, and who I really admired, showed me a snub-nosed revolver. I was never sure if it was an authentic-looking toy or if it were real. He also showed me a toy model car, a Ford of course, that you blew into through a long flexible tube and it floated on a little layer air. The future.
After school there was four a o’clock movie that came on the television and featured classic horror films. This is how I saw Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman, and Creature from the Black Lagoon. But the movie that really scared me was called The Day the World Ended, which featured an atomic blast that killed almost everybody on earth except a group of people who survived in an isolated box canyon. Radiation poisoning and mutations ensued. I was in about fifth grade and somehow I knew that radiation and mutations were actual things in the world. I became obsessed by this to the point of losing sleep. I asked my dad, very adult-like I thought, if “we could please please please dig an underground fallout shelter in the backyard.” I laid out my argument, but to my great disappointment, was unable to convince my father of the imminent danger. “You don’t need to worry about that,” he said. But I did.
Or, maybe the one thing you should know is that when he was child his father burned his mother’s heirloom furniture in the furnace to keep the family warm in the winter. You should know he was a true child of the depression and later he would be very careful, tight-fisted really, with his money.
My father was going to a funeral. Craig, the son of his friend Hal had killed himself.
Why? I asked.
Apparently, my father said, he was involved in some kind of cult.
How? I asked.
Shot himself.
What did you say to his dad?
What could I say? My father asked me.
Neither of my parents spoke much of their fathers, both who died young, before I was born. Once, I asked my father what his father died from. He was just, my father said, worn out.
The year I turned sixteen my father gave me two Christmas presents that surprised me: a stopwatch and a three volume, red-leatherbound set of Shakespeare. Until then I hadn’t been aware he understood me so well.
One time I was visiting at Blue Lake where my parents had a cottage and where my mother now lives year round. Early in the morning I took my coffee down to the dock and dangled my feet in the water as the mist rose off the surface. My dad wandered down and sat next to me.
What are we going to do today? I asked him.
We’re doing it, he said.
Or maybe this, maybe, this is the one thing you should know. At my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, I asked my father, Could my earliest memory be right? My earliest memory being the car spinning on ice, someone’s arms reach in to pull me out. My mother under the car on her back, her face, looking up at me, smiling, Don’t worry dear.
Yeah, he says, I lifted the car up with one hand and slid her out with the other.
Why haven’t I heard that story before? I wonder aloud.
I never told anyone.
My father drank too much for a while, late in life. Vodka, straight, so we thought it was water in the glass. Really cheap vodka, too. When I turned fifty he bought me a bottle of Glenmorangie, a good single malt Scotch whiskey. I figured this cost was about four times the amount he would ever spend on his own liquor. That was exactly twenty years ago. And he’s been gone eleven, now.
My father gave me a pair of very thin silk gloves. He had worn them as a pallbearer for a friend’s father’s funeral. Did he know the man well? I asked.
Not at all.
Then how did you end up carrying his casket?
Most people, he said, don’t have six friends left when they die.
He thought the gloves might be useful for mountaineering. But no way, bad juju. The really important things he gave me weren’t things at all. If it’s not too much a cliché to say so.
From the train window I could see my father walking up a stairway toward the platform exposed to the wind and snow. He looked small and hunched-over, inarguably old. On the short drive home, he said to me, When you got off the train I didn’t even recognize you. You looked like a tiny shrunken, old man.
One Alaskan morning I was out shoveling the driveway at 5:30 a.m. Quiet. The snow, which continued to fall, muffling all sound. I was thinking about my father and what a comfort he had been to me when our son died. Then I remembered, whoops, he wasn't there, he had already been dead for three years when our son died. And then, I thought, but yeah, he was a comfort to me then.
I still have the gloves. And, everything else.
