This hasn’t got anything to do with politics at any level. It’s about my Dad, who taught me so much about life and nature, and how to make bread and how to build a fire, and was the best example of a good, kind, patient man.
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Dad was born in 1921 in a cold and drafty farmhouse in Vermont, the sixth of seven children, and the youngest son in the family. His mother was a kind and gentle woman, his father a cold and grasping man who didn’t seem to care whether or not his children were fed, as long as they could help out on the farm. When Dad was 12 he had rheumatic fever and was sick for months. It was during this time that Dad learned how to knit, because his father said he had to learn to do something useful or get out — though where a sickly 12-year-old boy was supposed to go in 1933, I don’t know.
He regained his health eventually, and finished school, and joined the army in early 1942, and after basic training in NC, AL and FL, spent the duration slopping around in the mud in the ETO, primarily Italy. His wartime experiences left him with a dislike and distrust of all things military. Unlike many veterans, he never joined the VFW, and rarely looked at the photos and books about the war. He said he’d seen enough of it first-hand and didn’t want any more.
He and Mom married in ‘49, and had five kids. The first years of the marriage were marked by privation, as Dad barely earned enough to stay alive, working as a carpenter for a skinflint martinet who paid slave wages. When Dad finally quit to seek better pay with another builder, this man said he hoped Dad would starve to death first.
Dad and Mom bought a chunk of land in the early ‘50s, a piece of woods and rocks in the village where Mom had grown up, because she said that this particular piece of woods had saved her life when she was a child. She had lived in poverty, too, and while Dad’s father was a distant and avaricious cold fish, her father was a violent alcoholic. Mom escaped into the woods whenever she could, and found solace among the green trees. So when this healing forest came on the market for only $2000, they jumped at it and bought the place. It didn’t have a house — just a leaning barn, a well, and a crumbling, stone-lined cellarhole dating from the 1830s. Mom, Dad and my 2 eldest sisters lived in the barn until Dad built the house, almost single-handedly. First he and Mom rebuilt the stone foundation, and then, using a lot of salvaged material and a plan he drew himself, Dad built the house. Beside the house he tilled a garden, and began planting.
That’s pretty much how I remember Dad — building and gardening. He could do carpentry, plumbing, electrical, stone- and brick-work… you name it. He salvaged some huge thermopane windows, and then designed and built a solar greenhouse attached to the end of the house. He was also a very good cook, and loved baking. He modified a recipe for Swedish Limpa (a seeded rye) and made what we know as, simply, Dad’s Bread. He loved making cookies and biscuits and gingerbread and cornbread. He loved classical music, and on Sunday mornings the house was always filled with the scent of new bread and the sounds of Beethoven or Bizet or Schubert.
He loved laughter, and was a Romantic at heart. He loved The Idylls of the Kings and Lady of the Lake, and The Princess Bride. He would pick wildflowers for Mom, and once sent away for three heart-shaped agate stones to give to her for Valentine’s Day. They had some disagreements, as she was temperamental and stubborn, and he was quiet and stubborn — irresistible force and immovable object — but they were the best of friends and shared a deep love.
He loved to garden, and a good thing, too, because we needed every bean and potato the stony soil would yield. He was an early subscriber to Organic Gardening and The Mother Earth News. He loved dogs, but we could never have one because we lived too close to the road. He loved songbirds, and despised cats and raccoons. He was a good photographer, with an artist’s sense of light and composition.
As far as I know, he only ever took two vacations from work. One was before my time, in the mid-’60s, when the family took few frigid August days on the Maine coast. My sister M. says there was snow in the air as they went through the White Mountains on her August 10th birthday. The other vacation was in late August of 1981, and that was a stay-cation, hiking on local mountains and picnicking. Other than those two short breaks, Dad worked.
He loved nature — both being in it, and reading about it. His bookshelves hold the works of John Muir, Edwin Way Teale, Gerald Durrell, Aldo Leopold, and many others. He loved the idea of visiting Alaska, and read and re-read One Man’s Wilderness many times. He was a hunter, and told many tales of the good bucks he got, and the ones that got away — but he never hunted for fun, and always put the meat in the freezer to supplement the family’s somewhat meager stocks.
After he “retired” at 65, he didn’t stop working. He installed central vacuum cleaner systems all around the area, and finished building the beautiful stone fireplace he’d been planning for years. He grew even larger gardens than ever, and cut and split firewood. He made his own beer, a dark, strong, bitter beer brewed in a 15-gallon stoneware crock. Many times I helped him fill and cap the bottles and carry them down to the cool cellar, and it was an ordeal for me, because I have always hated the smell of beer. But Dad enjoyed it immensely.
in 2004, at the age of 83, he began to slow down. He felt winded and weak, and his joints ached. His doctor said it was arthritis, a bug, nothing terrible. In early 2005, disenchanted with his old Dr, he went to see a new one, who saw right away that Dad’s condition was very serious indeed, and diagnosed congestive heart failure, rather acute, with its roots waaaaayyyy back in that 1933 bout with rheumatic fever. Dad’s aortic valve was weak and failing, and he was slowly beginning to drown in his own fluids. Within three weeks Dad was in the big regional hospital undergoing aortic valve replacement surgery, while Mom and I paced the corridors. It was a brilliant success, and Dad was home 10 days later, and recovered enough by June to get back into his garden.
In 2010 Mom, at 83, was diagnosed with colon cancer, and with surgery and treatment, her doctor said we would have her with us for another 5 years. But she fell ill again in late 2012 (hospitalized in the day of the Sandy Hook disaster), and six months later she died, a week after her 86th birthday. (“If the Red Sox can make it 86 years,” she said, “then so can I!”). Her last few weeks were horrific, and Dad, then 91, cared for her with gentle, loving kindness, changing her ileostomy bag, washing her, lifting her in and out of bed. He was devastated when she died. 63 years of marriage, of love and laughter and shared sacrifice and friendship.
He planted a garden that summer, and found some solace in the green and growing things, but by then his arthritic spine was beginning to take its toll, and by the beginning of 2014 he could not stand at the counter and make bread, or “fix taters” any longer. He was hospitalized with crippling back pain that fall, and put on opioids as we searched for a treatment. Meds didn’t help. Laser surgery didn’t help. The only thing that did was medical marijuana, which we obtained after a daunting trip through the permitting process.
He was hospitalized again in 2015 with a case of pneumonia, but he bounced back from this with a speed that astonished everyone. But time always wins at the end, and by late 2016 he was getting weaker, barely able to get around with his walker, suffering from leg pain at night that kept him awake, and unconquerable sleepiness during the day. Still, he had an appetite, and an interest in things going on in the world, and enjoyed reading and watching the birds at the backyard feeders, watching Time Team on YouTube, and the Okeanos deep-sea exploration livestreams. But his CHF was returning with a vengeance, and only large doses of diuretics would keep his lungs clear, leading to inevitable kidney damage.
About a month ago I was sitting with Dad in the kitchen. He had his woolly hat on, and a shawl around his shoulders, his swollen and aching feet on a cushion. I thought he was napping, but he heaved a sigh, and muttered, “Damn.”
“What’s the matter, Dad?” I asked, taking his hand.
“Nothin’. Just don’t pay to think about things.”
The weekend of May 19th was the end. He could no longer walk, and we had to shuttle him to and fro in a wheeled chair (his actual wheelchair being too big for this small house’s narrow corners). He could not eat more than a bite at a sitting, and when he rolled into bed on the night of the 21st, and said, “Sweet dreams… Go, Sox!” it was the last thing he said to me.
We called all the sibs, and we gathered in this little house where we all grew up, and by turns we waited at his bedside all the next day and night as his breathing grew more shallow. My sister M. and I were sitting with him on the morning of the 23rd of May when he coughed, and then stopped breathing.
You know how when a bird dies, the brilliant iridescence in its plumage fades away immediately, and becomes flat and dull? I saw the “iridescence” of life fade from my Dad’s skin and hair (still blond, at 95!) once his heart had stopped.
On the kitchen table he left the book he never got to finish — Summer World, by Bernd Heinrich. The clip he used to mark his place wrinkled the page, so we will always know where he left off.
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I can picture him walking with Mom in the woods they both loved so much. She has her big straw hat on, with the flowered ribbon around the crown, and a big striped shirt, and she’s carrying a glass that had started out with wine in it, but now had a plant, or a tuft of ferns, or fragrant pine needles stuffed in it. Dad is carrying a walking stick, and has on that awful old straw hat he wore in the garden, and they are looking up into the sunlit treetops to see the wood thrush that is singing there. They are hand-in-hand, in the woods they loved.
Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I love you, and I miss you.