About My Father

I

Every year we make the pilgrimage to the cabin on the lake. The lake itself straddles the New Hampshire-Maine border, relatively quiet and off the beaten path, though not as far off as when my father's father built the place 70ish years ago. 

It's under an hour from Rye, where both my parents grew up, and so was convenient for family get aways. I can remember trips there as a kid. Eating on a bench overlooking the water, the scent of sun-warmed pine needles outside, the slightly musty lake smell inside. It still smells that way, and it takes me back the instant we get out of the car.

The camp is the last of the family roots up there. Both of my grandparents' homes are now gone, taken down so someone could build a fancier house. But the camp has pictures of family, a logbook that goes back decades (you have to journal your visit daily while there--house rules). My father and mother rescued the place, after some years of neglect by my uncle. They restored it, preserved it, added to it. Now six generations have used it this family legacy, though Mom and Dad haven't been able to make the trip for several years. Lot of memories from the past, but not much to do but be with the people who are there with you. We swim, paddle on the lake, or sit on the deck and read, listening to the wind through the trees and the loons on the water.

That's where we were when I got word that the hospice house had started my father on morphine.

II

My father was born in 1935. His father was a general contractor (the kind who always had work) and his mother would go on to be a longtime New Hampshire state legislator (the kind who is always unopposed for re-election because everyone is perfectly happy with her work). 

He was bit of a rapscallion as a youth. He flooded a school bathroom. His grandfather (The Doctor) found him placed in time out in the hall. His report cards say that he talked too much. His parents sent him to Philips Exeter Academy to be a non-residential student (a townie) not because they wanted him to run elbows with the sons of wealthy families, but because they wanted him to shape up. He wrote a letter to his aunt, pleading for her to intercede on his behalf, because Philips Exeter had no girls among the student body.

All of this comes as a surprise to people have only known him as an adult who seemed entirely straight-laced and by the book. 

But Dad always has always gone his own way. When other fifties teens were getting into Little Richard and Buddy Holly and Elvis, Dad was beginning a life-long interest in Glenn Miller. He watched Monty Python and a host of British comedies, but he was also a big fan of The Love Boat and the Jack Webb stable of procedurals. His love of Miller expanded into interest in all manner of interest in Big Band and jazz (for years, my brother and I hosted a Big Band show on the local radio station--we did it with his collection). But he also loved ABBA. 

He was spectacularly unconcerned about fashion. Preferred clothing: plaid shirt and white socks. Over the years he collected a variety of comfortable and practical hats, all ugly. He never drank nor smoked; he was the guy who shared with me the trick of carrying a glass with some ginger ale in it at parties to keep people from pestering you with alcohol.

You can let people control you by always doing what they say. You can also let people control you by doing the opposite of what they say. Just use your best judgement and do what's right. That's one of the lessons I learned from my father.

III

While his Philips Exeter classmates headed off for the Ivies, Dad went to the University of New Hampshire and got a mechanical engineering degree (top of his class). He was an engineer by profession his whole life, working for Joy Manufacturing Company (the leading producer of underground coal mining machinery) for 41 years. He was hugely respected there, called a "mentor" and lauded for both his engineering and leadership abilities. I long ago lost track of the number of people who have gone out of their way to tell me and my siblings how much they respected him and loved working for and with him. His policy and procedure directives were called Scotty Grams. Someone at the company once shared that he enjoyed the "dry pithy witticisms" in my father's memos.

Joy eventually became a poster child for all the bad things that can happen when companies are bought and sold by investors who are more important than cashing in than whatever it is the company actually does. There were some tense years when he was a undercover corporate rebel, holding the line in spite of what his bosses wanted him to do. At one point, new owners gave him a commendation for disobeying the previous owners.

He had the engineer's lover of rules, and he was practical and methodical. He taught me how to do body work repairs on a car by using pop rivets, left over sheet metal ductwork, and roofing cement. He wanted to tape audio from the tv, so he rigged wiring and plugs to do that. 

He had us help him on projects (this will just take fifteen minutes, he would say) and sometimes it took longer than promised because if the problem turns out to be bigger than you thought, well, that's what you have to deal with. Reality does not adjust itself to your wishes and hopes and expectations, and life is not always fair. 

He developed his own design for bookshelves (and all of his children ended up with them in their homes). He was a car guy, and we learned about how to work on them and take care of them, too. 

That engineer's mindset led to his second career. After retiring from Joy, he became a volunteer at a local museum of old musical contraptions--band organs and the like. Repairing and restoring the devices was real art and an engineer's dream challenge. He became the (unpaid) executive director of the museum, and the work he and his team did in restorations was in demand outside of the museum itself. In the family, we made the joke that he stopped working forty hours a week for pay so that he could work sixty hours a week for free. 

IV

He loved projects. The camp was a project, for certain, and the museum was perhaps the biggest project ever. But there were others.

He owned a 1914 Federal Fire Truck ("federal" was a make, not a jurisdictional designation). The kind with solid rubber tires that you had to start with a crank. He restored that. When we were little, he would drive it around the neighborhood and the neighborhood kids would all run out and ride on it. My daughter's wedding party took pictures on it. 

He also restored a 1940 four-door Buick convertible, which was used on a few occasions to drive his children and their new spouses around after the ceremonial flinging of the rice. Oh, and an aged roto-tiller.

He was constantly rebuilding, restoring, renovating. His other big decades-long project was the church, where he has certainly poked, prodded and repaired every nook and cranny of that aging structure. He took care of that place like it was his own home. 

V

He married the love of his life. They met and first dated in high school. Somewhere in one of those first dates he ended up with one of her bobby pins. He stuck it in his wallet. Then when he got a new wallet, he transferred the bobby pin. He carried that bobby pin with him for seventy-some years. 

They got married between his junior and senior year at UNH; she had already graduated from teachers' college. During his senior year, she taught in an elementary school. There's a graduation picture of him, in his cap and gown, with my mother, who is holding me, a lump barely a couple of weeks old. 

When they got married, he already had two potential employers after him, so as soon as he graduated, they moved to Claremont. They lived for a year with the Paradises, who were forever my third set of grandparents (their daughter Elaine is a reader of this blog). Then they moved to their own home, had a couple more kids, moved to the other side of town (Joy said, "Sell your house, you're moving to Pennsylvania" and then after the house was sold "Oh, we meant next year") and then to Pennsylvania. I was an adult before I realized that their story was the story of a pair of twenty-somethings repeatedly being uprooted and dragging three kids all over the countryside.

But they did it together and raised the kids together and took care of the church together, and when the museum gig came along it was perfect because for twenty-some years they went to work together. One of my old friends told me that he thought of them as Howard and Marion Cunningham; in the last few decades they also bore a resemblance to Henry Fonda and Katherine Hepburn in On Golden Pond. They modeled commitment and love for all of us.

Mind you, we are not a demonstrative clan, and the engineer-from-rock-ribbed-New-England thing may have gone along with a stern, hard exterior, but inside my father was all warm marshmallow, and if that was not entirely obvious to me and my siblings growing up, the grandchildren made it obvious. I grew up with the understanding that in church one was supposed to behave. Imagine my surprise when, as an adult member of the choir, I looked out at the congregation and saw my father making toys dance across the back of a pew to entertain my children. 

He did the genealogy thing, too, tracking down the many branches of the family tree. Some were way in the past (ancestor on the Mayflower, a guy who "dies" multiple times and then turned up again a bit further west). But he also tracked down his niece, the daughter of his brother who we'd last seen when she was a baby. She'd been raised separated from the family; he got her reconnected. 

VI

My father never stopped growing and learning. People making his kind of money can buy toys and fancy houses and cars and vacations in exotic locales (and colored socks), but he invested mostly in books and music and other people and worthwhile causes (even if that occasionally meant supporting groups that opposed each other). If you want to know more about something, go find out. And he would pass all of that on. "Here's a book you should read."  He would offer thoughts about religion to the pastor. He corresponded with all sorts of people; what is the point of learning and discovering if you don't share it with people. His grandchildren have letters from him offering observations about life in general.

Dad managed to be, simultaneously, a person who had very definite ideas about how to navigate the world, but also a person who did not judge you for the decisions you made. During the period when I was blowing up my marriage, it would not have been strange for him to sit me down and demand, "What the hell are you doing, kid?" He did not. I was not made to perform any kind of penance. In another family tale, my sister drove the car, with him in it, through the garage door. "It's just a door," he said as he waved my very alarmed mother off. 

Mom and Dad lived fairly traditional rolls in their marriage, but recently, while contemplating the spate of articles and takes and books about manhood and realized that my father never talked to us about how to be a man, just how to be a person. I have no recollection of ever being given the impression that the rules for Decent Human Being contained special appendices based on your plumbing. 

Treat people well. Be responsible. Help out. Keep learning things. The past is the past, but no matter how bad things have gone, they can do better from this point forward. Family matters. 

VII

Dad kept physically active, but as he aged, obstacles appeared. His heart needed a little extra regulation. His lungs started to let him down. His mind, always sharp, lost some of its edge. A few months ago, the trip to the hospital that led, not home, but to a local hospice facility, a homelike atmosphere in a house that serves just three residents at a time. 

If you've been there, you know the drill. Are we making the right choices? Is he getting better? Holding his own? Losing ground? The more closely you look for an answer, the more the answer changes minute to minute. You stay on high alert while at the same time trying to live your life. My mother made the trip to sit with him every day. He railed at his growing limitations, insisted on physical therapy even if his achievements were as simple as sitting up. No matter how bad things have been, how bad things are, face where you actually are and do your best to move forward. That was never not my father.

The siblings took turns driving and sitting. My sister came from mid-state to help Mom and perk up his days; my brother, now retired from helping run the company our father helped make a success, wrestled with the paperwork. Reading him the cards and letters. Fixing up a music player with Miller tunes. My daughter came and introduced him to his newest granddaughter, named for my mother.

My branch of the family took our planned trip to the lake, tethered to my siblings via Zuckerberg's messenger app every step of the way. We sent pictures; Mom said it pleased him to see the place, his legacy, being used. He had a good day. He had a bad day. 

Then the message: they'd started morphine.

If you've been here, you know that's the sign that the final leg of this journey has begun. We packed up and headed home, running through the careful steps he's written out years ago for closing up camp and leaving it sealed, clean, and ready for the next family to enter it.

He was still in there. He smiled when his grandson and granddaughter-in-law came to announce that they were expecting a baby girl in December. He lost more abilities, but, noted the staff member who had become his BFF, "he can still glare."

A few days ago, his struggles ended.

VIII

He had made his final plans years ago, pre-paid and on file at the funeral home. It was my job to write the obit, but that consisted mostly of editing the obit he had written for himself a decade ago. These days between death and departure are, for some families, a flurry of activity, but my father didn't leave us a lot to do, other than stand by our mother and help her manage.

People deal with these things in their own ways. I haven't cried, much, and I expect that what will happen is that I will encounter some random line of writing or hear a snatch of music and turn into a giant weepy puddle. In the meantime, I deal with things by writing through them--the words collect and organize themselves in my head sometime in the early morning hours and they peck at me until I write them out onto the page. And so here we are.

He was a good person, a smart person, a focused and admirable person who made the world around him better. Another old friend described him as "sweet and interesting," and that's pretty on point as well. He had a good long run, and he didn't waste a bit of it, but I wish there were more. His is a great story, and while he will no longer actively participate in it, it's certainly not over. It is trite and cliche to say that he'll live on through his family and the work that he did and the mark he left in his community, but while it is trite and cliche it is also absolutely true. 

Know what matters, and walk steadily toward it without fanfare or complaint. May his memory be a blessing.