Legacy--Dad

My dad was a man of many passions. He loved travel, history, machines, cars, woodworking, gardening, pie, old hymns, flirting with children, the Ohio State University Buckeyes, and my mom--not necessarily in that order. But one thing that he really loved was a good story. Consequently I have much more material on my dad than on my mom. The trouble has been deciding how much to leave out, as he had a full life with lots of stories. 

Dad claimed that he was born leaving Michigan, and to be honest I have no evidence to the contrary. He was the son of a veterinarian, and a housewife who loved to sing hymns as she worked, but it all fell apart during the Depression. Grandpa could find plenty of work, but nobody could afford to pay him for it, so his veterinary career went by the wayside. He spent a few nights sleeping in Grand Central Station and looking for work of any kind during the day, and finally landed as post as a federal meat inspector. A good steady job, but he had to travel a lot for work.

His wife, my grandmother, soon fell ill with an illness that plagued her for the rest of her life, and she died when my dad was around twelve. But since she had been ill for so long, and her husband was constantly on the road as an inspector, Dad and his older brother had been farmed out (literally) when Dad was still quite small to Aunt Ottie and Uncle Henry's farm. Ottie and Henry had seven children living, and so they barely noticed two more little boys added to the house. 

Dad was the youngest of the nine cousins, and sort of became everyone's roly-poly pet. His nickname was Itty Bitty Teeny Tiny Earl Tommy Tiner Baby, and he tagged along after the eight older ones and thrived. For the rest of his life, he considered all those first cousins to be siblings, and I was relatively old before I recognized that they were not in fact aunts and uncles of mine, but cousins instead. They were very close, and we paid lots of visits. 

The kids all fought every morning for the honor of taking that day's milk down the road to Aunt Susie (after whom I was named) because the person who delivered the milk invariably got a lovely home-baked treat fresh from Aunt Susie's oven. Dad became a really good baker himself, living on that farm, specializing in pies and Christmas fruit cakes. Another feature of Dad's childhood was, surprisingly, embroidery. Dad broke an ankle at some point, and Aunt Ottie declared that no one on a farm could lie around all day with nothing to do, so sewing and embroidery it was until he was up and about and into mischief again. 

Dad, his  brother, and his dad moved to Piqua at some point before high school, and he graduated early in order to join the navy. Uncle was already on a ship in the South Pacific, but World War II ended before Dad could get out of basic training and onto a ship of his own. He did join the army later and spent a tour of duty in Korea, as a cook for the army. He found out that war wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and for the rest of his life didn't like Fourth of July fireworks as they reminded him too much of the sound of the guns. 

After the army he went to Ohio State, traveling home on the weekends to be with his church and his future bride, and they were married while he was still getting his second degree, in agricultural economics. There was a problem though--Mom was determined to not be married to a farmer; so he ended up working as a sales manager (for seed corn, naturally) for a while, and eventually ended up working for the air force. Ellen and I were born during the sales job, and Tom later on during the air force job. 

Dad designed the house we built on the hill above town, and Ellen and I helped to the degree that people in elementary school could. My hands were the smallest, so it was my job to stuff insulation into the cracks around the window frames. The house was largely done all by us, with the exception of some things like the basement digging and the cement walls, the framing, and the plasterwork. Otherwise, it was very much a family affair. Grandpa Martin did the wiring, Uncle James worked on duct work, and it came together in about two years, in time for Tom to put in his appearance. 

Most of my memories of growing up with Dad center on the fact that he was what you could only call jolly. He was constantly humming, whistling, beating time to his singing. He was one of the few men I know who actually laughed until he cried, and it happened often. I think my son inherited this personality. Not that Dad wasn't serious when seriousness was called for. He somehow managed to always be on the governing board or a committee of our church, and that gave him no end of frustration. It was a case of duty calling, I suppose, because he certainly didn't enjoy that experience, and yet it persisted for decades. 

Dad also had a history of heart attacks. I'm not sure now how many there were, but there were quite a few. That must had been very scary for him and Mom, as his own father had died of heart failure before I was even born, so I never met either of those grandparents. When we met with the pastor of the church to work on Dad's funeral, we were read an interesting document about Dad and his heart which he had penned to be given to us after his life was over. Apparently at one point it became apparent that Dad's heart was not going to last. He spent some time desperately begging God in prayer to let him live long enough to see Tom graduate, and God came through. As he slept, he saw a golden light come into his chest and rest on his heart, and he knew his prayers had been answered. Sure enough, his heart healed up significantly from that point on, and he died much later of something else entirely. Our own little family miracle. He ended up seeing all his grandchildren, and that made him happy too. 

Dad loved to travel, and as a result I ended up visiting a majority of the states. We were always short on funds though, so I'm not sure how he managed it. I suspect he took out hefty loans from the Bank of Uncle James, and there was some evidence to support this. And one more thing Dad loved--battlegrounds. We never saw the things that would appeal to children, for the most part, but we did see a LOT of battlegrounds. It was part of his love of history, because an awful lot of recorded history involves battles, so there we went. When I finally, in my fifties, voluntarily went to visit Valley Forge, I knew that my Dad would have been proud of me. 

And that's another thing about Dad. He was immensely proud of all three children and all four grandchildren. And he let us know it. This man of great enthusiasm was enthusiastic about US, and it made all the difference in the world to an awkward child's aching heart. He was proud of Mom too, and even occasionally managed to sneak in a hug when she thought nobody was looking.

When I was a new mother, I was working a job that gave me one weekday off every week. From the beginning of my motherhood until the kids were in school, there would come a knock on my door in the mid-morning on those days off, and there would be the proudest Grandpa in the world, come for a visit. He was with me one day when I was lugging around my two-year-old non-mobile child with a bunch of bags of equipment in a medical building (another feature of my weekly day off was an endless round of specialist doctors for my son), and I was pregnant again at the time. I could tell by his reactions that he was distressed that this had become my reality, but I was oddly comforted that there was one other person in the world who had a small clue what my life was like at that point. Proud Grandpa was also Understanding Grandpa. That helped, emotionally.

Once Mom became a victim of dementia, Dad stuck pretty close to home. Those were some lonely years for him, but he didn't feel like he could leave her alone. The one time that he did go to an appointment without her, Mom left the house and wandered, crossing a busy road and getting picked up by a policeman who saw her looking vague and endangered. He never left her side again unless she was in someone else's hands. 

When Mom died, he was broken-hearted, because she had been the love of his life for more than fifty years. At the same time, he was freed. After a time of mourning, he set off cross-country in his car and visited all those cousins he hadn't seen for a few years. He was on the road quite a bit there for a while, catching up with his "siblings". He also did the other thing that Mom would never let him do, and grew a most luxuriant white mustache. He looked just like Wilford Brimley and I loved it. 

Mom had this little finger wave she would do to say good-bye. When Dad was in the hospital post-stroke and she had been gone for nearly four years, I paid a visit. He wasn't really aware of what was going on and who was who. As I went to leave, without even thinking about it I did that little finger wave. His face lit up like the sun and he did it back, and I realized that he was disoriented enough to think he was seeing his beloved wife once again. It made me sad, but I was glad that I had made him happy.

My dad had a big happy life, and I am sure as I can be that he's still having one. Someday we'll meet again, and I'm sure about that too. See you later, Dad. 

Love, Spud