Remembering My Father

(presented at Dad's memorial service, Community Unitarian Universalist Church of Brighton, August 16, 2014)

I am told I have nice hair.  It's wavy and thick and firmly rooted.   My barber, Judy, when first seeing it, ran her giddy fingers through my scalp and asked where I got it.  "I got it from my dad," I said.  Dad sported a reddish-blonde crop that he combed straight back.  But in his last years, as he spent about twenty hours a day sleeping on one side of his head or the other, his hair, now turned white, became a mini mohawk from the constant pillow pressure.

I don't really care whether my hair is one thing or another, although I would reject his cockatoo look.  My hair: I get it from my father.  But of some greater importance, he also gave me his world.  When I came of age, we lived in Turkey.  Together we stood on the walls of ancient Troy and cruised the Anatolian plateau for Hittite ruins. On the Black Sea, we watched Turkish women in rainbow bloomers rake hazelnuts on flat rooftops, and we shopped for hammered copper tables and Turkish carpets in old Ulus.  In Istanbul we stayed at the Tarabya Hotel on the Bosphorus where by day we got lost in the Grand Bazaar and at night dined on swordfish baked in a bag, shish kebab, and sweet white strawberries.  It seemed that in Europe, Mom and Dad dragged Julie and me to every cathedral and chapel they could, until, as Dad so loved to tell it, I shouted, "If I have to visit one more church, I'm going to convert!"  

While living in Indiana some years before, we floated down the Tippecanoe River on tippy canoes and cast Mepps spinners at smallmouth bass.  Once when he landed a feisty three-pounder, I pounded his back in celebration.  He would later share with me how prized a moment that was, not so much catching the fish, but the back slapping from his son.  From 1960 to 1968, we attended every home football and basketball game at Purdue University.  After a basketball game when I was 11, my coat fell to the ground under the bleachers, and as I was a small kid, I climbed the 10 feet down to retrieve it.  An enormous security guard approached in that no-man’s land, grabbed my shoulders, and shook me so hard my head bounced like a balloon on the end of a stick.  I'll never forget when Dad saw this attack, he reached a panicked arm down through the floorboards and screamed, “That’s my son!  That’s my son!"  When I was a very small child and ready for bed, he would hoist me over his shoulder and try to sell me as a sack of flour to my mother.  Then I would stand on his shoes as we walked down the hall before a story.  He taught me to ride a bicycle and to play chess, although at certain times, I can't forgive him for introducing me to golf. 

Dad never spanked, never squeezed an arm or slammed a door in anger.  I was never grounded or lost privileges.  And believe me, I was no angel.  I created a mountain of teenage mayhem and many a parent would have been right to chain me to the water heater.  But my father had not the heart or mind to control or shame others.  I remember that when dealing with one of my many bad choices, I shared how I hated to disappoint him.  Dad said that my disappointing him was impossible, that I never had, never could.  Confound, maybe, but never disappoint.

One night my brother Mark and his high school friends were apprehended by the West Lafayette Police Department for performing a so-called, Chinese Fire Drill.  While waiting at a red light in town, all six jumped out of the car and proceeded to race around the vehicle, screaming like madmen, until the light turned green.  Then just as quickly, they jumped back in and were on their way.  The arresting officer was not amused and the cops later called Dad in the wee hours to come pick up his son who waited with head hung low.  The ride home was stone silent until Dad couldn’t take it anymore.  He exploded.  With howls of laughter!  He could not have been prouder of his juvenile delinquent and loved to tell the story at the dinner table.

For more than 20 years I fought a non-stop battle with drugs and alcohol.  Dad, of course, was a powerless bystander, but a keen observer, and I exerted exhausting energy in trying to exhibit control.  Dad stayed out of the fray, but his mere presence in my twisted world served to compound the guilt.  One unforgettable day when loneliness had me cornered and my hands trembled from thirst, I let down my guard and shared an honest moment with my father.  I confessed that I was suffering, that alcohol had me by the throat.  And he responded in his gentle way, "I envy you."  Envy?  But Dad, how, of all feelings, could you possibly feel envy?  To which he said, "Because, son, you have a purpose."  And in that instant, while his comment seemed mysterious, my father gave me a ribbon of hope.  That purpose, as I would discover some years later, was to find the courage to surrender, and by surrendering, discover peace.

Whenever Dad met others, they got the genuine article.  In less than twenty seconds, they would greet a fellow pilgrim with the common stripe of humanity.  He never masqueraded with a fictitious sense of self, and as a Midwesterner and former Californian, despised arrogance and elitism.  Dad was a gifted storyteller and as children we often demanded that he tell again and again our family legends.  He developed this talent as a boy in Springfield, Illinois, during the Depression when he would return from a Saturday double feature and regale spellbound neighborhood children with the high dramas, children who could not get a dime for admission.  It's no wonder that Dr. Bohnhorst was such an effective and beloved teacher.  Whenever one of his students has learned that I am their teacher's son, they share how much he and his classes meant to them.  Dad may hold the record as the most hugged professor in Michigan State University history.

Dad liked his steaks very rare and would kindly send back an entree if the middle were not red enough.  He liked his ice cream chocolate and his pie cherry. Way back in the day, he preferred his martinis dry and savored a pipe tobacco called Amphora.  He loved Mozart and would exclaim, "My God, he wrote an entire symphony at the age of six. Age six!"  He loved Beethoven and would exclaim, "My God, he wrote the Ninth Symphony when he was stone cold deaf!  Do you hear me?  Totally deaf!"  He loved Laurence Olivier as Hamlet and Charlie Chaplin as the Little Tramp.   He believed Moby Dick was the greatest novel of all time, and Dad dubbed himself Ahab when playing bridge on the Internet.  And releasing my father into the great art museums of Europe was like unleashing a child on Christmas morning.  After moving through the Sistine Chapel, he said, "I can die happy now." 

My memories of Dad almost always include my mom.  Ben was not Dad, and Marie was not Mom without the other.  They had a fantastic marriage and were their own people.  Unfortunately, their only wedding photograph had them posing in front of the church, cut off at the neck.  She was the slightly better bridge player.  Dad worshipped her and they explored the world together.  Somehow, they felt comfortable with Unitarians.   After he retired, and with Mom rooting him on, Dad became a poet.  He found meaning in simple things, like feeding birds, and published, among others, a book of poems entitled "A Sermon on the Sufficiency of Feeding Finches."

My wife Sue and I had the privilege of taking care of Dad at home for about five years.  Mom had died and he remained diminished mentally from a stroke in 2001.  He was frail and slowly trailed his walker between rooms, marking his tiny steps with the words, "Putsa, putsa, putsa."   A few times every day while sitting in the living room, his blanket over his lap, out of the blue he would shout, "I have a question!"  To which I'd respond, "What's your question?"  And he would cry out, "What makes you such a sweetheart?"  Or he might shout, "I have a question! Why do I love you so much?"  After a while I suggested his persistent affection might be the result of indigestion.  He'd say, "Indigestion? Oh, bullshit!"  And so it would go.  Now and then he would end up in the hospital from this or that.  One basic conversation between nurses and patient always seemed to arise:

NURSE: How are you doing today, Ben?

DAD: I’m old! Old and decrepit!

NURSE: Decrepid?

DAD:  Decrepit. With a T.

NURSE: Oh, okay. Well, lay back down on your bed.

DAD: It’s lie back down, my dear. The verb is to lie.

Always the English teacher.  And even in his last year or two, with his memory vanished like the Model T, if you recited the first few words of a Shakepearean sonnet, say Sonnet 29, he could proceed without error or pause, and proclaim with a certain bravado:

"When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries

And look upon myself and curse my fate."

When I was a boy of five or six, my father, the young professor at Oglethorpe College, would sometimes pace back and forth across the rooms at home, pipe in mouth, puzzling out life's predicaments.  I would fall in behind him, trying to keep pace, and strode those floors like my leader.  In a way, I always have.  As I've adjusted my bearings over 62 years, I have taken signals and learned lessons from the greatest teacher I have ever known.   In all this world, Dad is the person I admire most, in all the love that he has been.  From my back porch where I write, cardinals and goldfinches are having their frantic fill of sunflowers from my feeders.  This brings calm and a simple and loving purpose.  I must get it from my dad.