The Ties that Bind

One of the letters published in Tim Russert’s Wisdom of Our Fathers describes a father who quit school in sixth grade because his own father voiced increasing contempt for education and beat his son for bringing home books.

This is not the first time I’ve read of such a reaction to reading. Even yesterday at the library I witnessed a mother rebuking her young daughter for wanting to borrow more than two books. The girl tried to explain her choices, but the mother didn’t bother listening. She held firm in her position.

My goodness. I can’t even imagine who I would have turned out to be had my father not encouraged my love for books and reading—a love initiated by my mother, who religiously read stories to me during my pre-K years. Most of the quality time I spent with my father involved books and libraries. Books remain my favorite leisure activity and my trusted source for expanding my knowledge base. My fascination with interpreting the printed word paved the way to interpreting music notation and to (proof)reading for a living.

I’ve much to thank my father for, but I think I’m most grateful that he shaped and nurtured my bond with reading and learning. He created more than memories for me. He fostered my desire for continued personal and intellectual growth, armchair traveling, creativity, and pleasure.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. No tie or soap-on-a-rope for you this year. Just a genuine, humble thank-you.

[Art by Eugene Manet.]

The Memory Keeper’s Father

Father’s Day is approaching and I gave myself an assignment:
Read Tim Russert’s Wisdom of Our Fathers and let it guide you through memories of your own father. Write down all the things your father did and said for which you’re grateful—the things you should never forget.

Why the Russert book in particular? Because several years ago I bought it for my father for Father’s Day, then got the wacky idea that I’d get a copy, too, and we’d read it and talk about it together. It would structure our phone conversations and, I’d hoped, prompt my father to tell a few stories I’d never heard—perhaps about his own father or grandfather. Together we would also reminisce about our father-daughter relationship.

Of course, it didn’t work out as planned. Instead, we each owned the book, and we each did not read it. Like father, like daughter.

Yesterday I removed the Russert book from a shelf and added it to the 20 pounds of books I’m about to part with (some I’ve read, others I haven’t). But it gnawed at me. Reminded me of my failed plans and guilted me into action. I felt like ONE of us should have read the blasted thing and since my father had already taken off for the Great Beyond, the responsibility fell to me.

So far it’s working! The reading is sweet and easy (the book is a collection of stories written by adult children about their fathers) and I’m creating a list of the ways in which my father positively influenced my life. This will become the list I’ll never want to forget—a fatherhood torch of sorts.

I recommend my assignment to you, though you don’t need the Russert book to do it. If you’re lucky enough to still have your father around, perhaps your list could become your Father’s Day gift to him this year.

I know some of us have/had fathers who aren’t/weren’t great role models. As one man wrote for the Russert book: “My dad was a beast. … I learned much more about love from my dogs than I ever did from my dad.” Even so, even learning from a father that you want to live differently is a lesson to be thankful for.

Do you have a favorite memory of or lesson from your father to share on Lull? Is your father a closet inventor or tireless prankster? What role did he play in your childhood? I’m not asking for masterpieces—just a line or two will do. Do it for your dad.

[Art by Norman Rockwell.]

Snoop Dog’s CuddleDog

When I was searching through my half-organized photo albums for a pic of the bakery donkey, I found this:

As I’ve said before, we have precious few pics of the camera-shy pooch so any photograph of her becomes a gateway to a flood of memories. And this particular photograph includes memories of my father.

You may recall that my father had a penchant for sending me Peanuts-related gifts and cards. I can only guess that it had something to do with my role in a small-town production of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown.

One holiday, when I was well into my fifth decade, my father’s Christmas gifts to me included the Snoopy pillow pictured above. As I lifted it from its box, my pooch posed other ideas for it. To her, it was a splendid megaversion of the plush playthings that overflowed her Dogtoy Basket. Naturally, she assumed it was meant for her.

She nosed it and nudged me and politely waited for my permission to mouth it and call it her own. I didn’t worry too long about how Dad would feel if I regifted his gift. The very thought of a “dog’s dog” won out and I encouraged the pooch to play with Snoopy.

The experiment of carrying the pillow around and fetching it lasted about a minute. Clearly, it was too unwieldy for her gentle bite.

However, it became (or reverted to) the next best thing: a cushy creature to cuddle with.

I never found the donkey pic, but that’s okay. The donkey led me to a sweeter moment.

Thanksgiving Plenty: The Food that Binds

Thanksgiving 2010 seems like yesterday to me. From his deathbed, my list-making, eternally instruction-giving father supervised the kitchen proceedings. In his hyperspecific way, he detailed what he wanted on the menu and from which restaurant I was to procure it.

At first, I was crestfallen: No home-cooked holiday meal? Then irritated: I wasn’t fond of the food at the restaurant he’d chosen. And embarrassed: The “restaurant” was a CHAIN!

But how can you not fulfill the wishes (or demands) of the dying? Upon reconsidering the situation, I realized the upside: If my father didn’t like the food, it wouldn’t be my fault. Grateful for that, I decided to add a few homemade dishes to the mix as backup—if not for my father, for my husband.

As it turned out, the massive quantities of food from the restaurant languished in the refrigerator while my father repeatedly requested the corn pudding, sweet potato casserole, and pumpkin pie I had made (without his instruction) in his kitchen.

I was secretly happy about this, though not just because the homemade won out over the chain restaurant. It felt good to be able to provide some pleasure to my father’s difficult days and sustenance to his deteriorating palate. It was especially meaningful—to me, anyway—that those particular dishes represented a host of Thanksgivings past, recollections permanently attached to my childhood and happier times. The time before the losses—the deaths and the divorce. Those dishes were traditional to our family’s gatherings, and now I had connected my father’s final Thanksgiving celebration to a sunnier, familial reminiscence.

Today I’ll be making pumpkin pie, corn pudding, and sweet potato casserole again. I’m grateful for the role they played in last year’s meal, and I take comfort in the memories they conjure that I will continue savoring for many years and meals to come.

May Peace and Plenty be yours this Thanksgiving.

Sight-Seeing in the Bluegrass: Part 3

The last you’ll (probably) hear about my week with The Visitor…

On a crisp and sunny Friday, we rode a lift up to the panoramic views of the Natural Bridge on the edge of Eastern Kentucky. Our aim was twofold: to show our Visitor some different terrain during her stay, and to spread some of my father’s ashes there as he’d requested.

There are laws prohibiting what my husband and I planned to do, plus it was gusty atop the rock. So we had to choose a sequestered spot where no one would see us or be disturbed by us (i.e., get “sprayed” by bits o’ Dad). Our Visitor, long divorced from my father, chose to wait for us in a clump of trees where she felt protected from the wind.

When we finished our mission, we rejoined our Visitor, who told us lots of folks kept trying to get her to sit in a nearby shelter where she’d be warmer. Worried what people would think of her standing in one place for so long, The Visitor finally spilled the beans to the next person who approached her: The Park Ranger.

Yes, The Visitor chose to expose our illegal activity to the one person with the authority to punish us. Yes, unbelievably, my own mother gave us up.

“I told him exactly what you were doing and he thought it was a beautiful idea!”

“Mother! It was illegal. We didn’t want anyone to know!”

“I know,” said The Visitor. “That’s why you have to be careful who you tell.”

“Exactly.” WTF? “He’s probably waiting for us at the end of the trail.”

“No, no, no. He thought it was beautiful,” The Visitor reassured us.

“Right. And now he can hardly wait to arrest us—at the end of the trail.”

My husband chimed in at this point, warning The Visitor, “Don’t be surprised if we pretend not to know you.”

We followed the trail to another scenic view, offering small talk to passing hikers along the way but not mentioning “the incident” again. As the trail opened onto another massive rock and aerial view of mountains and valleys, there before us were not one, but TWO PARK RANGERS.

There was no escape. I had no choice.

“We don’t know you,” I whispered to The Visitor.

Memories of a Date with the Printed Word

Today is Saturday.

Those are powerful words to me that spark a rush of sensory recall and always, always bring to mind my father and borrowed books.

Decades ago, in the land where I spent my childhood, there were no Borders or Amazon.coms. The local Carnegie Library, with its roaming Bookmobile, was the go-to place for bibliophiles. Thanks to my mother, who had told me stories and read books to me daily since my infancy, I could already be counted a bibliophile at a tender age. Once I could read on my own, I craved a larger world to explore.

That’s when my father stepped into the picture. We had a standing date on Saturdays. While my friends watched cartoons in their pajamas, I dressed for a downtown outing. My father forfeited the time he spent daily with his business buddies and instead took me to one of his favorite diners for breakfast, after which we drove to the library.

The Carnegie Library stood majestically atop a slight hill, its stained-glass windows adding religious undertones to its architectural grandeur. I felt privileged to be permitted inside.

Children’s books were shelved in the basement, where there were three rooms of books and one exceptional librarian (likely charmed by my father) who broke all the rules. She allowed me to borrow twice the maximum number of books every week. It was our secret. She didn’t have much to worry about, though. I treated books well, read quickly, and returned all the books the following Saturday because I could hardly wait to get new ones. The more books I borrowed, the more I loved books.

After I’d chosen a stack of biographies and animal tales, I’d tag along with my father to work, where I could learn from him the finer points of repairing typewriters or I could start reading my treasures. To my father’s (feigned) dismay, I usually chose the latter.

Our Saturday dates subsided as I got older—relegated to a mere memory.

Then I moved to the Bluegrass to be near my father during his final battle with cancer. It was a Saturday in October last year when I took him out for breakfast, then drove to a local library branch so I could apply for a library card. My father remained in the car, where he was most comfortable.

It didn’t take long for me to return to him—a stack of books about horses in hand. He stared at it for a bit, deep in thought.

“Hmm,” he finally stirred. “It’s Saturday, isn’t it?”

Yes, it is, Dad. Today is Saturday. Our day.

[Sculpture by Melissa A. Brown.]

Fast and Curious: A Father and Daughter Rebuild a Shared History

It’s an unusual Father’s Day this year at Lull HQ. Our grandfathers are long gone; we no longer have fathers or father figures left, and we no longer have any furred “girls” around to honor their male human with a card and (usually) a CD. Father’s Day isn’t meaningless, but it’s not an active holiday for us—we’re under no obligation to do anything. It feels like the perfect occasion to tell you about Sidney…

My father and I had grown apart emotionally as well as geographically over the years. What we knew of each other was based on interactions from my childhood, B.D. (Before the Divorce). I hoped to remedy this by moving to the Bluegrass State.

On one of our visits with my father last spring, prior to our move, my husband and I spent time doing the physical labor my father was no longer capable of doing—raking, organizing the barn, general cleaning. One of my duties was to prepare the ground-level birdbaths and garden drinking elements for use. This meant weeding, pulling muck out of the birdbaths, scraping algae off the decorative stones, making it all shiny and new again for the avian populations of my father’s backyard.

What I didn’t realize when I accepted the task was that it was a pet project and my father wanted it done a particular way—that is to say, HIS way. So I positioned a chair near the action and helped my father into it. From the chair, my father would be close enough to supervise my every move, but not so close that he’d get sprayed by the hose (unless, of course, I took aim at him). As his instructions grew more detailed and his corrections of my work mounted, taking aim at him was beginning to look like a satisfying option.

That’s when Sidney (or maybe Sydney) popped into our lives. I was scooping stones out of the baths and throwing them into the driveway. On one was the little gastropod. I gasped at the thought of a different outcome, of the snail being crushed by the stones. All tension slipped away at this new development. We now had a dual purpose: clean and protect.

You might think that protecting a snail is easy. “Just keep an eye on him,” you advise. “He won’t go far—snails are slow.”

But you’d be wrong, at least where Sidney was concerned.

Sidney was focused and FAST. One moment he was resting on a rock, the next he was stretched across two rocks—tasting algae, testing surfaces, conducting who-knows-what exploratory exercises. He was a fascinating snippet of a creature who appeared to be fascinated by everything around him. He exuded personality.

I could almost hear him “Hrrmph” each time I wrangled him from going too far. I didn’t want Sidney wandering into the driveway, facing certain death by automobile. I intended to return him to the mini-wetlands environment from which he’d come, but not before I had the area cleaned and replenished with fresh water.

It was a hot day and my father started worrying about the snail getting overheated. “Have you checked on Sidney lately? Is he okay?” asked my father.

Periodically, I created tiny pools of water next to my charge so he could drink (he didn’t) and sprinkled water over him to cool him off, which spurred him to scoot away from me (indignantly, I thought). Had he been a dog, he would have shaken his little body at that point and splattered water right back at me.

I struck up a conversation with him. That is, I talked to Sidney and he stretched his head in my direction, as if he were listening. (I know. More likely he was thinking, What the Hell?) I told him he needed to keep hydrated because my father was getting on my case about his welfare. And I could take only so many orders from the old man in that heat.

In truth, Sidney had already taken some of the heat off of me. My father had become more interested in the snail than in supervising me. It was looking like Sidney had clinched his future as a yard pet.

Once I’d made Sidney’s home habitable again, I placed him on the edge of the pool. He couldn’t get away from it fast enough. I repeated my effort, this time situating him closer to the water. He stretched out his neck, surveyed the liquid, and took a long drink. I offered a leaf as a way out of the pool. Instead, he took a bite from it.

“What’s he doing now?” asked my father.

“He’s looking at me again,” I answered. Then Sidney disappeared into the foliage as mysteriously as he had materialized in the first place.

We never saw Sidney again, but he became part of my father’s storytelling repertoire in the final months of his life and a precious shared experience between us.

Note: The photos of Sidney don’t show his true colors. The dark “veins” on his body were purple, and his shell had a chartreuse glow to it. He was quite striking.

So Long, Snoopy, Snoopy, So Long

y father took great care in choosing cards for people. Whether for a specific occasion or for no reason at all, the card had to speak to him as well as to the recipient. (Frankly, this is how all of us should choose our cards.)

I’ve saved most of the cards he sent to me over the years, knowing how much of him was in each one. (Confession: When we moved, I parted ways with the Snoopy cards. Eons ago I played the part of Snoopy in a small production of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown. Loved the role at the time, but didn’t expect it to follow me into the Golden Years. Dad kept the flame lit.)

Mindful of my father’s perspective, I tried to reciprocate with my card choices for him. Sometimes this felt like an exercise in futility. The major greeting-card companies didn’t seem to have a handle on my personality. But one year, the gods of the cards came to my rescue for Father’s Day.

A publication I oversaw needed cover art that easily connected to one of the stories inside. It was a June issue, so there was also a need to give a nod to Father’s Day somewhere in the issue. Holidays usually inspired us to find cover art that did double duty—that worked as well for the special occasion as for a particular story.

We were coming up empty though—running out of ideas and time. I was desperate enough to start thumbing through my own boxes of photos and memorabilia. That’s how I found it.

The photograph from my childhood prominently featured my father (in what some might think a humiliating position) in a spontaneous musical moment with his youngest daughter. Silliness reigned.

The photo tied in with both the holiday and with a story about hearing a different beat in life and following that rhythm. (My father bristled at being labeled a conformist. He relished being a little outside the norm.) On the inside cover, I published this note for him:

ABOUT THE COVER: By example, this man encouraged me to see joy and meaning in everyday things. And to imagine what I wanted as something I already had. He convinced me that there’s always something new to learn and to always have a Plan B. He made sacrifices so that my life would be what his hadn’t been. And for all these reasons, I feel grateful and privileged. This man, Robert S. Jackson, is my father. Happy Father’s Day, Dad!

Voilà! Instant Father’s Day card!

I don’t remember the gift I sent that year. It was secondary to the perfect card, which I knew my father would like. However, I couldn’t have imagined just how much pleasure he would derive from it. He wrote to me that now he’d made it to the cover of a magazine, maybe he’d try to get onto a calendar next. I’d forgotten when I made the cover art choice that my father bought this same pocket-size, inspirational publication in bulk and sent it to all his clients each month. He didn’t hesitate (as I would have) sharing the incriminating shot of silliness. He got a LOT of mileage from it over the years.

Once again, it’s time to pay tribute to dads. This is the first Father’s Day I won’t have to obsess about finding the perfect card and gift. Mission already accomplished.

[Drop cap by Jessica Hische.]

Robert S. Jackson

31 August 1928 ¬ 15 December 2010

“Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second.
Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!”
–Paul Gauguin

Caught in Death’s Undertow

Our move to the South was spurred by my father’s declining health. He’s battled cancer for about 10 years and now faces the last stretch.

I anticipated keeping an eye on him—encouraging better eating habits, overseeing his meds, accompanying him to doctor appointments—and my husband anticipated working on art projects with him in the small barn behind my father’s home. We both looked forward to deepening our relationship with him.

But we came too late.

My father’s confrontation with the Very Grim Reaper is unfolding at breakneck speed. He has spent the past 1-1/2 months focused on his funeral and his legacy. It’s kept him busy certainly, but at the expense of the quality of life he’d planned for. Instead of taking short driving jaunts to the countryside and mountains, he’s been steeped in the minutiae of his funeral and the sale of his home after his death.

There will be no art projects—my father’s stamina is depleted. My hope for “better eating” has given way to “eating something” for my father has no appetite. Driving jaunts* will soon be out of the question as my father’s mobility deteriorates.

I’m in charge of the funeral service, for which I’ll create a program and deliver a eulogy. If my father had his way, both would be complete by now and in his hands for approval.

But I can’t bring myself to write eulogies for folks who are still alive—especially folks I’m close to. That time is precious and seems better spent in the present.

And so, dear readers, my writing on Lull continues to be sporadic. I’ll try to share tidbits and info worth your exploration, but longer posts will have to wait.

* My husband shot this pic of the Natural Bridge—one of many gorgeous spots in this state—on a recent outing with my father. Note: My father napped in the car while we hiked. He LOVES the comfortable leather seats of his minivan and would furnish his living room with them if possible.