From Purple Mountain

Greetings:

It was natural to spend a few moments of reflection yesterday – Father’s Day – thinking of my own father. He passed away not much more than a year ago and my mother wanted me to say something about him at his funeral, which I must say was nicely attended by so many of his friends and family. He was a well-liked man.

What I said at his funeral was a mere reading of something I had written about my father on Father’s Day 2008, ten years before his death, for a column in our local newspaper. I thought I would share it with you. Thanks for listening. Sincerely, Steve

The View from Here

Tri-Lakes Tribune

Father’s Day 2008

As Father’s Day nears, it is the time of the year we fathers take stock in what kind of dad we have been and what kind of dad we want to be. It also is the time to appreciate anew our own fathers, if we are lucky enough to still have them around.

I had the perfect opportunity a couple weeks ago to spend a week of quality time with my father, and came away from the experienced with renewed admiration and love for my dad.

My dad and I live 500 miles away from each other, so much of our communication happens on the phone. Having him under my roof for a week was a special treat. Once a year we make a point to get together and I always cherish the experience, learning something new about my father and myself.

On the surface, my father is a common man. He grew up on a Nebraska farm with his dog Tippy and seven brothers and sisters. He walked to a tiny rural school house miles down the dirt road, graduating at the age of 16 from Dixon High School, which no longer exists. 

My father went to work immediately after high school in a hardware store, making small-town retail his career for most of his lifetime.

My father has never been to New York City or Hawaii. He rarely ventures too far from his home, a modest bungalow on a pleasant but unpretentious street in the middle of America.   

My dad has his vices. He has smoked since he was 16, a fact that seems to pale when you consider he is turning 80 next year and is still spry and healthy. I’ve never seen my dad wear a seat belt, a habit that seems irrelevant when you consider he has driven thousands of miles on dangerous two-lane highways and never had an accident. His diet would mildly alarm any qualified nutritionist, but he still weighs in at the same 168 pounds he’s carried all his adult life.

My dad seems to have worked out a way to stay mentally and physically healthy, in spite of himself.

He drinks countless cups of coffee, but hardly ever touches alcohol. He’s never “exercised” in his life but has spent a lifetime of hours mowing lawns and fixing things around the house. He loves to spend a roll of quarters in Cripple Creek but has never been to Las Vegas.

He goes to church every Sunday but never passes judgment on others or condemns those who don’t share his beliefs.  Like the rest of his life, he is the quiet, smiling usher, never the preacher.     

He helped raise three relatively happy and well-functioning kids. He has been married to the same woman, his high school sweetheart, since 1950. He has outlived all his siblings, many of whom lived to be quite elderly.

But beyond all my dad’s outward traits and quiet lifestyle, is where you can find the real man who I’m fortunate enough to call my father. You will find anything but a common man.

He has far more wisdom than his high school diploma would imply, for example.

I look to him in times of crisis and he is always there with calm and common sense. Even when he tells me what I already know, it is reassuring to hear from him what is the right thing to do and what is the right way to look at a problem.

I keep learning from this man. On his recent trip we were discussing the fear of death that older people have. “I’m not afraid of death,” he told me. “But I am afraid of dying.” It seemed such a simple statement, but I spent days thinking about what that meant and how truthful it was for him, and for me.

Conversely, he listens to me, even when I say things that aren’t so common sense or calm. Ever since I was a rebellious young man in the 1970s, he listened and didn’t judge my sometimes outrageous and crazy statements. And I have made quite a few outrageous and crazy statements in my lifetime. 

“He loves me and supports me no matter what,” I told one of my sons as we talked about my relationship with “Grandpa Pete.” It doesn’t get any better than that for a son.

“I can talk to him about anything, and he takes it in stride,” I added.

I guess the experts would call this a good example of “unconditional love.” Whatever it’s called, it feels good and I hope I can give the same to my sons.  I also hope that when I reach my father’s age, if I reach his age, I can look back at my life with the same sense of fulfillment he should be feeling.

Greetings:

What better day to start this new blog but on Father’s Day. I remember my own father, who passed away just last year at the age of 89. I also have the pleasure of spending the day with my three sons, two of whom now are fathers themselves. And of course I wish my first son was here to spend the day with me, but he’s been gone now for 14 years. So this day is dedicated to Pete, Colin, Seth, Will and Graham.

This day also marks my renewed effort to once again write on a regular basis, this time using a blog form. I want to do this because writing brings me enjoyment and fulfillment, of course with not a small amount of angst thrown in. This has been the case since I was very young, writing a family “newspaper” which my mother would send to my grandparents. We lived quite far away from the grandparents so this allowed me to give them the family news (this was the time without smart phones, email, etc.). The other day when I was going through the boxes of our family photos and other odds and ends from the past I ran into some of those newspapers and got a chuckle out of them. I called them “The Family Circle,” not much of a creative name since the popular weekly magazine of the day was one of the same name. In all my writing creativity has not been my strong suit, I’m better at being more of an observer and researcher and interviewer and then writing about the things others have said or done.

This early writing ended up providing me with an education in journalism and for the first eight years of my adult life a real job as a newspaper reporter before changing careers. But even after leaving journalism I always found a way to keep writing, sending a weekly email to those in the company I was in charge of as well as writing a column for our local newspaper in Monument Colorado. I also wrote a column for our college newspaper so you see I have been writing in one form or another practically all my life.

In addition I wrote a book after Graham died in 2005, essentially about his life and death, an my feelings about both. (This is self serving I suppose but if you want to check it out it is on Amazon, the title is Under the Night Sky.) In fact the name of this blog comes from a chapter in my book about Purple Mountain, where I discovered was a mountain Graham climbed as a boy and wrote fondly about in a journal I found after his death. Our family buried Graham’s ashes several years ago on a hill overlooking Purple Mountain and we all visit that site together each summer.

Recently I began writing a second book, this one a novel that had been brewing in my head for the past few years. I had written little fiction so I thought this would be a nice change, only to find out just how difficult that is and feeling that I was failing in writing something that was interesting and meaningful. It seems I should stick to “reporting” and stay away from “creating.”

That may explain my attempt to write a blog, something that gives me some form and structure and will hopefully keep me writing. Now that I’m retired I certainly have the time to write, and hopefully I can feed my lifelong need to tap away at the keyboard, reporting what I see around me and perhaps even trying to make some sense of it. Writing is a funny thing in that it is a very quiet and singular activity that connects my brain to paper, helpful to me in ways that are difficult to explain or even understand, and perhaps even helpful to others who might read what I have said.

So on this Father’s Day let us note the important things in life, like fatherhood, as well as the less important things such as writing about important things. Hopefully I can continue to discover the difference between those two things as I do this writing thing well into my future.

Thanks for listening

Sincerely, Steve