He Came Home Whistling

Proud

What does it mean to be proud of someone?

Proud: (Miriam Webster) Marked by stateliness, displayed self-esteem, vigorous and spirited...

Well. None of those quite work.

Proud: (Cambridge Dictionary) feeling pleasure and satisfaction because you or people connected with you have done or gotten something good

That’s better. It’s still off. I am proud of my father. In this small series where I will talk about him, I want to give advice, or give... lessons I learned from his death. Like I said in the last posting, this is not about me, and this is not about my catharsis. This is for you, whoever you are, my reader.

It feels strange to say I am proud of my father. I had nothing to do with his creation, his achievements, his goals, his attainments of those goals or his attitude toward life. He preceded me, and created the garden in which I grew. (Metaphorically, he didn’t have time to garden until he retired) It feels like stealing something from him.

I am proud of my father. I am also proud to be his son. They are subtly different to me. I am proud of my father means I think it is easy to defend the morale character of the man. It is easy to laud how he lived, and what he accomplished. I am making a judgment about him as a person, independent of me. When I say I am proud to be my father’s son it is something more. It is a lineage I am claiming and wanting to make part of me. This man made me and I stand by the memory of him. To be associated with him is an honor which is mine.  

I can tell you stories about him, which support this belief, and feeling. I have many memories of him giving to the local churches to give meals to the poor. We were not rich growing up; we were solidly middle class. More on that in a second. But I understood it was the role of an adult to care for people around him. He played with his children, he took us on hikes, he read to us and taught us to read back to him. (Mom did these things too, but this is about dad because he is gone, and mom while no longer mentally capable due to dementia, is still with us for now.) When he coached teams, he made sure even the bad players got time in the field because that was what you did. It was about the kids having fun not the parents saying their kids team won.

He stood between abusive men and their wives on two occasions I know of. He was physically large, topping six feet in his prime and with workers hands that dwarfed my own to his end. I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the wrong side of him. He was powerful, and then always controlled it to defend the weak and never once that I can remember abused it. When he passed away more stories came out about him being a kind defender of everyone around him than I had already known, and not one example of “well, really he wasn’t that great...”

He sacrificed the last seven or eight years of his life to take care of my mother, who has advanced dementia, and he was kind 99% of the time, despite the fact that my mother can be ... more than a touch mean in her addled state at times.

He was loved by the many people who worked for him over the years and he worked hard alongside them. He was a machinist back before CNC machines and software made everything. He had no high school diploma and never got one, but he was extremely intelligent. It was a different time back then. He worked 2 jobs frequently, once I understand he worked 3 for a time because he had to. Three kids at home, one more on the way, things were tight so he did what he had to do. Every day he came home for dinner no matter what else was going on, and he came home whistling.

I can keep going with this list, and I can say I hope it impresses you, because it impresses me but that is not the point. Not fully.

This is a very reductionist approach. Something utilitarian, which I find to be a danger in the judgement of people. They are their actions of course, but the individual actions add up to more than this.

I am proud to be my father’s son because my father crafted together with my mother the greatest adventure of any pair of human beings I have ever known.

They married at 18 and 22, him the older, and they had three kids by the time he was 27. Even if half of what they told me was misremembered, and only half of that was true, their lives were still unfathomably hard. My father’s father was abusive beyond measure. He routinely beat his six kids with whatever was at hand and asked questions later. He was cruel, demanding and only in his late nineties did a hint of apology seep out to anyone. My uncles and aunts talk about how dad made sure he got the brunt of the abuse to protect his younger siblings.

Mom was so poor I can’t understand it. Her father walked out when she was five years old, and her mother lived on welfare until her brother was old enough to join the military and send money home to the family. And when I say poor I mean, not enough to eat, and there was no heat in the winter. I mean insufficient clothing and being made fun of for being poor and underweight. Moving when they missed out on rent and had to hide from landlords.

These two people met, fell in love and then agreed they would stop the cycle of shit there. They talked about it early, and god damned if they did everything they said. The cycle of abuse stopped with dad. He never drank at all, that I ever saw much less like his father to excess. We were solidly middle class, because he busted his ass at whenever jobs were needed to give us security, food, love, and good educations if we wanted it. They were married for 64 years and 49 weeks before my father died.

The picture below is the last picture of him on earth, 11 days before he passed away. He is in his garden, my mom trying to help him untangle the hose so he could sit on his porch and water his plants. They worked together to the end.

This is where I want to make my point. They went on an amazing god damn adventure. They didn’t know if they could do what they set out to do. Have a house. Have kids. Raise them well. Be good people. Make the world better for their passing through it. They weren’t perfect. I have no illusion of such things as perfect people, but they achieved. They achieved far beyond anything their upbringing would allow anyone to think possible.

And in their shadow I am a pale comparison of a man. It’s dad’s fault. 😊 He gave us a good life, and so I didn’t have to be as hard as he was. I didn’t need the metal that was his core. But I am impressed by it, and in the ways I can, work to emulate it.  

You need someone to emulate. You need an adventure.

I nearly quit on mine, because it got harder than I wanted. How dare I. Did I learn nothing? He didn’t quit when he had sick children. (I was a sickly child. Very.) He didn’t quit when the house caught fire. He didn’t quit when a company went under, or when his whole industry collapsed. He didn’t quit when he had a heart attack, or when mom got very sick with kidney failure. He did what needed doing. And he whistled when he came home from doing it.

Find someone to copy. Find someone you will be proud to walk in their footsteps for a time, and then do something you don’t know you can do. Try to be more than you are right now, and try to be more than you think you can be. Walk a life of adventure, because if you don’t, when you are 88, you will have more regrets than not, and by then there is nothing you can do to undo it.

I was very lucky to have a father like him. To know anyone like him. He is missed because he was worth missing. His stories were worth sitting through too many times, as many of us do to others when we age, because he had a meta narrative that was an adventure.

Go have an adventure. Do it because it’s hard. Make someone proud, like I’m proud to be my father’s son.