Fathers and Sons

Today would have been my father's 102nd Birthday.  Or our combined 60th attempt to get through two birthday cakes in one week.

I am familiar with that.  My daughter, our first child, was born the day after I was - well, with thirty years difference.  My son, our second child, followed five weeks and three years later.

For much of my youth I was a little bit of my father's mini-me.  We had similar interests, enjoying technology and gadgets, and how things worked.  Where I benefited probably the very most was from his wisdom when it came to health care.  Not that my father's parents did not care about health care, but that my father had a fair amount of experience with the inadequate health care of the time.  Being born in 1922 meant that he had to survive a heck of a lot.  He lived through polio, a disease which is usually referred to as "eliminated" though it pops up regularly around the world.

For those who have never seen a polio case up close or experienced their daily struggles, I can't tell you everything.  I am no medical expert.  I did, however, live with my father in the same house for 25 years, and was aware of what he went through for the next 11 until he died in 1999.  

Polio robs the body of muscle tone.  Extreme cases often rendered the patient incapable of breathing.  You might not think about the major muscles involved in keeping oxygen flowing in your blood stream, but there are plenty,   The diaphragm pulls the lower portion of your lungs down, sucking air in, and your lungs pull out what they need.  And on occasion, they may store additional things you don't need, like the chemicals and carcinogens which dad drew in with his habit of smoking a pipe which I recall from very young until his massive heart attack in 1980.  On the bright side, while it was scary as hell, it did most likely lead to him living the next 19 years.  

My mother undertook to make most of his meals from scratch, eliminating salt from most of our diets.  Which rendered a lot of things I had loved unpalatable, but it meant my father was around to meet my son.

Dad and I, however, did share a few adventures of our own over the years.  One of the most memorable to me was a fall day when we got into the car and drove about six miles from home to get to nearly downtown St. Stephen, another small town like Sartell, in the other direction.  Within that town there was a farm on a bit of a hill that had, for several years, hosted a gathering of old-time steam-powered farming equipment, where we went to see steam powered tractors, sawmills, and other equipment just hanging out.

In my father's case, the polio robbed him of a lot of muscles.  His legs and arms looked a lot like those pictures you might see of people being released from World War II prison camps.  While my father's ribs were not as prominent as theirs were, his legs were thin stems with knobs for knees, and his arms were similar.  The muscles that most of us prize for their appearance and what they permit us to do are eaten away with Polio, and so at the age of seven or so I could lift and carry more than my father could.  But I also knew, when we were out together, to stay close to him in case he fell.  

And those falls happened at terrible times.  I do remember one of the most frightening happening to him after he had dropped me off on campus at St. Johns, and went to his office.  It was the last time he did that.  My father had an office that had been on the end of one building, facing Stump Lake.  There was a parking spot next to a garage space which was, I guess, used to store things like snow removal equipment.  He could get out of the station wagon, walk about four steps, and get into the door.  Yes, there were stairs to go up to his office, or down to a bathroom, but it was indoors.

While I was in college, they moved his office from that beautiful location to an area which had been known as "The barracks".  One of the benefits of having my dad as dad was the occasional mailing events his employer, the Liturgical Press, would do each year.  When kids reached about 12 to 14, we would get to get up early on a Saturday, just like every week day, and go with Dad out to his work.  We'd then be set down at long tables, given stacks of old over-print (purposely) bulletin blanks which was one of the company's sales items, which would be combined with others, typically five to eight others, and wrapped with a letter that explained everything.  These were inserted by others into pre-labeled envelopes, which had to be kept together, because they were bound in bunches and dropped into waiting mail sacks that had been sorted for specific mail sorting centers.  They would go to parish priests, parish committee members, and others who were responsible for maintaining the communication with their parish members.

We got paid minimum wages, in cash, for the time we spent working.  And I do remember the excitement of being able to go to the pop machine and drop in a quarter and pull out a cold bottle of pop.  That was pretty cool.

As were most adventures with my father.  But one terrible November morning, if memory serves, my father had slipped and fallen next to his car.  The new office came with new parking outside the building.  Where his previous spot had been nice and level, this was sloped to encourage water to drain from the building, which made any ice on the ground dangerous.  The school had labeled a spot as handicapped for him, after learning from their first mistake.  

His previous usual parking spot had been labeled as handicapped, one of the first on that end of campus.  My Dad's employer was on the edge of campus, only the seminary, where priests-in-training lived and spent much of their time.  While most seminarians lived on campus, a few did not, and one, during this time, was handicapped.  And rather than parking in the Seminary parking lot on the other side of my father's building, this fellow chose to park a few times in my father's standard spot.  Once things had been sorted out, the Seminary lot got three spots near the doors designated as Handicapped, and the university got a bit more of a clue.

But the November morning I recall was unusually cold, and my father had fallen, alone, in the parking lot.  Between two cars, because someone had taken the handicapped spot, his usual parking spot.  Being on the ground, between cars, in a brown overcoat far too light for the weather could have killed him.  Fortunately someone from the Monastery's wood shop across from my father's office noticed him on the ground.  They came over, got him up and into his office.  I noticed the ripped knee of his pants on the way home that evening, and the next morning I had words with the Campus Safety Staff.  Which very nearly got me thrown out of school due to my temper.  I made poorly-considered comments while trying to get the campus police to designate a few more parking spots, with ample safety space that the handicapped parking laws called for, on campus.  Oddly enough, while I had to go apologize a few days later to the people whom I unloaded on, they did find a way to apply yellow paint to pavement in the deepest part of winter, to insure the designated handicapped spots were properly marked, spaced, and de-iced.

So I do suppose my tirade at them accomplished something.  But it sure didn't make my father happy when he found out.  And it did continue a pattern which we did seem to fall into as we grew older.  I tried to please my father where and when I thought I could, only to find that it wasn't quite what he liked.

Riding a school bus with older high school kids I got to see some pretty cool things, at least from the people side of the world.  A couple of older guys would stake out the back four seats of the bus and run a daily acey-ducey game.  I learned the rules but was never judged old enough to play.  My bus route ran from St. Stephen to Sartell, so some of those kids may have been on the bus for 20 minutes or more.  I was on the bus for maybe ten.  But I did see, one day, one of the older boys bring onto the bus a heavy bag with some aluminum castings.  He had made a Minnesota Vikings head by carving the shape into wood, then pressing it into wet sand.  After melting some aluminum, they poured it into the mold, which made an aluminum Vikings head.  

I struck upon buying a couple of them for the then-princely price of $3 each, and made my father and Godfather, both Vikings fans, Vikings "art" I suppose you might call it by finding some 3/4" thick plywood scraps in the garage just big enough.  I used rasps and files to round off the sharp corners and edges, then used brown shoe polish and paste wax to finish the wood.  Then carefully sanding out a spot in the middle where I would glue the Vikings Head which I'd already layered with a couple layers of felt, thanks to my mother, to build it up in the middle so more than the edges touched the wood behind.  

"Hmm.  The finish could be more even" I recall him saying when he unwrapped it.  Not a great compliment, but par for the course.  I was always just a little bit off.  I suppose it may have been because, unlike my father, I was something of an indifferent student for much of my schooling.  Specific subjects and projects would engage me, but I was often so lost in a fog of what we now call ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.  Windows, or certain things, caught my attention.  

In the first grade, I recall being utterly fascinated by erasers.  It was the first time I had learned that an errant pencil stroke, which many of mine were, could be removed, not just covered up.  That fascination caused me to ignore the work of the moment, where Sister Ann Carol was using the overhead, yet another cool piece of equipment which I had already encountered in kindergarten, to detail how we were to organize our desks, these boxes in front of us on legs that were to store our various books and materials.  

Which in no way excuses one of the more infamous events of a few years later, when my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Kainz, who was the mother of the fellow who was later to become my best friend, "dumped" my desk.  Often a punishment for those of us who failed the inevitable review of the contents of our desks, Mrs. Kainz dumped my desk onto the floor, and nothing at all came out because I had it so fully packed it was in there tight.

That became a story she loved to tell for years.  She may still enjoy telling it.  

But I still miss my father.  He and I somehow did not seem to connect on any real level over the years, despite my trying.  I had sisters who were far better students, either having figured out how to deal with any latent ADHD tendencies, or not having to deal with it at all.  But it did become the incentive for me to insure that, in my life, my own son would never doubt where he stood with me.

I was not, and never will be, the perfect father.  But I did try to learn from my own experience.  I tried to take the time when and where I could, when and where it was needed, to build the bond we share today.  I do believe one of the bigger and more fortunate moments came when he was about six.  As a kindergarten student, he was really struggling.  I had been picking him up from kindergarten daily because I was trying to either start a consulting firm or find a way to feed and pay for my family's continued existence.

And because I was at loose ends, I took him to the doctor.  His kindergarten teacher was concerned there may be underlying health reasons for his difficulties in school.  Hearing this from the teacher who endured his first day of school, after which he proudly announced to the assembled adults and children, "Dad!  There's no burping or farting in school!"  We went to the doctor's office in an early-afternoon appointment, after school, and Jack and I sat in the examination room.  The doctor and I conversed while he watched our interactions, and I would try to keep Jack busy with other things while we talked.  I had very deliberately NOT researched anything like ADD/ADHD because I did not want to project onto him my misdiagnosis.

I'm not an expert in many things, but I did know my son well.  He would flit from thing to thing, toys, TV shows, or other things that caught his interest.  I put that down to his personality and interests, because I did similar things.  But as we conversed, the doctor and I, I used techniques I had for keeping Jack interested in other things.  After a full twenty minutes, the doctor left the room and came back with a piece of paper.  He had me read the back.  There, it presented ten techniques on how to redirect and guide a child to do or complete a specific task.  I had already used eight of them, the doctor said, in trying to get Jack to focus.  The two which I had not used were two rather easy methods which had not ever really worked with Jack, and with that said, he had me flip the paper over, where it provided a lot of information about ADD and ADHD.  Jack fell into the second category.

While this diagnosis and information was not available when I was a child, I was properly vaccinated from every disease that one could be vaccinated for.  I recall an event at the local shopping mall when I was very young where I got into a line, took off my jacket and rolled up my short sleeve when the nurse pulled out this gun-looking machine, pressed it against my arm, and pulled a trigger.  My arm had a round dot on it with little red dots in a ring around the center.  I'm not sure what that one was for, but it was given at a mall, which was the same place I would later meet Casey Jones and Roundhouse Rodney, the hosts of my noon TV show I could watch while eating lunch, before being put down for my afternoon nap which I desperately detested.  And would take any day it's offered, these days.  The wisdom of years.

But when it comes to my son and I, I am glad to know I have both his affection and his confidence.  This past weekend we worked to replace the brakes on the rear end of my wife's 2014 Ford Explorer.  As so often happens with us, our initial trip to NAPA for parts turned out to be the first of three.  Patting ourselves prematurely on our backs for being so smart, I should have known better.  When we had to make a choice of parts, I chose the middle of the road parts, only to learn that we needed others, but could exchange the ones we had not used.  Which we did.  Then we had to make another trip (it took a total of four) to get tools, then more tools since we broke the first ones, but the whole time we were talking about this, that, and the other.  He would go on about the finer points of supercharger versus turbocharger engines, I'd relate something I'd seen about recent science or engineering discoveries, while he'd go on a little more about robot ideas he's had, and more.

Both of my children came to dinner with us on my birthday, and it was a real joy to see the both of them.  It also helped to drive home, yet again, how fortunate I am.  When we would go visit my parents, there was, until my father passed, the inevitable "do you want us to bring any food?" / "You know your father's diet is very restricted, I'd rather cook for him" - but I know that was my mother's way of showing her love for her husband.  She wanted to keep him around.  And we were fortunate when a routine scan found a spot the size of a dime on one of her kidneys which turned out to be cancer.  How it began there and not in her lungs after 50 years of smoking cigarettes, I don't know, but I do know that cancer can show up anywhere.  The cruelest thing it did do to her was take her ability to communicate, so that our last meeting, less than a week before she died, she was unable to respond to anything I said or did.  But I do know she heard me when I told her that if she needed to let go, we would understand, and her grandchildren who were 21 and 19 at the time, would understand and remember her.  

I'd like to think she passed peacefully, after a long life of working to care for five kids and her late husband of 37 years.  For some reason, until after her death, I had often taken our connection for granted.  She would give me an old clock to take apart, or let me play in the sink when Sister Ann Carol asked if we knew how to form water into shapes.  My mom let me fiddle on until I hit on a few ideas, all of which required an additive, which failed the test the next day, when one of my schoolmates - of a class of 26 - said "you could freeze it".  While she pointed out it was the addition of cold that permitted that, I asked "Isn't it the removal of heat?"

Which was where I figured it wasn't that there was a single answer, simply a matter of perspective.  While I didn't necessarily always see eye-to-eye with my father, I did see his daily examples of perseverance.  Sure, I still saw his inability to play catch with me, take me hunting or fishing, go camping, do active things with me, he was still one of my two first teachers who taught me how to get through things.  Which my son also does, daily, as he continues to do well as a mechanic.  Some might see that as a far step down from the engineer, the biotech engineer, he had talked about later in high school.  He, like me, had some tough times with math.  His older sister could explain and understood the algebra that to my son and I is so much alphabet soup and little else.  We are both adept at breaking a problem down into multiple solvable parts, and we get the jobs done.  What impresses me is his continued learning.  He may, some day, develop a powered exoskeleton like he talked about for his grandfather that might permit people who have had severe or even minor spine injuries to control their limbs, or let a construction worker fall off a roof and land on the ground without breaking a leg or more.  

Sure, there are many ideas out there for it, I don't doubt he'll have some unique insights into transmissions and power to get it from a motor to a way to move a limb as needed.  But even if he doesn't, he's still a success I'm proud of. And hope to continue to have that relationship we have, so that, some day, he can tell his grandkids about me.  They'll be pretty cool people, of that I'm sure, because I know their granddad.  He's a very cool guy.