We'll Have Coffee ~~
Learning from my Father and his Life
Among other things, aging is a procession of moments when one thinks or says something that begins with, “Now I know what Dad meant when he…”
When we visited our parents in their later years and the end of a day came, my father would climb the stairs to his room and bid goodnight to those of us still on the first floor. “We’ll have coffee,” he might add, already looking forward to that comforting, life-giving morning event about which I eventually learned something – there would be days in life when nothing more enjoyable happened. The smell of the coffee, conversation’s timid little competition in the form of the old coffee maker’s snorty noises, the pleasure of getting the half & half out of the fridge, the unspoken promise to oneself to use less sugar – next time. The view of the sun still low on the horizon through the trees beyond the back yard.
One of the exemplary things about my father was his quiet but high valuation of things that less reflective people might dismiss as not worthy of comment. Morning coffee, discovering a new donut shop, reading oneself to sleep, improving one’s vocabulary, doing careful work, enjoying the yard instead of going broke traveling to Europe. Because of my father my siblings and I know better than to drag home shopping bags from the mall in search of the contentment achievable only by embracing the pleasures of the ordinary.
Yet something needs to be said about that. Doing careful work and improving one’s vocabulary are not only ordinary. They are superior but accessible. One wants to avoid trotting out the homey old adage that the best things in life are free, but there seems little point in trying to avoid the truth that the most happiness and sustained contentment are derived from endeavors and priorities having the least connection to what Karl Marx called the “cash nexus.”
It should come as no surprise that Dad’s facility for keeping materialism in its proper place were complemented by his sense of responsibility, loyalty and work ethic. Something else he shared with many men of his generation was a comprehensive knowledge of basic phenomena and how things worked.
Some years ago a young man and his child joined me in an elevator. The little girl asked him what made the elevator go. “I don’t know,” he said. Then he looked at me and giggled.
I have no memory of my father ever saying “I don’t know” when you asked him something – unless it was something like “when is Mom coming home?” He either knew the answer or tried to know. What do you think the weather will be tomorrow? What do you call those tall grasses at the edge of the water? How come that bridge is made of some different material in the middle? He always took a stab at it.
His mechanical ability, craftsmanship and precision approach to anything he made or fixed were enough to make us wonder why anyone would bother with a college education.
Some years ago I had a pair of reading glasses that broke. I took them out to the house and showed my father the damage. To my surprise he said, “gee, I don’t know if I can fix that, Julie. These things they make today aren’t made to be fixed, you know, they’re made to be replaced.”
“Oh, that’s okay, Dad, don’t worry about it. I’ll buy another pair.”
But I knew him. Rather than putting them back into my pocketbook, I just left them on the kitchen table. Some hours later he came up from his workbench carrying my glasses, reporting that he had “managed to find some little pieces that came in handy” amongst his tools and bits of hardware.
I looked down at the glasses and couldn’t even remember which side had needed repair, they were so perfect.
I have a beautiful carved maple leaf that makes an intriguing fruit bowl. Thank goodness my life doesn’t depend on my ability to explain how my father made it. My sister captured perfectly what the leaf’s creation represented. “It combines Dad’s artistic talent, his craftsmanship and his love of Nature.” Oh…is that all.
My father had a sweet tooth that would have put 50 pounds on most people. But he was simply too smart to become overweight. There was never any prattle about his BMI index or his carbohydrate allowance. He just packed his lunch for work every day and always added a wedge of lettuce to it instead of something like the now-lamented Twinkies. He took long walks. One evening in his fifties he came home and said excitedly, “Julie, what do you think I bought?”
“Well, gee, Dad, I'm not sure I can….”
“A 10-speed racer!” He had gone downtown and bought what I think was the first bicycle he had ever owned. It had come in a kit – little parts would soon be spread out on the floor. For him, assembling the bike was no more difficult than picking up a wrench. The years went by and he had to give up riding his bike all over town because of balance problems. But he still had his walking.
Landscaping his property was a 50-year project. When he built the house (of course he built it, doesn’t everybody?), the woods came right up to the kitchen window. Those days were harder to picture than Atlantis for anyone who saw his extensive, gorgeous back yard in the later years of his life. Planting, digging, mowing, cutting, tree felling, designing – he worked for hours, for years. He didn’t need one of those exercise contraptions that end up in peoples’ basements. He was his own machine.
High school educated and orphaned in his teens, he taught himself to speak with unfailing articulation. On a little shelf above his bed he had titles like “English Grammar and Usage.” He never got tired of reminiscing about his World War II years on a destroyer tender with the U.S. Navy and entertained us for years with stories of admirable officers and obnoxious shipmates. Please do look at my brother Steve's extensive website for more on Dad in the Navy.
When I was looking for my first job and didn’t find one immediately, I came home noticeably downcast.
“Finding a job right away?” he said in a skeptical tone. “That may be an illusion under which you have been laboring.”
Show me a college graduate in 2013 who can exploit the richness of the English language like that.
My father was not very social. Friendly, yes, but not terrible social. He liked family. So nobody would have necessarily expected him to respect that his children had their own lives. But he never said anything like “how come you don’t live closer to home? Can’t you get a job in Hartford? Why do you want to go down there?”
In some years of my childhood things were rough for my father. My mother was sick and away from home. He was obliged to find babysitters, housekeepers, cooks. It never would have occurred to him to decamp, to find another woman, to fail to make a mortgage payment, to drink, to fall asleep in front of the television (which I never even witnessed him watching until sometime in his seventies). He repaired his own cars. He never lost a job.
His big personal extravagance in life was his photography and darkroom, which he showed me how to use. How fine it would be now to somehow recapture the contentment of my nights long ago, alone in my father’s basement, listening to the radio and watching my black & white pictures miraculously take form, light and shade in the big pan of developing fluid.
The late Christopher Hitchens ended his stunningly literary memoir, Hitch-22, with a reference to his own father, who once had said, “…at least I know what I am supposed to be doing.”
I never heard my father say that about himself but, if he had, no one would have had a better right.
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