After five weeks out, I returned to Alaska with a pocketful of Cape May diamonds* and a new appreciation for family and the people from my childhood.
We are patching things back together following the death of my father, as all families do. Siblings take on new roles to fill the gap. Life goes on.
My dad was good, a quiet and mannerly potentate who only occasionally offered his opinions of the world. He worked for what came to him and considered himself lucky for landing my mom as his wife, earning a college degree, and surviving the Marine Corps.
He liked swimming, fishing, smoking cheap cigars and listening to classical music on the car radio. He sometimes told me to “normal up.”
Depending on one’s perspective, dad’s claim to fame either was earning a patent for a chemical process involving tar sands, or dating Delores DeForrest, a curly-haired daredevil who worked at Atlantic City’s Steel Pier, riding a diving horse from a platform four stories high into a pool below.
Either way, Dad was accomplished for a man who was also “seriously kind,” as my kid brother best put it. When he took his grandkids for an outing, Dad invited their neighborhood friends along, too.
Years before she died, my mother, the daughter of a poor Polish immigrant, recounted detailed stories about her childhood and upbringing. She described how she became the person we knew, or so we thought. At the very end of her successful and impressive life, she said, “I just wish I hadn’t been such a chicken and missed half of it.”
We were floored.
How well do we know our parents? How well can we ever know them?
Dad shared just enough for us to understand his actions. He left the remainder for us to puzzle out.
Only once do I remember him ever lowering his guard. It was just after my mom died, and we were driving to the cemetery where he’d bought side-by-side crypts for them both.
Pointing out a house we were passing, he told me he once dated a girl who lived there, adding, “Man, could she kiss.”
I should have seized on the revelation to press him for more of his candid thoughts, to get at that person who was so much bigger than my dad. But he got a second wind and a girlfriend and he stopped looking back. As death approached, he became taciturn, his only response to the news of the day a seemingly mocking, “Oh, my.”
To the end, he remained unfailingly polite. His last known words were, “Thank you.”
Days after Dad died, I was at his desk, gathering important family documents but also looking for clues about the man, his dreams and unspoken thoughts. I came across letters he’d written as an adult to one of his brothers, checkbooks, tax returns, weekly planners, and cabinets full of files on topics ranging from installing skylights to surviving nuclear attack.
Dad saved newspaper clippings about family and friends, ticket stubs from ball games and programs from plays. He saved his draft notice, the dance card from my mom’s high school senior prom, and the telegram his mother received in 1918 notifying her that my grandfather was wounded fighting in France.
A chemist’s assistant who became a librarian, Dad was interested in the factual world, and organizing it in a way he could understand.
He once famously told my oldest brother, who phoned asking for help after becoming separated from another of my brothers at a rock concert: “Stay until everyone else has gone home. The only other person there will be your brother.”
He seemed to specialize in luck and logic.
I gathered his life’s documents – letters, school report cards, fragments of a Marine Corps diary – and sealed them up in a Tupperware bin to review later. Cleaning out of the family house, liquidating his library, and throwing out notes, keepsakes and calendars will diminish the clues we have for fleshing out his story.
The game is afoot and, as always when it comes to gathering history, the clock is ticking.
*Translucent beach pebbles found at the confluence of Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.