Friday, June 18, 2010
Dad's Day...Steve's Turn
Steve and the youngest Mr. Copper...Walt
My younger brother, Steve, is a fine writer. He used to write a regular newspaper column, but in recent years has been too busy as an editor to continue grinding out his insightful and often very funny observations. I wish that weren't the case.
Long ago I had decided to run his June 26, 1990 piece about our dad as a Father's Day tribute. It is one that I have saved and re-read many times over the last several years. Little did I know that he would come out of retirement to pen his thoughts on becoming a father himself. Though I'm sure he'll think I'm a dope for doing it, I am reprinting both of them here.
Hey, it's what big brothers are for. Let the torment begin...
REFLECTIONS: SUNDAY ON THE DECK WITH DAD
(Tuesday, June 26, 1990)
"There's a deranged duck in the pond," my dad informs me matter-of-factly.
It's Sunday afternoon. Father's Day. We are standing one story above the ground on the narrow deck of my parents' condo squinting out into the glary light. It is hot and breezy, the sky is a dizzying whirl of blue and cirrus clouds.
My dad, who is retired and has time on his hands, keeps a close watch on the ducks these days as they come and go in the small lake out beyond the manicured lawn behind the condo complex. He counts the ducklings ("Snapping turtles got most of them this year.") and enjoys what, to his admittedly inexpert eye, seems to be the vagaries of duck social life.
If there's a weird duck out there, I'm sure my dad knows about it. When he points out the wayward fowl in question--a lone duck, a diver, he says--I observe him for a while too. He (or is it a she?) swims erratically around the lake avoiding the other ducks. My dad thinks maybe it has lost its mate and is grief-stricken. Through binoculars, the duck looks to me to be young and scrawny and glassy-eyed, maybe a little disheveled ( a tuft of feathers is askew on its head). Dangerous, I think. A loner, a rebel. The John Hinckley or Travis Bickle of the duck world.
Hinckley Duck goes away eventually, paddling with a sudden purpose (off to buy a handgun?) toward a distant corner of the lake and out of sight. Our thoughts and conversation drift to other things.
I have been thinking a lot about the old man lately, and about the inexorability of genes.
There was a rebellious time when I thought I had little in common with my dad, and I don't think he knew quite what to make of me. If there's one thing he can't stand in the world, it's a smart-aleck. "Stay away from that guy. He's a smart-aleck," was a warning I heard repeatedly as a kid.
Dad is your basic solid-citizen ---a patient, portly Ward Cleaver type interested in insurance, real estate, the crops, golf, washing the car, moderation and fairness. He is cursed, however, with two kids who are Eddie Haskells. Classic smart-alecks. My brother is a big city DJ, I'm a small town newspaper drone---jobs for un-solid citizens---two businesses fraught with cynics, burnouts, booze-hounds and other unsavory characters.
At one point, I think my dad dreamed that I could be a golf pro. He bought me golf clubs and got me started playing when I was little. I was pretty good and he kept encouraging me. Of course I gave it up in high school.
I was a brooding, solitary, wiseacre kid and I've become a brooding, semi-solitary, wiseacre adult. Lately though, in the mornings before I have had time to activate my arsenal of self-delusions, I am often startled by the slightly puffy countenance returning my myopic gaze in the mirror. "Dad," I think. Time and circumstance (and booze) work their magic on a face, but genes will out. I notice, too, I am taking new pleasure in things like washing the car and mowing the yard. Perhaps moderation and a resumption of my golf career are next.
Dad has gotten jolly in retirement, though, to be honest, the last few years have not been especially kind to him. A man who, as I recall, was never sick a day in his life had barely said goodbye to the everyday work grind when he was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, then diabetes. He developed an ulcer, needed back surgery, spent the better part of a winter in the hospital or flat on his back at home.
My family is small but not what I imagine most people would consider particularly close-knit. Much is left unsaid between us. We share, rightly or wrongly, a distrust of anybody who talks too openly about his feelings, and a sense that life's important stuff, its essential truths, are ineffable. Maybe it's the Midwestern reticence, but I never heard my dad complain through any of his troubles. (He will be embarrassed, of course, that I'm committing any of this to paper.)
I think he's having a good year this year, I'm happy to say. He's able to golf again. His White Sox are winning (he's a life-long fan; naturally, to be contrary, I became a Cubs fan). Most of all, he seems comfortable with himself---untortured by regret---which, I imagine, must be the best part of growing old.
He's done OK.
When it's time to leave, my dad walks out to the parking lot to see me off. Night has begun to crouch down around the lake and the white brick condos. My folks decided to move to this place when the house got to be too much for them to care for, and I sense they are just now starting to feel at home here. It still seems foreign to me. We stand by the car for a moment as the insects whir incessantly from the shimmering trees. He notes with some pride that I am keeping my car clean.
"Happy Father's Day. And thanks," I say for a final time and we shake hands this Sunday. Father' Day.
"Another day long gone," he says to me cheerfully. And in my head on the quiet drive home my father's voice echoes back to me as my own.
(Steve Copper is a wire editor for the Journal Courier. He also writes about the movies. As far as we know, the deranged duck remains at large.)
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(Sunday June 17, 2007)
I've been thinking this week. (news in its own right)
about fathers and sons.
My dad was born 89 years ago today, June 17, 1918. He died in the wee hours on a Tuesday morning in May twelve years ago, disappearing around the last corner of this life after a long labyrinthine fade into the fog of Alzheimer's.
I think of my dad as a pretty basic guy, typical of his generation: hard-working, solid citizen, straight-arrow (never cursed, that I heard anyway, unless you count "Beans!" or "Son of a Buck!"), lived through the Depression, helped save our bacon in World War II (but never talked about it), came back from the war and simply got on with it, starting a family and carving out a life.
One of those guys.
Yet, he was always a mystery to me, and I admit I was vaguely scared of him, though I can't for the life of me tell you why. Maybe because it was always left to him to dole out punishment on those occasions (pretty rare) when the need arose. "Wait till your father gets home." my mom would threaten, though the repercussions for my brother and me were never extreme.
Or maybe I was always afraid I would disappoint him
somehow.
I think of him more often today than I did when he was alive, perhaps because not so long ago I became a father myself for the first time at an advanced (some would say embarrassingly advanced) age.
I'm 51 and have an 18-month old son, Walt- a gift in my life received after I'd pretty much given up on the whole notion.
Dad is a frequent visitor to my dreams now, and it's always good to see him. It's not the dad of old-age who appears but the the one from my boyhood - the one who played catch or shot baskets with me, the one who taught me how to mow the lawn and drive a car and , well how to be a man of the world, whatever that means and however poorly I absorbed it.
After my dad died, I found myself drawn back to the places we had lived as I grew up, particularly to Spencer, the small town in northwest Iowas where we stayed the longest and where my memories of him seemed most vivid.
He worked as a land appraiser in the farm mortgage department for Prudential Insurance then, and spent a lot of time driving the back roads looking at farms or talking to small town bankers. I drove those roads for a few days, too, watching the corn and beans sway on the undulating landscape and trying to imagine what he must have thought about.
I walked and bicycled past our old house so often that I feared whoever lived there now would suspect me of casing the joint and summon the cops.
Time tilted sideways. His ghost was everywhere, and mine was too.
Of course I went through a stage (way too long) where I thought my dad was clueless, hopelessly hide - bound.
Square. We weren't interested in the same things. He just didn't get it. Didn't get me.
Maybe I get it now.
Though we became fathers at different stages in our lives and in different eras, I find that I compare myself to him now at almost every turn about how I'm doing at being a dad and paying the bills and setting and example and living a decent life - and hoping I'm not screwing it all up.
I'm in his shadow.
My son's at a stage where he's easily impressed. He thinks I'm a giant of a guy who can do miraculous things (Look at daddy read a book! Get the mail! Drink coffee! Start the lawnmower! Carry me upstairs!)
I know I'll be a doddering old coot soon enough.
I look into Walt's eyes and wonder how I will haunt him.
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