Reflections: Sunday on the deck with Dad

(My brother, Steve, spent many years in the newspaper business and is a fine writer.  This is a piece he wrote in June of 1990 about our father.  Dad has been gone more than twenty years now, but this still resonates.)

By: Steve Copper

"There is 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 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, seem to be the vagaries of duck social life.

If there is 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 the 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, burn-outs, 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 have become a brooding, semi-solitary, wiseacre adult.  Lately though, in the mornings before I 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 the 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 this 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 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's 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.


(Since this was written Steve has become the father of Walter Copper a young man who will no doubt think his dad is the dumbest most unfair clown on the planet until he comes to grips with the limits of his own intelligence and lack of experience.  That's just the way it is with fathers and sons.  I was lucky.  I had daughters; they knew I was a moron but loved me anyway.)  KC-retired smart-aleck