My boy, Sam, keeps asking me to take him fishing. I’m determined – we have to go. I have this vague memory from years ago of my dad and grandparents taking us kids fishing at some pond (don’t remember where it was) and Grandma cooking the fish for dinner.
The most salient thing for me was how her fried fish tasted better and completely different from those yucky fish sticks my mom would make from a box.
Dad says I can bring the wife and kids by any time and borrow his fishing poles, but I really hope he and my step-mom, Marcia, come with us. I want to give my kids some time with their grandparents, preserve some heritage for them.
Gerald Guy was a farm kid, lived way in the sticks and he has stories about cool stuff like bailing hay, getting baptized in a country pond and fishing in a nearby stream. The rural Kansas influence endures in the way he drops his g’s, and uses phrases like “I’m gonna learn you to” do such and such.
Many times in life, I’ve been too quick to make judgments and not look at the entire picture. Once I was working in a convenience store with this 70-year-od woman, a Beech Aircraft retiree. I started kvetching about my dad. “The old man doesn’t get me,” I said. “His advice is so lame. He’s full of crap.”
“Just be thankful you’ve got a dad,” she said.
I had no idea her words would re-enter my mind and resonate so deeply these past few years. If I’ve had any resentments toward either of my parents, I’ve replaced bitterness with forgiveness. I can appreciate now the hardships of life they have dealt with. Empathy is something I’ve had to develop.
I was helping the old man clean out his garage and doing other chores this past Saturday. He and Marcia will be moving from the house in the country where they’ve lived for the past 25 years and into a new home in town. So we were preparing for an auction they’ll have this next Saturday.
Dad’s arthritis started gradually when he was a few years older than I am now. I figure that’s what led him to enlist my help last weekend with the bending, lifting and carrying work. I’m a little sad that he’s not as sinewy as I remember. I watched him stepping forward slowly, a bit hunkered. “Damn Dad,” I said. “You’re even starting to walk like an old man.”
“Hurts like hell too,” he said with a laugh.
It was only later that evening when I was with Liana and the kids at the park – a grassy playground with an old-fashioned wooden sled, monkey bars and tire swing – that I remembered Dad pushing me in the swing as a kid. It was a blast when he’d run underneath you underdog style.
The heat was in the 90s Saturday afternoon, but I had a pleasant time -- sorting motor oil, garden insecticides and car cleaning sprays in another; scrubbing down the riding lawn mower, rotary tillers and other motorized machines after Dad ran the hose over them. If I would’ve helped with such tasks 20 years ago, I would’ve been in a hurry to get done and Dad would have been critiquing every move I made. Either he’s not as uptight or I don’t have my head as far up my ass as I used to. Maybe, it’s both. I just know I felt at ease and happy to be of help.
“Go get Grandpa’s hay hook,” he said. “It’s in the backseat passenger side of the Durango. We’re gonna’ move these T-poles out of the dirt.”
He was referring to some posts left over from a fencing job he put up around his pasture years ago. I used the hook to grab the poles out of the dirt so they can be more easily picked up and loaded into a trailer. Dad told me how his dad, who passed away a few years ago, used the hook to bail hay on his farm. He went on and on about how the hook was around 100 years old and had been welded old school style by a blacksmith.
“Ain’t that somethin’” I said. “Glad we can still use it.”
I had fun getting dirty, grimy and doing manual labor. As a parent, I’m always afraid of not spending enough time with my kids – of working too much, writing too much and being preoccupied – and waking up one morning to find out they’re grown up and I’m stuck singing “Cat’s in the Cradle.” But I think there’s something to be said for kids spending time with their parents too, especially as the parents become older and – let’s face it – become more like kids again, themselves.
There’s this vague memory. I was 4-years-old, maybe 5. The church bus rolled by the house every Sunday morning to pick me up for Sunday school and would take me back home when it was out. Upon coming home, Dad would be sitting in a chair at one end of the room, Mom in another. There was this undercurrent of tension. It wasn’t lost to me.
One day I was there – at the Southern Baptist Church on Oil Hill Road – sitting by myself in a roomful of kids, eating a sack lunch. I heard this deep voice at my back. “What are you doing?” There was my dad, svelte, looking handsome. I was pleasantly surprised, and I felt happy to see him. Heck, I didn’t know he knew where my Sunday school was. (I was a kid who thought my two sets of grandparents weren’t aware of each other.) I don’t know why one fleeting moment sticks with me. Maybe I just felt safe and protected.
Yeah I’m thankful to have a dad. He appears more relaxed and seems to enjoy life more since retiring 10 years ago. I’m happy to see him vital and active -- going to grandkids’ ball games, taking vacations with his wife, joining various morning kaffeklatsches…
We’ll have to go fishing soon.
