Six months after my father died, I told a friend I miss my Daddy.
Not the Dad who succumbed to cancer and the more insidious ravages of Alzheimer’s. Those diseases changed him, turning him into an old man whose mind and body were dramatically altered.
I miss the Daddy I could talk with, who gave me advice. He was good at fixing things. He helped me move innumerable times. He constructed raised flower beds for my patio. He built a floor-to-ceiling cat tree for my felines, using lumber and carpet scraps. It’s well-used, even to this day.
Dad taught me how to ride a bike. I remember him holding it while I pedaled. Then he let go and I was pedaling on my own. That’s what parents do, support their kids and then let them go. He also taught me how to drive a car, although by the end of the day I was in tears, he was frustrated, and my mother promptly signed me up for driver’s ed.
He liked to work in his garden, saying you could take the boy off the farm but couldn’t take the farm out of the boy. That farm was in Western Kansas, near Ford, southeast of Dodge City. He was one of five children – four boys and one girl. He remembered the Dust Bowl and the Depression.
He was gregarious and he liked people, enjoyed talking with them, enjoyed people-watching. That’s why he was such a good salesman. One of his favorite activities as he got older was to go up to the local coffee shop where he had his own mug. He’d drink coffee and talk with, as he described them, all the other old farts.
When I was in junior high and high school, Mom had to work on Saturdays, so after breakfast Dad would tell me and my younger brother, let’s clean the house so your Mom doesn’t have to when she gets home from work. Dad was an old-fashioned, conservative man for whom societal roles were clearly defined. But he wasn’t afraid of doing housework, didn’t consider it beneath him. He figured it was his job, as a member of a partnership. Mom says he always helped take care of me and my brother when we were small.
Dad was so proud of my success as a writer. In the trunk of his car, he carried copies of Kindred Crimes, my first book, and he’d sell them to anyone who expressed an interest.
I miss my Daddy, the one who would, on an autumn Sunday afternoon in Colorado, drive us into the mountains to look at the beautiful gold colors of the changing aspen trees. He never lost his love of the land. He could find beauty in any landscape, whether the mountains, the high plains of Eastern Colorado and Western Kansas, or the rolling hills of Northern California.
My father died on Veteran’s Day, six years ago. The date was appropriate because he was a veteran of World War II, a Navy aviation machinist’s mate.
He was stationed at a Navy school in Norman, Oklahoma, and one night he was on shore patrol in the small nearby town of Purcell. Mom was selling tickets at her family’s movie theater. That’s how they met. Mom was nineteen and Dad was twenty-one.
Don and Thelma Dawson, Wedding, March 1944
Like many young couples of that era, they married during that uncertain wartime. Mom followed Dad to a duty station in Philadelphia. She arrived by train, not knowing exactly where Dad was, or where they would live. By the end of that day, she’d found Dad, a job and a room to rent. She’s resourceful that way. Later they went to Tacoma, where Dad served on a carrier escort and Mom worked in a defense plant.
After the war, Dad went to college on the GI Bill, the government program that educated so many of the young men who returned from the war. The farm boy became a businessman.
Several years ago, at a family reunion, I sat Dad down with his younger brother Ken. I started a tape recorder and got them talking their childhood on that farm, and some of the shenanigans that ensued. I’d already heard the story about Dad’s encounter with a skunk under the house. I hadn’t heard the one about Uncle Ken wiring the clothesline so Grandma would get an electrical shock while she was hanging out the wash.
Now that Dad’s gone, I’m so glad I have that recording.
My parents were married 61 years and had two children. They stayed together through boom and bust, good times and bad.
At the funeral, Mom displayed photos of Dad taken through the years. At one point she picked up the eight-by-ten color shot of Dad in his Navy dress blues, a bit teary-eyed as she said, “I sure picked a good-looking sailor.”
Yes, Mom, you sure did.
It’s Veterans Day, and six years since my father died. I still miss my Daddy.
