I guess part of me didn't want to concentrate on my dad on Fathers Day. I didn't want to think about why I didn't need to send a card this year and why I wasn't driving down to my hometown to see him. I didn't want to think about why I have been dreaming about him walking along talking to me night after night. I didn't want to be this upset.
My dad was never what anyone would call the sensitive type. He was raised in circumstances and fought through situations that required a hardened and uncaring outlook in order to make it to the other side. He was in both the Air Force and the Army. He graduated from West Point. He worked 30 years for a branch of the U.S. Government whose only purpose was to create weapons to defend against annihilation by the Soviet Union. He took his job very seriously. He had a top secret clearance. He would never talk about what he did, even after he retired, and even when he had to bring work home and struggle with it right in front of us.
At one point I recall him buying a bunch of model airplanes and flying them all over the yard. His sudden interest in these noisy plastic planes was fun for me, but he never seemed interested in playing with me or my brother while he flew them. And then, just as suddenly as his interest in those planes arose, it was gone again, and the planes were thrown into a box in his workshop. I had no idea at the time that he was working on the very first design for an unmanned drone spyplane for the Army. He didn't care at all about flying model planes.
I do recall him complaining about how they had a perfectly good design for a plane with a camera that would allow the infantry to fly over the enemy's position and see what they had and how they were forming without risking any men. He said the damn generals wanted to "gold plate" the plane until it was so expensive that our men would never get it. And as it turned out, that is exactly what happened. Today those planes are in production, but they would have been available a good ten years sooner if not for all the extras that the generals tried to load onto them, extras which they have gotten in many cases, but in a very different and much larger version.
Dad was the sort of man who would laugh at other men's pain. He felt that compassion was for the weak and was something that needed to be beaten out of a man. He loved a cold heart. It wasn't until after he had retired and gone back to church that his views on this began to change. It had not really occurred to me that my own father had had no use for God all those years when I was growing up. And it hadn't occurred to me that perhaps God was the reason that I was so different from him.
My father was a smart man. My middle sister's husband is probably the most intelligent person to ever become a part of our family. He once said that my dad could teach himself absolutely anything just from reading it in a book. That was true. Dad read more books than any human being I have ever known. He would read ANYTHING. He had stacks of old used textbooks that he had read cover to cover just for the hell of it.
Despite my dad's high intelligence and wide spectrum of knowledge, still he had some wild ideas about things. He once tried to fill his own cavity when a filling came out, simply because he hated going to the doctor or dentist for any reason. He was acutely aware of the statistics for people dying in hospitals and such. He could justify his avoidance, but couldn't make the extremes he would often go to seem less outrageous even so.
My dad did alright with money. He was never hurting. Yet he took great pleasure in fixing things in odd ways, just to make them last longer than any human being might ever want them to. He would cut out pieces of rubber from old innertubes and attach them to the bottoms of his worn out tennis shoes. He had done this with his leather dress shoes for many years and apparently saw no reason to stop doing it when he retired and switched to garage sale tennis shoes, for which I'm sure he had paid no more than $5 per pair. It wasn't about the money. It was about the challenge.
Unfortunately, that challenge sometimes backfired, as it did with the shoes. His soles would flip and flop around when the metal tacks came loose from the rubber pieces he had used. Several times he tripped from the flapping rubber patches. One time he fell down a large concrete step and injured his knee.
I know he tore some cartilage in that knee when he fell, but I couldn't convince him to go to an orthopedic surgeon to have it looked at. He limped for several years without ever allowing any doctor to find out for sure what was wrong.
Despite his pain and limping, he went for long, rapid walks every day, except when his knee was hurting him too much. On his very last walk, a neighbor saw him holding his leg tightly and grimacing as he raced by. The neighbor yelled to my dad, but my dad didn't respond and kept racing towards home. Later that afternoon, my mother found Dad lying in the floor of the downstairs bathroom, barely concious. He had thrown up in the tub and fallen between the tub and toilet. He was in an awkward, mangled position and had been there for a long time.
At the hospital they diagnosed him as having had a stroke. A bloodclot had gone to his brain. They did surgery and it appeared that he might recover. By the time I arrived from Memphis, he was in the ICU and didn't look well. Still, my dad had been an indestructible man all my life and not one of us ever doubted that he would recover. He was a lifetime weightlifter and would have no trouble with all the rehab exercises. He was always stronger than anyone else. He could not possibly die.
It appears, although we have no way of knowing for certain, that his knee injury finally caused a blood clot to form and go to his brain, lodging at the base, which is a most deadly place for it to be. The doctors likely knew that he would not recover, but they couldn't tell us that.
Dad was recovering at a rapid pace when he suddenly died in his hospital bed one night. We were all taken completely by surprise.
Since then my life has changed. Although I did not rely on him for money or shelter or food or any of the things he gave me when I was a child, suddenly losing him made me realize that for as long as he was there I would always feel as if I had a safety net. I had a place to fall if disaster ever struck. And of course, whenever I needed advice that no one else could give, I would ask him. I didn't always take his advice, but I listened to it even so.
This past week I have been dreaming about my dad again. He is walking along with me while I'm working. He's talking to me, yet I can't hear what he's saying. It doesn't bother me that I can't hear him. It just feels good to know that he's there.
And then I wake up.
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