Once he had the assignment of protecting Betty Davis from a group of soldiers she was entertaining at her house and my father had to help her escape from the mayhem of rowdy soldiers out her bathroom window.  Not once do I remember my father complaining about these circumstances that life threw at him.  In fact he even rarely mentioned them.   I only remember him complaining about me and Democrats.  You see my family helped found the Republican Party back in the 1860’s in Iowa and a family member was James Grimes who was the first Republican governor of Iowa and later became a Senator of Iowa.  I think my father was suspicious of me being a Democrat all along. 

Speaking of tough, my father ran a credit bureau in Okanogan County and one day my sister and I were sitting on a bench in the entry way waiting for a ride home with my father.  I was probably 7 and my sister was 12.  A man about 28 years old stormed into the office with his parents and started yelling obscenities at my Father and his staff for taking him to court to collect his bad debts.  The man’s mother was crying and it was quite a hysterical scene.  My father told them to calm down and said let’s find a way to negotiate  with the man’s debtor’s rather than yell at each other.  The man ran out of the office and came back from his truck with a rifle that was fully loaded and he pointed the rifle at my father.  “Let’s negotiate with this rifle,” the man yelled.  All of my father’s staff ducked for cover and the parent’s of the man with the rifle backed away from their son and wrapped their arms around each other and began to weep.  My father stood tall and told the man he needed to put the rifle down or my father would take it away from him.  Meanwhile my sister and I are sitting down not more than six feet from where the riflemen stood.  In this time of trouble my father was not going to negotiate an inch knowing that to give in to this mad man would cause us all a greater harm.  If it would have been me as the parent I would have given him what he wanted in order to protect my children but my father played it another way.  He walked towards the gunman and took the loaded rifle out of his hand even though the gunman was yelling at my father the whole time that he was going to shoot him.  My father took the rifle and told the gunman to get out of the office and never come back again.  The gunman and his parents rushed out of the office crying madly but because my father never called the police.
This kid was given another chance at working out his problems.  I think he did just that.

I think my father also added, as he looked out the door of his office with the rifle in his hand, “And stay the hell away from me!”  Later as we rode home that night my father asked us what kind of grades did we get in school that day.  We never mentioned the gunman.  It seems my father and I both shared a great talent for Denial.  We probably could have gone into business together as Denial, Inc.  It’s good we shared something.

I came into this world, my father believed, to fulfill his unfulfilled expectations or something like that.  My father didn’t plan or articulate quite that seriously but I’m sure he was thinking those thoughts at least some of the time.  My due date for birth was to be near Lincoln’s birthday on the 12^th of February, 1951.  To my father if I was born on that date it would have been a sign from God.  Our Republican family with a son born on Lincoln’s birthday would have been source for family legend.  In order to insure that the 12^th would be the day I was born my father drove my mother around the Okanogan on the bumpiest of dirt roads in his 2 door Ford hoping I would get the message and decide to be born in time to share the day with Lincoln.  I can’t imagine that my father actually talked my mother into this exercise.  She was a very bright woman in those days and she probably gave in just to humor my father.  I, of course, had other ideas and I wasn’t born until the following day and right at that moment I think the disappointment in me began. 

Omak was a lumber and apple orchard town.  There were ranches too and lots of cowboys and Indians walking around in real life.  My parent’s home was once the ranch for a family that raised livestock for rodeos.  Brahma bulls, bucking broncos and roping calves used to roam where my brother and I and the neighborhood kids would later play baseball and football.

We had this old barn way out back in what was then a pasture behind our house when we first moved in.   My father hated it because it was old and falling down but he never really had a plan for what to do with it other than hope the neighborhood kids would burn it down smoking cigarettes out there.  He used to claim he had that barn insured for a lot of money and he hoped the kids would just smoke away out there.  Well the barn was also a great place to have adventures and swing from ropes and hide from your friends.

One day a fellow down the road offered my father a few hundred dollars to buy the barn and move it onto another piece of property that the fellow owned.  My father had grown tired of waiting for the neighborhood toughs to burn the barn down and collect the insurance money so he agreed.  I remember the day the barn was hauled away.  The movers cut it in half and lifted the separate pieces onto a very large trailer.  As the pieces of the barn were lifted up about a million cigarette butts spilled out onto the ground and everyone around the site started to laugh.  Even my dad got a good laugh out of that.

My father was a habitual smoker and he was always in the process of lighting his pipe, a cigar or a cigarette.  He was famous for his pipe and he must have had hundreds of them.

As he was mostly smoking one of his pipes this meant he was in a constant state of lighting the pipe.  My father was a moving smokestack and the great problem for him was where to throw the matches when he was in his office.  As my father walked around his office checking on the work his staff was doing he would constantly be lighting his pipe and then throwing the matches into the waste paper baskets.  This meant that about every half an hour a fire would start in the waste paper baskets.  This wasn’t a problem for my father because he was so compulsive he would go around and empty the waste paper baskets every half an hour to avoid a fire.  Occasionally he would forget or a fire would start any way and a staff person would jump up from their desk because the waste paper basket was on fire.  To the older staff members this was just routine and they would just yell, “Charlie.” 

Because my father’s office generated so much paper we had a large dumpster behind the office in the parking lot where we would empty the paper and the garbage.  One day when I was hanging out at the office after school my father was on a mission to empty the waste paper baskets and avoid any catastrophes.  He was having trouble keeping his pipe going that day because he was using a new tobacco from a Norwegian shop in Seattle.

He was having me haul out the baskets all afternoon as I waited.  I went out to empty the trash for what I hoped was the final time when I saw the dumpster engulfed in flames. Obviously one of my father’s matches lingered in a basket and didn’t burst out in flame until it was in the dumpster.   This was bad enough but the dumpster leaned against a telephone pole which also had a large metal box on it that serviced the entire block of offices and retail stores with electrical power.  I ran inside and grabbed my father and he ran out with a fire extinguisher.  The flames were licking the electrical transformer box and we were worried the box was going to explode.  Luckily the paper in the dumpster did not provide enough fuel to burn down the telephone pole or damage the electrical transformer box so the fire died down pretty quickly.  As we walked away from the spent fire and near catastrophe my father lit his pipe again and threw the match into the dumpster.  That was my dad.

Perhaps it is the ironies in life’s twists and turns that bring us the greater truths.  As I reflect upon my relationship with my father I always thought there was a great separation between us.  On the surface our temperaments seemed so different.  My father was the kind of man who could never sit still. He was a restless man.  When my father was alive I used to think I was a reflective and calm person who studied what needed to be done rather than to rush in and create mayhem.  With each passing day I now dig deep to draw on my father’s restlessness to get through my problems and when that fails me I turn on the supernatural power of denial, we both share, to take care of what restlessness won’t cure.

My brother and I would watch television interactively.  The Lone Ranger was one of our favorite shows and when the William Tell Overture would start and the Lone Ranger and Tonto would ride down the trail after the bad guys my brother and I would hop onto the arms of the couch in my parent’s living room and start to hoop and holler like we were riding off with the Lone Ranger.  We’d jump off the couch and have gun fights and die a thousand deaths and then jump back on the arm of the couch and ride off with Tonto and Kimosobe.  We would yell and scream and collapse when the bad guys shot us to death.

Wrestling shows were even better we’d pretend the living room was a wrestling ring and we’d throw each other around and into the furniture and then take each other down on the floor and rub each other’s faces into the carpet.  Now this would annoy my parents to no end as the living carpet was wall to wall wool and in Omak during the 50’s to have wall to wall wool carpet was a sign of luxury.  To my mother’s great horror my brother and I were wearing a hole in the carpet right where we would rub each other’s face into it in front of the television.  We were warned to no end about this behavior but we couldn’t help ourselves there were just to many bad guys to defeat on television. 

One day my father came home from work and found us riding the arms of the couch like crazy cowboys out on the trail and started to yell, “that’s it.  I can’t take it anymore.”

That night after dinner we started to remodel the basement into a family room to watch television in and in my father’s typical compulsive form he started by breaking up the concrete with a sledge hammer and putting the broken pieces of concrete into buckets.

He insisted that my brother and I had to haul the buckets out to the yard because we couldn’t control ourselves watching TV.  My brother complained that he was too young to have to work like this and my father responded by saying you’ll be older by the time your done.  It worked out much better for us crazy people to watch television downstairs because our parent’s response time in breaking up our fights was much longer.  The last great fight we had watching television was a little gruesome.  My brother and I started to wrestle on the couch and then before we knew it we were sprawled over the coffee table and then with a thud we hit the tiled concrete floor of the family room and my brother’s head hit the floor with a loud thud and he was knocked unconscious.  I thought I had killed him and instead of worrying about whether he would live I was busy thinking up a story about how it wasn’t my fault that he was dead ( I think I was going with he slipped on the floor after spilling a drink of water) while my mother ran down the stairs screaming is he still alive.  Fortunately my brother lived and grew up to be a mathematician so the crack on the head probably was good for him

Maverick was absolutely our favorite show and it was on Sunday nights which was also when my father decided we needed to be bathed so we would be clean when the school week started.  We hated to miss any part of Maverick so my father set up this 2 minute drill for us to get bathed during the commercials.  It was a win win for us all.  We got our baths and dad didn’t have to listen to us whine because we would miss even a small part of Maverick.  As the commercial began one of us would run into the bathroom tearing our clothes off as we went down the hall and then we’d jump into my father’s arms and he’d throw us into the tub, lather us up and then dunk us under water.  He’d then pull us out of the tub and wrap a towel around us and send us back out to watch the rest of Maverick.  From the bathroom to the living room wet footprints could be seen on the wall to wall wool carpet but on those nights it didn’t seem to matter.

The time I spent with my dad, until I became an absurd teen-ager, was always a teaching event of some sort.  His all time favorite wisdom was to “work with your mind.  You’ll never make any money working with your hands and your back.”  Another favorite was to “always work for your self.  A boss can never pay you what you are worth.”   But my favorite wisdoms were from when we worked in the yard and he taught how you needed to work towards the end of your project.  He always cautioned about wasted movements while working on the garden.  “Don’t create work for yourself,” was one of his favorite sayings.  Even today as I work in my own garden my father’s musings on labor come to my mind.  As I plan my work day in the garden I always outline in my mind what I’m going to accomplish that day and how to insure I don’t waste any movement or create any extra work for myself while working through the day. 

I must tell you that I used to hate working in the yard with my father.  He was a task master and would complain all day long to me about how slow and inefficient I was.  He could never work me enough to  satisfy his needs.   At the time I was just trying to put in a minimum effort so that I could soon spend time with my friends playing ball or just messing around.  I didn’t quite understand it then that my father was trying to instill a pride of ownership and self-worth into my childhood brain.  The last thing I ever wanted to do was become a gardener.  I hated everything about it and taking care of a yard only meant work to me then.  It was all about raking leaves, mowing lawn and pulling weeds and I could not understand why people bothered with it.

In my adult life I have become an avid gardener and although my father and I garden completely different we are the same in that we love to walk out into our gardens and enjoy the dew on the flower petal, the pink brilliance of a cherry blossom and an exotic perfumed scent rising from the rose garden.  Funny how that works.   He is with me every day that I garden in my haphazard cottage garden way and I only wish I could spend five more minutes with him in his straight lined well mowed perfectly weeded garden. 

The craziest teaching lessons my father ever gave me was at the bowling alley.  We would go there on Sunday afternoons and bowl two or three games at a time.  My brother would come with us and there was the excitement of being at the bowling alley, getting your shoes and ball picked out, putting talcum powder on your hands and then the daunting task of trying to send the ball down the alley and knock down pins with at least some accuracy.  The food at the bowling alley was great too.  The café at the bowling alley was an authentic greasy spoon with cheap hamburgers, French fries and Pepsis.  I can still hear my father complaining we were dripping ketchup and mustard all over the bowling lanes.

The teaching lesson at the bowling alley was in Math.  It was my job to keep the scores of our games and my father would always be leaning over me to get the score added up.  Keeping score in bowling is a bit of an arcane science with bonus points for completing a spare or strike in a frame and I would sometimes hesitate while I added the points up in my head first before I wrote down the actual score.  The reason for my hesitation was because not only did you keep score but your score was also projected up on the wall of the bowling alley for everyone to see and if you made a mistake with your score it could be quite embarrassing.  My father would lean over me and press me to add the score up as fast as I could.  Faster he would encourage me.  Don’t think about it don’t hesitate.  Math is like a language just use the skill and you’ll get better.  I think my brother got this message better than I did.  To this day whenever I am adding up numbers I press my self to go as fast as I can and I hear my father saying, “faster, faster.”

As I became a teen-ager it was harder for me to talk with my father about anything.  He became even more restless with our family life as time went on and he enjoyed the company of his friends much more.  This was good because he was giving me space to become myself.  As much as my father cajoled me to improve he always let me decided what was the best direction to go in life.  The only time we would ever talk was when he was playing solitaire in his card room because it was the only time he would sit still long enough to listen to what was being said.  We were always at odds over what was the latest topic from the generation gap to what kind of music we liked to our politics. 

For so many years I thought my father and I were so different.  It was a little contest I had with myself to be improving on what my father had accomplished in his life.  I thought I was so smart being able to succeed in a large city like Seattle while my father had only thrived in a small town like Omak.  And then one day I was about to get into my brown 2 door Saab and drive my boys to school and I realized I was just like my dad in his brown Ford 2 door sedan.  I worked for myself just like he had told me to and I was living in a large house with a beautiful garden just like him.  It really knocked me out that day to realize that after all of the rebelling, after all of the emotional distance and the denial that I would ever be like him I was turning out to be just like my father only in my personal version. My father had become the most important teacher in my life. 

When my father came to see the house that Melanie and I were going to buy he walked around the beat up old house and then strolled out into the garden and told me point blank not to waste my time fixing this house up.  It was way too much work he complained.  I decided that day that buying that house was the best idea in the world.   If my dad didn’t like it then it was right for me.  I thought by buying the house I was going against his will but I realize now that by repairing this house and gardens I was building a home for my family just the way he had done us and I wanted that for my family.

Although I would like to think I am an improvement on my father, some people would argue this, I do know that in a 21^st century ironic way I am truly my father’s son.  We are so alike and yet so different.  The acorn does not fall far from the tree.

I missed being with my father the moment he died.  I guess I thought I had work to do that was more important.  My brother was there and I thank him for that.   I atoned for this misfortune by sitting with my mother during her death rattle at the end of her days.

I never allowed my parents to become people in my mind.  They were always my parents and I didn’t want that to change.  It wasn’t until I sat next to my mother as she passed on that I realized she was a person first and a parent later.  I wish I had known that earlier because once your parent’s are gone they are never going to walk back into that room again and you never get another chance to sort things out.  I do know my father watches out for me from time to time from up above because I’ll hear a voice saying “what the hell are you thinking about?”