Wanting to say things,
I miss my father tonight.
–Simon J. Ortiz, “My Father’s Song“

Like the speaker in Simon J. Ortiz’s poem “My Father’s Song,” I miss my father’s voice. In recent years, the clearest indication of his declining health has been his long silences. A few weeks ago, I called him for his birthday, the only sound, his labored breathing and my fumbling attempts to fill the silence between us.

Years ago, after a long night driving home from college, arriving at 3 a.m., I would be met at the door by my father, who sat up talking to me until it was time for him to leave for work the following morning. I seldom said anything. He filled my silence with the sounds of his life, the things he had been working on around the house, his life at work, complaints about family members, stories about his homing pigeons, reminiscences about his past–the litany was never ending, and I was its helpless audience, tired from twelve to fourteen hours on the road, and wanting sleep. But I never said anything, and he never noticed, just sat at the kitchen table talking, drinking cup after cup of coffee, smoking one cigarette after another, filling me with his life.

Those first years of college and marriage, I didn’t have a phone, but once I did, calls home lasted hours, with brief breaks as my mom took the phone, before handing it back to dad. He told me about Sears repairmen coming to fix the then fifteen year old freezer, complaining about how they kept insisting he replace the antique chest freezer, only to have him show them how to replace the irreplaceable thermostat or fuss at them for damaging the seal. The freezer still sits in the utility room, fifty years old, hoary with frost, humming to itself.

Far too often his voice was filled with lament–at real and imagined wrongs–grumblings about supervisors, criticisms of his pigeon racing buddies, complaints about my brothers and sisters. Sometimes, that constant harangue turned angry and bitter, and the paranoia and mood swings his mental illness infected him with carried him along in a wave toward disaster. One year I stopped him.

“You’re doing it again,” I said. “You’re working yourself into a fever pitch. If you keep this up, you’ll be back in the hospital.”

–And he stopped, pulled himself back from the brink of insanity for the week I was home and a few weeks after before falling into the maelstrom again.

He refused to call them “mental breakdowns.” “I needed a vacation,” he’d say. “I just needed to get away from your-mother-your-sisters-your-brothers-the-pigeon-guys-work-the-farm, the list was endless, a riff of interwoven melodies of disappointment and self-righteous indignation.

The Sunday he returned home after his first mental breakdown, after he had taken his rifle to the hill above Windsor, where the gospel radio station’s tower pointed up toward the stars, and told the police he was protecting us from the aliens, on the Sunday after he came home from a two week stay in the mental ward of York Hospital, I came into the kitchen to hear him say to my mother across the room as she washed dishes, “I know now it wasn’t you. It was those damn kids.” And then he saw me, and all I could think was, “They let him out, and he is still crazy.”

But it wasn’t always like that. Most of his stories were about his work, first as a machine operator and then as inspector at Allis Chalmers and then Precision Engineering, where he worked until he retired. He worked on turbines for nuclear power plants and submarines, and his stories were full of his pride in his work, his pride in a job done right, even when everyone else was willing to settle for second best in the service of expediency.

Other times, he spent long hours talking about his racing pigeons, which of his birds won which race, and who he beat, and by how much, tracing the pedigree of the winners through his breeding stock named for the men who had founded the breeding lines–Sion, Bastian, Gruder-Moss, and others whose names I have forgotten. He talked about eye sign, and what made a good homer, and what he was feeding them. He described blue bars and red checks, silvers and chocolates, tail feathers and flight feathers, famous flyers like Federal Girl, who got her name because she always flew over the Federal Bank building when coming home from a race. Several years ago, I realized that his wealth of stories and information about homing pigeons would soon be lost, and I tried to encourage him to talk about the birds while I took notes, but paranoia set in. “No one’s getting my secrets,” he said. “I’m taking them to the grave.”

For years, the week after Thanksgiving, my dad took a week of vacation from work for the first week of buck season. In those early years coming home, he talked about shots made and missed, fourteen point bucks with perfect racks and button bucks. Later, when he no longer hunted, he talked about feeding the deer corn, walking up to them, and talking to them, soothing. “Come on, three-legger,” he’d say to one doe, whose fourth leg had been damaged by a hunter. “Come on, girl. You know me.”

My dad charmed animals, a deer whisperer, dog whisperer, bird whisperer, long before anyone else. For a time, he raised hunting dogs, going small game hunting each fall. Evenings he’d sit on his back porch talking to squirrels, cardinals, and chipmunks, to the gaggle of ducks he kept, who followed him around the yard, to the deer who munched his gift of corn, watching him with their dark brown eyes. If there’s a forest in heaven, he’s sitting in a battered chair near its edge, smoking, drinking coffee, talking in the gathering dusk.

© Bill Stifler, 2009

My dad passed away this morning about 8 a.m.  For those of you who never met him, and for those who did, here are a few stories about him.

1.  Accepting Charity 

My dad felt very strongly about accepting charity.  In his mind, it called in question his manhood and his ability to provide for his family.  It was near Christmas; I must have been about 12 years old, and my dad, my brothers and sisters, and I were sitting in the car along a street in York, PA, while my mom was in the store shopping. I was sitting directly behind my dad when a man came up to the car. It was obvious that he had been drinking although I seem to remember that he was not badly dressed. He kept trying to give my father a $20 dollar bill, but my dad refused. Finally, the man gestured toward all of us kids in the car, and looking directly at my dad, he said, “Please, take this money and buy your kids some Christmas presents. If you don’t, I’m just going to end up drinking it.” My dad took the money, thanked the man, and the man left.

The next day my dad kept talking about what had happened. My dad had always refused what he considered ‘charity’ from other people. But this time, in accepting charity from this stranger, it seemed to my dad that it wasn’t charity because my dad had taken the money to help the man keep from drinking. I remember sensing how important this event was to my father and how it made him look at things in a different way.

2.   Dad and Uncle Ben

My dad’s uncle Ben was only a couple of years older than he. Apparently Ben was very mischievous. Once he lured my dad into a field where my dad was attacked by a goat. Another time Uncle Ben told my dad that he had jumped off a local railroad bridge about 30 feet into the Muddy River (in Maryland), which is only a few feet deep. My dad, to prove he was as clever and brave, dove off the bridge into 4 or 5 feet of water.  Dad said he had to pull up sharply, but his chest still scraped the rocky bottom.  When he told Uncle Ben that he dove off the bridge, Ben laughed, and said he had jumped feet first and that he didn’t believe my dad. So dad dove in again, just to prove it.

Another time, dad was driving to Uncle Ben’s. The road twists along through woods along the Muddy River and has numerous blind spots. Dad was driving about 60 miles an hour along this road which was posted for 35. He rounded a particularly dangerous curve on the wrong side of the road. As he did, Uncle Ben passed him going the other way, also on the wrong side of the road. Dad slewed to a stop, turned around, and came racing back down the road to catch Ben. As he again rounded this dangerous curve on the wrong side, Ben passed him going back the way he had come, also on the wrong side. Again, dad found a place to stop and turned around. This time, however, he rounded that dangerous curve carefully, and on the right side of the road. Just past the curve, he found Ben waiting for him. Ben said he hadn’t wanted to try rounding that curve again.

3.  Tobacco Stems

I also have my own trickster story involving my dad. Dad raises homing pigeons, and my brother Joe was stuck with the task of carrying buckets of water up to the second floor of the barn to the breeding pens there and down in the yard to the loft where Dad kept his racing pigeons. My dad bought some tobacco stems for nest bowls. Tobacco is very itchy to handle. Dad came home and at lunch told me that I had a choice between carrying the tobacco stems from where he had left them in the barn down to the loft or letting Joe do that while I watered the birds. Physically, watering the birds was more demanding, but given how itchy the tobacco stems were, handling the tobacco stems was the worse job. My dad had orchestrated all this to teach me a lesson about hard work. Joe was certain I would leave him to move the tobacco stems, and he was not happy. Dad had placed the stems on a large sheet of plastic to protect them from moisture. I asked him if he wanted me to put the stems back on the plastic when I got them down to the loft. When he said yes, I said I’d move the tobacco stems–much to the surprise of both my dad and my brother.  In fact, dad was thrilled.  He had me where he wanted me.

After lunch, I went out to the barn. Lifting the edges of the large plastic sheet, I flipped all the tobacco stems to the center, then grabbed all four corners of the sheet of plastic and dragged it down to the loft, never handling the tobacco stems. In effect, I had outfoxed the fox. Dad was in two minds–unhappy his “lesson” had failed and impressed at my cleverness in evading his trap. Joe, on the other hand, felt cheated.

4.  Pork Brains 

I was a very picky eater as a child (Actually, I still am, although I have gotten somewhat better). One of the foods I particularly hated was liver. One year when I was in senior high, I was shopping with my mother and grandmother. My mother decided we were having liver for supper. Then my grandmother saw some pork brains on sale.

“I haven’t had pork brains in a long time,” she said. “But I can’t eat all those.”

My mother looked at me and said, “If you don’t want liver, you can eat pork brains.”

Well, I knew I didn’t like liver, so I decided to take a chance on the pork brains.  I mean, they couldn’t be worse?

That night at supper, my grandmother and I were eating pork brains while my mother and five siblings were eating liver. While I didn’t like the pork brains, they were better than liver. Then my father came in to join us for supper.

What’s this?” he said, pointing to the pork brains.

My mother said, “If you want some, just eat them.” My father looked at the rest of us. No one said anything.

I shoved a fork full of brains in my mouth. “Go ahead,” I said, trying hard not to smile.

He tried some. “Taste like smelts,” he said. Smelts are fried fish eggs, which my father loves. He helped himself to some more brains. “What are these?” he asked again.

“Just eat them. They’re good,” my grandmother said. Perhaps I should mention this was my maternal grandmother, his mother-in-law. She laughed. At the stove, I heard my mother snicker.

My father grabbed another generous helping. I watched with interest. If this continued, I wasn’t going to have to eat any more brains or liver. I smiled.

My father proceeded to wolf down brains. Soon all the brains were gone. “What were those?” he asked again.

Now that the brains were all gone, I looked my father square in the face. “Pork brains,” I said.

My father leapt from the table, sprang to the door, and ran into the front yard, retching while my mother and grandmother cackled.

© Bill Stifler, 2009