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