Father's Day

If your father is still with you, see him, call him, talk to him. If not, take a few minutes to remember him.
My father has much to do with who and how I am, I think. For one thing, the ADD that my grandson was diagnosed with, I can trace back through my daughter, myself , and on to my father. He was an intelligent man who only went to the eighth grade in formal schooling, but who never stopped learning. He was a young man during Word War II, but never was in the armed forces, I think he was deferred for flat feet, if I recall correctly. He started working for a company called Pulver Gas & Oil, delivering fuel oil. When the company began to offer oil burner installation and service, he drove to Rochester, NY (a major trip in those pre-NYS Thruway days) and, went to school for a week to learn how to do that. He became the top burner serviceman for the company, and did that until his heart attack in 1959. After that he was put into a desk job and eventually became manager of the company.
Along with the full-time job with Pulver, he started his life’s dream, to have a dairy farm. How did he get that dream, when the only connection with cows he had growing up was the family no doubt having a cow for milk at some time? Who knows. But he learned all he could about cows and farming and away we went, buying a farm (plus some machinery and one cow) when I was 6.
The farm lasted about 13 or 14 years (my sister can correct me on this); when she married a guy who also wanted to dairy farm they ran it for a while, but that ended badly and the cows were sold in the early 1960’s.
He was about 6 months away from retirement when he died.
But, he would never have retired, because there always would have been another project, another something new to learn and try. When he died I said ‘I wish he could have done all the things he wanted to – but then again he never would have because there would have been something new coming along all the time’.
A couple of stories about my father: He was the first man in New York State known to shoot a deer with a bow and arrow since the time of the Indians. He got interested in bow hunting, and went up to Indian Lake (there was no better place to hunt, in his opinion). On the way up, he stopped at a small mountain gas station and got talking with the owner and mentioned the bow hunting. The other man scoffed, and said no one could shoot a deer with a bow and arrow. My father did. He had to chase the deer a little ways through the woods to get to where it dropped, but he did it. On the way home he stopped at the same station, and while the owner was standing by the back of the car putting the gas in, my father just walked around and casually opened the trunk, where the deer lay, causing mush sputtering and ‘How did?’ from the other guy. He was written up in the New York Times for that.
Which leads to another story: most farm machinery is by nature large, awkward and dangerous, some more than other pieces. One of the more dangerous we had for a while was a corn husker. It was two long cylinders with some type of rough covering (I can’t remember exactly what that was, what I am thinking is some sort of metal or wooded or both slats going lengthwise down the rolls, but not sure on that) that were angled down from top to bottom of the machine and turned towards each other. You put ears of corn at the top and the rollers caught the husk and by the time the ear got to the bottom it was stripped, and fell into a container that you had to keep emptying. That was our job, to many, many, many warning not to get our hands near the rollers because the machine would take them off. Well, one night, my father was husking corn, went to push an ear that wasn’t catching into the rollers and his glove got caught and pulled his hand in. He managed to pull it out of the glove, but not before some finger damage was done; he lost the tip of one, had to have skin grafts on another and two or three of them were permanently crooked. His main concern was whether he would still be able to pull the bow string. One of his roommates was a reporter with the NY Times, who said that if he ever shot a deer to let him know, he’d do a story.
My father had his share of mishaps, but he didn’t like to admit it. One of the most famous was the winter night he was spreading the manure and got the tractor and spreader stuck at the far end of our pond – he thought it was frozen enough to drive across and it wasn’t. He walked down to the house, and never said a word, just called a neighbor to come up to give him a hand with ‘something’ and bring a heavy chain. It took some pulling and cussing but they got it out. This was a couple of weeks before Christmas, and for a gift, the neighbor put together a little scene with snow, a mirror for a pond, and a little tractor in the middle of the pond, on a bar of Ivory soap – because ‘it floats’.
When I was 6 or 7, one night I couldn’t sleep, and went downstairs while my parents were still up. He took me on his lap and sang ‘Daddy’s Little Girl’.
When I was about 13, he didn’t like my current ‘boyfriend’ and pretty much said I shouldn’t see him any more, or at least that was how I heard it. I had my bags packed that night to run away from home. Never did it, but my bags were packed.
When I was learning to drive, he tried and tried to teach me how to double clutch to shift our old farm truck. Didn’t work. When I was driving truck, I learned, and thought of him. I asked my mother what he would have thought of my doing that. We agreed that he would have given a little giggle – and wanted to come along on a trip with me.
He died doing one of the things he loved most, hunting in the woods near Indian Lake. Well, technically he died in the hospital the next day, but for all intent and purposes, that was the last thing he was doing. As one of his companions said, that’s about the best last thing you could do, and the prettiest last place you could be.
I still miss him. I have evidence that he’s still around, though, but those are other stories.
To all of you who are, Happy Father’s Day.