More About My Dad

My father was very proud of his health, albeit in a way that was, well, maybe a bit eugenicist. He stayed active throughout most of his life (and even later, when his wife forced him into exercise classes), and he could recover from things that should have been crippling. Or simply... shrug off damage that should potentially have been lethal. That stayed with him right to the end; the simple fact that he was still breathing and had a heartbeat when his blood pressure had fallen to 12/12 was so absolutely in character that we weren't even surprised. 

I once watched the man slide down a fify-foot-high granite cliff -- not vertical, but probably about a seventy-five degree angle -- crash into the underbrush, and then stand up and start looking around for his wallet. The back pockets of his jeans had been abraded away. The rawhide jacket he was wearing appeared untouched. 

In his youth, he was out on the mountainside and in a moment of inattention shot himself in the thigh; with no particular way to seek help -- this was long before cellphones existed -- he hiked back up the mountainside to the only local hospital and checked himself in. They looked him over, told him that the bullet had passed through cleanly and not hit anything important, and that the wound had basically closed itself up already, so there really wasn't much to do. He then walked back home. 

When I was young -- maybe seven or eight? -- he slipped while trying to help a sailboat dock, and the prow of the boat bent his right knee sideways. It wasn't quite to ninety degrees, but it was pretty horrible to watch and in retrospect I'm a little surprised I didn't have nightmares about it. Except Dad, true to form, spent the next few years walking with a cane until his knee apparently fucking recovered completely and after that it was all back to normal. That was well before the cliff incident, I should add. 

In his... Fifties? Sixties? ...he discovered that he had some blockages in his heart and got a bypass. Life expectancy after that was, we were told, maybe twenty to twenty-five years. He lived to be eighty-nine, and really only succumbed to COVID. The man had the constitution of a musk ox. 

One memory that I've recently found myself circling back to is spelunking with him and some others in my youth -- I'd guess I was about ten years old, which would put my younger brother at around seven; but we might have been a few years older than that. We were down in one of the limestone caves along the edge of the Cumberland Plateau, and we saw an opening that looked like it led to a larger room. Now, this opening was wide enough that it didn't feel claustrophobic for us, even though it had a very low ceiling -- maybe a foot high near the center. So my brother and I scooted through it, and sure enough it opened into a larger chamber with some pretty neat formations -- flowstone and soda straws, as I recall. 

So Dad... followed us in. He scooted along on his belly, while we called encouragement for him to hurry up until he finally called back that he was moving as fast as he could. Which seemed puzzling until we realized.... Remember what I said about the height of that passage? For the two of us, as children, it was "don't bump your head" territory. It was a lot tighter for my Dad. When he inhaled, he pressed against the floor and ceiling and there was no moving forward. So for him it was "inhale, exhale, and then scoot forward before you breathe in again" territory. 

He did it anyway, and we all agreed that it was a pretty cool cavern, and then he sent us back ahead of him and made his laborious way out. 

Dad's primary musical interests were folk and classical, but when I hit my teenage Serious Heavy Metal phase his only comment was to ask me to please, please turn down the volume on the radio before I turned off the car. Apparently he'd gotten in to go get groceries, and nearly been blown back out the car door by the volume of the music. When my brother developed an interest in drums, well, the house developed a second-hand drum kit in the Activity Room -- which was what we called his workshop. 

Kids need some room in order to grow up, and Dad was always willing to give that to us. We were allowed to make mistakes, to be wrong, to screw up. He taught kindness and patience by example. And he loved learning new things. Right up into his final years, we would call each other up to look up interesting bits of etymology -- did you know that fraught is basically the past tense of freight? It literally means that whatever you're describing has baggage attached.