My Father’s World

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

MY FATHER’S WORLD

While going through family albums, one photo of my dad simply tackled me. I don’t think I’d ever seen it before, or if I had, it didn’t strike me like it did at this particular moment, two days after his death.

Standing in front of the school bus he drove, my father’s arms are clasped behind him, shoulders back, chin up; he has a slight but mysterious smile. His gaze is strong and off to the distant right. My dad’s unusual but confident pose brought the word superhero to mind.

Like most little girls, I viewed my dad as some sort of Superman. There was nothing he couldn’t do. He knelt beside me on our grassy lawn and showed how to remove a bicycle inner tube. He built the house we lived in, mowed the yard, changed the oil in the car. He read to me, answered all the questions a 4-year-old girl could ask, and on Sunday mornings he put frilly white socks on my feet.

But as I grew older, I began to see that everyone has shortcomings and that some people are burdened by unresolved childhood issues.

My dad’s life was difficult from day one. In 1926, he entered this world with a congenital skin condition. He was different, impossibly and visibly different. As a boy, he was ridiculed and ostracized. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to live inside of his skin.

Depression sometimes took him for a ride and he had silent spells. He and my mother didn’t mesh well. But as a father, he always offered gentle love and guidance.

Two days after his passing in late July, my brother and I each selected dozens of photographs to be made into a slide show for viewing at the funeral home.

Scanning the arc of Dad’s life was enlightening. Although I had known the countless things he was involved in, seeing everything at once showed me the depth and range of his 85 years on this planet.

I saw photos of him as a Lions Club member, handing out coffee to Labor Day travelers. There were pictures of him with the Cheyenne Stamp Club. My brother and I also became stamp collectors, attending Sunday afternoon meetings in Great Bend with our dad.

I found images of him mowing grass at one of the cemeteries he maintained, and a photo of him as a church officeholder. He was also Pawnee Rock’s unofficial historian with a vast collection of old photographs and documents.

Dad drove a Pawnee Rock school bus for 18 years and later became the rural mail carrier, but he was a carpenter at heart and by trade. Several pictures were of him in his shop, acting as the local 4-H club’s woodworking leader.

He began his career with wood in the 1940s, building truck beds. Then he opened his own woodworking shop in downtown Pawnee Rock where he made sawdust for 46 years, and specialized in fine cabinets and bookcases.

Betty, my stepmother, and Dad were happy together; they had 24 married years. And Dad’s ornery grin was present in nearly every picture she took of him.

Photos from Betty’s albums show my dad 30 feet above the back yard, cutting down a tree, limb by limb. One image has him raising, by himself, an obviously heavy metal pole for a purple martin birdhouse. Never one to ask for help, he was physically strong and fiercely independent.

Things changed. An accident at 70 made him, for the first time, temporarily dependent on others. He made a monumental comeback in less than a year. But by the time he hit 80, age and ailments began to get the upper hand.

Because these past 15 years were often focused on limitations, I was grateful that the photos reminded me of the full measure of his life.

I kept going back to that striking and confident superhero pose of Dad standing in front of his school bus. In some ways, this picture showed a father I hadn’t known.

While scanning pictures that evening, I saw that Dad had put together a complete and happy life. Maybe I was just softened by emotion, but I suddenly felt as if I understood him in ways I hadn’t before, in a way that perhaps only death reveals to us.

Life isn’t easy. We take what we have and we make the best out of it. My dad wasn’t a superhero, but he did live a life of silent courage. And his endurance and tenacity will always inspire me.

Copyright 2011 ~ Cheryl Unruh