What I Said Today

There are many things to admire about my father. If you’d observed him lately those things have been difficult to see. The last two years for my father have been dismal. The loss of his wife, my mother, and the steady decline of his own health had really held him back from being the man he had always been. Actually, my own observation had been that recently he’d turned a corner and at least in his head was back on a more even keel. He had started to think about what his life was going to carry on to be, he’d taken joy in meeting and playing with his grandson Easton; he’d gotten himself out into some activity around town, and after a multi-year hiatus had gotten back to tending his garden. In the end though years and years of less fortunate health decisions caused his body to be unable to meet the new challenge of his improving attitude, and just a few days ago while working in his yard he left us forever.

But that was just the end, not even the last chapter; more like a note on the inside back cover of his life. The rest of the story was quite different showing a man who was a great educator, a skilled craftsman, and a loving father.

My dad worked at the same job for 40 years. In the last 20 years I have had 9 jobs and have lived in four states. It’s difficult to imagine the sticktuitiveness required to stay with something so long and the ingenuity required to keep work fresh year after year. My earliest memories of my dad as a teacher were going with him to basketball and football games at Niles West, or puttering around for hour after hour in the Social Studies office playing with the ditto machine on a Saturday afternoon while my father prepared something for next week’s class. Sometimes when he’d bring home work to grade he would hand me his gradebook, point at two people and say “figure out what I have to do so that this guy passes and this guy doesn’t.” This is a problem I find myself with all the time on my own job now.

My father was an outlier in the implementation of technology in the classroom, film, video, laser, computers, he was always trying to get the next thing he could use. At one point it seemed like there was nothing he couldn’t tape at home and use at school. I remember him trying to figure out if there was some way he could integrate “Law & Order,” his new favorite show, into classroom instruction. He did. Year’s later, not to be outdone, I remember phoning up my dad to tell him that on that day I had shown my Production Planning class an episode of “Iron Chef.” As if to say “Top that!” I’m fairly sure given the opportunity he could have. As a teacher, my father touched the lives of thousands of students. At the time of his retirement he was just one year away from the possibility of having had three generations: a student, their son, and that son’s son pass through his classroom. His was an unheard of length of outstanding service from which many, many students benefited.

All along the time my father was hard at work at his vocation he also had a series of avocations that were to me equally impressive. First and foremost I think was the garden. I have memory of year after year of tomatoes, green beans, cucumbers, strawberries and countless varieties of flowers. During the summer our activities always included trips to the nurseries and hours planting and weeding in the yard. This had been largely an activity of my youth, and had dropped off after a while – but then picked up again after my sister and I left home. I think in that case it was because the more of the yard he maintained as a garden, the less he would have to mow.

Dad had a college buddy named Gene Stockton, and Gene ran a business in Rosemont fabricating things from Plexiglass. Through that friendship my dad got access to a shop and to materials and gained access to a new creative sideline. There were napkin rings and candlesticks and picture frames and nameplates. PI became the new Saturday haunt for me. Dad taught me to use the pantograph so I could make dozens of useless signs for dozens of people that didn’t need them. This hobby also produced the first scenery for the Eileen Boevers Traveling Troupe, a high tech reconfigurable scenery system for the production of “Snow” and a very intricate sign and central plot point for the Percy Utley School for Girls in another. We always had to leave the shop as if we’d never been there and I can still hear in my head dad running down the list “gas is off, compressors off, lights are out, door is locked…”

Some of the picture frames from this era caught the eye of a local photographer Michael Metzger and that lead into the next avocation as dad spent countless hours doing custom framing and collages for Mike’s customers. If you live in Highland Park, even if you haven’t been to the house, you have almost certainly seen fruit of this collaboration. These projects reinvigorated a longtime love of photography for my father and suddenly every inch of the walls of our home were covered with family photos.

The most recent of these hobbies was creating glasses out of wine bottles. He’d even placed some pieces with local restaurants, and a youtube video of his process, as of last night, had over 81,000 hits. Though deep down I think these activities were always just something he loved to do for himself they have all had a profound effect on me and I am sure on many others as well.

Even more though than dad the craftsman or dad the educator was dad the dad. I had a great dad. My dad was tough and would occasionally lay down the law but also left me and my sister room for us to be ourselves and discover ourselves. He drove year after year to activity after activity. I think he spent long enough in the Soleil parking lot to get an honorary Bar Mitzvah. He came to concerts and shows and ferried to rehearsals and calls and drove and drove and drove and drove. We had multiple family vacations encompassing multiple states. I remember being at Antietam battlefield and getting the Civil War lesson on the spot “how can one man defeat 30 – well if they all have to come through the door one at a time…” I remember being at National Bridges in Utah and opening a guidebook box only to release an angry bee and having to run all the way back to the car. My formative years were a virtual travelogue of the United States, and pretty much all of it with him at the wheel. Special occasion or run of the mill my dad was always there for me no question – yet another remarkably long run of excellence.

More recently I had been seeing less and less of my father. Almost certainly that was on me. The world has moved on from a place where kids stay close to home. A little bit I feel about the last ten years the way a working parent must feel about the first few years of a child’s life “oh I’ve missed so much.” But I was living the life he’d worked so hard for me to have and even though he wasn’t there physically in my presence I always knew without a single doubt that he was there for me if I needed him and that he loved my unconditionally. So here we are, heading out one last time: gas is off, compressor’s off. Dad, thank you so much for all you gave to me. I will always love you and I will miss you more than I can say.