If I could, if there was some way I could talk to him once again, I would let him know I am thinking of him:
Hey Dad,
I have missed you so much! Your unconditional love for me (your Pumpkin), has guided me all these years without you. I have wanted so much to show off my boys to you; you were such a great influence on them. They loved “Grandpa from the farm” and then when you moved to the Oregon coast, “Grandpa from the beach.”
They’ve grown! One got married! Can you believe it?
Dad, I wish you were here – so many good things about my life are because of you. I want to emulate your goodness, kindness, and compassion. I want to be held to your high standards of professionalism and integrity.
And I want to have the same enthusiasm you did for the little things in life – the short cuts that really weren’t; the home made sling shots that were the best invention for sibling interaction – why call it anything else – we weren’t rivals. No way! We were warriors and soldiers and adventurers, our only “prop” a simple wooden sling shot made from old inner tubes. The fantastically fast six-man toboggan run you made, that got so smoothed out from many rides that we could make a complete loop and never have to get off the toboggan. The igloo made out of the two feet of snow we had in 1964. In 1969 we had another record breaking snow and that’s the last time you ever shouted to the winter gods, “I wish it would snow two feet deep!”
I thought of you the last few days as I spent about eight hours cumulative in shoveling and scraping snow, and finding a place to dump the snow I shoveled. We have had three feet of snow in the last four days! Isn’t that phenomenal? Imagine the igloo palaces you could make!
As I move on and leave you over the Rainbow Bridge, I would really like to crawl in your lap and just lean into you, my comfort and my strength.
God bless you, Dad!
Dedicated to my Dad, Don Rice, Spokane Chronicle Editor, who passed away 15 years ago this week at the age of 67.
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Showing posts with label Dad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dad. Show all posts
12.22.2008
12.06.2008
I Know a Short Cut!
“I know a short cut!” my Dad would shout in triumph.
And the rest of the carload – Mom, two brothers, one sister, and me – would, in unison, tremble and shudder. A short cut meant only one thing: Dad was lost and we were doomed.
We frequently went for “Sunday drives” with Mom packing a loaf of bread and peanut butter. Off we would go in the family station wagon, over hill and dale, paved highway traversed by thousands of cars or rocky road never seen by man or machine in centuries. It didn’t matter – it was a short cut.
I remember once traveling up a road that could scarcely be defined as a legal mode of transportation, narrow, barely wide enough for the family wagon. Traversing up and up and zigzagging and back ending and tail whipping to the highest reaches of the earth, the car lumbering and laboring like a breathless elephant, suddenly Dad would decide this wasn’t a road at all and then proceed to back down with the sheer drop to the earth far, far below and a rock face spearing the sky on the other side. Dad would steer the monster behemoth car precariously close to the edge. We’d hold our collective breath, clamp our eyes tight shut, and PRAY!
Twice, we went on “short cuts” through uninhabited frontier and ended up in gullies, formed from some recent flash flooding, so that the “road” disappeared into a black, inky, gooey muddy mire that Dad would bravely plow through because he knew it was only a minor detail – until – well, the wheels stopped turning because they were essentially enveloped in a cement like gunk. We’d all get out and push the car while Dad steered. One of those muddy abysses was at least a mile long surrounded by watery swamps on either side tempting the car as Dad fishtailed, zigged, and zagged and finally landed on firm soil.
Many road trips later, I grew up, moved out, had a couple children, and teamed up with my Significant Other. When the boys were about 10 and 11, Lovey decided he wanted to go for a Sunday drive and look for grouse. We traveled towards Chewelah, all the time he is telling us tales of his grouse hunts with his dad, when he veers the car left to a side road, while exclaiming, “I know a short cut!”
Déjà vu set in. I shuddered. Closed my eyes tight. And PRAYED. We were even in an old classic Dodge station wagon, a big black hulking thing. The road started out paved, then turned to gravel, then turned to a wagon train trail, with grass growing knee-high up the middle of the “road.” And then pretty soon it was only a couple of trails, leading up, up, up into the clouds, the proverbial drop off cliff on MY side, the road getting, if possible, NARROWER, still going up, when we reach a “bump” in the road which made you feel like you were going to launch into outer space – where you couldn’t see where you were going to “land.” And the road immediately started to go down, bumpy and jarring – huge boulders in the way – we jumbled and dumbled our way down when we finally came out onto a forest road that branched in two different directions. Lovey took the left route and we ended up on a highway outside of Ford, Washington.
We found no grouse in this little adventure – however, when we reached the highway (alive), the forest road had a sign: “Grouse Trail Road.”
And that’s my last “short cut.”
.
And the rest of the carload – Mom, two brothers, one sister, and me – would, in unison, tremble and shudder. A short cut meant only one thing: Dad was lost and we were doomed.
We frequently went for “Sunday drives” with Mom packing a loaf of bread and peanut butter. Off we would go in the family station wagon, over hill and dale, paved highway traversed by thousands of cars or rocky road never seen by man or machine in centuries. It didn’t matter – it was a short cut.
I remember once traveling up a road that could scarcely be defined as a legal mode of transportation, narrow, barely wide enough for the family wagon. Traversing up and up and zigzagging and back ending and tail whipping to the highest reaches of the earth, the car lumbering and laboring like a breathless elephant, suddenly Dad would decide this wasn’t a road at all and then proceed to back down with the sheer drop to the earth far, far below and a rock face spearing the sky on the other side. Dad would steer the monster behemoth car precariously close to the edge. We’d hold our collective breath, clamp our eyes tight shut, and PRAY!
Twice, we went on “short cuts” through uninhabited frontier and ended up in gullies, formed from some recent flash flooding, so that the “road” disappeared into a black, inky, gooey muddy mire that Dad would bravely plow through because he knew it was only a minor detail – until – well, the wheels stopped turning because they were essentially enveloped in a cement like gunk. We’d all get out and push the car while Dad steered. One of those muddy abysses was at least a mile long surrounded by watery swamps on either side tempting the car as Dad fishtailed, zigged, and zagged and finally landed on firm soil.
Many road trips later, I grew up, moved out, had a couple children, and teamed up with my Significant Other. When the boys were about 10 and 11, Lovey decided he wanted to go for a Sunday drive and look for grouse. We traveled towards Chewelah, all the time he is telling us tales of his grouse hunts with his dad, when he veers the car left to a side road, while exclaiming, “I know a short cut!”
Déjà vu set in. I shuddered. Closed my eyes tight. And PRAYED. We were even in an old classic Dodge station wagon, a big black hulking thing. The road started out paved, then turned to gravel, then turned to a wagon train trail, with grass growing knee-high up the middle of the “road.” And then pretty soon it was only a couple of trails, leading up, up, up into the clouds, the proverbial drop off cliff on MY side, the road getting, if possible, NARROWER, still going up, when we reach a “bump” in the road which made you feel like you were going to launch into outer space – where you couldn’t see where you were going to “land.” And the road immediately started to go down, bumpy and jarring – huge boulders in the way – we jumbled and dumbled our way down when we finally came out onto a forest road that branched in two different directions. Lovey took the left route and we ended up on a highway outside of Ford, Washington.
We found no grouse in this little adventure – however, when we reached the highway (alive), the forest road had a sign: “Grouse Trail Road.”
And that’s my last “short cut.”
.
3.17.2008
Memories of Dad
This past weekend I chanced upon an article about a Dad/Daughter Dance. And the memories of my Dad whooshed in on me.
I have learned over time that a lot of daughters do not have the wonderful heroic image of their father as I do. It is very sad to me to realize not all daughters are the apple of their father’s eyes.
My Dad was my hero and my Prince Charming. He was the root of my self-esteem – he always said I could do anything, be anything I wanted. When I was a young adult he said, on my dating, you can BE an attorney, a doctor, a teacher, a leader – you don't have to marry one. (Of course, he would have been quite content if my sister and I remained pure, sweet, and innocent for our remaining days – a convent would not be disappointing to him.)
I was the light of my Dad’s life; my sister and I held a special place in his heart, making our brothers take a back seat. Sorry guys.
When I was in 8th grade (at one of the last eight-grade schools here in Spokane), we had a Father Daughter Tea. I was beyond thrilled to have my Dad, suited up, attend this tea. (So, that’s probably why I like men in uniform; a suit is such a class act!)
My Dad was ten feet tall to me. I would place my feet on his and he would dance me around the living room. He was everything to me and I to him. Once I sliced open my hand on a broken glass milk bottle (remember those?) He was just sick with grief for that little injury. The emergency room staff made him leave because they didn’t want to deal with a fainting father. His hand hurt…. Later when he broke his leg, my leg itched. We joked that it was too bad that when I scratched my leg, it wouldn’t relieve the terrible itching he had under his cast that ran from his foot to his hip. (I was 16 – in fact, he broke his leg the day before my birthday and that was a time that hospitals limited visitors to 16 and older.)
Funny, years after I became a mother and had two sons, I was walking out of the building I worked in, a bank, and this cute little man held the door open for me. I blinked, thinking he looked familiar when I realized that it was my ten-foot tall hero-Dad displayed as the real human being he was - only a couple inches taller than me. :)
In March of 1994, I wrote a short article that was picked for “Your Turn” in the Spokesman Review, titled “Happy Father’s Day.” It wasn’t Father’s Day; it was a memorial for my Dad who died December 19, 1993.
It was a thank you to my Dad; I had turned it into a speech for my Toastmaster’s group and it went something like this:
Thank you, Dad, for all the memories.
The time you made sling shots for all of us kids out of wooden clothes clips and rubber from inner tubes. Good for zapping little brothers.
The time it snowed so deep that you made an igloo for us that lasted for two whole months!
The same year, you made the fantastic toboggan run behind our house that was so sleek and fast that it would propel our six-man toboggan down and around the barn, and whoosh back up to the top – we only had to walk it over to the starting point and do it all again.
Making up the rule not to sing at the kitchen table or the window would fall on our heads. (Says something about how happy we were that you would have to make up a rule to keep us from singing at the kitchen table!)
Making up the Quiet Game (again at the kitchen table) where the game was lost at the first peep from a child, so we would spend delicious minutes making faces and sticking out our tongues at hapless siblings until one would burst out laughing. It only would last maybe five minutes before one of us would cave.
Coming up with titles for the book you never wrote. Naming the cats after events like Sir Odd Leigh Waffled (the result of making waffles that were, well, odd) and Precious Horace D, or PhD, the only doctor in the family.
The time we were camping at Priest Lake and our beach ball got away from us in the cool morning hours and you rushed in after it in your underwear – boxer shorts! How totally embarrassing to a 13-year old daughter when you came back with the beach ball, shorts plastered to your skin, and an audience of all the campers in the area. Clapping.
Sunday drives, especially ones where you would shout "I know a SHORT CUT!" that always turned out very obviously to us in the back seat - NOT! Like the time we got stuck on a flooded muddy road that went on for at least a mile and we (meaning your four children) pushed the car the entire way.
There are more wonderful memories. But the Dad-Daughter Dessert has to be right up there on top.
At the end of my Toastmaster’s speech, every guy in the room who had a daughter came up to me to thank me for reminding me of their most important duty as a father.
A father’s love for his child is the foundation for that child’s future. And a father’s relationship to his daughter is unique and the force behind her self esteem, growth, life, decisions.
Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I miss you greatly!
I have learned over time that a lot of daughters do not have the wonderful heroic image of their father as I do. It is very sad to me to realize not all daughters are the apple of their father’s eyes.
My Dad was my hero and my Prince Charming. He was the root of my self-esteem – he always said I could do anything, be anything I wanted. When I was a young adult he said, on my dating, you can BE an attorney, a doctor, a teacher, a leader – you don't have to marry one. (Of course, he would have been quite content if my sister and I remained pure, sweet, and innocent for our remaining days – a convent would not be disappointing to him.)
I was the light of my Dad’s life; my sister and I held a special place in his heart, making our brothers take a back seat. Sorry guys.
When I was in 8th grade (at one of the last eight-grade schools here in Spokane), we had a Father Daughter Tea. I was beyond thrilled to have my Dad, suited up, attend this tea. (So, that’s probably why I like men in uniform; a suit is such a class act!)
My Dad was ten feet tall to me. I would place my feet on his and he would dance me around the living room. He was everything to me and I to him. Once I sliced open my hand on a broken glass milk bottle (remember those?) He was just sick with grief for that little injury. The emergency room staff made him leave because they didn’t want to deal with a fainting father. His hand hurt…. Later when he broke his leg, my leg itched. We joked that it was too bad that when I scratched my leg, it wouldn’t relieve the terrible itching he had under his cast that ran from his foot to his hip. (I was 16 – in fact, he broke his leg the day before my birthday and that was a time that hospitals limited visitors to 16 and older.)
Funny, years after I became a mother and had two sons, I was walking out of the building I worked in, a bank, and this cute little man held the door open for me. I blinked, thinking he looked familiar when I realized that it was my ten-foot tall hero-Dad displayed as the real human being he was - only a couple inches taller than me. :)
In March of 1994, I wrote a short article that was picked for “Your Turn” in the Spokesman Review, titled “Happy Father’s Day.” It wasn’t Father’s Day; it was a memorial for my Dad who died December 19, 1993.
It was a thank you to my Dad; I had turned it into a speech for my Toastmaster’s group and it went something like this:
Thank you, Dad, for all the memories.
There are more wonderful memories. But the Dad-Daughter Dessert has to be right up there on top.
At the end of my Toastmaster’s speech, every guy in the room who had a daughter came up to me to thank me for reminding me of their most important duty as a father.
A father’s love for his child is the foundation for that child’s future. And a father’s relationship to his daughter is unique and the force behind her self esteem, growth, life, decisions.
Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I miss you greatly!
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