Memories of my father CONTINUED———– PART II
Dad made sure I witnessed a lot of baseball, football and basketball magic. I especially liked it when Nemelka and Congden and Limo and Cosic dazzled us with their wizardry and hustle, defined best when they ran four or five rows into the crowd, shot from the top of the key, or passed the ball behind their backs… without even lookin’.
Tho, dad didn’t like staying up until 2 am, he seemed not to mind getting UP at 2 am…especially when it meant a day of fishin’ down near Loa, at Forsythe reservoir or in the Bicknell bottoms, we would drive for 3 hours so we would arrive before the sun came up and fish until our hearts were content. I can’t even tell you how many hundred nights we spent fishing the Provo river.
I play the piano. Mom took me to lessons but dad made me practice. He would come home from grocery shopping and sit down to listen to me. Play me a concert he would say as he named some of my most recently learned songs…like Ebb Tide or Ally Cat or Cherish. After I finished playing the piano, we would watch a TV movie, play cards, chess, checkers and gamble RED Twizzlers licorice or Cherry nibs until one of us owned them all or ended up eatin’m. Sometimes we would go to the Movies at the Uinta, the Academy, or the Paramount. He liked war movies, comedies, and westerns, and he liked Cary Grant a lot. He also loved to go shoot pool, he liked rotation, and I liked 8 ball, because when we played 9 ball or rotation, he was TROUBLE, with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for Pool…(I think mom took me to that play when he was working away from home once)
We liked to go hiking too. Whether it was climbing to the top of Timp, or to the Y, then on to Maple flats, We always had a great time. After arriving at the summit, we would sit enjoying the view and talk for hours.
COS bought me my fist skis, but NOT my golf clubs, which he made me earn, … Well, he did by me my first real golf bag and donated the canvas for the first one I made. He loved to Bowl with me or pot bowling with the boys at Regal Lanes. He bowled for the letter carriers team and had a 178 average. When I really got into bowling, I would roll from 25 to 50 games a week at 3 for a dollar…and to earn money, he taught me to keep score for the major tournaments at Regal where I would earn 2 dollars to score 4 guys for 3 games. He taught me that you don’t add 19 but instead, you ad 20 and subtract 1)…
We would go shooting in the west desert out along the ole pony express trail then drive down thru skull valley clear to Delta or go looking for fossils or out thru the sand dunes…not with ATVs or to picnic, or to celebrate a holiday but to learn the geology or history of where we went….Dad LOVED “I don’t know roads”…We went down hundreds of roads just to see where they went.
Work…COS decided that everyone needed to learn how to work…and so he made me work! Mowing the lawn, taking care of the flower beds, cleaning along fences or ditches He always bought REEL mowers rather than rotary types because they were self propelled. In those days it took him an hour and a half to mow our lawn….It took me an hour and ten minutes. He would mow meticulously around the trees, flowers on the ditch banks and trim along the sidewalks. He would leave me a list of jobs EVERY DAY which started with his nick name for me RUSH, long before Limbaugh The only thing that made him mad is if I didn’t have those jobs done BEFORE he got home from work.. Even if I had only one more pass to finish the lawn, he would not be happy. Get it done EARLY he would sternly reprimand me. . When I got to be 18 he bought a riding mower and I got a full time Job in addition to school, which meant I semi retired from the lawn mowin’ business. .
I loved working WITH dad. We had 4 hour irrigation turns at 9 am. 5 pm or 1 am, we would set up the boards with rebar pegs to direct the flow of water and flood the entire place. I loved playing in the water as a child almost as much as I liked leanin’ on my shovel with dad and just talkin’ while we watched the flow (as if he ever stood still that long, he would be scooping water onto the high places or hooking up the pump to pull more water from the ditch.
He bought a hay baler from Simon Benson on the rock canyon road, and I began a five year odyssey of balin’ hay for dad and the neighbors. I learned that with each click I would make a quarter, and I often heard as many as three clicks a minute. I am a businessman today, rather than an hourly worker or a salaried employee, because of the lessons I learned about finding clients and getting paid for what I actually accomplished, or doing accounting in my head a click at a time. while baling hay with my dads old Allis Chalmers tractor and that International 45 model open top bailer.
I developed a mechanical mind, and learned how to fix broken hearts and the crack of dawn because of the opportunities my dad provided me. We always had time to visit my fathers friends…The Jameses, Cliff, Beaver, Irvin and Muriel, Nathan, Kamel, Sweed, Clair, Wally, Charlie, Danner, Murdock , Ted, Van, or Uncle Jack and a host of other NEIGHBORS, or those he knew from his many years in Provo.
We added onto the house, built his barn, picked cherries peaches and pears at the orchard he bought from Cliff on the S-bend of the canyon road, or apples and plums in his orchard behind the house. He loved growing a garden, between the trees, before he decided to surround the trees with lawn. Once when the garden was in full production, our Neighbor’s (Howard Stutz) cow got out after we had just irrigated, and it walked down one row of dads garden eating every cabbage plant in the row. When dad saw what had happened I expected him to blow a gasket, but he liked Howard, so he just said He trusts his cows too much… he needs to have a better fence…and I never have liked cabbage all that much anyway.
What dad DID like was flowers and trees, although he cut down that weeping willow without even sheddin’ a tear, and he didn’t much like spraying three or four times a year, even tho Jack was good enough to let us use his sprayer for the fruit trees, I used to drive the tractor and he would walk around with the nozzle spraying for aphids, worms and coddling moth, then hit the flower beds to get the ants. ..My dad was an ant’s worst enemy. He could spot a bug from a hundred yards and sprayed and dusted with cloridane and cleaned constantly to make sure there was NOTHING to attract them.
He was a Petunia man, a Marigold man, a Snapdragon man. He liked roses, especially the climbing kind, and irises of all colors. He liked Columbine, and Tulips, and Lilies and Chrysanthemums, and Sweet Williams, and Butter Cups, and Blue Bells and Pinks and Zineas which he pronounced ZEENYAS…(did you know you can tell if a man is from Missouri by how he says the word Greasy…if he’s from St Louis he will say GREEEZZY) …but he wasn’t much for Gladiolas or Peonies . I recall times when he worked construction away from home he would bring me back little sawdust flower boxes that you punched with a pencil and watered until they sprouted. One year I used the Marigolds and Zinnias he’d brought me, for the flower show and won a 1st place ribbon, which he said wasn’t near as pretty as the flowers.
We mucked out the barn, hauled hay, painted fences and the gable ends, went to the auction, and hauled coal for our stoker furnace. We pruned, fixed fence, fed the cattle and horses, pumped water with the pitcher pump, picked fruit, hauled hay and put it into the loft. We mowed, raked and bailed alfalfa, mowed the orchard, sickled anything we didn’t like , picked up rocks EVERY YEAR from the same ground. (I think he grew them), cleaned ditch, picked up fallen fruit, trimmed the shrubs, weeded and raked the rock driveway, swept the blacktop, plowed and shoveled snow, raked up from the irrigation or leaves in the fall…Clean out the furnace, made tons of trips to the dump, polish my shoes, hose down the parking area, water the flowers, move the hoses. We washed and waxed our cars, and detailed the inside. And when our work was thru, he wanted to help mom with her dusting vacuuming, even washing the ceilings or walls when they needed it. . .
Clarence was a voracious reader… he read all the time, National Geographic, Newsweek, or Time, cover to cover and ALL the back issues and TONS of books and he loved the history channel. He knew politics but was not political…he was spiritual but not religious… he was extremely intelligent but knew how to shoot the breeze on any level…from highly educated people to the mentally handicapped. but NEVER disrespectfully…The only ones he avoided were the self righteous and relatives.. which lead to his being afflicted with the DENNY”S virus…or better said a victim of the Denny’s principle…That means if I or a family member told him anything he wouldn’t believe it or would ignore it completely, but if he heard the exact same advice from a wino or some homeless guy at the counter at Denny’s it was gospel truth and he would act on it immediately.
He was as comfortable talking with a professor as he was with our mentally challenged neighbor Dennis Ferguson, He never demeaned or made fun of him, but he had a hard time to keep from laughing when he talked to ole FERG at Sambo’s and asked him what he was doing….. Teachin’ the Police, Dennis said, Oh y’are huh? dad nodded, what are you teachin’m? How to duck bullets, Fergie proudly proclaimed. Dad with his poker face asked, and HOW do you do that? Dennis bobbed his head up and down in a jerking motion, to illustrate. Well, I hope they learn how before someone shoots at them, dad said, bearly able to hide his delite. – He liked people a lot, and he had totally mastered the art of shooting the bull.
Now to finish up, if you are like most people, you are at least a little curious about my dad’s religious views, …..so I will share them with you as much as I know.. He believed in God. I learned this after he took me to the funeral of Tom James young son who died in a horribly tragic death with some kind of explosive at a bus stop…On the ride home after we had expressed our sympathies and heard Tom share his convictions about seeing his son again after this life, …I asked dad about his view of being with loved ones after this life…It was a good conversation…he knew a lot, and he made sense- mostly he didn’t believe life just ended…but that there must something beyond…he wondered out loud HOW something so complex and wonderful as PEOPLE or the love between them could just Vanish…It made sense to me. And I think he mentioned wanting to see his mother again someday. …And to this day I think such thots are at the foundation of my hopes….
When my horse Prince died…I understood his feelings about the sanctity of LIFE…I think I have wept only at the death of my grandfather, my father, my uncle Jack, when Aaron Ferguson got killed in Viet Nam…the first bird I shot with a bb gun…and over a little kitty dad accidently backed over and yes.. PRINCE…dad knew how much I loved that colt, born the day after the last snow melted…He was becoming a magnificent horse…but he must have eaten something that stopped up his digestion and he died on a cold November evening a day before it snowed. After dad paid a lot of money to have the vet come twice…Prince died… he came to tell me the bad news… I understood in his eyes that he was hurting too…maybe he hurt more for ME than for the loss of my horse, but I sensed a deep pain in dad…I knew I was not alone in my sorrow.
After I received my mission call to Italy, despite him saying that he did not want me to go on a mission, I arrived home one evening to find him sitting in the family room with my Stake President and his first counselor. I could see by the look on their face that something wasn’t right and they confirmed it when they told me they had been on the phone with one of the Apostles, Spencer Kimball and that I would not be allowed to go on my mission without my fathers approval, and since he had not given that approval, my mission would be cancelled. I was devastated, it was as if I had been smacked up side the head with a two by four.
As President Call left he asked me to come see him that evening and shortly there after to avoid a major conflagration, I left as well. My stake president said that I had until the day I was to enter the mission home in SLC to see if my dad would change his mind…If not, he said you will have to wait until you are on your own and you can re-submit your papers but you will probably not go to Italy. The pit in my stomach was bottomless. I went up on the squaw peak look out and just cried. When I got home at 1 am Dad and Mom were talking in the kitchen. She said to him, we had a deal, and you are braking your word. You said you would allow him to be raised in my faith and this is part of that. We argued and finally just went to bed…for three days it was like walking on pins and needles, a darkness hanging over me… I was so blue I couldn’t eat…At 6 am on Saturday morning he called from work…he said to mom, I didn’t understand that it was this important to you two, I haven’t been sleeping , and I think I made a mistake. Tell him he can go…YOU tell him she said, and make sure Dick Call knows…Now Dad had known Dick Call for years and liked him, so when he came home he told me he would not stand in my way and Phoned President Call. Dick, This is Clarence, Listen I have been thinking about this mission, and I think I have made a mistake. If it hasn’t gone too far I would appreciate if it we could not stop the mission, and just let him go.
President Call listened and told him he would make sure things were on track. My Father was a man of convictions, but he was NOT a prideful man. It was hard for him to have me leave. He was my postman in the Language Training Mission (LTM) which was in some ways pretty hard, I’m sure for both of us. I would see him every day but we couldn’t really talk. He would enter Iona house and say, ..Porto la Posta, …in perfect Italian, Hand letters to those who were waiting and put the rest in the box. He would nod at me and leave. Once he asked “how are you doin’?” not too good I said…I was really, really homesick.. It was your choice he said as he walked away to finish his route..
When I flew out for Italy he came to see me off. He gave me a hug and shook my hand and told me to do a good job and look out for myself. When they got home he lie down on the bed and my mom put her head on his chest…he was sobbing…obviously he was missing me as much as I missed him and far more than I ever knew.
In the two years I was in Italy my father only wrote me THREE letters, and they all came when he read in my letters or heard in my tape that I was in trouble, homesick beyond description, having a crisis of faith or in deep depression… John Michael Murphy sings a song about a soldier getting letters from home. First he describes his MOTHERS letters where she says they miss him and that dad sends his love…when he holds it up they laugh and then go back to work…when he gets a letter from his girlfriend he tells them she says hello but doesn’t read the good parts and they laugh and go back to work…when he got a letter from his dad, he read them but no one laughed, because you don’t laugh when a soldier, or a missionary cries…, Especially when the expression of Love there comes in four words. I’m proud of you.
I never remember my father ever saying “I love you” in just those three words, but he said it in a hundred other ways. By his times of generosity or his interest in what I was doing, or when I would overhear him telling his brother Ken about me while they talked on the phone.
After I got home we had a good relationship. But honestly, he was not nearly as unhappy when I moved out the next time…he didn’t miss me coming and going at all hours, being gone on trips for days at a time, or waking him up when I came in from dates at well past 2 AM…. In fact I think he liked it when I got married and moved out, mostly because, He liked my wife.., and he loved the kids and always talked about them and wanted to know what they were doing. I learned how critically important those unexpressed feelings are for both a father AND a son.
He was curious about when Melinda’s band was playing or how Allison’s job was working out, or how Andy or Cynth were fixing up their houses, or who the triplets latest boyfriends were…yep, curious but never nosey. …he love it when they went to see him, just to watch games on TV or just to visit a while.. He always asked about what I was doing, even when I had just landed on real life Boardwalk and the other guy had five hotels on it. He loved a good joke or prank. His laugh was fun loving and ended in what was almost a long joyful sigh.
He was until the end a kidder, joshin’ with the nurses and doctors…when one of them asked him “whats your name?”..he said what he often said to me as a child when I watched him shave “Puddin tame..ask me again and Ill tell you the same!” .. The poor nurse didn’t know what to think…he just grinned. When they asked him if he knew where he was, he said.. isnt this Las Vegas? And when they said LAS VEGAS?.. he smiled and added. Yeah, Sin City, he’d confirm it with a perfectly straight face…until they left., then he’d grin ear to ear.
Two years ago on Father’s day I planned to take my dad up to Wallsburg so we could see the Erickson’s miniature city of antique tractors, motorcycles, narrow gage trains, trucks and autos in that small townscape complete with soda fountain, mechanics shop, school house and filing station. I called dad to see if he was up to a road trip. I could hear in his voice a concern I seldom heard. I’m hurting pretty bad he said. My chest, shoulder blade and left arm are just killing me. All signs of a heart attack, or a least severe angina. Have you taken your Nitros? Three of them he assured me. Oh, and a pain pill. For the last 8 years he starts hurting, takes a nitro rest, then goes back to work as soon as the pain stops.
Do you want me to come take you to the ER? OhNo, I think it will let up soon he said. Your mom’s at church… Well call me if you want me to take you, reminding him of my phone number. Ten minutes later he phoned. Come get me, I think we better go get this checked out. In minutes I was pulling up to his house. Before I even stopped he was coming down the sidewalk.
He played back seat driver all the way to the ER, probably because he had taken MOM to the ER the prior Wednesday for the same thing. When we arrived they took forever to check him in…if he had been having a heart attack he would have been dead…and I saw him getting pretty ticked off…finally they led him to room 13…bad luck he smiled as he entered…As we walked into the main corridor my second cousin saw us and became our personal ER tour guide and nurse…she took very good care of my Father…and soon had him hooked up to a billion leads ..I could see from the monitor that my dad’s heart was racing..160+ beats per minute…by 11 am he was undergoing an EKG and the pain he was feeling was off the chart…every time the wave of pain came he winced…finally our family nurse gave him some morphine and an hour later a doctor showed up.
By then his heart had snapped back into a normal rhythm and the pain was half what it had been…after the doctor came in and they discussed fathers day, the potency of his nitros, his abnormal heartbeat…and his cardiologist…we were left to just pass the time until the next EKG…during those two-three hours I had about as substantial a conversation as I had had with him in years. Finally at 3 pm it was realized that his heart was beating normally, ..that the pain had gone and he was telling the staff that he was going to go home…The Doctor came and gave him his card…told him to get an appointment as soon as possible with his cardiologist ..and left…my dad got dressed and we headed home… A strange way to spend a fathers day…
When we had finished dinner that Sunday, Mom called…Dad was feeling a lot better, and was already trying to schedule his appointment with his cardiologist on his answering machine…(then I knew he was feeling like himself)……
Everyone has asked me if I enjoyed my fathers day…even my kids…but of course I did…and the day after… and the day after that…life really is good…sometimes its the stuff that happens out of the ordinary that makes a day so memorable… I just love talking with my father…I have noticed over the past three days how many times being a son, and a dad brings me into the lives of others…….and has shown me again just how lucky I am to have, ..and to be…a dad. I have been thinking how much dad loves to be reminded of the past, seeing all that old stuff getting in touch with his memories.——.I got musta got that gene from HIM….
He has evolved over the years from a good fences make good neighbors kinda guy…to someone who would buy a snow plow so he could plow his own snow and his neighbors too…as long as the driver…(that would be me)…was ok with it..
HIS LAST DAYS. After COS came home from the hospital in November, he realized that the roses he was trimming when his legs started to hurt him were only partially pruned, so once he regained enough strength in March, he decided to finish that job. He pulled his chair out next to the center of the roses on his driveway and began a very slow process of pruning each bush from the comfort of his white plastic lawn chair. He still visited with the boys at McDonalds, took the bus out to Wendover, visited with his neighbors, contined his somewhat established daily routine, and watched over everything in his world. Friday April 10, he asked mom to take him to the hospital, where it was discovered that his heart was working at 15% efficiency down nearly 10%…and that his heart was filling with fluids. They gave him meds to reduce the water, and took fluids directly from his lungs, but the buildup returned. Over the week his need for oxygen steadily increased until he decided that there wasn’t anything else that could be done. He was moved to the top floor of the hospital on the last day of his life, into a nice open room with a big southern window where he could look out to see the mountains east of Provo. I looked out and told him all the buildings I could identify in the city as he rested. At the foot of his bed, there was a white board. On which I wrote the words.. Hi Cos! You’re the best!….Later in the day he was struggling a bit to breath but his eyes were still alert, so I wrote Thank you for EVERYTHING…he was starting to feel pain in his arm so he motioned for the nurse and asked for some pain medication. At about 7 PM she brought him his meds and something that would help him sleep. Before I left at 9 30 pm I wrote again on the message board
If you leave before I return, please remember that I love you.
I sensed that it would be the last time I would ever see him so I sat and talked to him put my hand on his head a held his right hand…(His hands…The thing that drew me to his casket today were his hands. I can’t even imagine how many times he used them to make my life better. I left to check on mom since she had been with him all day up until 6 pm. I told her he was sleeping, but that I didn’t think he would make it thru the night. She woke up early to go see him and was on her way to the Hospital when the nurse called her and informed her that Dad had just passed away. When she arrived she phoned me, and told me he was gone. She read the note on the board and wondered if he had seen it.. Of course he saw it, you can’t leave that room without reading it I told her. It was then she said… I wish I could have talked to him just before he died. I think it is strange how people assume that the dead have someplace they must go right after their passing. I said when you die will you be in any kind of hurry to leave the place you left your body? No…Well then if I were you I would take this time to say anything you would like to say to him. I am certain he will hear you, and tho he wont be able to respond verbally. I think he will depart feeling better about leaving and I think you will feel better too, for having said what you want him to know.
Preparing for this funeral has been a very moving experience. Revisiting photos, and remembrances, and talking with friends and family. Clarence was a good man. I think most of you who knew him understood that. He was a grateful man, a generous man, a playful sort who liked people, and loved to visit.
I HAVE REALIZED THAT EVERYTHING IN MY LIFE IS IN SOMEWAY INTERCONNECTED AND NEARLY ALWAYS THOSE CONNECTIONS RUN BACK THRU MY ASSOCIATIONS WITH MY DAD or MY MOM..
He didn’t much believe in Coincidence…so today when Jon Pfunder told me about the time he had seen my dad returning from turning down the water in his irrigation boots, walking down the road toward home, with four DEER following him in single file almost like pets I got this chill that came over me…. The events of yesterday morning took on a feeling of a good omen. As mom looked out into dad’s perfectly manicured back yard, TWO deer came up over the hill onto the lawn. One of them ran around by his bedroom window, while the other peered into the living room window When mom came to the window, it stood there and looked at her for over a minutes (which is a lot in deer time) before they both bounced off to the east toward the mountain…It was for her almost like his voice saying…I’m here, I’m ok…..AFTER the funeral we returned home and the tree in their front yard that yesterday seemed lifeless, had burst into full bloom with brilliant blossoms of red. I recall how happy such things made my dad. He would get so excited when his flowers bloomed, or when he saw a deer or even a squirrel. He appreciated the beauty of such events, ..He loved life and lived it with a purpose. To fashion everything he touched in his own very particular image, and into what he understood life was supposed be.
You see its only been a week, … and already
There’s a somebody I’m longing to see… I hope when that happens, it turns out to be ..
Someone who WATCHED over ME.
The Adventures of Thotman 