Tuesday, October 10, 2006 2:10 P.M. CST
It's been six and a half years now that my dad died.
I still miss him a lot. I think about him often. The prevailing thought is how unfortunate it is that he died just as I was beginning to see him less as "my dad" and more as the man he was. And he was a very good man.
The word "genius" is thrown around liberally, frequently to people who don't deserve it, but that's how I think of my dad. He was from a small town in Kansas and talked and acted the part his entire life, but he had a brilliant, technical mind. As a kid in the fifties he used to rip apart old cars and fix them up. That led to a job at General Motors, where he worked for over thirty years before taking an early retirement. He was one of the guys who built the robots that built the cars. Not only did he design the individual pieces that made up those large mechanical arms, he also wrote the programming for them to perform whatever job was needed.
And he was the type of guy who took the white collar job when it was offered to him, but quickly left it because you can't keep a guy like my dad away from tools for very long.
Almost every piece of furniture in my parents' house was built by him. He was an excellent wood craftsman. As a kid, I used to spend a lot of time in his workshop, watching him cut and assemble pieces of wood into tables and cabinets. Everything he made was very intricately designed, with in-laid wood, mirrors, and glass doors and shelves. The smell of sawdust will always remind me of my dad.
Dad was a big jock in high school. Baseball was his favorite sport, so when I hit the appropriate age he signed me up for little league T-ball, and he'd play catch with me any time I asked. And he always had really good advice on how to improve my game. No matter how much I sucked, he always encouraged me to do better. After one entire season, I'd decided I'd had enough, so I didn't sign up for the next year. I waited a couple of years until I could play real baseball instead of T-ball and we played almost every spare minute he had, just throwing to ball around and nothing was really said, it was just the joy of being with him and my brothers in the back yard.
His other favorite game was bowling. I have a lot of good memories of our family outings to the Cave Springs Lanes.
Dad was always good as the "voice of reason." Sometimes it benefited me, sometimes not. When I moved out in the late nineties, dad was the only one who thought it wasn't a bad idea. My mom didn't like the idea of me moving but, dad said, "Well, you're not really doing that much out here right now, so why not? Although your mother would probably kill me if she heard me say that."
Being a computer programmer guy, he always tried to get me interested in computers. Our family got our first computer, a TRS-80, in the early eighties. He'd spend hours writing programs, just to see what it could do. Knowing what tools he had to work with at the automotive plant, I wonder how frustrating it was for him to use a computer with such limited capabilities. It didn't matter. He'd spend hours at the computer, making it do all kinds of cool tricks to show his kids.
I never cared much for computers outside of video games, but I did learn a few basic programming skills under his guidance. I used to make electronic "Choose Your Own Adventure" text games, first writing the story elements and then putting them in the correct order. "You see a cave to your left and a castle to your right. Where do you go? Type LEFT or RIGHT." The novelty of this wore off rather quickly. I didn't pay computers much interest throughout high school unless I had a paper to write or found a really cool video game.
My dad had been upgrading his computers over the years. From the TRS-80 he got an Amiga (if anyone remembers those), then a 286, a 386, and finally a 486 running Windows 3.1. He kept this last computer running much longer than it should have, but if you have years of technical experience you can make an older computer do just about anything. And that's when I realized it was time to buy a computer.
I finally got one of my own in the fall of 1998: a fantastic Pentium II 333 with 64 megabytes of memory. As I do with anything electronic, I immediately disassembled it to find out how it worked. I looked up every switch, setting, and jumper to see what did what and how I could make it work better. Personal computing became a bit of an obsession. I was always checking out new hardware and planning for upgrades. As it turned out, that computer is the only one I ever bought. I replaced every component on it so many times that there was eventually nothing left of the original computer, except for the monitor. Even when I decided to build a second computer solely for office work, I bought each piece at various computer shows and put it together myself. I like to know exactly what I'm getting.
After getting my computer set up with internet access, the person I wrote to most often was my dad. Most of the many e-mails were about computers, but we'd get to a lot of gossip and familial stuff, too. He had been retired for years at this point and now spent most of his time sitting in the basement office, playing his guitar, working with his computers, and building stuff in his workshop. He had become an on-call handyman for the neighbors, fixing minor household problems and even building entertainment centers and basement bars for them. He had also begun making electric and acoustic guitars in his workshop as a new hobby. He never bought any of those pre-fab body kits. He always cut and sanded the wood himself using pieces he'd picked up at the local hardware store.
During the summer months, he spent a good part of each day swimming. He kept meticulous records on the swimming pool so that the water always looked that perfect shade of blue. He used to sit under the deck in his swimming trunks, drinking iced tea, reading computer magazines.
I like to think he had a very happy retirement.
In 1999 on my usual Christmas holiday visit home, I brought my computer with me. The case was too big to bring on the plane, so I removed each of the components and wrapped them separately to carry in my suitcase. My dad and I reassembled it here so he could see how Windows 98 worked. I had just bought my first digital video camcorder so I brought that long, too, to show him how great firewire was for editing video. He had a great time fiddling with all my new toys. For a change, I was answering his questions about what did what. I spent most of that visit in the basement office with him.
In my entire childhood, I think I only saw dad drink alcohol twice. During this visit, I was somewhat surprised when I saw him having a drink at one of the neighborhood holiday block parties. This party was rather well-catered; lots of food and a hired bartender. I took over the bartending duties after the hired one went home. I asked my dad if I could get anything for him (I'd been bartending for years at this point). He said he wanted a Tom Collins. As incredibly goofy as it sounds to say—and I know it does—I felt "all grown up" to mix my dad a drink, especially after he said it tasted really good (as if it's that difficult to screw up a Tom Collins). We stood at the bar for hours, having a few drinks and talking like a couple of regular guys.
That was a really good trip home.
Shortly after I got back to the Army, our e-mails focused mostly on computers. Inspired by what he'd seen of my system, he wanted to build a much faster computer than his 486. We talked about which parts he should buy and what would be a good price for each component. He had started selling some of his old tools and random accumulated junk on eBay. Every time he made a sale, he bought a new piece of the computer. I wish I could have been here at that time. To have the pieces and assemble the computer with him would have been great, like all those car model kits we built together when I was a kid. By early March of 2000, he only needed a few more pieces.
I do a full back up of my computer fairly regularly. I save everything, including all my e-mails. You never know when you're going to need a program. Or, like now, when you're going to want to read a few old files.
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2000 14:02:30 -0800
Hi Son,
I need help again. Which sound card is the best? SB Live, SB XGamer, or
SB MP3. The X-Gamer seems to be the same as yours. I can't find much on
the MP3 board. If I can't figure these out I'll just get a cheap SB 16
or 64 to start.
So far here's what I've bought:
400 PII
Abit BE6-II Motherboard
128mg 133 SDRAM
Creative 52x CD-ROM
Maxtor 17 Gig HD
I'm going to get the ATI All-in Wonder 128 16meg. The retail box is
about $150. The OEM box is about $145. I'm not sure what a OEM or a
"White Box" has in it so for $5 extra I think the retail version would
be best.
Give me your views on the above.
Write soon.
Dad
PS We had about 6" of snow this morning.
Three days later, while I was getting ready to be deployed, I got the message that he had just died. There was no warning of it. He had had a heart attack while getting out of the shower and, according to the paramedics, was probably dead before his body hit the floor. He was cremated a few days later. His ashes rest in a large urn in his office next to where his computer monitor sat for all those years.
By the time I got back to Missouri, the rest of his computer parts had arrived.
I spent a lot of time with my five brothers and sisters and my mom. It was a very awkward and depressing time, but then there's no such thing as a good death.
I stayed here for about a week. In that time, I took all the computer pieces he'd bought and put them together. Everything worked perfectly. I think he would have been very happy with the way the computer turned out.
I showed my mom how to use it so she could get on the internet. Even to this day, my mom's really never gotten the hang of the internet. Or computers in general, for that matter, despite having a master's degree in business.
And that was not my first personal experience with death. I'd seen a dead person before, but it's totally different when it's one of your parents. Whenever anyone asks me how it feels to have someone close to you die (which you might think is a stupid or rude question, but if you haven't experienced it yourself you don't have a frame of reference for it), I just tell them, simply, "It sucks." I could use more words, but I think that concise phrase sums it up well enough.
So now, six years later, I'm back in my parents' house (for the next two days, at least) and I spent the afternoon wandering through my dad's workshop. Aside from all the junk my mom's piled in there, it still looks very much the way it did when he was alive. All his tools are still hanging on the wall. There are rows of all types of lumber, leaning against the wall or stacked up under his power saw. His old computer parts and programs are on the top back shelf, across from the old steam engines he used to build. I was always impressed with those engines. They're made from forged steel and you can't do anything with them if you don't have very good metal working skills to grind the gears and wheels down enough to make them all fit together smoothly. Once they're finished, you light the little pilot flame and the wheels will spin for hours.
...
It's been about eight hours since I wrote the first part of this. I did a good deal of editing in between having lunch and then dinner with my mom. Strangely, my dad wasn't mentioned at either meal. There was no depressing cast over the day. The conversation was very lively and the topics varied. I think he wasn't mentioned by either of us simply out of fear of upsetting the other. The oddest part of the whole thing is that rarely a day goes by where no one refers to him in some way.
There's no denying that he still hovers around this house. And I don't mean that in any creepy spiritual way. He drew up the blueprints for this house after he bought the empty lot back in 1989. He built every piece of furniture I'm currently using in my studio. But beyond the physical reminders, still to this day, whenever I do anything remotely technical, my automatic first thought is "How would dad do it?" And that's not just because he's my dad. It's because he always did everything right the first time. He had a wonderful, innate quality when it came to understanding mechanics. I have yet to meet anyone else who can match how much he enjoyed learning and creating.
But more than that, he gave me the best role model in the world. Not just in technical understanding, either. Fact is, he remains the best man I've ever known.
Damn, I miss him.
