Pops
For My Dear Dad, John Foydel
Welcome to False Choice. This is a tribute to my Dad, written and published last year. But most of you, my dear subscribers, are new, so I thought re-publishing this post would be ok. Happy Father’s day to all the father’s.
My old man loved rocks, but not for their beauty, or their geologic history; no, he loved them for their heft, for their hold fast against the onslaught. They were allies, like the men of his own hardened generation.
When he grew bored on a Sunday, when he ran out of chores, lunch consumed and forgotten, he’d say “let’s hook up the trailer, huh, what’d ya say?” He backed the car up to the heavy, steel trailer someone had welded together and I positioned the tongue over the ball and dropped it into place, with a loud grunt or two. He hooked up the chains and the lights and off we went, slowly, bouncing along, getting used to the strange noises from the trailer and its tug against the car. This was our Sunday adventure. We drove along empty roads in southern Ontario until we found a farm with a pile of rocks.
Sometimes the piles were just on the corner of a culver. To these we helped ourselves. Picking them up one by one and pushing them into the bed of the trailer. It was like a public service according to the old man. Other times we pulled right into a the farm’s yard when the pile was behind a barn or chicken coup. A couple of words with the farmer or his wife and they would wave us through. They thought it odd that someone wanted the rocks that every spring, after the frost rose, produced a small pain in their backside. They always made those faces that French speakers make, tilting their heads and raising their eyebrows and shoulders to signal ‘strange, but ok, if you insist…’.
Most of these Sunday trips were uneventful. A load of rocks, very little conversation, the old man normally in a meditative mood during these excursions. One autumn Sunday we pulled into a farm yard and the farmer raced over and wanted to know what we were doing. He was not happy about our trailer’s sudden appearance. “Qu’est que c’est? Q’est que c’est?” he demanded, bent over and glaring at us in the car. The old man opened his door slowly and got out to talk. “I only want to know if I could have the rocks behind the barn,” he said motioning to the few rocks already in the back of the trailer. I got out, too, just to look around. A woman with jet black hair stood in the doorway of the house, her face pale, sad and troubled, with an older child, maybe three, in one arm. There was a boy of 7 or 8 with shoes on, but no socks, staring at me, laundry hung on the line.
The man calmed down a bit, running his hands over his face and hair, like a nervous tick. In his broken English he explained to the old man that he had run over his baby son while he backed out farm equipment in the yard. “Jesus,” Pops said, his own head drooping, like the memory, now shared, hung on his neck like an anchor.
“OK, OK, there,” the farmer finally said, waving us off to the back of the barn. We got back into the car and rumbled off as slowly as possible. We got the trailer as close to the pile as we could and without a single word we loaded the entire pile. I couldn’t wait to get out of there, and I know the old man felt the same way. We trespassed on sacred ground, on sacred memories, like a couple of fool heathens. It was shameful, but having done it our only way to pay tribute was to clean up the pile of rocks. We left with the trailer over full. The whole operation creaked and grinded as we pulled over a culver onto a gravel side road. As we turned and drove towards home, you didn’t want to look but you did. Thank God, the yard was empty, the farmer, the boy and the woman at the door all out of sight and earshot as we tugged the trailer along. We stopped about a hundred yards from the farm, just to breath easy again. The old man looked out his window, he wiped tears from his eyes. “Jesus,” he repeated. The dried corn husks in the fields rustled in the approaching night air. “You ok Pops?” I held his arm. I couldn’t yet imagine the weight of the farmer’s tragic story that Pops shouldered. That was our last trip for rocks.
While he loved rocks, Pops wasn’t keen on a lot of rules. He started to take off Wednesdays when I was a kid, and he’d show up at my grade school midmorning and pull me out class, under the glaring eyes of Sister Ruth. We would head out to our cottage in southern Ontario, spending the day on clean up chores, or putting up the dock or taking it down, or picking apples. The cottage was an escape for the family. For the kids it was time out of the city, with different friends, different things to do all day. For Pops it was a break from the shop, with outdoor work. He left a list of chores he wanted done before returning to work in the city. The cottage was not for vacations or easy living.
When I was 16 we sold the house I grew up in during the Detroit evacuation, and moved to a small ranch in a nearby suburb. Pops closed the barbershop and went to work at a commercial drapery house. The last two years of high school slipped by quickly and I was on my way to Ann Arbor. I came back for one summer to work nights at a yacht club on the river and then it was 10 years later before I moved back to southeast Michigan. When you’re young, your own life consumes you, as it must. You have to make your way in the world.
By the time I moved back Mom and Dad had been living without children for several years, and they’d settled into life as a ‘senior’ couple. His children grown and on their way, Pops finally found a bit of calm in life. He had a garden and some other small attempts at hobbies. We had always shared a sense of humor, so talk turned to funny stuff in the paper or on tv. I also listened quietly, a little amused, a little bemused, as he described a book he read privately; apparently an auto biography by some rake of the 19th century and his sexual exploits. Pops gave each exploit a thorough going over, agreed or disagreed with various points of the scheme. Pops was never not surprising.
There were lots of grandchildren now, to talk about, to be proud of. Weekends in the fall were no longer consumed with feats of strength. Football was a new interest. He kept one of his barber chairs in their finished basement, and I was a regular customer, one of just two. He appreciated cutting a head of hair again. He wouldn’t take money, so in payment I purchased a computer for him and internet access, required in those early days. He never really caught on to computing. I wrote everything down for him, how to logon to the service, navigate around. But the only time he really used it was when I was there. I would bring up sites like Ellis Island Immigration and he could see when his parents, aunts and uncles came over, the names of the ships, the dates, the signatures.
At one point, while doing some research, we actually found a man who’d written a book about my grandfather’s hometown in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, “Pardan, Meine Heimat (Pardan, my homeland).” We learned from the book the sad fate of many relatives - killed in Soviet labor camps after the territory was recaptured from the Germans. And we exchanged emails with a relative we discovered in Stuttgart, Germany. Pops loved stuff like this. It gave him a chance to share old stories about Grandpa, their barbershop, the old relatives.
One afternoon, I ran into Pops and Mom at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. We were all there to visit my older sister. While we waited for visiting hours to start, Pops told me how he had brought one of their twin girls to the same hospital during WWII. She had a bad infection, and he carried her through the hospital, desperate to find someone to help. “But there was no penicillin, it was all for the war effort. There was none stateside. They couldn’t do anything for her.” Mom took his hand at the thought of it. The child, my sister I never knew, died not long after , well short of her first birthday.
I only saw Pops cry twice. Once at the farm and once when we visited the lost twin’s grave in Detroit several years later. When Pops died I kissed his forehead and thanked God for him, and that he could finally put it all away, the desperation and helplessness, and find some peace. It’d hung around his neck like an anchor all these years.
The rocks? We had quite a pile that fall after we emptied the trailer. The next spring after we assembled the dock we started to walk the rocks into the water. We had a rock jetty - a line of rocks that ran from the beach out into about 4 feet of water. It would stop the waves and let the sand collect behind it to create a beach. We had the nicest beach of all our neighbors. But it had been getting smaller each year as the lake water rose. The next spring it was gone. A huge storm blew in on St Patrick weekend 1973 and deposited the beach around the house. The rocks and their heft were no match for the onslaught. Pops found me out on my paper route that morning, at the height of the storm. I’m still not sure what thought he had in his head. It was Saturday, so a busy day at the barbershop. And there was nothing I could do to stop the wind from blowing the doors off. I think Pops just wanted someone to tell him it was going to be ok. And in the end, it was.