An old essay about Dad

Season of Change

I awoke one morning in early November and thumped down stairs to get a drink of water. I was home for the weekend from graduate school. My parents, both in their sixties, have taken recently to sleeping in later than me. This is a change. Gone are the lazy weekend mornings when my dad or mom would have to yell at me repeatedly to get up and eat breakfast. As an adult now (yes, I've resigned myself to falling into that category due to my age, if nothing else), I find it next to impossible to sleep in.

It was an ordinary morning. Well, no it was actually the morning that marked a major rite of passage in my life. But I didn't know that as I let the water cool from the faucet, testing it with my index finger. I peered out the kitchen window and saw my Cavalier pulled up to our shop, which on our farm serves as a garage. The hood was propped up. Dad's legs were sticking out from beneath the car. Uggghhhhh.

That reminded me how last weekend a plastic guard beneath my car broke loose. Since I am not practical, I drove it all week without bothering to see what was wrong. When I came home, my dad must have spotted it. This type of mechanical mishap falls under his area of expertise. Over the past 10 years since I've had a car, within the first two minutes of every phone conversation I've ever had with him, he has asked me one of these questions: Have you checked the oil? How many miles do you have on it? Did you add a can of Heat since the temperatures are going to drop? Did you check the air in the tires? Have you changed the oil yet?

Dad loves cars, tractors, tools, and working on and with them. As a boy I would watch him slice two by fours with a skill saw. One quick zip and the plank floated to the ground on a cushion of wood chips and dust. In my hands the saw felt lethal. The board rejected the saw every inch of the way as I cut it. The board thudded to the ground while I was left with wood chips on my lips and dust in my eyes. I would watch him change spark plugs. A few rapid turns with the socket and the plugs seemed to unscrew themselves. In my hands the wrench felt alien. I would groan and tug until my knuckles were white before I realized I was turning the wrench the wrong way. The plugs often snapped off at the root just as I felt they were about to relent. I would watch him sink nails into boards with one whap from the hammer. The nails instantly sank flush in the wood. In my hands the hammer felt clumsy. The nails invariable bent in half. Or I purpled my thumbnail. This was the way of my adolescence.

The shop and yard and pastures were my dad's domain. My room and my books and my tablets were mine. Often we would end an evening sitting at the kitchen table. I would be writing a paper while he would be finishing his log, for his real job was as a truck driver. My pen, nuzzled between my index finger and the large writing callous on my middle finger just below the first joint, would flow across the page in a stream of cursive words. My dad's pen, fisted in his right paw, seemed lost amidst his sausage-sized fingers. It would stutter and spurt in print across the log. Years later when I was home for the weekend from college, I would sit at the same table with my lap top. My fingers would waltz across the keypad orchestrating my words. It was nearly impossible for my dad to even use a calculator. He pecked away at it with his index fingers one key at a time. Inevitably he would punch two or three keys at a time because of his huge fingers. That was when my mother stepped in to do the typing. This too was the way of my adolescence.

Finishing my glass of water I thought, "God, that man has stamina." Then I hopped into a pair of jogging pants and slid into my coat. My mom mumbled slightly from the bedroom as I left. The morning air stung my face and pierced my lungs. The sunrise looked delicious: cotton candy streaks of clouds surrounding a large scoop of orange sherbet that began to break the eastern horizon.

"Look at this. No wonder the thing wouldn't hold," my dad said sensing my presence. He opened his left hand. I peered down at the small broken black bolt engulfed in his palm. "Who would ever make a plastic bolt?" he wondered as he tried to slide out from beneath the car, but he reminded me more of an insect flipped on its back. I offered my hand and helped him to his feet. He headed to the shop to scour for a real bolt. My dad is comprised of the old American stock that believes not in plastic or fat free foods or Hillary Clinton, but in metal and steak and LBJ. In a moment he returned from the shop with the replacement pieces ready, a shiny new metal bolt, a nut, two washers, and one lock washer, just in case. That guard was never going to come undone again.

Things still had the guise of normalcy. My dad was under the car, in his natural habitat, while I stood and tried to be of use, mostly just blocking the sun from his eyes as the rays filtered in through the engine and grill. The problem arose when my dad, who has worked outside for the majority of his life, tried to hold the tiny nut and gently weave it onto the minute threads on the bolt. His fingertips don't have any feeling in them anymore. He complained of this while I stood watching him as I had done for the previous 28 years.

But looking back now, the rite of passage was upon me. I stood watching my dad grapple with the problem for about fifteen minutes. Maybe he was too proud to ask for my help. Finally, I said, "I'll give it a try Dad."

It took me ten seconds to tighten the nut on the bolt as my dad stood and watched me work. It was the first time I did something mechanical quicker and better than my dad. We didn't mentioned it at the time.

Now I wonder what he thought about this change. I don't even want to think about what else I can do better than him now. I spent so much of my youth trying to out do him, but failing. He could toss bails higher, unload them quicker, throw a baseball harder, catch a football easier, bait a line better, and find a gopher hole, set the trap, and mark it all while I was still probing the gopher mound for the entrance. I fear that it is not so much that I am better at anything, but that my dad is becoming worse.

I think about his fingertips. I remember back in '94 when he had his triple bypass. The nurses wanted to teach him how to check his pulse so he could monitor his heart rate. He prodded the underside of his wrist again and again, but he couldn't find a pulse. I watched as the nurse held her tiny fingers over his thick fingers and pressed them right on his vein. He still felt nothing.

Dr. Wolf finally informed us that many men lose feeling in their fingertips due to working outside in the brutal Minnesota winters. Indeed, my dad's love for cars, tractors, and tools extended all year round. Thus he spent the majority of his days outside whether it was 90 degrees above or 20 degrees below zero.

I remember dreading working outside with him in the winter. Despite being draped in half a closet of clothes, I could only stand the temperatures for an hour. Two at most. With his army surplus parka pulled tight to reveal just a pinhole to peer out off, Dad would work outside all day.

His favorite activity was plowing snow on his 730 John Deere (cabless of course). On weekend afternoons when my dad was actually home and not on the road driving truck, he would reach his limit of sitting around in the house, which usually took about half an hour. Then he would layer on the clothing and venture outside to start his tractor. Of course, I had to help him with this because the starter was out, and I had to pull him with our pickup, a job that once I completed, I left behind and scampered back to the warm security of the house and my books. Dad, when he had our yard cleared, would drive over to the neighbors and plow out their yards or just plow snow into huge piles out behind our sheds. Maybe after working for 40 years as a truck driver hauling other peoples' property, he relished pushing his own.

Once when he was out in the truck, a blizzard dumped three feet of snow us. It was up to me to plow a path to the highway. My mom pulled me while I clung to the steering wheel on my dad's tractor. It took me an hour, the coldest 60 minutes of my life, to simply plow a single path from our driveway to the highway. Forget about the rest of the yard! Dad could do that when he got back. And he did.

There were times Mom made me bundle up and run out and tell him lunch or dinner was ready. "Dad," I would scream over the chugging 730 engine, "dinner's ready. It's five o' clock. Come in already!" Out there on his tractor, he would fall into a trance and lose all track of time. It was amazing to see how he could gage the distance between the edge of the bucket and the ground. It would just skim across the yard, never gouging into the grass and ripping up sod. To watch him pop the clutch with his right hand, then shift the tractor from third gear to reverse with his left hand, then expertly work the controls to raise and lower the loader and empty the bucket full of snow with his right hand again was like watching a great artist. He made it look so easy. When I tried to plow out the yard, the bucket skipped over the yard, digging up divets of driveway and grass all the way. Orchestrating the clutch, gears, and loader controls was a nightmare. I spent more time trying to get the tractor in and out of the correct gears while only slightly bludgeoning my mom's precious yard than I did actually plowing snow.

That night after fixing my car, I began working on an essay on my lap top at the kitchen table. I fell into one of my trances. By the time I finished my first draft, I realized it was well past eleven and my parents had gone to bed. By the time I finished my second draft, my dad entered the kitchen on his way to the bathroom. "Boy, you're still at it? It's almost one. Go to bed already," he said squeezing his eyes shut against the kitchen light and listening to my fingertips dance across the keys.