I can still see my father on his front porch last Saturday, waving goodbye. He's starting to bend a little.
Flipping through images of childhood, I find my toy rifle, dog and wooden skis before I ever see him.
It's Christmas Eve in the Seward Park house. My brothers are raking in the loot. I've got socks and underwear. From the kitchen comes a commotion, and here's my father, rushing in on a Schwinn corvette bike.
He goes by us trying to apply the foot brakes. Wrong era. It has hand brakes. He plows into the tree.
He was born in Meridian, Miss., just before the end of World War I. I saw Meridian from a train once: gray, wet - like a cardboard box caught in the rain. It was, however, the home of Jimmie Rodgers, the "father of country music."
My father's father was a boilermaker. He worked for the Longbell timber company.
When Mr. R.A. Long had cut most of the trees around him, he bought several hundred thousand acres of virgin timber in Washington from Mr. Weyerhaeuser at a few dollars an acre.
Then Mr. R.A. Long cleared, leveled and squared a piece of land next to Kelso and called his new town Longview.
My father grew up clear, level, square and with a scary capacity for work. But he claims he's shiftless compared to his father. Grandpa Joe in his fifties was so used up he could barely get out of bed.
In the war my father welded oil storage tanks in the Aleutians. Water-tested, they sprung hundreds of leaks, but so many men worked on them, my father says, nobody realized that he might have been responsible for more than his share.
Up there he watched men lose months of wages in card games. He found other ways to make his money disappear. He sent it to my mother in Seattle. "When she couldn't account for it, I had to marry her to recoup my investment."
In Seattle he welded motor mounts to B-17s. The quota was two. He did six. The union told him to lay off. His dad had taught him to respect the union. So he did four before lunch and then hit the books.
I use to study his after-work ritual. He'd stand before the blond dresser in his room and pull out the narrow top drawer. Into it would go his orange badge, comb, wallet, change - ka-ching! - and hanky in a neat line.
He changed into his work clothes, went out and put in lawns, built rockeries, fixed pipes. He figured you could do anything if you put your mind to it.
On weekends he took us fishing, hunting and skiing.
Once we hiked in to a long, green lake in the Cascades. We fished past dark and caught the biggest trout we'd ever seen. My father was too busy experimenting with different gear and keeping our hooks baited to catch one himself. Back at the cabin he fried them up with sliced potatoes and onions. Never eaten a better meal.
About this time of year in 1956 I asked him why we were the only ones who didn't like Ike. He said Ike had heart problems and he didn't trust his vice president, Richard Nixon.
When my parents built a house on Mercer Island, I can remember my father knee deep in blue mud mucking out a curtain drain. Seemed hopeless, but he worked every night until it was dry.
Like many in his generation, I figure, he has steel in him that was Depression forged.
Every February he took the family to Sun Valley. Our friends would spend $1,000 there - they left steak on their plates. We ate spaghetti and spent $350.
At Boeing, he was an industrial engineer on the B-47, Bomarc and Minuteman missiles and the Manned Orbital Lunar.
After promo-tions, he treated us to Jolly-Boy hamburgers and root beer floats.
But his ascent at Boeing came to a halt when he told the truth. No, the engines wouldn't be ready. As he went into free fall, he recalled his father telling him "never to work for a big company, because they don't care."
It taught him to mind his own business. He made his investments. Spent evenings working the numbers. Retired from Boeing at 55. Told them to keep the watch.
When his sisters got cancer, he gave them trips to Hawaii. He took care of his parents, helped out relatives and put four grandchildren through college.
Many years ago I gave him a stuffed chukar - that's the roadrunner of birds - for his birthday. He'd come through the front door and shoot it with his fingers. It now sits below the front window.
This past Christmas, my sister-in-law, who hails from the East Coast, remarked how ragged it looked. Maybe the time had come to throw it away?
My father looked up from the turkey and spoke. "You wouldn't look too good either if your butt was sitting in the sun for 30 years."
Enough said.
My father has been making things mostly better for 87 years. If he can hold on for another 87, I think we'll be all right.
Thom Gunn welcomes feedback at thomgunn@msn.com
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