There were times when I was small that I watched my father as he slept on the couch or napped in his recliner in the den. I studied the lines on his face and measured the intervals of his breaths as his chest moved slightly up and down. I watched him for those brief periods and I silently wondered back then what would I do if he never woke up. What if he just suddenly and inexplicably stopped? I must admit I had no clue as to how I would get by and live beyond that moment if he failed to ever once again open his eyes and resume his normal routine of being the good father that he was. I have disjointed memories of him. Pictures both physical and mental and also moments of experience that defined him for me. Long rides in the back seat of the family car permeated with his cigarette smoke. Church services where I listened to him sing beside me or even in the choir with that distinctive high harmony immediately identifying him as Freeman Anson Otis. The pup tent he built in our yard for me as a young boy, encouraging me to play out side. Late evenings tossing the baseball back and forth and then later his fruitless efforts to teach me the game of golf in our yard on Michigan Avenue. A letter he wrote to me scolding me for the issue of my hair and what the punishment would be ( raking the leaves in the yard) for the subsequent disharmony it caused within our family. Saturday mornings spent in bed as I heard the early morning silence broken by the lawnmower engine cranked up and repeatedly passing by my window. It was a chore he loved...at least that's what he told me. There was an early Sunday morning when my father showed tremendous restraint when he met me at the family front door at 6:30 am as I was just getting getting home from a night out of drinking and sexual hijinks still sporting an air of defiance. He was a kind and gentle man with infinite patience but he was not perfect. I remember one morning at our kitchen table when my dad gathered us all around him and tearfully asked for our forgiveness for an indiscretion that could have conceivably torn our family apart.... but it didn't. Where other men might have walked away he stayed and I admired him for that. Those moments that race back and forth through time out of order, and stumbling over each other in their effort to remind me of who he was, appear in my head from time to time and I just stop what I'm doing and reflect on them.
We nearly lost my father on three separate occasions over the years all related to his heart. In May of 2005 he died quietly at home in the early morning hours with my mother and sister close by and a hospice nurse in attendance who verified that his heart just finally stopped beating. I had said my final goodbye to him about a week before but was not there at the moment of death. I suppose I thought that he would never die if I just refused to accept it. At the funeral I was just numb...blocking out the reality that stared me in the face...that he was with us one minute and gone the next. It was a helpless feeling. Before on my visits to my parents home in Birmingham I would always make a point to look through the many photo albums that my mother had taken the time to put together over the decades. Some pictures were of course from my childhood but the ones I really enjoyed were the older photos from before I was ever born and when my parents were youngsters themselves. One of my favorites was a picture of my dad ( 8 or 9 years old) sitting in a single classroom school in Blackduck, Minnesota posing for a class picture wearing a big smile and overalls with a head of hair that reminded me of Opie Taylor on the Andy Griffith show. Others were from his time in the army stationed in Paris and then later some wonderful photos of both my mom and dad while they were dating and then newly married. Those photos regrettably were lost this past April when my mother's house was destroyed by the devastating tornado that passed over Pleasant Grove.
In the midst of all the destruction I could not help but think of those albums. Even though lives were spared while possessions were lost I was angry that Nature had seen fit to destroy such valuable family documents that had been so carefully preserved for so long. So much of our family was in those albums and each picture served as a touchstone to a vast collection of treasured experiences. My conversations with my father toward the end revolved around his childhood in the backwoods of Minnesota and times spent on the farm there. His father would take him along on his visits to nearby Indian communities where he bought goods from them and he recalled how the family car spooked the horses of the Indians when they arrived. My father hunted and fished in those backwoods as a boy and it broke his heart when they lost the family farm to foreclosure. He carried that with him throughout his life and I believe it was the thing that made him work so hard for his own family later in life. When I was a baby my father used to rock me to sleep with soft whispered church hymns that he knew by heart but the one lullaby that I remember the most was an odd folk song called "Old Uncle Ned" and in my later years we talked and laughed about it because of the controversial nature of it's subject matter. My dad had just picked it up from somewhere and sang the lyrics as well as he knew them. I found out later that it was a pre-Civil War minstrel song,written by Stephen Foster in 1864, about a beloved slave that had died. As I write this now I can still hear his voice singing those lyrics..."so pick up the fiddle and the bow, lay down the shovel and the hoe...for there's no more work for Old Uncle Ned...he's gone where the good darkies go." For me, the context of the song and what it meant really did not matter to me. I loved the sound of his voice when he sang that distinctive melody. It was my dad that first encouraged me to play the guitar and I made a point of learning "Old Uncle Ned" so that it would never be lost to me.
I told my father that I loved him frequently and when I said my goodbyes to head back home after quick visits to my parents home I always hugged him with a strong lingering hug. It's really all a person can do when you care about someone that much. No words or embraces can suffice when faced with the prospect of death. There can be no final satisfying moment when you feel that you've said everything you wanted to say. Words fail and moments cannot be frozen in time. And as it concerns my father and me, I will always want just one more hug from my dad.
