Who Dad?!

Tribute

I caught myself the other day giving The Look. The one my father would after hearing some harebrained idea of mine. His eyebrows would rise, his lips purse, and with a hint of a shoulder shrug, his head would half-tilt, half-nod, as he turned and walked away without saying a word.

That Look is now in me! I give it to myself (but to no one else, I hope). It's a private conversation that has been going on for a lifetime.

After he died, as the executor of his estate, I paid for his phone service long after it was needed, just to be able to dial his number, hear his voice on the recording, and leave the messages I wanted him to hear.

So many years later, and how I wish we could speak. I have so many questions for him, and I'd like to share with him how I've been making sense out of our past.

As a kid in his warehouse I used to climb the stacks of tile and grout, imagining them mountains. It was a fantasyland jungle gym made of hard things, heavy masculine construction things. It was also the place of my first job. No more than ten years old, weighing barely 80 pounds, my job was to drag, push, and carry the 25-90 lb. boxes of tile, bags of sand and cement, pile like with like, make ordered aisles through the warehouse, and then sweep them.

At the end of that first weekend of work, I looked around at the clear, clean paths I had made and felt incredibly proud and satisfied. Then, my father's partner rewarded me with the unbelievable sum of $40! My eyes bulged. I felt important. I felt rich.

But my order did not last. Every time a truck unloaded, or someone in a hurry looked for tile, the chaos would return. There just didn't seem any way to truly organize and keep organized the seventy-five years of tile history my father and his father had accumulated.

In my thirties, I came back to work at Acorn Tile. I drove the truck, managed jobs, learned to estimate, but in my spare time, I kept returning to the warehouse. I installed pallet racks and shelving units, identified and sorted the tile I once played on and wrestled with as a child. I was obsessed. It was a Herculean task that took years to accomplish.

It was also a time in my life when I was in therapy and participating in a variety of personal growth programs and workshops. Through some strange alchemy, the inner work I was doing was aided by this physical culling, cataloguing, shaping, and arranging of my family's ceramic foundation.

Twenty-five years after beginning my first job, I finally completed it. It freed me to begin a new life back in Tucson where, over the years, I tackled many daunting projects with a confidence I wouldn't have otherwise had.

I've been thinking of those countless dusty hours in my father's back rooms as I've grown into facing the challenge of my own making: fifty plus years of notebooks, manuscripts, scribbles, and hopeful typed pages. It is a mess I do not want to leave for others to untangle.

I know too well the Siren sorting song of the garbage can, and the fragility of life.

And, I remember the men in my father's circle who taught me much just by being who they were:

Sid B., with posture as straight as his words, looked as if he had taken some punches but had won most of his fights. He always took the time to acknowledge me, a kid, as someone real.

Joe L., who stood by my dad when my mother died. He had lost his daughter in a horrible manner, so knew the pain of loss. He was comfortable showing concern in loyal silence. Even the lines in his face knew the value of presence.

But most of all there was Pat McKenty. Learning his practical, slow approach to problem solving served me well in life. He even drove slowly. Okay, the speed limit, but that made me restless back then. Yet, he was quick to tell a story, to buy or accept a beer, preferably Old Style.