Condensing a Life to Three Short Pages

Yesterday I took a day off work to finally write my father's obituary.

He died on Jan. 11, so, yes, I didn't get on this immediately. But since he was a business owner, I oddly feel he would understand the delay. Whenever something came up in the family, he immediately consulted his planner to see what else was going on that day.

I took that day off because I had eight pages of material (all chronicled by him) detailing his education and work history, so I really needed a day to focus on just that. Somehow, I managed to condense all that information to three short pages, which is long by most obituary standards and too short to really tell the stories behind those accomplishments.

As I wrote his obituary, I learned my father was a creative and forward thinker, which I didn't know to the precise details until yesterday because he rarely talked about himself.

Now about this photo.

My sister recently posted this photo on social media. I have hazy memories of this particular scene and clear sharp memories of all the elements in it, especially feeling the tug of my kite in my hands under the large eternal sky. 

We lived at 2108 Belmont Ave. in Joliet, which looks very different today. But this photo was taken back in 1964 when the space felt wide and very, very open, mostly due to the lack of trees and houses in this very new development.

I remember my father teacher me how to fly a kite, how to let the string out, how to steer the kite, and I remember this particular kite.

I remember playing in that sandbox.

I remember the white car.

I remember the house before he installed the privacy fence and the metal shed that people thought was a barn on the first glance - but every house must have a shed, he used to say.

I remember my sister as a baby.

The side of the house had an outside thermometer and the mercury measured more than 100 degrees that summer. 

I recalled being amazed that the temperature had reached all the way to one hundred when my mother opened the side door and announced it just as I, who was playing outside, came traipsing up the concrete driveway.

If you had visited this house a few years later, you would have seen the fence, the shed, the rock garden, the honeysuckle hedges on both sides, and the lush green grass without a single dandelion.

You might hear him call you over to him to see a large green grasshopper (large brown grasshoppers were scary) that he had caught in his work gloves and you'd watch in delight as he fed it a blade of grass and then taught you to do the same. Seriously, you really haven't lived until you've hand-fed a grasshopper.

He spent most weekends in good weather with yard work. Late in the afternoon, he'd take a break and sit on the back porch with one ice cold beer. And sometimes, I could persuade him to remove his thumb, a amazing trick to a young child.

We had three wading pools in our lifetime at that house (we moved to New Lenox in the fall of 1974): a round inflatable we used a few times in the front yard, a rectangular one with a hard plastic triangular seats in all four corners (I remember him taking it out of the box assembling it, and I remember my excited anticipating of getting into that large pool), and (later) a three-foot wading pool that sat where the white car is sitting the summer before we moved.

That end of the driveway where the concrete meets the grass was also the place where he'd set up the charcoal grill on weekends. And I got to help shuck the fresh sweet corn.

I often tell my children that time doesn't move for me. I say this because some people might say this happened a long time ago.

But it doesn't feel like a long time ago.

It doesn't feel that long ago at all.