In Memoriam

My father died last night. He had been declining for a long time, heart, kidneys, and brain more or less in sync, and while at the end the turn for the worse seemed sudden, I think it was really just the result of a long slow descent, like an airplane landing (safely) in the fog.

I have the impression that stoicism is having a moment, appropriate for confusing and difficult times, and coincidentally Dad was the paramount example of stoicism among all the people I've ever known. He was famously self-contained. He grew up poor on tenant farms during the Depression, the family abandoned by his father at an early age, finding an escape route by working as a stable hand for posh families on the Main Line.

In spite of circumstances, and his legendary unwillingness to speak, he managed to become Class President and Salutatorian of his high school class (1945). According to legend, he enlisted in the Navy to avoid having to give a speech at graduation. As it happened, the war ended while he was still in training at Pearl Harbor, so he did a brief stint in postwar Manchuria, then a few months in Japan. He was discharged in 1946, but still owed Uncle Sam the best part of a year, and was called up for service in Korea in 1951. There he was attached to a logistics unit, set up to distribute pay to soldiers and sailors invading the North--which service was abruptly interrupted when the Chinese army routed the UN troops and the entire enterprise was abandoned in a mad scramble for the ships. When his term of service was over, he was offered a chance to take Navy pilot training, but was not enamored of the prospect of landing planes on ships, and decided to come back home instead. Not long after, he met and married my mother (BTW, the second most stoic person I know). They were married for 64 years.

His love for and ability with horses was something I didn't really know about until Karen and I were old enough to be introduced to riding lessons when I was 10 or so. I was a sad disappointment to him, lacking both ability and confidence, but Karen took to it. It was only a few years later we moved to a small farm with pastures and surrounding open country, and horses re-entered his life in a major way.

From that point on, I watched the most interesting developments in his life from a distance, although he had considerable (I won't say endless) patience for my insistence on fishing, tennis, ping-pong, horseshoes, and other recreations more compelling to me. Until age became a major factor, he was consistently better at all that stuff than I was, and my adolescent frustration fueled some pretty serious, seriously one-dimensional, competition. It might be that the whole drama was contained within me--an outside observer might have had trouble finding any drama--but I thought it was real at the time.

Dad's competence (and his confidence) was such that he rarely hesitated to quit a job when he had had enough. Mostly he had a new job within a few weeks, and he generally he seemed to feel better off for having made the change. Not always, however: he did a stint as "Mr. Goodwrench" at a local Chevy dealer, and hated the association with a lame but well-known advertising campaign. He quit that job too.

I think his glory days came in the decade or so after he retired (maybe a trifle early, truth to tell). He became a full-time horseman. Between fox hunts, horse shows, and the daily cycle of feeding/watering/grooming/exercising/mucking out, he was fully engaged and extremely good at his work. This was a job he didn't want to quit, and he didn't. He was still working at horses last year, in spite of age, infirmity, and people finding him an easy mark. If that could have been sustained, I think he might have lived forever.