70 Years (or Happy Birthday Dad)

Today’s my dad’s birthday. His 70th birthday. When I think about birthdays and my dad, I think about this song. For years, I had no idea this was a Beatles’ song. I just thought it was the Holdaway family birthday song that Dad would play whenever it was somebody’s birthday. He’d play it on the stereo in his studio, and he could really turn up the volume on it, and we would rock out. It just feels right to hear this song on this day.

Dad isn’t around to celebrate his 70th birthday. On Friday, May 15th, 2009, he passed away. He was 65. This is still a raw thing to process. It’s one of those things that I can’t really get used to, even though it has been over four years …

Dad’s funeral was held on Saturday, May 23rd, 2009. During the days leading up to the funeral, as a family, we discussed what the service should be like. Ultimately, we decided that each of the five kids would speak for a few minutes, and share our memories about Dad. When this course was agreed upon, I immediately began to feel concerned, because I’m not very good at conjuring up memories, and I’m especially not very good at articulating those memories. To do so, as I have discovered with the project I have been doing on this blog, I have to work very much chronologically, have a starting point and an ending point, and have a very specific purpose in mind. It’s the task of recalling random specific moments, and elaborating on those.

I’m much more inclined to think of ideas or themes that center around a subject. For example, when I think about Dad I think about sketching, about back rubs, about his singing the bass line of the hymns in Sacrament Meeting (and how I have always felt that the bass parts of the hymns belong to Dad), about the smell of rolls and reams of unused glossy paper, about the red tiles on the downstairs bathroom floor–Dad’s bathroom, about the nobs and levers on the thing in the dark room that was kind of like a copier, and about so many other things. But I didn’t feel like that was the right way to go about sharing my memories of Dad, just listing stuff.

Finally I had a burst of inspiration. I would kind of cheat, as it were, and let Dad write the memories for me. I dug around and found a number of letters he wrote to me while I was on my mission, and I quoted from those letters in my talk. The excerpts captured a number of different things about Dad, and articulated those things, in a way that I could not do myself. Following the funeral service, Mom and Dad’s bishop approached me and asked if I would make copies of my talk for each of my family members, and I agreed to. But I didn’t do it in those first few days, and I still have not done it. And I cannot find my copy; I must have put it some place so secure that it’s safe from me.

I searched through shoe boxes and files and in my suit coat pockets, and I could not find it anywhere. This troubled me for days, because I really wanted to be able to share those memories on his 70th birthday, and the weeks were slipping by too quickly. Then one evening while I was racking my brain a thought occurred to me (Jessica would call this process critical thinking, a talent I’m still very much in infantile stages developing) to see if I had saved a copy on my computer. After a few minutes of searching I found it. And so, finally, I can make good on my promise, and I can share these excerpts that are so very much Dad.

What follows is the talk in its entirety; the excerpts from his letters are italicized:

When Dad first started dialysis, I was serving my mission. I remember well the letter he sent me describing what he had to do every day to keep his kidneys clean. He compared himself to an upright tire pump with a hose coming out the side of it, and even drew a picture to help me visualize what he was talking about. I wanted to find that letter, but couldn’t. However, I did find a number of other letters he sent me while I was gone, and I want to share some of the things he wrote me with you today.

This first one comes from a letter he typed rather than wrote by hand, the only one of its kind that he sent me. Interspersed through the letter were two photos that he put in the document, one of Grandma Jessie driving a convertible he bought not long after returning from his mission, and the other one he took of me in my black hair days. He writes:

Mom is at the gym. She likes to work out on the treadmill and do weights sometimes. She showed me that she can touch her toes without bending her knees. She was surprised to discover this new trick. She says she is getting stronger. I’d better watch out.

 

This next one comes from a letter with a homemade letterhead, something that was very common among his letters. The letter head consisted of a photo I sent home of me standing in a green field looking upward in a setting that reminded me of the depiction of the Sacred Grove in the old First Vision church video. He photoshopped a UFO in my line of sight, explaining that he had enhanced the photo and discovered what it was I was looking at, and that it now made more sense to him. He mentioned in the letter that Mom was going to send me my favorite cookies and then included this anecdote about receiving a package from a girl back home while on his own mission:

It was May or June and our district went into Paris for an all mission conference. Someone there told me that I had a package from home. I was many miles from Paris when it arrived around Christmas. Even if it was 5 or 6 months later I was still happy to have it. … It was quite solid. I wondered what the heck it was. … When we were settled on the train I decided to open it. Sure enough, Christmas paper. Then a plastic bag with a …what?—a crusty brick? Oh I see a raisin, and what’s that? A rock-hard cherry. There are many, all embedded in a … a … fruitcake! Hard as a rock. We used it for a tire chalk when we parked our VW van on a hill. It was indestructible. Sad thing too was that it was not alone in the plastic wrapper. Out came a skinny necktie that more resembled a shoelace. Dang. I could have used that—as a necktie anyway. I think my companion did use it as a shoelace.

 

And this one from “Saturday June 20-something—maybe the 26^th. I can’t check the date cause I’m hooked to a bag.”

Dialysis time. Every 5-7 hours, sometimes 6-10 if I forget or busy at work or in SLC… -FLASH-the phone just rang and I answered it sitting here with my drain going… Summer is oh-fish-ally here! … I guess Mom told you about the party/picnic we had last week … I sang barbershop style with the big Ogden dude, Terry Hatch, and bro. Benson. I thought Jeff was going to explode—he had to hit some really high notes and then went up from there. He must have lost 10 lbs by sweating and forcing the moisture out straining to break glass with those piercing high notes. He was about 6 octaves above the rest of us. All the neighborhood dogs high-tailed it in a hurry… Hayley’s having a birthday party today [for her fifth birthday]. Only girls she informed me. Kristin came over to borrow a table cloth this morning for the party and brought Hayley and Alyssa. Hayley told me to call her Sally. Then she heads for my markers and starts drawing whales at the bar. I’m making pancakes so I make her one that looks like Minnie Mouse. Then I put a candle in it and light it. And Hayley blows it out. When she saw it she said something I can’t repeat. She didn’t eat the mouse head.

Included in the text of this one were pictures of the Minnie Mouse Pancake complete with burning candle.

I ought to make mention of the letter he wrote me while I was in the MTC. The letterhead was of a hand holding a rubber chicken by the neck, and he said the chicken was a bird left over from Thanksgiving because it was scrawny enough or green enough to be overlooked. There was also a photo of a pumkin pie frosted with a portrait of me. He was an expert cake (and pie) decorator.

Not long into my mission, when I was experiencing some disappointment with people not keeping commitments, he wrote me this:

It’s easy to be discouraged—but remember—discouragment is only a tool of Satan—nothing more. Understanding what discouragement is really helps because in understanding you can overcome it because you see the source and know you are stronger than an evil influence.

He would have ample opportunity to live this profound principle through the last nine years of his life.

And finally, toward the end of my mission he wrote:

You’ll look back upon the days you are really living this very moment … for strength, direction and comfort … The people whose lives you’ve touched—and helped change for the better. You’ll probably do a lot more of it throughout your life. It will be before mission. During mission & after mission. Too bad the time goes so fast but it’s what you do with what time you have that’s important. But remember to get enough sleep too!

Dad’s life was one that touched many. He made the most of the time of his life, that did go by too fast. He was always willing to lift and bless those around him with his quick and unique wit and charisma. And now is his time to get enough sleep from his tired mortal tabernacle.

How grateful I am to have the restored gospel and to know that through the grace of God and His Son Jesus Christ, “that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory” (D&C 130:2).

Brief Interlude

I’m interrupting my regularly scheduled blogs to talk about my dream that I had this morning before waking up.

I was walking away from work when I got a phone call from Aaron Bench. He said he was in town and wanted help finding this town house he was going to look at possibly renting. When I turned a corner I saw Aaron on his cell phone and so the two of us went and found this town house. (Aaron was short, like as short as one of my children, and I found myself patting him on the head like I do my kids, but he moved away from me.) The address was tricky to locate, it was a downstairs unit that had a treacherous set of stairs that wound down to the door. Thankfully, though, there was a separate street that had access to the town house, so you didn’t have to use the stairs.

Just as we got to the door, the residents of the town house got home from church. There were a lot of people who lived there, from a number of different families. I held the door all of them, and then went inside. The tour of the town house was brief, until they wanted to show us the storage space, which was located up a back set of stairs that lead to a room above the upstairs unit. We climbed the stairs and went into the storage area.

The first thing I noticed was a number of drum sets in the room, including one that looked a lot like my first (really second) drum set, the one I bought when I was 15 and used in Rash and CBA!. Upon closer inspection, it was my drum set, and it even included the original snare drum, the piccolo snare with matching design that I had traded with a kid named Joe when I was a sophomore for a more traditional snare with silver finish.

I noticed a number of notes scattered around about the different music lessons the kids in the families were taking. The people offered to let me take the drum set home.

Aaron signed the lease papers and then we went down the stairs from the storage area, and I suddenly found myself holding a puppy while Aaron used the bathroom. The puppy peed on the floor while in my arms, and someone helped me clean up after it, though they only helped me part way and I had to find more supplies to use. It was at this point that I found what I thought was a roll of paper towel that turned out to be drinking straws with paper-like texture.

It was at this point that I realized that Lewis and Jack were there with me. Jack had just done something a little naughty and was hiding himself under a blanket. I went over to him to talk to him and one of the people there came with me and began to philosophize about parenting and how she didn’t want to be one of those parents who just set greasy hamburgers and fries in front of her children. She said that I wasn’t really one of those parents because she had observed how I talked with and engaged Jack earlier in the day.

Then I woke up.