The Birthday Of TB The Elder

 This weekend was TB The Elder's 83rd birthday.

The home where he is staying sent my sister a picture of him celebrating, with a hat and cake with candles in front of him.  He looks happy and, knowing him,  I am sure was very happy about the cake.  Even now, from what they tell us, he is still very happy about food. 

My father and I had a rough relationship for most of my growing up years - not so much from any behavioral issues as the fact that we were very different people. He was blue collar worker that worked with this hands, working his way up in a utility company from ditch digger to foreman; I was the proverbial nerd who read all the time and whose head was lost in the clouds of fantasy and imagination.  We had few touchpoints:  animals were one, cars were another.  It was only far later that we were able to find more.

I feared my father, not from any sort of physical violence - that was never, ever a thing - as much from the fact that he had a temper and would react (and feel sorry afterwards).  I learned to either say nothing at all or to try and hide my mistakes or disobedience, which taught me the sorts of habits that in some ways I am still working on to this day (the fact that I continue to work on them remains completely my own issue, not his:  I recognized it, but am still working to confront it). The fact that I still abhor confrontation to this day is something I continue to deal with; I will walk out of a room rather than hear two people argue, even people I do not know.

Probably like most sons with their fathers, I only learned later - mostly from my mother but partially from my father - some of the issues that made him who he was:  a relatively poor childhood (his parents migrated as part of the Great Depression), a brother that was killed by a drunk driver when he was 6 or 7 and how the family essentially went into survival mode (my grandfather took care of my granny, his older brother took care of his younger sister, and my father was largely left on his own), and a series of moves from the time they arrived in their new home (my Old Home) as they moved from place to place following the agriculture work (one of the last things we did before everything went downhill was drive from place to place as he would point out where they had lived; most of the locations are gone now except in his mind).

He became angry when I ran the car out of gas more than once or had a small fender bender; it was only years later that my mother told me about how he had totaled his older brother's car when he had taken it without permission.  

But even with all of this, his positive qualities outshone anything that I might have perceived about him.

He was a loyal spouse and good father in that we never went hungry, did not have clothes, or did not have a roof over our head - things that I suspect he had experienced at some point.  He came to literally every event my sister and I did in grammar school or high school.  He never went to college, but he made sure we did.  

He claimed that he never really "knew anything", but somehow he knew a lot about a lot:  he re-roofed our house, fixed our cars, built a chicken pen, cleared The Ranch of scrub brush, and a thousand other things that I had no idea he could do.  He thought that he could pretty much give anything a try at least, something that I have inherited.

He was a natural raconteur and loved to talk with people, sometimes spending hours visiting.  He and mother traveled through the US in a trailer and motorhome over the years. Over time, he even picked up reading.  For years they square danced until most of their friends who were older were not longer able to our died and the group simply faded away.

But in his greatest, most selfless act, he became the caretaker of my mother when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and for the last six years, learned to do everything that she had done:  cook, clean, laundry.  He negotiated doctor's appointments.  He made sure the cars ran and the house was warm.  He did it all until - literally - his body gave out on him and betrayed his mind.

I will go to see him this coming weekend, and hopefully he will have had a good night's sleep and we can visit. As is the case, if we do I will likely have no idea what he is trying communicate; I will nod and try to answer the question I think he asking and hopefully, both he and I will be satisfied with the answer.

I can speak to my father still, but it is as if a dark glass lies between the two of us and even though he is still there, the things that made him my father are now locked away in a place I can no longer access them.  I can only pick through the memories of a life and the gleanings of their home, 62 years of married life.  

Happy Birthday, Dad.