Daddy Care: Still Here

Photo by Diana McGraw. Text by Janet Grace Riehl

If we’re not eyeball to eyeball, my friends ask me “Where are you?” rather than “How are you?” Midst the back-and-forth whirl often I’m not really sure.  But this morning my buckwheat pillow under my head crunches the answer.  I’m in my bed in the city—in the home I made for myself. My father is in his bed in the country—in the home he’s lived in all his life with time out to almost get killed in World War II. Two generations before him and three generations after him have lived on this land. Soon, later today, I’ll travel across the Mississippi once more to resume my place on the homeplace. But not yet.

I sleep alone with pillows on either side. No matter which way I turn in the night there’ll be a comforting something there. I’ve seen mothers secure their babies this way away from home. Away from the cradle, away from the crib—before high-tech baby carriers—mothers improvised. I take my comfort where I find it.

My digital travel clock says 4:30 a. m. It’s too soon to get up; I’d be wrecked for the day. I will myself back into the softness of sleep. Later a dream comes to visit. It’s one I’ll remember upon waking. These remembered dreams are so few they jerk me to attention. In the dream my father and I stand in line inside a church. The seats fill up on the near side of a balustrade. By the time we get to the front of the line—by the time we must choose and take our seats—there are no seats together any more. My father takes his seat on the other side of the rail. I sit behind, but lean forward. I whisper to his neighbor, “Take good care of him, would you?” I know Pop won’t be alone. But I don’t want to be alone either. When I wake, the dream cradles me between the pillows.

Finally it’s a decent time to get up. I cross the round rug and lean over to set my tea on a basket from Ghana. Upside down it serves as a side table. My writing nest beckons. The gold chair wants me. I yield.

I haven’t written anything of note for a long time. But now I settle in a cozy gold chair surrounded by a circle of art and artifacts. It’s like the pillows. These objects comfort and hold me in a circle of memories. This circle hints of life before me, reminds me where I’ve been, and reassures me there’s a future.

Writing by hand frees me from a computer screen and keyboard. My hand grips a 0.7 zebra roller pen that reminds me of the fountain pens I filled as a young woman. Before ink cartridges for printers, there were plastic ink cartridges for pens.  As I refilled the cartridges with a syringe, the ink streamed in like blood or squid ink. When my frugality backfired, the ink leaked onto the knuckle of my writing finger and splattered onto the page. This morning the ink from my fat pen sinks into the soft paper of my Moleskine journal. That better writers than I used these is no mystery to me. They are the world’s most perfect friend to listen to whatever words come.

At 9 o’clock I call my father. Our ritual greeting of “How did you sleep?” echo village exchanges in Botswana that translate: “How have you risen? I have risen well.” My father’s characteristic response is delivered in a gravelly voice tempered with age. “Well, I made it through the night. I’m still breathing. Nothing to brag about. I aim to make it through the day as gracefully as possible.”

Later when I’ve made it to the other side of the river I’ll cook dinner for us and he’ll nap. Then I tiptoe beside his bed to see his chest rise a bit. His fingers twitch. He’s still breathing. Maybe it’s nothing to brag about, but he’s still here, and so am I.

Daddy Care: Setting His House in Order

My father Erwin A. Thompson

Photo by Gerry Mandel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My father at 97  has set a lifetime record for nearly dying. He’s done this at least 10 times in the last 6 years since I’ve come back home to live, not just visit. We have partnered during these years to preserve his legacy and prepare in every way imaginable for as smooth a passing as possible. The business of death is never easy, no matter what. But we’ve attacked the project with the strong will we Thompsons are famous for.  I wrote “Setting His House in Order”  a few years back during one of these scurrying downturn times

Setting His House in Order
by Janet Grace Riehl
for my father Erwin A. Thompson

Thus saith the LORD, Set thine house in order: for thou shalt die, and not live. —Isaiah 38:1

Like a woman readying for delivery from pregnancy
he scurries between books, barn, and basements
to set his house in order.

For he is pregnant with the news of his life
and the coming of his death
when he will meet a new life.

What news he will learn in this new life
when the roll is called up yonder
he knows not.

He has charted the lead boat of a flurry of small skiffs
across so many troubled waters, wracked by waves
bigger than the lapping current and flooding of his beloved Mississippi.
He knows the turbulence of heavy waters
we must navigate in our small skiffs
when he is safely on the other side.

He knows he’ll be there, and we’ll be here, trying to sort it all out.

He sets us to sorting.
He wants to clear his space.
He wants to clear his mind.

And so, he sorts.
He sorts to clear a path to the canning jars in the root cellar.
He sorts to make categories of couplings in the antique basement.
He sorts the gardener’s lair, the old potting basement, stripping it back to basics.
He sorts metal scrap in the barn—a tractor steering wheel and a groundhog trap seeing how these things could be art.

He sorts and catalogues books, then stores them up high.
He sorts and types old family letters for the university archive.

He pours his memories out on paper.
He sorts his papers and book manuscripts.
He readies his new books for printing.

He passes on the bigness of himself in music, whittled wood, poetry, and prose.

He dreams of documenting the craft of generations of women in his family,
found in the cloth of quilts and comforters he helped his wife tie on the old  frame.

He is a farmer.
He knows these rhythms of the seasons as surely as
he knows his own heartbeat and rasping breath.

He knows what it is to sort the seeds for planting.
He knows what it is to plow the field and plant these seeds.

He continues to farm himself and to plow our fields
so we shall be ready when the last of his seeds are flung
from his hands, and we are left to farm on our own
in fields cultivated and disked by the lessons of his life.