What Is A Man
My father, an architect and artist by choice, a reluctant WWII veteran, serial marry-er and philanderer, spawner of a short pack of kids, avid reader, political liberal and very particular person, did not like having his photo taken. At least, he didn’t like the sitting for a photo. A candid group photo? Sure. Camera aimed at him at the breakfast table? Arched eyebrows and fixed smile. Tolerant. Not loving it.
I say “my” father because that is true, and because I am writing this of myself, not on behalf of my siblings. I’m sure there’s a lot about our father we agree on, in fact having, like, spoken with them about him I’m sure of it, but this is about my personal feelings about him and his passing, with no attempt to expressing theirs.
And since Dad didn’t want a memorial, this won’t be a proper obituary and though I’ll tell you a little about him, there won’t be a laundry list of all the cool things he did and all the great times we had together. There are definitely some of the first there were weren’t a lot of the second. Dad’s particularity meant our lives intersected pretty much only in the very particular ways in which he was comfortable that they did.
That particularity, which was by turns peculiar and pedestrian in character, made him an interesting person but not great as a businessman, parent, or spouse.
But this isn’t a post for the purpose of excoriating him. This is about the man as he was and who he was to me without aim to any particular judgement. In the end I’m at peace with the relationship I had with him. This is not because I am so saintly patient and understanding (lol, I’m very much my father’s child in some respects), but because I’ve done some important self-work on the subject and also a function of my own inherited particularity and how that meant throughout my life I depended on him for very little of my emotional landscape.
Some quick Dad hits:
He had a temper and low patience for other people’s needs. I could absolutely tell when the rare occasions he was mad at me, but mostly he seemed to be mad that he had to deal with me not about whatever I was doing that was forcing that interaction.
He scoffed at religion and had some anger toward religious officials for perpetrating a hoax and taking advantage of people. And yet, he himself was attracted to mysticism and earnestly spoke of his friend who could see UFOs hiding in the clouds because of the wavelengths she was on.
He was not a man of The Computer Age even though he did teach a CAD class at what is now Central New Mexico Community College (then called TVI). Being in the tech industry, I did get him a couple of computers over the last 25 years. The first one he needed to send back to me for Reasons one time, and since he still had the original box (of course he did) he sent it back from NM to me in CA in that. What I can’t explain and never asked about is “why the nuts?”
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| Note that it's still on, sleeping. WTF. |
He wasn’t kind, but he also wasn’t mean and he could be complimentary and generous. He always sent money back to whatever cause sent him a letter asking for it and he had quite a collection of address return labels because of it*.
Dad made good use of all those return address labels by sending a bunch of people a birthday card, holiday cards, etc.. In these he used one or both of his exactly two style of handwriting. There was the architecture-informed all-caps block print, and the cursive letters that if I had to guess his goal was to use only the elements of loops, points, and crossings. Reading this second one is a learned art, not aided by the fact that he didn’t think he needed to stick to common spelling. He had personal yet not always consistent spellings of his own. E.g. “thought” was always “thot”, but he could be depended on to come up with new spellings at seeming random.
He could be very charming (yo laaaaadies!), but was often very quiet.
Dad said that Twain was right about San Francisco, saying “the coldest I ever was was on a Navy ship in San Francisco Bay in July. We had to jump off the deck into the Bay for drills and swimming practice.” Dad also took no pride in military service and was adamant that no one else should either; it was a duty of citizens upon being drafted, specifically. His instructions explicitly state there are to be no military honors at that memorial he didn’t want.**
He knew a lot of things and read constantly and taught me very little directly. I did have many interesting conversations with him once I was old enough to be interesting to him and that developed most strongly during the couple of years I lived with him during college. And throughout his life I learned by observation that all kinds of things were things you could just do if you wanted to, like ride horses, drive tractors, dig postholes, garden, draw, design buildings, arrange wanted congruences of how the light changes over the year against how the views in and out of a place will change and where the water will go and how the air will flow, sculpt, draw, and paint, and pick fights with government agencies and win.
To that last; in his retirement he decided that FEMA was wrong about the local floodplain maps and who was federally mandated to purchase flood insurance so he spent years fighting them on that. This brief note in Landscape Architecture Magazine is very, very typical of his voice and doesn’t capture all the story. One dude from FEMA retired possibly rather than keep dealing with my father’s onslaught of drawings, analyses, letters and calls, and the new guy showed up to the village to look at all the stuff, agree that Dad was right, and get the maps changed. If I recall correctly what was related to me the FEMA guy said something about how he’d never seen anything like it. Note that Dad doesn’t take any credit for it, he gives it to the Senator, but, uh, it 100% would not have happened without Dad (and that may be true of the Senator too, I don’t know, Dad’s mention of it in his telling to me was just that he’d contacted them and they seemed interested in it). Don’t think that he did this because he saw an injustice. It’s right there in the letter. “Foolish.” He did it because he was Right and he had time for it. The good he did was a side-effect. I don’t think he’d agree with me on this.
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| LITTLE SQUARES ; 1955 | |
As A Parent
Dad didn’t like kids. Regardless, he had six, all told. I’m the youngest and the only one from his third and last marriage, though it didn’t last either. I am considerably younger than my siblings, by between 12 and 21 years. This is one of the ways in which my father and I are similar, but very different. My kids are 15 years apart which seems like it follows the mold of the old man, but I break the mold in that I quite like kids. So why did this guy who didn’t like kids have a bunch of them? I suspect that had a lot to do with meeting some kind of expectation. It wasn’t that he loved being married either, but maybe he thought that was expected and if you were going to do that expected thing, you had to do the other expected things too. He didn’t seem to delight in any of that and that was very much an expression of how peculiarly particular he was.
But as much as he seemed to believe that expectations needed to be met he often chaffed in doing so. He may have had some sort of Golden Rule a bit different than the classic one, that went something like “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you unless that would result in them being very annoying in which case they should behave as I want them to unless it doesn’t impact my life at all in which case of course I will tell them they should live as they please and happily so.” So, meet expectations until in some particular way you decide not to and then do that instead but never really be very happy ever doing anything that someone else thought he ought to do.
How do I know he didn’t like kids? He barely spoke to me until I was a teenager. I think I played catch with him a couple of times, ever, and most of what he said to small me was “why this mess” “stop that noise” “elbows off the table” and the like. And it wasn’t just me (though I never worried that it was, that I recall), because when I was an adult I’d see the literal eye-rolling exasperation he displayed at children in the rare instances they were around. And, of course, I’ve talked to my sibs about their experiences.
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| A father and his surviving children ; circa 1995 This is the only group photo of us that exists. |
The oldest I was and co-habited with one of my sibs, I was about 5, tops. We’re in three batches:
- Batch 1: Oldest sister, survivor of two in the batch (infantile Tay Sachs took the other one). Dad married relatively young here, and just fully took off with some other woman leaving two young kids, one doomed to die.
- Batch 2: Three kids with the woman he left Batch 1 for. It will not shock you to learn that he also left their mother, for mine.
- Batch 3: Me, an only child.
He didn’t remarry or have more kids.
I don’t think it’s saying too much to relate that my eldest sister is grateful that Dad left early and she very much loved her mother’s second husband, who adopted her and was by all accounts a great dad. I honestly think the middle three had it worst. By the time there was me… I dunno, Dad had sorta leaned into hanging around but being checked out, maybe? That seemed to work for him for a while anyway, but I really am not aware of how my parents felt about this time. I remember my mother calling him up to the house from the office downstairs (this sounds more posh than we lived, I’ll get to it in a sec.) to help deal with me (Dear Reader, I was, uh, A Handful, betimes, but that is a tale for another time) and his very obvious reluctance to appear, evident both in the language my mother was using on the phone, and his expression when he did appear. I also don’t remember anything like that happening again. I was firmly my mother’s problem, and when they divorced, I lived with her in a different state from him and saw him like one week each summer until I briefly lived with him during college.
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| A candid photo of some dudes smiling easily. |
But the middle three Have Stories - not mine to tell here - and one of my few memories of my sibs being in the same house is my father going hammer and tongs (verbally, some door slamming) with one of my sibs.
And while humans have a tendency to focus on the negative, to retell the bad stories, there aren’t a lot of stories from them of enjoyable time spent. I know there was some, but I’m just as guilty as struggling to remember the good stories from their (or my…) childhood.
At the end of life, dad was still just as particular, and There Are Stories about his distaste in going to doctors and hospitals, and of getting kicked out of a nursing home when it looked like he finally couldn’t live alone anymore, but the sister who moved to near him and helped him in his last years and in whose home he passed away in, has many good memories and stories, and misses him very much now that he is gone.
Similarly, my relationship with him as an adult myself was almost entirely pleasant, marred only by not really being great - but not terrible - roommates when I was a dumb proto-adult as a college freshman and sophomore. But I never heard from him about how he felt (“Of course not! Dad wouldn’t say a goddamn thing if his mouth was full of shit!”). Oh, except the one time he snapped at me because I hadn’t refilled the OJ after drinking most of the last of it. But I could tell from That Look when he was annoyed. Which, again, I think he mostly wasn’t and this time of cohabitation was pretty good, if very, very low-key.
After I moved out we’d still grab dinner and stuff and that was always pleasant. When I started a career and a family we’d talk on the phone for a couple hours a couple times a quarter for years at a time with intermittent year+ breaks of not calling. He even dabbled on the Internet with me! … it did not stick 🤣. But even though he’d express to others that he hated computers and smartphones and derisively that every modern car (including mine! ) “looked like a cat kicked in the ass” (he liked 70’s and 80’s Chevy Blazers particularly and sedans of the time too), he always said that he was grateful for the effort I put into him having computers (occasional; minimal) and Internet, and cars (my brother is the Car Guy, I just helped fund those projects).
Probably my fondest memory of him is a short road trip we took after a family reunion in the Pacific Northwest. On what he called a “You Can Never Go Home Again Tour” I drove him around a bunch of places he hadn’t been to in decades. He pointed out housing subdivisions that were built with all of three house plans that he drew in the 50’s. We went near but not to ‘Hayhoops’, a place much storied in family history that I’ve never been to. We went past Bremerton where he talked about being a kid working in the shipyards. Olympia got a specific shoutout for the quality of the local beer due to the sterling quality of the water. He talked a little about the family dairy plant that the family sold but kept operating and the uncles who would pick up two 40lb metal cans of milk in each hand and just walk off with them. I’m glad I said yes to that trip. It was good to see him excited about something he was enjoying.
So, I have some good memories of him, from our time together as fellow adults.
As A Provider
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I primarily remember my father as an architect and landscape architect. This had been his profession since being discharged from the Navy in (I think) ‘47 which he “joined to avoid being drafted into the Army” in 1944. He practiced in Washington, New York, Oregon and Wyoming and during my lifetime only the last of the three. I was born in Worland, and while we were there he regularly travelled all over the state to various project sites since Wyoming has such a low population density over a lot of territory. My mother and I went on a few of these trips and I remember finding construction sites very interesting.
At first there was an office down in town, and I mostly remember it from going there to watch Denver Broncos games ‘cause that’s where the only TV was. One was not allowed in the house (eventually there was a little rabbit-eared black & white one my sister left behind after living there for a short bit (like, a spring and summer? It wasn’t very long) and I moved into that room after.
The house was seeded by a log cabin. Dad designed a house plan that anchored on the cabin and converted it into a primary suite with a little courtyard around an existing elm tree. While I was an infant and small kid, the business funded the build of the house and eventually an office space and a small painter’s studio under neath it. This last was made possible by the siting of the build along the top of a tall, steep bank that dropped into the swamp and cottonwoods lowlands between the house and the Big Horn River.
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There are a few things to know about the house that are relevant to this section. The views were amazing. You could look East out from the living room through floor-to-ceiling windows right into the tops of the cottonwoods, often populated with birds including owls, falcons and the local nesting pair of Bald Eagles! The kitchen windows on the other side of that section of house looked mostly into some earthen berms that had been raised to create sound barriers but above them and through the trees you got amazing Wyoming sunsets into the badlands. So on the sun rising side it was downhill into green and wet and abundant life, and on the sun setting side it was rising into rolling desert hills of sandstone and earth.
Inside the ceilings of the main living space were quite high, like 12 or 13 ft - we always had a VERY tall Christmas Tree - and everywhere the house had electric baseboard heaters. These worked pretty well. When we could afford to run them.
You see, there was very little insulation in the ceiling or walls, and the windows - floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall - were single pane. Wyoming is famous for hot summers and freezing winters. Many winters I put on two or three layers of clothes under my ski pants and jacket and then with googles, mittens and moon boots would head out into -20F with windchill, snow coming sideways, to dive into a 3 ft snow bank in the lee of some architectural berm or retaining wall, pretending I was an Arctic explorer about to discover aliens under the ice or something (No, I hadn’t see the The Thing From Another World yet, but I loved it when I did). Summers were brutal. No airflow (these windows did not open, you see, and even if they did the mosquito density from the swamp below was lethal) and temperatures in the 90Fs and 100Fs. But hey it was a dry heat if you were far enough from the swamp.
Dad, as I may have mentioned, was very particular. There was one winter I remember where there was no money for the very expensive electric heaters to run constantly in very large uninsulated spaces. Why? Because he argued with clients and contractors, and then he either wouldn’t work with him or they’d fire him, because they wanted siting choices of the project he didn’t like or they wanted the bathrooms in the “wrong” place or whatever it was.
Not long after that winter, Dad had the business going along fine again - at least as far as I know - but was clearly very unhappy. Sometimes he’d stay in bed for days at a time, talking to no one, not eating. As an adult I learned - I think from my mother, not him - that he had tried some anti-depressants or something but didn’t like how they made him feel; “those damn goofballs” or the like. He didn’t like doctors much either. He had been a very sickly kid who did not want to go camping and fishing (he liked horse riding and there were horses in Wyoming when I was very small but I never had my own because they were gone when I was big enough for that) and these had been points of contention with his own extremely hale and hardy father, Emil. Now, I’m drawing an inference from half-remembered things Dad said when I was young and some notes my grandfather left to me, but I bet I’m right. Remember I said he got kicked out of the nursing home? Yeah, he didn’t get along with doctors or patients.
Anyway. My mother survived a round with cancer around this time. Then Dad decided to go back to school. He moved to Laramie for a lot of the next several years attending the University of Wyoming and getting a Masters in Art. He started a new affair, my parents divorced, my mother and I moved to Cheyenne and Dad moved to Albuquerque. (this timeline is very general; don’t @ me)
It was later discovered that there were some engraving prints in the house inherited from the mid-to-late 1800s that may have been worth a pretty penny. They were never sold to heat any room in that very interesting yet impractical house, and that wasn’t the first time Dad had a family in financial straights. It’s not clear how much they may have been worth. Many years later hey were donated to George Fox University which family legend holds our Quaker ancestors were among those Quakers who helped found it. I remember “Jerusalem in her Grandeur - AD 33” quite well, as it hung in the kitchen of his little apartment in Albuquerque.
With only himself to maintain, Dad did tolerably well financially. There was a point where I leant him a little money (“Sometimes there’s a little money left at the end of the month, and sometimes there’s a little month left at the end of the money”) and he insisted on creating a written schedule of payments to pay me back. I was like, “…OK. Dad, I don’t care about this amount of money, you can just have it…” But he insisted and so I didn’t argue. He kept that schedule like a metronome and every month the repayment came with an updated ledger. And I know he borrowed some money from his wealthier sister to buy his place in Tularosa where he retired-retired to, and paid all that back too. With years of careful investing of a splinter of his small income sources with a “money guy”, by the end of his life Dad had more money on hand than he’d probably ever had in his life. So, there’s that.
All in all, his example was one to counter. To go hard for some money, early. To keep it growing. I have done tolerably well at this, and I must in some part be grateful to my father for it.
Here, At The End
 | AEL ; by Ben Konis ; 1981 ; Pastel on Paper |
I remember where this portrait hung in the house in Worland - right in the entryway - and I used to stop and marvel at how well it captured not just how he looked but how he was. I rarely hang it, these days. It’s a … it’s a lot.
And so there he is. My Dad. A man I never really knew very well, someone I think was very lonely and yet some kind of trapped by himself from doing much about that, who was really good at some pretty technical stuff but really, really bad at all personal stuff (“Well, Andy, It’s always wonderful hearing about your relationships. One thing I learned about myself is that I am not very good at relationships.”), whose lessons to me about how to be me were almost entirely made by being a mirror to adjust my course away from a lot of the places he wound up.
But after all that, it really seemed like he found his way to a good relationship at the very end. A lot because of a lot of effort by my sister and I have been and will always be grateful to her for relieving that loneliness and giving him grace and comfort through to his last moments.
I’m not mad at him. I don’t think I ever was. I did love him.
Good bye, Dad.
*If you're like "what?" lemme explain: it's common for oh, say, UNICEF or whoever to send you a thick envelope with a glossy letter asking for donations, some heart-tugging pictures of the folks they are fundraising, and several sheets of address return stickers with your name and home address on them. I don't know the history of this strange custom, but it's totally a thing. I have a pile of them myself. |