A deeper lake

A snapshot of my dad & me

Photo by Kevin Mueller on Unsplash

My dad has a history of almost dying.

There was the time the brakes went out on his tractor going down a steep hill. The time he impaled himself on a power-washer. The time a few years ago at a fishing tournament, in late November, he fell out of his bass boat into a frigid lake and sunk like a stone. Luckily, two guys from the club witnessed it and rescued him.

I asked him—over the phone on our Sunday call—if he’d been disappointed to have to leave the tournament early.

“Hell no!” he said.

“No?”

“I had me a change of clothes.”

A cancer diagnosis last year, however, was a tumble into a deeper lake. My mom phoned with the news, saying in typical stiff-upper-lip Midwestern fashion that the chemo wouldn’t be fun but he’d gut it out. Then one morning a few days after his second round of chemo, I got a text: “Dad admitted to hospital last night. Neutropenic fever. Fever was 102. He fell and cut his face and arm.” Then came a picture of him. He wore a knit sock-cap and looked gaunt and scared in his white hospital gown. A shiner graced one eye. A gash high on his cheek had bled through its bandage. A bruise in the shape of a crescent moon stretched from the side of his nose all down his jaw to the tip of his chin.

For as bad as he looked, he was in good spirits when we talked on the phone. “What’d you guys have for supper?” he wanted to know. “I had me some mashed potatoes. But they didn’t taste like nothing. I don’t have much of an appetite, I guess.”

That he lacked an appetite bothered me more than his mangled face. My most indelible memories of him were at our kitchen table. He’d have just come in from mowing grass some hot summer afternoon and down to a dinner my mom put together. In a filthy white T-shirt and grass-spattered work pants, stinking of lawnmower exhaust, he rattled the ice in his iced tea and called for bread. He leaned over his plate, eating fast and furious with both hands. He stabbed a knife into pork chops. Split open a baked potato and doused it with butter and sour cream and generous shakes of salt and pepper. Sucked clean three ears of corn on the cob. Sopped up the pork grease with the bread.

“I don’t eat to live!” he crowed. “I live to eat!”

For a man as high strung as my dad, it took fuel to get him through the day. When he wasn’t mowing grass, he was out burning big piles of sticks and leaves; or gathering black walnuts in five-gallon buckets; or down on his knees weeding rows of green beans in the garden; or felling trees with a chainsaw and bucking the trunks, then splitting them for firewood he’d haul inside by the armful all winter; or hunting nightcrawlers with a flashlight after a midnight thunderstorm; or wading creeks with a stringer full of catfish; or fishing in ponds and strip pits; or cleaning messes of bluegill and crappie on the back porch; or snapping his gum; or belching enthusiastically and patting his belly. In bed at night—in tighty-whities tucked into a fresh white T-shirt—he rocked himself to sleep like a critter burrowing deep into its nest, or maybe more like a broken wind-up toy stuck in gear.

I had seen him sick before, once, a few years back, laid up after a mini-stroke. I had never seen him without an appetite. A childhood of poverty in southern Illinois left him hungry for life. Some days a pot of brown beans was all he and his sisters ate. At five he’d had his appendix removed, and it came out lined with little rocks he swallowed after running a finger under the kitchen linoleum and sucking it.

His favorite meal—one he talked about often—was a dish called soakie his mother made by sprinkling a spoonful of coffee and sugar onto a stale biscuit. Nothing could ever taste as good as soakie.

It occurred to me nothing might ever taste like anything to him again. But there wasn’t much I could do about that. He was 79 and had outlived nearly all the rest of his family. Neither was there much I could do to change the fact that in the last fifteen years I’d started a life in Massachusetts and had only been back home to Indiana twice. The usual suspects conspired against me: time, money, my son’s ill health as a young child, my wife’s chronic migraines, the arrival of the pandemic, severe political differences, and the fact that, honestly, I just didn’t have it in me because the thought of going home hurt too much.

The best I could do was our weekly Sunday calls. We chatted about the weather and how he was feeling. I told him what I had for dinner. Sometimes I texted him pictures of our meals: French onion soup with braised short ribs, strawberry shortcake with whipped cream.

“Boy oh boy,” he’d say, smacking his lips as the images arrived. “Just as soon as I get my appetite back, why, I wanna eat me some of that!” He’d make a slurping sound and list off everything he was going to eat again someday.

It was a comfort to hear.