It’s been forty-five years since Dad died.
Ten years ago, I wrote Hard to Believe, But Not Hard to Believe on the thirty-fifth anniversary of his death, the gist of that post being that it was hard to believe that it had actually been 35 years since his death. Now, ten years later, it feels like a lifetime.
For one thing, Mum is gone now too, as are all but one of his siblings, and all but one of his in-laws. I’ve written too many memorials over the past couple of years. But mainly, it’s that a lot has happened now, without him. My siblings married, a couple of them had children, and one of those grandchildren is now a mother herself. I’ve been through five jobs, two of them fairly lengthy, and I’ve now moved. He’s been out of the picture for way too long.
Anytime I think of the grandkids and Dad at the same time, I think of what a shame it was that they never knew him — Dad was great with kids. Before he married, he was a surrogate father to his dead brother’s daughters, and he was great with us, and my cousins and many of the kids in the neighborhood.
I would have loved to have gone picture taking with him. Dad was a great photographer, and not fully appreciated within the family. He would put on the occasional slide show of family pictures, but what I didn’t realize fully until after he was gone was that he had a bunch of pictures he didn’t show, because they weren’t people pictures — but they were really good. Dad started letting me use his cameras when I was in high school, but they were both rangefinders, with fixed lenses. I didn’t get my first SLR until the year after he died. I wish I could have gone shooting with him.
When he had the time, Dad loved to paint pictures of ships. Square riggers, especially, and clipper ships in particular. He would go downstairs late at night, put on the old radio, and paint. He started by taking slides of pictures in books, and then he would project the slide onto the blank canvas and trace the outlines. Sometimes I would wake up late at night, and somehow know he was down there — maybe I heard the radio? — and go downstairs and watch. I remember one night, he showed me how he was painting the roundness of a sail. He showed me how he painted the shadows in the corners of the sail, and the brightness in the belly of the sail. And he knew the history of them; I remember one night, his subject was a Black Ball packet ship, and him telling me about them. I remember him mentioning that the lights in the cellar where he was painting were relatively yellow, and that was why the color palette of his paintings was blueish. I was fairly young during the years when he was doing most of his painting, and the memories have grown blurry, but they’re my favorite memories of him.
Dad was a Boston patrolman, and a good one. When I was going through the papers Mum had saved, I found two separate letters of commendation he had received. He liked to help people, and couldn’t abide cruelty.
Dad loved the outdoors, especially the Blue Hills. There was a short-lived mountain bike rental concession near Trailside Museum, and I tried it out. I remember thinking the whole time, God, Dad would have loved this.
It’s been too long without him.
