Father’s Day

In life there are many promises we make to ourselves, and some people seem to have an entire collection of specific personal oaths about not eventually turning into their parents.  My father had two traits in particular which were both an inspiration for such promises and a source of great amusement. The first was his ability to cram an astonishing quantity of items into his shirt pocket. In his day a plastic pocket protector bearing the company logo was part of the daily uniform for tradesmen, which also provided convenient storage for his menagerie of pocket-bound paraphernalia. In addition to the requisite collection of pens – working and otherwise – at any given time there would also be a tire pressure gauge, a small metal ruler, eyeglasses, breath mints, tooth picks, several dimes to make phone calls, and a host of other minute articles. In a compelling display of spatial physics, he could also seemingly bend and move at will without scattering the pocket’s contents.

The second practice was what I came to call his “weekend uniform”. He often wore plain, gray gym sweats to work in the yard, but after he retired this regalia shifted to a light blue warm-up suit he seemed to occupy for days at a time. The sight of him striding purposefully about the yard in this attire – the sartorial spectacle made complete by the addition of tall mud boots and a tool belt – always made me smile and shake my head. His explanation was that he needed something comfortable in which to work, and didn’t want to have to change clothes if he needed to run to the store or head out on some other errand, but the thought of him going out in public in this particular garb only provoked further forehead slaps.

While I do not believe it is either axiomatic or certain that we will become our parents, it occurs to me that there are sets of choices we make as we grow older that can influence this possibility. There are undoubtedly ways in which we consciously choose to mirror or imitate them. I landed on “R.W. Hickey” as the way I penned my signature largely after watching my father abbreviate Patrick Vernard Hickey down to “P.V. Hickey” when he signed checks at his business. That arrangement appealed to me as much more worldly and sophisticated than a simple first-name-last-name scribble. Further, there are the aphoristic lessons we took to heart while growing up and now practice as adults. On national holidays when I pull our American flag from the hall closet, I still hear and follow my father’s gentle but firm admonishment to “never let the flag touch the ground”, and I cannot put a saw to wood without thinking of his oft-repeated advice to “measure twice, cut once”.

Often we find commonality in that we have independently trod the same experiential ground. While learning and practicing ropecraft in the mountaineering days of my thirties and early forties, I had an inexplicable affinity for a knot called the Trucker’s Hitch, which uses loops and turns in the rope to form a crude block and tackle that can be used to tension and lock down a line. On a hiking trip up the western coast of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, I was using the knot to raise and secure our food supply from potential animal intruders, when it struck me that the Trucker’s Hitch was the very same knot my father used to call the “dump knot.” I don’t know if it came from his stint in the Navy during the Korean War, but my father seemed to know a thousand knots, and always had just the right one for a given application. This was the knot he used to tighten the ropes holding down loads in the bed of his pickup that were headed to the county landfill (“the dump”). From that realization on, there was generational magic in seeing my hands recreate the shapes I had watched his hands form countless times.

The most powerful and humbling ways in which our behaviors echo our progenitors seem to be those that are unintentional and catch us wholly unaware – as if some subliminal transition had occurred that rendered us incapable of any original thought or action. I am told that the process of having children exacerbates this condition, leaving you mindlessly repeating word for word all the pithy platitudes you protested as a child and swore would never leave your own lips. As an uncle but not a father myself, I have only a limited understanding of this verbal regression, but have been visited by other varieties of these unconscious reflections. Recently I took a few days off of work, and was heading out to do some sanding and varnishing on our sailboat when I happened to catch a glance at what I was wearing. In a somewhat awkward epiphany, I realized that I was wearing the same ratty jeans I had been wearing nonstop for several days. And the same gray work shirt. And the same dirt-smattered baseball hat. And the same long-sleeved flannel shirt.  In my left shirt pocket were my checkbook, a shopping list, my phone, my sunglasses, and two pens. There was nothing left to do but smile, and chalk one up to non-genetic heredity.

Today my father would have been eighty-one. While these revelations do not fill the long, silent spaces in the nearly fifteen years since his passing, they do help to create a small sense of comfort and
connection. To continue to discover new hints of my father revealed in my own persona nurtures a growing measure of grace and forgiveness for whatever eccentricities or foibles he may have possessed. Ultimately, he was just human, and I could do far worse than to become even more like him.