I wanted to tell him today that the birds aren’t at the feeder very often lately. It is the Sharp-shinned Hawk who visits us regularly for his own meals.
He would have loved to hear the update.
I scooped up bird seed to feed the birds out of big empty cat litter tubs. I thought of him as I put the lids back on to keep the mice out. He had great stories to tell of so many of his life experiences, one was “making a better mouse trap.” His ingenuity was not to make money, just to solve the problem of the mice getting into the grain. It was a simple story with a big barrel and water, but his way of telling it, and his chuckles made it a fantastic story.
He had stories about everything. His life must have been five lifetimes to fit it all in. He was down to earth, but a genius. He could talk to persons of high caliber, and yet agonize how to help a secretary who was being beaten by her husband.
I remember the many RC airplanes he would build and finally go out to fly, only to come home with it all broken or nothing at all as, “it just kept going and we couldn’t find it.”
We would go camping during Easter Break to the Smoky Mountains and then in August to Algonquin in Canada. He would be up before sunrise and make every breakfast on the fire pit on the monstrous cast iron pan, he named "Old Come and Get it." Then he would walk the campground to stop and talk with other men. He seemed to be a friend to everyone.
My mother would say every year that camping was the only time he ever really relaxed, and she was thankful for those times. As a child I never knew how stressful his work life was.
As a preteen I thought he was a spy, like "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." TV show. I asked my mother one time after we had taken him to the airport. She just laughed as she said, “no.”
A while back he was telling “work” stories I had never heard before. They were incredible stories of military history I had learned about as an adult. I shared with him how I use to think he was spy. He laughed in his big chuckle and said, “well… I kind of was.” He then proceeded to tell more adventures which he had lived.
Why didn’t I listen more closely to his stories? Why can’t I remember them? I hear his voice, but the words don’t form in my mind.
It is an end of an era for me, and I will miss his precious excitement to hear one more thing about the Bald Eagles in Iowa, and his typical answer of how he feels, no matter how ill he was,
“I feel like a million bucks!”, or “I’ve never had it so good!”
Thank you, LORD, for my father! (1928-2014)
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