Walking the Wall

We’ve had a long week and a pretty frightening time with my dad this week (although he is doing better), so being a bit scared, a great deal unsettled–I’ve been very nostalgic thinking about my dad and memories with him. It is funny because they seem to revolve around three things: camping, movies, and books.

I guess it makes sense that camping memories would stick out, he worked long hours to take care of a family of 7 children, so camping trips would be concentrated chunks of time that would stand out from the every day. I remember him with big messy brown hair and a burly red beard, looking like a tousled, scholarly version of a Grisley Adams. I remember the orange camping "sink" we had and him pumping the handle for me to get a drink of water. I remember fishing early in the morning, and I remember a mouse running around in the tent one night. Silly little wonderful memories.

I remember going to the original Star Wars movies with my dad, funnily enough, my mom says she was there as well, at least for the first one, but I don’t remember that, I just remember going with my dad and him having to take my little brother home because he was scared of Yoda. I remember going and seeing Davy Crocket, and I can remember going to drive in movies with the speaker box hanging in the window–I can’t remember the movie, but I remember my dad laughing about something.

My strongest memories have to do with reading and books, not surprisingly. He was always reading either a paper or a book, sitting to the side with all the chaos of family life swirling around him, happy to sit and watch and read his book. I remember when I was very young he worked somewhere that sold the thin little Golden Books, so he would bring home one here, two there, I think we ended up with all of them (he also brought home a lot of chocolate cakes from some restaurant near by). I remember him sitting and reading to us out loud–The Hobbit and some book about a boxer that stands out in my mind. I had taken his Best Loved Poems of the American People book when I was young and never given it back, I loved it–a few years ago he bought me my own copy, he asked for his old one and gave me a new one in he had written a note to me, it is very precious to me (I won’t tell him that I have all his Tarzan books that were his father’s, then his, and then read and re-read by me growing up).

I’ve said it before, and I still say the same thing–it is amazing how many big moments we have in our lives–but when it comes right down to it, it is the quiet little moments, the simple, the quirky, the little stray smiles and laughs that seem to stand out as being important at the end of the day.