My Father Has Many Thumbs

On any given day, during any given week, encapsulated in the grander scheme of any given year, one can usually find my dad either toiling away on a project in the basement or enacting precise maneuvers, like a surgeon, on any one of dozens of plants or trees in his backyard garden.

The yard is a testament to his patience and diligence. There are bonsai plants everywhere, most of them on outdoor shelves he specifically built to hold them. There is also a cornucopia of other plants and flowers, planted in the soil or potted, meticulously nurtured and lovingly tended. It takes at least an hour to make the watering rounds. Throughout the year, as if he is resorting to some long lost time-keeping method, he moves the potted plants around the yard, where they can get the optimal amount of sun, shade, rain or protection from all the elements.

My dad will turn 74 at the end of July. He was born when Harry Truman was president. In the pictures I’ve seen of him as a young man, some from his time in Vietnam, he has already lost most of his hair. In one of them he is standing next to a German Shepard he talks about fondly. In another, one of the few in which he does have a startling amount of hair on top, he looks exactly like my younger brother. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Nowadays, he short shaves the little ring of ear-to-ear gray he has left, the way my mom likes it. He has an all white beard and mustache, once a rich deep black. I’ve always wondered what he would look like if he shaved it all off. Mom has made it clear that will never happen. Maybe he’d look exactly like my younger brother.

I smirk.

Growing up, the backyard was not the lush, green oasis it has since become. Along the back fence was a row of three apple trees, still there, in a scraggly grass yard bisected by a blockade of railroad ties (the ties still smell strongly of creosote when the sun is at its hottest). I remember having to pick up the apples with my brothers. For some reason we always waited until they were rotten, vinegary-smelling, fruit fly bombs that could explode at the slightest touch.

On the other side of the ties was a smattering of large gravel, still there, and in one corner, a double-decker big toy, complete with rope ladder, tire ladder, steering wheels on both levels and a six foot metal slide that became so hot in the summer we raced ice cubes down it. The cubes usually melted before they reached the bottom. If we were brave we would quickly follow the ice cubes, as their meltage cooled the blistering surface of the slide.

My dad built the big toy for us when we were toddlers. It was a significant part of my childhood and I always feel a certain nostalgia and pride when I think about it. When I came home from my freshman year of college in 2001, the big toy had magically vanished, soon to be replaced by a hot tub.

To the left of the backdoor to the house is a stairwell made up of concrete steps between two cracked and moss-covered concrete walls. These stairs lead to the basement. From one side to the other is barely wide enough to carry a laundry basket without rapping your knuckles on the rough, pebbled concrete. The basement still has a dog door for our Dalmatian, Jake, who passed away from a degenerative muscle disease in the early nineties. He was another dog my dad loved deeply.

Once, on a winter hike near Tiger Mountain in the Cascade Mountain Range, Jake bolted out onto a lake thinly covered with ice. He fell through the ice too far offshore to reach. As my brothers and I watched stunned, my dad stood at the shore calling to Jake with his large booming voice. “Come on, Jake, come on boy!” The ice kept breaking every time it looked like our dog was gaining purchase. He struggled and struggled. After what seemed like an eternity Jake was able to follow the lead of my dad’s voice and clamber back onto solid ground.

The basement these stairs descend to is a memory vault all its own. It’s a laundry room, a workshop where nightmares are made, a lumber repurposing center, a kite manufacturing studio, a camping gear storage facility and a dog grooming station.

My dad has spent countless hours in the basement. He has worked on hundreds of projects, both his own and those of his three sons. He has guided us in the making of pinewood derby race cars for cub scouts, headless foam costumes for halloween, kinetic sculptures for science class, little free libraries for the neighborhood. He has built lofts and cabinets and patio chairs and a rocking elephant for a local school. He taught us how to use the force and weight of a hammer to properly strike a nail. He showed us how to transform an unassuming piece of wood into a three dimensional puzzle. He demonstrated how, with a little perseverance and imagination, we could literally build our dreams.

My dad shows little fear of things. Growing up I didn’t think it was possible for him to be scared of anything. He was, at times, the thing that was scary. He is a big man. He can project his voice loudly. When we were bad he was the one who spanked us. With a wooden salad spoon. I often wonder if he was afraid during his time in the Vietnam war. He had to have been, right? How does a person’s relationship with fear shape them? He was stationed at Qui Nhon in Vietnam. He operated in Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Burma. He remembers eating dog, driving a motorcycle on the beautiful jungle roads, swollen leeches dropping from the trees and his best friends dying. It’s hard for him to talk about such things, but we have had conversations now and then. I’m grateful he has opened up even a little. My dad has killed people at the behest of the US government. I’m certain he has undiagnosed, untreated PTSD. I wonder whether my mom or my brothers ever think about that part of him. I seldom do. It’s not who he is. He’s my dad.

At some point when I was a teenager, I noticed whenever we were watching an action movie he would flinch during all the punches or when the action footage was a nonstop barrage of cuts and explosions. His shoulders would jerk back and forth and his neck muscles would tighten and his face would wince. We loved watching those movies. At least, I think we did. Or was he just trying to replace his memories with the fictions of Chuck Norris, Jean -Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal, so he could sleep better at night?

About ten years ago, not long after he had a near-fatal heart attack and a triple-bypass, my dad turned the basement into what he casually refers to as his horror shop. He began constructing elaborate, homemade halloween props. He built tombstones, scarecrows, emaciated bats, a witch’s cabinet of curiosities, a mobile of severed limbs (including molded, latex versions of his own thumbs) and skeletons in various states of decay and decomposition. Lots and lots and lots of skeletons. So many skeletons. He became particularly adept at using latex paint and hot glue to reproduce the sickeningly real-looking rotten flesh on a skull’s face. The fake death my dad had (near obsessively) embarked on constructing, and the immediacy of his own mortality he was confronted with every day, were a literal metaphor for facing death. He was, in a manner of speaking, proof of the living dead and he was building his zombie army.

I have bonded with my dad in many ways over the years. Action movies, reverence for the natural world, our love of halloween and the macabre, and a fondness for a certain fatherly style of joke now firmly and appropriately established in popular culture as his. My connection with him is my own. I often wonder how my brothers perceive him. What do they think of when they think of him? As a man, a father, a caregiver? I wonder if they are proud of him and his life as a veteran, a shipbuilder, a xerox technician, dedicated horiculturist or amateur halloween prop enthusiast. Are they indifferent to any or all of those things? Does their curiosity grow with each passing visit? Do they see him as the man who gave us our first rootbeer floats and the one who glided across the YMCA pool while we each took our turn on an aquatic piggyback ride. We, my brothers and I, don’t talk much about such things.

When I was a mopey senior in high school, my dad showed me he saw me for the writer I wanted to be, by giving me a personalized set of pens. He accompanied it with a card in which he purposefully replaced the word right for write. Being the awkward and full-of-myself age that I was, I corrected the mistake, instead of seeing it for the humor he had intended. After the fact, I was ashamed and embarrassed I had missed the hidden depths that would allow him to be so playful and intentionally daft.

I don’t know how he does it. Create so effortlessly. It can’t have been the same with his children. My dad is big on forgiving oneself. At least, I think he is. He has always told me, when I’m especially hard on my mistakes, to think of mistakes as progress toward the end goal. Be adaptable, he says. Course correct and use the mistake as a learning experience, or better yet, incorporate the mistake. Make the mistake appear intentional. Sometimes therein lies the beauty of the final product. I wonder if he ever thought of that when raising us- a series of mistakes gently guided into a more honest version of what was intended.

I smirk.

I don’t know if my dad is proud of all that he has made. He has never boasted. He has never bragged. He taciturnly works, creates, teaches and provides. He is a green thumb, a craftsman and a steadfast husband and father. I think through acts of doing he has atoned for life’s discrepancies and he has found a way to forgive (himself and others) and live in peace. I don’t know if he has the capacity or propensity to be proud of himself and all he is and does, but I know he should be.