Soda Pop Perspective

On a Saturday morning more than 25 years ago, the phone rang with the shattering news of my father’s death. He spent the last ten months of his life sitting on our patio, crippled by the consequences of a botched back surgery.

I know his active mind remained sharp and engaged. When his friends stopped by, parking their cars in the shade, and walking toward the porch swing, Daddy greeted them with his roguish grin.

All the men who talked with him through those long afternoons are gone now, too. I don’t know what tales they shared, or what advice Daddy offered to those who came to him with their problems.

Now that I live in the house, I look at that swing and wonder if my father continues to watch over me and the property. I know I long to sit with him and talk away the hours as the sun sinks behind the mountains to the west.

The day he died, I drove home to our small town from the city where I lived four hours to the north. When I arrived, I sought out a beloved family friend to tell me what happened. John’s words remain with me to this day. “Butch wasn’t having any fun anymore.”

Of all the expressions of comfort offered to me in the coming days, none did more to loosen the iron band around my chest and to allow me to draw a ragged breath.

My father, a hardworking man and a World War II veteran, loved life. He peopled his world with interesting men and women, spoiled dogs, and endless ideas he translated into action. Creative and engaged, Daddy made things work other people deemed impossible.

More than being my parent, Daddy offered me the hand of friendship, speaking to me as an equal and teaching me lessons gleaned from a tough childhood during the Great Depression. He loved to quote the big screen cowboys who were his childhood heroes, and to teach me practical things.

I learned the value of buying only what you can consume, standing by your word, and observing simple courtesies. Return a man’s tools. Close the gate you opened. Don’t talk about politics or religion. And trust that most things can be fixed, at least temporarily, with bailing wire and duct tape.

The older I grow, the more I think about my father’s everyday wisdom, his effortless humor, and the breadth of his curiosity. But a single incident comes back to me more than any other, a living reflection on the value of perspective that I often repeat to friends caught in the whirlpool of worry.

One morning at the breakfast table sometime around the time I turned ten, I saw an article in the regional paper that predicted the end of the world the next day. Daddy had already left for work, but my mind, already given to obsessive fits, turned that dire forecast over and over throughout the school day.

When classes let out, I walked the few blocks to our family business, a commercial laundry, and found Daddy seated at his desk studying financial reports. The stock market fascinated him, and he worked to educate himself on investment strategies.

I guess my face must have betrayed the distress I felt, because he greeted me with, “Hey, Shorty. What’s wrong?”

Daddy listened as I recounted the details of the disturbing article. “And the paper said the world will end tomorrow,” I finished breathlessly, looking to him for some reassuring plan of action.

Instead, he leaned back in his desk chair and said, “Well, if it does, what are you gonna do about it?”

With that simple, well-timed question, the absurdity of the predicted apocalypse and my angst became clear in an instant. “I guess nothing.”

“That’s right,” he said, getting up. “But just in case, let’s have a Coke and talk about it.”

With that, he unlocked the soft drink machine, handed me a soda in a cold green bottle, and together we went out front and sat on the curb to share our drinks. I can see us in my mind’s eye as clearly as if the conversation happened yesterday, not fifty years ago.

And seldom a day passes that I don’t ask myself “what are you going to do about it?” when I’m upset over something I can’t control.

I’m not a parent. All my “children” have fur, but I recognize good parenting because I experienced it firsthand. Without lectures or pontification, Daddy taught me to stop, take a breath, and assess my capacity to alter impending events.

What I can do, I have a responsibility to try. But when the disaster at hand proves to be too large, to lie too far beyond my abilities, he taught me to stop and be in the moment. And in those moments, Daddy is with me still.