My father and I were picking blackberries off the
mountainous vines that engulfed the back half of the barn. This, an annual event that produced both
jelly jars of jam and a few moments of easy peace between us. He kept threatening to raze the
labyrinthian prickly mess, but each year passed and the mass of brambled vines
grew larger. I am not sure if it
was the enormous, nasty labor that it would take to bring them down, or simply
the hour or so we would have with each other out there each summer, that leaves
them arching up, ten feet thick, over and around the rafters of the
cowsheds. But here we were
again, risking the pokes and scratches of a plant that trades battle wounds for
sweet dark fruit. We filled those little green plastic berry baskets that my Dad hoarded all year for just this event.
“So it was after the service?”
“No, before.”
“What were you doing there?”
“I was going to pick apples up in Washington, we went up
there every year as farm workers.”
“Did you live in California?”
“No, I was still living in Arkansas. We would pool resources for gas and head
up there each summer for field work.
There wasn’t much work
during The Depression, and there were more people from Arkansas up there
during picking season that there were Washingtonians!”
I had a sudden picture in my head of my father as a young
man. It came from a photo that I
had seen of him around that time.
He was young, thin, and unlike most of my lifetime, he had a dark head
of hair. He looked like a lanky
farm boy, somewhat shy in front of the camera. The picture had the look of Depression era clothes and attitude. He looked dry and hot, and his clothes
mostly fit, larger collars, and lose pleated pants. I tried to imagine him as a 16 year old orphan piling into a lumpy fendered dusty car from the thirties and traveling about 2000 miles to pick fruit. What was he like? Was he nervous with those people in the
car, or did he know them? Where
were they from? What did they talk about and do on the trip? And then, what would
he think about when he lay in his bed in the
bunkhouses on the orchard ranches?
It was one of those pieces of a person’s history that lets you know just
how little we really know of someone else. Just how much we miss, even when we live decades in the same
house with them. I wanted to ask
more about this, but just then he moved his ladder to the back side of the barn
to pick from a different spot.
Later, as I was driving back to Nevada, with flats of
berries, dripping inky color, awaiting the mash and heat of jam pots, I did the
calculations and determined that the years he was talking about had to be in
1937 or 38. Just as I had done
this figuring, the jazz station that I was listening to shifted shows and I
began to listen to a program called “The Swinging Years”. It was music from the 30’s to the
50’s. The first piece was a gravel
voiced black woman singing about the Depression while picking occasionally on a
guitar, and it was followed by other tunes from the same era. I was given an opportunity to hear into
Dad’s past, to some of the songs that may have been on the radio in that big
clunky car, lumbering up the road to the Northwwest. I imagined him sitting in the back seat tapping his fingers
on his knee, or maybe just leaning his head against the window and watching the
land go by. It was a good
moment we shared. Even though he
might never know.
I wrote this in 2007 two years before he died. His birthday is coming up this week. He would have turned 91 tomorrow. With all the postings around Father's Day I went hunting for this piece to share. I was talking to another friend this week, one I have known for over 40 years, and I referenced a period in my life that he had no knowledge of. The conversation that followed reminded me of this moment with Dad. It reminded me that even our best efforts to get to know someone leaves us often short of truly knowing them.
Although there are great and wondrous things it, I think the current culture of social media, which is so "me" oriented takes us even farther from the possibility of a deep connection. It seems to me that we have all gone into the publicity business, personally advertising who we wish to be known as. In the case of the conversation with my Dad, it took standing next to him, and allowing for the conversation to wander down the wind and find this topic. To me some of the best conversations occur after a long period of silence between two people. In these moments, things can rise to the surface that stay out of sight in the "touch-you-are-it" world we live in.
Try this.. find someone you care about and just sit with them, on a bench, in the kitchen, on a walk. Don't, for a minute listen to music or have the TV on, and do not pick up that phone. Just see what happens.
Other than that................Happy Birthday Dad! love, Misty
I wrote this in 2007 two years before he died. His birthday is coming up this week. He would have turned 91 tomorrow. With all the postings around Father's Day I went hunting for this piece to share. I was talking to another friend this week, one I have known for over 40 years, and I referenced a period in my life that he had no knowledge of. The conversation that followed reminded me of this moment with Dad. It reminded me that even our best efforts to get to know someone leaves us often short of truly knowing them.
Although there are great and wondrous things it, I think the current culture of social media, which is so "me" oriented takes us even farther from the possibility of a deep connection. It seems to me that we have all gone into the publicity business, personally advertising who we wish to be known as. In the case of the conversation with my Dad, it took standing next to him, and allowing for the conversation to wander down the wind and find this topic. To me some of the best conversations occur after a long period of silence between two people. In these moments, things can rise to the surface that stay out of sight in the "touch-you-are-it" world we live in.
Try this.. find someone you care about and just sit with them, on a bench, in the kitchen, on a walk. Don't, for a minute listen to music or have the TV on, and do not pick up that phone. Just see what happens.
Other than that................Happy Birthday Dad! love, Misty
