Dad

My father would be 101 years old today. Sadly, he died of heart failure when he was younger than I am now. It happened when OilMan and I were on a trip to China and my mother and brother elected not to tell me until we got home. It was a practical decision, but I have always wished it had been otherwise.

One of my first memories of Dad was when he gave me a ride in a wheelbarrow full of newly cut grass. He would mow the lawn with an old fashioned push mower. It had a big canvas grass catcher on the back which he would periodically empty into the wheelbarrow as it got full. When the lawn was finished, he would push the wheelbarrow, with me in it, to a large compost pile behind the house. As old fashioned lawnmowers are replaced by smelly gas driven ones, the smell of new mown grass is less common, but it is one of those scents that transports me instantly back to those Saturday morning wheelbarrow rides with Dad.

Dad had a long commute, from Altadena, to Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles, where he worked as a marine underwriter for the Fireman's Fund Insurance Company. When he left in the morning, he would invariably say, "…off to the marts of trade…" or on a bad day "…off to the salt mines…" Frequently I was heading out the door with him, as he was always happy to drop my friends and me at school. It's surprising how many of the schools I attended just happened to be "on his way". One summer he got me a job as a filing clerk and I would ride all the way to work with him.

When he got home at 6pm, it was the sacrosanct cocktail hour with my mother. They would sit in the living room, drinking bourbon and water, and discussing the events of the day. My brother and I were not excluded, but usually had pressing concerns of our own and little interest in how their day went. In retrospect, it strikes me as a very civilized thing to do. Occasionally, when the cocktail hour lasted a bit longer than an hour, dinner was very late, but that was just a normal part of our routine.

Dad was a great reader, a love of books which he passed along to me. I can still picture seeing him, as I was coming down the stairs whenever he came to visit, sitting on one end of the couch in our living room, reading his book. I got quite a shock when I came down the stairs not too long before we moved, to see my dad sitting in his customary seat on the end of the couch. But of course, it was my brother, who clearly inherited the Eastman genes. (All I got were the famously large "Eastman Ears"….) We no longer have the couch or the stairs, but it is only a matter of time until I do a second take when I see my son , Matthew, sitting on the end of of the couch.

I remember the road trips, the visits to the house in the Santa Cruz mountains where Dad's parents retired, the trips to the nursery and the hardware store (wonderful dark places with creaky wood floors and metal bins full of nails and screws) and to church on Sunday mornings when Dad's dad sat in the front row because he was deaf as a post quite hard of hearing, and we sat farther back because we were so embarrassed by his tone deaf hymn singing. After church, Grandpa would come for the Sunday roast, which Dad would help Mom cook . After Dad took Grandpa home, he would make spoon bread for supper--an old family recipe which I still make.

It's funny. My father lived a quiet, sedentary life, but he was always there, hand on the tiller, steering a straight course for our family.