It was a tough call to get, riding in a good friend’s car on the way to a meeting with a client. But it would seem I’ve been preparing myself for it for some time, and frankly it just wasn’t that shocking. The sense of palatable relief among my nuclear family was evident in the series of phone calls that flew back and forth for the next 12 hours. His suffering from cancer, heart problems, memory loss & the cumulative effect of All Those Meds... was finally at an end. We were all ready.
We 3 kids all eulogized him, and we were all complimented afterward on ‘…what a good job you kids did for your Dad…”. And my mother finally, after 30 something years, got to sit in the front row at church.
What really unites everyone present at the multitude of wakes that pop up around the death of a patriarch... is the stories. Each of us carried a piece of my Dad and our experiences with him, and to a person we all had a story that the rest of us probably had not heard. He had managed to spread himself amongst family and friends in a similar way all his life, and it did not surprise me in the least that so many people remembered these relatively brief moments in time when he had touched them in some meaningful way. I included a couple of my own moments when I spoke of him at the memorial service, but there were a couple that time simply did not allow for… and one that seemed a violation of the spirit of the moment.
My parents & I were camping in a spot called Tuolumne Family Camp near Berkeley, CA in the summer of 1980 or 81. The camp is still in operation, and though I haven’t been back since then, I’d still recommend looking into it if you & yours wish to check out the California forest within a day’s drive of Yosemite. They provide meals, fun activities, all the things that help strike a balance between men’s yearning for the outdoors & women’s toleration of sharing a bathroom.
The last night of our stay at the camp included a family-oriented ‘skit-night’ where everyone in camp got to hop on stage and take a shot at sketch comedy. The ‘stage’ was a good-sized platform with a back wall, set between 2 towering trees, with a fire pit in front of it for the occasional evening campfire. The evening’s entertainment went off without a hitch, and we said our goodbyes & went to bed.
About 3:30am the next morning my Dad jostles me awake on the porch outside our tent with a simple piece of info nobody wants to hear while camping in the California woods; ‘Get up. There’s a fire.’ I sat upright & leaned over the porch railing to get a look, and about 100 feet away there was the stage, backdrop and both trees next to them fully engulfed in flames that were rising by the second into the canopy.
Clothes were grabbed, shoes were put on, chaos was abundant. Campers were fleeing, cars were peeling out of the parking area, staff and counselors were already racing to get fire equipment in place. There had been at least some rain that season, certainly the forest was not as dry as it is now in northern or southern California, because under those conditions things might not have turned out so well. The staff got the blaze under control, and 3 hours later fire officials showed up to look around, pronounce the fire out, and point at the fire pit in front of the stage to ID it as the ignition source. Things calmed down, and we stayed around camp until they got a meal together for those of us remaining.
While we sat enjoying our last meal that morning, out of nowhere the entire camp staff gathers around our table and fires up a raucous version of one of the dozens of ‘camp songs’ they’d been singing all week… and I realize they’re singing to my Dad. “Thank you Mr. Mills… .he spotted the fire, and he was no liar, dah-dah da, wo-hoo!!”
And there he sat, with that catbird smile on his face… Ho hum, just saved the camp, no big deal.
Turns out being a light sleeper paid off, and he was the first person in the camp that the sound of the fire actually awakened. It took me a little time to pry the sequence of events out of him, but he did soon enough confirm that he woke up, saw the glow through the tent & figured out what was up, grabbed his clothes, dashed to the staff cabin to pound on their door, got them up, and then returned to the tent… to wake his own family.
How’s that for priorities? Classic Dad, classic military training in action. He knew exactly what needed to be done for the greater good, and he didn’t panic. He always had a sharp sense of right and wrong, of what moral choices he was comfortable with, and I did eulogize him as having honesty as a high priority that he drilled into me early and often. But I did get one good example of when the big picture took over for the small details…and all semblance of the truth got tossed out to achieve a goal.
I played a few seasons of AYSO soccer when I was in Jr. High. Not an athletic career with many highlights, but soccer was mas popular in So. Cal back then, mostly due to the great Pele coming to the NASL, and the fact that many Americans were finally figuring out that soccer is a great sport. The league I played in rose and fell in rapid fashion, and by my third year the writing was on the wall that its days were numbered. But they forged ahead doing what they could to raise funds for trophies & such, and one of those fund-raisers was a Jog-A-Thon.
Kids get a pledge card, they make the rounds of neighbors, friends, teachers, anyone unfortunate enough to be in sight while they’re thinking of it, and take pledges for a certain amount of money for each lap run around a soccer field in an hour of cardio-vascular, fund-raising torture.
Now the object here is to raise money for the league, and raise as much as possible. But to the kids involved, pledges aside, it’s a competition to see who can win the bragger’s stud award for running the most laps in an hour. Which I was good at, but not that good... I harbored no illusions. So off we ran that Saturday morning, and within 15 or 20 minutes me & my friends settled into a decent rhythm.
Then logistics started to get in the way. There’s dozens of kids running around the field, and with each lap we completed we had to run through a checkpoint and get a mark on our pledge card for that lap. But the checkpoint started to back up… not enough adults to assist with marking, and some trouble finding enough markers to go around. Not good. Kids upset they’re being held up, whoa to us for our lap count, how can we raise money to keep our league going?? So Dad saw an opportunity, and sprang into action.
He went to the car and brought back a few more markers & passed them out to the parents who could help out at the checkpoint. And soon there was no more waiting at the checkpoint & we’re off & running again. And the next lap around, I naturally went to my Dad to get my card marked for that lap, and he marked it…
Twice. For one lap. As I pulled away from the checkpoint, my head actually reeled a little bit. It wasn’t a mistake, he didn’t do it by accident… my Dad marked my card twice and gave me credit for 2 laps instead of 1. He was cheating. The next lap through, I ran to a different person marking cards I was so freaked out. And I forget if he noticed I avoided him, but as I ran the next lap it finally dawned on me.
My Dad didn’t give a crap about how many laps we ran amongst ourselves, or who was the stud athlete that could run the most. My Dad was a businessman, and saw his kid’s soccer league failing, and took advantage of an opportunity to raise more money “…by any means necessary.” And when I figured it out, the first thing I did was get my friends & teammates in on it. “Dude, go to my Dad to get your card marked!” So yeah, he cheated. But he, and any other alert parent that joined in, jacked up our fund-raising take by about 30% that day.
The icing on the cake came the following Monday at school, when one of the cute chicks in the league sitting in front of me in class turned around and asked “I ran 32 laps, how many did you run?”
“48.” (I did come clean later that year, after the league folded)
So Dad, if the dead can in fact peruse cyberspace, know that your youngest son is still figuring out all the lessons doled out over the years. So many of them coming not with a moment of clarity regarding something you said or did, but during the process of living life and going through an experience similar to something we witnessed you going through and how you handled it.
