W O O D E N B O X E S

I thought my father would live forever. Don’t all little girls? My father was the smartest, most in-demand, most respected Daddy of all the daddies I knew. If your television broke, he could fix it. When the car needed a repair, he was the one who did it. Family friends brought him Pontiacs, Volkswagens, and one man had an XKE that always had a problem. He had a 16mm Bolex camera and took movies of everything, or 35mm color slides. He had a full darkroom and played the harmonica.

He played football in high school--till the Second World War came along and, after four student deferments, he realised he didn’t want to get drafted into the Army. So, just before graduation, he and a school friend joined the Army Air Corps and went off to learn to fly bombers. Somewhere along the way, he learned to do a double axel over the ice on skates, had a pet tarantula in Hawaii and could do a magic trick with a quarter that lasted four more generations.

My parents met on the ice on April Fool’s Day, 1947, when Mom fell skating backwards. Daddy was the skate guard, a returning lieutenant just released from service. He picked her up and their eyes met. She went home and told her family “I’ve met the man I’m going to marry,” broke up with her high school sweetheart and married his “Franny” five months later.

Dad survived seventy-five or so night bombing missions over North Korea when the 731st was re-activated and told ‘fly fifty and you can go home’. After that war, a pilot to the core, he eventually became a flight test engineer. He hung around supporting people who broke the sound barrier, worked on the Gemini project and, in the Smithsonian, there’s a whatsit on the landing module that he co-designed.

In fourth grade, I had to talk about my father’s career during ‘show-and-tell.’ When I got up the nerve to ask him what should say, he said “Tell ‘em your father is the highest-paid non-college graduate at North American Aviation.” They kids were impressed but, like me, I don’t think they had a clue what that meant either.

My father taught me how to use a slide rule. I wasn’t very good at it, not like him anyway. To my shame, I got my first and only ‘D’ in Algebra I shortly thereafter and, boy, was I in big trouble. I was supposed to be a near straight-A student and my father was, well...'disappointed' doesn’t begin to cover it. The answer? Summer school and ‘you’re grounded.’

I got lucky. It was the run-up to the Apollo XIII launch and one of the astronauts on the project, staying in the LA area from out of state, used to come to our house and hang out. My father and four friends were keen to own the first stereo speakers anyone they knew had, so they used to get together on weekends and work on woofers, tweeters and massive mahogany cabinets, and hang out with an astronaut. They built five pair in the garage that summer, and they all swam in the pool at the end of the day. The lucky part? I got through summer school Algebra because Jack Swigert tutored me every Saturday while the others built speakers. I guess he noticed I was terrified of my father, wouldn’t ask for help--and was deathly afraid I’d fail. I didn’t. I got a ‘B’, thanks to Jack.

The day after high school graduation, Daddy left for three months on some secret project we only found out about much later. This was during the Vietnam War; he was a contractor assigned to go to Thailand and install a ‘black box’ in all the B-52s at Korat AFB. He’d helped develop a product that, when the enemy fired a missile at the plane, sensed the ‘incoming’ and fired one back. Three years ago, cleaning out some of my mom’s files, I found letters from several of the ‘Wild Weasels’ unit thanking him for saving their lives.

A few months ago, I realized that the smartest man I’ve ever known, the man I’d never live up to, never felt I'd pleased, the man in whose presence I often lost the ability to speak, wasn’t going to live forever. And he didn’t. He died eighteen days ago. He would have turned 94 this coming Christmas Eve but, instead, he’s being honored, and buried, at March AFB today.

Daddy had been diagnosed with dementia, or perhaps Alzheimer’s, a few months earlier. Mom had been diagnosed with it eight or so years ago and, hard as he tried to take care of her, he never came to terms with the disease and the ‘loss’ of his Fran. He went quickly, too quickly. Is there ever enough time?

I couldn’t imagine: how could the brain that knew everything, could do anything, could fix anything, remember every detail, suddenly be failing this man?

My father? The man who could work any puzzle--we know because, over the years we all bought him every ‘can’t be solved’ puzzles on earth. The man who bought me a Hammond organ and paid for weekly lessons for ten years so I could accompany him when he played the harmonica (never having had a music lesson himself, of course)? The man who bought and maintained his own airplane, and, into his 80s, maintained the airplanes of a group of surgeons he got to know with along the way?

Yes, that one. Just last year Daddy told me he planned to live to be one hundred. His mother and sister lived well into their nineties. Why not? The odds were in his favour. When did he ever not know something? When did he ever not show the rest of us how it was done? Yeah, sure, I knew it was the autumn of his life but I didn’t know that so many leaves had fallen from the mighty oak that was the strength, the roots, that had grown me and supported me and set me on my own course.

The one I have lived my life in awe of.

Just before I left California to return home in late September, I found an old wooden box, a gift handmade and given in 1903, it says on a note glued to the inside. I brought it home with me. The wood is dark but nothing special; it’s roughly carved, almost hammered, badly worn and needed oil. I could tell from what it contained and who the owner was that it would have been my grandmother’s, then perhaps went to my aunt when she died, and finally to my father as the last remaining survivor of his own nuclear family.

Among the collection in the box, I found a small brown envelope. My grandmother’s neat scrawl, diagonally across it reads: “Chicken Bone cooked when Bob and Francy married, Sept. 26, 1947.” Imagine that: a wishbone--Nana would have called it ‘the pully bone’--unused for seventy years. Why wasn't it used for luck at some dark moment, I wondered? Every family has them. There is an Air Medal in a leather case, hung from gold and blue ribbon, an eagle cluthing two lightning bolts on the medallion. A little leather wallet contained only two small clippings: in one, a photo of my father and the headline: “Air Corps Course is Completed”. The other, a photo I recognise; my father took it the day Mom finished her first flying lesson. He proposed then and there. The headline says simply: “BETROTHED.”

And then, near the bottom on the left side, a thick stack of cards, blue-green, tan, beige, pink, some larger and yellowed on the edges, but most three inches by five inches, held together by a rubber band that broke, limp and dry, when I removed it. Each card is two-sided, with forms to be filled out by the teacher, marks assigned in Scholarship and Citizenship, and a place for comments. The earliest cards are from the Amarillo (TX) Public Schools, continue through Franklin Junior High (Long Beach, CA) and end with Long Beach Polytechnic High School. There is a card for nearly every subject. The set is remarkably complete, each card signed by one or the other of my grandparents, though they didn’t live together after my father was four or so.

Every card has been carefully filled in by a variety of teachers. For instance, there’s a Miss Walker, an M.L. Coates, a G. Elliker and, on one card, a Gregory C. Robb. Gregory C. Robb, it transpires, was my father’s Algebra I teacher. As I held that card, I hesitated, remembering my own ‘D’ grade, the summer school punishment that year, all those stereo speakers, my own beloved (long since passed away) astronaut-saviour.

I turned the card over. At Long Beach Poly High at the end of the semester, January 31, 1941, Gregory C. Robb gave my father a Scholarship Grade of ‘F’ in Algebra I. In the notes, Mr. Robb wrote: ‘Conditional at mid-semester. You did not begin to work soon enough.’

I think of those cards often as I pass the old wooden box, there on the bookcase in my own home now. I probably always will. They remind me that things are not always what they seem, and certainly not always what we make them out to be. They make me closer to my father. While he wasn’t easy for me to know, I have spent my life pursuing his bright star, cataloguing his moves, studying the signs, listening to his stories when, finally, he was ready to tell them. And now, writing his stories, at last, I at least know him all the better in death.

It’s late autumn, winter fast approaching. The leaves have fallen all around and a first brief snow teased us just a little. Now, we’re back to just another rainy day, a quiet sad way to mark what must, at last, come to us all. Real winter is coming, real endings have come. All is impermanence.

But when it comes to love and algebra, Daddy, and everything in between, you’ll always be ‘aces’ to me.

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