Thoughts of my Father

Today would have been my father’s 79th birthday. He died at the age of 50 from lung cancer after smoking Lucky Strikes for over 30 years. Most of my thoughts about my childhood are problematic, so I try to forget them, but today I want to not do that, I want to try and remember what I can about this man, about my father.

He was not well educated; I think he went as far as primary school. He grew up on a farm in rural Wisconsin. He escaped the farm by joining the navy and later the army, or perhaps in the other order. He fought in the Korean War and was awarded a Purple Heart medal. He was not one of those men who spoke about the war in all its glory. He never mentioned it. When my cousin, who fought in the Vietnam War, visited they would lock themselves up in a room and drink and speak of the things no one else could understand.

My father worked very hard at working class jobs. For most of the time that I can remember he was a long distance truck driver. He transported tanks of corn syrup, mostly, around the Midwestern United States. I don’t know if he liked this job. He was gone for most of the week sleeping in hotels, coming home only on the weekends.

He married twice. He married my mother, who he told me once was the only woman he’d ever loved. Unfortunately, she was flawed and harmed him in uncountable ways. He was left with five children and a job that gave him only two days out of seven to raise them. He married again. This time, as he also told me, “to get a babysitter”. He had shockingly bad judgment in choosing wives.

He liked to build things though detested instructions; I’ve inherited the last from him. He would buy DIY books only to get ideas, never to be read. So we had strange objects such as picnic tables that catapulted people on one side into the air like a seesaw when someone sat opposite them, and a braii stand people always thought was a far too elegant dog house. He once used a chain saw to change a station wagon into a baakie. He was the definition of a man who ‘could make a plan’.

A farm boy at heart, he loved to hunt. He’d hunt anything in season: deer, geese, squirrels, rabbits, but rarely had success. It was not about that, it was about being in the woods with his friends or his dog.

He was very patriotic. One of his many projects was to build a very tall flag pole. On public holidays he made a ceremony of raising his flag, the one he’d been given, the one that would drape his coffin, up that pole to blow in the wind high above.

He was a charismatic man, few people who met him stopped there; they went on to be his friend, often fiercely so. At his funeral, I remembered being shocked at the number of people. Many grown men wept openly, something I had never seen before. As they carried his coffin out the door of the church, stepping over puddles of melted snow amidst the first sprouts of green grass, honking could be heard and the gathering raised their heads to watch the high above V of Canadian geese on their way home, perhaps they were accompanying him, I don’t know.

So today I think about this man, my father. I know more about him and his motivations now as I too am an adult and a parent, a wife. But still I wonder what he thought about at the front of his mind and the tiny crevices too. I wonder what secrets he kept. I wonder what his dreams were, what regrets he had. I wonder if he raged at his life cut too short, or he welcomed it as relief after years of struggle and pain.

Today I think of my father, Chancey Eli Burch.