One Time on the Mulberry River…

Hi. It’s been a while. 
Much has happened. The worldwide Coronavirus pandemic continues, to a somewhat manageable degree in most of the industrialized world, but even more so in areas with less access to modern medicine. My oldest kid graduated college and entered the workforce. The younger one entered college, discovered he hated his major and changed it almost immediately, and is now living his best life studying music. I finished a Masters degree in Education. 

My father died. 

Twelve hours before he gave up the fight, while hospice nurses, private aides and my mother tried their damndest to get on top of the pain that had suddenly ratcheted up like a display of fireworks during a finale, I held his hand and told him it was okay to let go. I told him him he could rest, and I promised I would take care of my mother. I told him not to worry, we are ready for this, and if he was ready, then just let go. He held onto my hand like we were crossing a wooden step bridge over a wide gulch together, though I cannot say whom was leading whom. 

Ten days later I stood before an audience of over 150 people and gave a speech I’ve been planning to give for years. This was no small feat. It required an extraordinary amount of will, a cocktail of prescription drugs, and the knowledge that two tiny bottles of vodka were in my purse, just in case. I have never simultaneously wanted and dreaded a performance more, perhaps since giving birth. (That also involved sheer will and lots of drugs, but no backup vodka.)

Twenty years ago I could speak before an audience with no problems, I have a decent amount of workshop training in live speaking, actually. But somewhere along the way I developed a bizarre, crippling fear of stages and microphones. It isn’t the speaking that makes me panic, it isn’t the audience. It’s the microphone. I don’t know exactly why. This is why it’s called a Panic Disorder. Anyway, I did it. 

And it was good. People laughed in the right places, I didn’t pass out, I didn’t chicken out, I didn’t need the airplane bottle of vodka. I’m proud of it, both having written the eulogy and delivered it. So I’m putting it here. And then I think I’m gonna move on.

I’m no longer collecting snippets of ideas and thoughts and stories knowing my father will die someday soon, and I have a speech to give. Instead, now I have a stack of his own writing- his thoughts, essays and emails- to edit, and hopefully publish. I’m gonna call it:

”One Time on The Mulberry River“  

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Thanks everyone for coming today to help us celebrate my dad. He gave a few eulogies in his life, those that know him well know that he was never short on words. But he always said it was different, getting up and talking about someone you loved so much. So I’m giving it a shot. 

Love of words was something I definitely shared with my dad. I was never into golf, I don’t have the hand/eye coordination. Chris caught the love of golf, and dad was so proud of him and his game. But I mostly think of something completely different than words or golf when I think of the things my brother and I inherited from our father. Because the number one thing I learned from my father is empathy. 

 

Empathy. Dennis had an unending reserve. A bottomless, cold water spring, of empathy. And he taught it to me, indirectly, at a very early age. 

 

Let me tell you a story. 

 When I was little, I remember being at The Jones Store with Dad and Chris. It was crowded, it may have been around Christmas time, and there was a guy in a wheelchair making a scene near the escalator. People were pushing past him and ignoring him, as if he were a homeless beggar in the street corner. I remember feeling a little scared, I was small and the guy didn't speak clearly as part of his handicap, and that kind of freaked me out. But my dad stopped, surveyed the situation, and asked the man if he needed to go downstairs, which he did. Dad told us to stay put, and took the man's chair, tipped it back gently and rode with him down the escalator. Then he got back on the up escalator, collected me and my brother as we went about our day. 

 

I don't know why I remember this event from about 1980 so clearly.  Maybe it was because dad left us standing there among a huge crowd of people. All I know is that in that moment, I understood that helping people, that looking out for others without being asked is a responsibility. 

 

Dennis paid it forward often and regularly. So observant of people around him, he could see when someone needed assistance or even a kind word- a retail worker getting reamed by a customer, a waitress in the weeds, anyone- he would verbally acknowledge their struggle, telling them to hang in there, or don't let the bastards get you down. 

 

And he would sometimes intervene, telling someone berating a retail clerk to relax, or back off, or give the guy a break. As a 6ft tall white man with a deep voice, people being jerks rarely challenged him back. 

 

My father never met a stranger. He would strike up a conversation with anyone, anywhere. Waiting in line, sitting at a table in a restaurant... to the extent that he would sometimes even butt into conversations he was clearly eavesdropping on, to my and my brother's horror. 

 

Oh, were we in a hurry? Too bad, Dad is lecturing that guy in Dick's Sporting Goods about the virtues of DIY camping gear, he just uses a foam egg crate he's had for 30 years, works great, you don't need all that fancy expensive stuff. 

 

"One time on the Mulberry River..." Is a sentence that filled me with dread. To satisfy his need to talk to someone when nobody would listen anymore, he volunteered for many years at a retirement/nursing home. He would spend a few hours a week talking with residents who didn't get many visitors, listening to their stories and enjoying the audience, who would rapturously listen to him telling his own stories. He enjoyed the minutia of their past lives, giving them a chance to tell their own stories, and finding out details that made them special. 

 

It was always about people. 

 

It was so much about people for him that the career he finally settled into and built for himself was in Executive Search. A recruiter. A headhunter. In his career in executive search, his goal was Finding talented employees for companies to hire. “He called it Mutual Need Fulfillment.” Most of you know that phrase well. 

 

I worked with him for 10 years, and sidenote: if you had told me at age 16 that I would spend a large chunk of my career working alongside my father I would have laughed you out of the room. But we actually worked pretty well together. Our similar personalities that threatened to destroy our family when I was a melodramatic teenager living under his roof meant that when working together as adults, we could read each other's minds and finish each other's sentences. This was super annoying for the rest of our family, although still a better scenario than my teenage years. 

 

At some point in my early college life my dad came across a framed glass picture that we call "The Thought Picture." It is a series of statements about how hard it truly is to live your life as the embodiment of good. He gave it to me, then my brother, then he bought one for himself, then he started buying them for anyone he decided needed one. Eventually he couldn't find them anymore and he worked with an art store to make them from scratch. 

 

It is, essentially, Dennis's moral code. His rules to live by. The bottom line is there will always be forces working against you; Do Good Anyway. 

 

When I said that my father never met a stranger, it really isn’t that simple.  Dennis made friends everywhere he went. But he didn't have just friends. 

 

• Because you don't float down a river in a canoe in whitewater rapids over and over for decades- until you know each other's habits and strengths and can guide each other through safely with but a few words - with just friends. 

• You don't create golf tournaments to honor tragically deceased buddies and then play that tournament for 30 years with just friends. 

• You don't hike to the top of a 14,000 foot mountain peak - or just short of the top- and tend to each other's injuries  - and egos - with just friends. 

• Fraternity brothers from a lifetime ago. 

• His KCBobos Book Clubbers. Who recorded themselves reading a book for him when he could no longer see well enough to read the selection at hand.

• His Core of Four. His “Let’s Roll” crew. 

 

It is Mutual Need Fulfillment personified. He didn’t just talk about it. He lived it.  

 

The thing that I've avoided touching on so far has been, of course, how much he loved my mother. I consider myself a decent writer but on this topic I am without the proper words, I struggle to convey the depth of their relationship. 

 

It's a fairytale, honestly, a love story that most of us know cannot exist in the real world, yet here they are. They met, dated for 6 weeks, were engaged and married 6 months later in 1967. 

He always let her win, he ate everything she put in front of him regardless of whether it was good or not, he worked to give her the things she wanted whether she knew them or not. 

 

His weakest moments and his greatest fears revolved around just the chance of her unhappiness. He would tolerate no such thing. He spent much of the last five years trying to prepare for her to be comfortable after he was gone, as if that would somehow be possible. 

 

At the onset of the isolation of the Covid-19, he was a little cavalier regarding staying home in quarantine. After a while, my brother and I decided it was time for a Come to Jesus meeting. 

 

"I'm dying soon anyway, what do I care if it's the cancer that gets me or this Coronavirus?" 

 

I said, fine, but if you take my mother with you, we're gonna have a problem. "Oh." Nothing more was needed. He would risk himself, but not her. 

 

I want to wrap up here with a couple of poems. I first came across Ithaka by greek poet Constantine Cavavy in 1994, when it was read during the funeral of Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis. 

 

Ithaka

BY C. P. CAVAFY

TRANSLATED BY EDMUND KEELEY

As you set out for Ithaka

hope your road is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:

you’ll never find things like that on your way

as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

as long as a rare excitement

stirs your spirit and your body.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them

unless you bring them along inside your soul,

unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

 

Hope your road is a long one.

May there be many summer mornings when,

with what pleasure, what joy,

you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;

may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

to buy fine things,

mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

sensual perfume of every kind—

as many sensual perfumes as you can;

and may you visit many Egyptian cities

to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

 

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you’re destined for.

But don’t hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you’re old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

 

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you wouldn't have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

 

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Secondly, my father knew that I have a nerdy love of old books, that I collect them. Mostly volumes of Shakespeare but I have quite the collection of other poets and writers as well - Spenser, Whittier, first editions of classics from long ago. At some point, he gave me a crackled, disintegrating leather bound copy of Tennyson poems, probably for a birthday because there is a Hallmark envelope marking a place like a bookmark. I don't know if the spot was chosen, or by chance, but it happens to be the center of Tennyson's long poem "In Memoriam." 

 

Now, I am not going to read you all of In Memoriam, it is long and tedious and only the English majors among us care. But I am going to read this one section. 

I wage not any feud with Death

For changes wrought on form and face;

No lower life that earth’s embrace

May breed with him can fright my faith

 

Eternal process moving on, 

From state to state the spirit walks;

And these are but the shatter’d stalks, 

Or ruin’d chrysalis of one.

 

Nor blame I Death, because he bare

The use of virtue out of earth;

I know transplanted human worth

Will bloom to profit, otherwhere.

 

For this alone on Death I wreak

The wrathe that garners in my heart;

He put our lives so far apart

We cannot hear each other speak. 

My father was a lot of things, but subtle wasn't one, so I doubt his bookmark envelope was placed purposely. I never asked him. I think I’d call it kismet. Or maybe what Ann Lamott calls “Tiny Epiphanies.” 

 

Regardless, these words soothe me, may they bring you peace, as well. 

 

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