Sing to me in F Sharp...

I inherited my love of gadgets legitimately, from my Grandfather. We both used to get a little too excited over cameras and wristwatches. So when my parents gave me an Accutron wristwatch as a High School graduation present (and after I had pestered them endlessly about it), Grandpa was green with envy. It kept time with an innovative system that used a "360 hertz tuning fork instead of a balance wheel" as the timekeeping element. That was both new and groundbreaking at the time. Grandpa couldn't stop salivating and ran right out to buy one for himself. With that tuning fork, if you pressed it to your ear, you could hear it humming an F sharp. In the summer of 1966,following my high school graduation, I toured England with the church choir that I had sung in since I was 7 years old. When we hit Westminster Abbey to open with an a Capella hymn, our choir master realized that he had lost his pitch pipe. He had me listen to my watch and hum an F sharp. Scaling it up or down from there, he hummed the proper note for us to start on. I told my Grandfather about the F sharp, but at his age he had lost all hearing in the upper ranges and just had to take my word for it. He still loved his Accutron though and enjoyed telling people that his wristwatch was always singing... in F sharp, of course...

Limericks with Dad...

Mom was number one in Dad’s world, his law practice at Beer, Richards, and Haller, number two. I believe that having kids was about number 27 on dad’s priority list, just after “pulling the crabgrass”. Dad had kids because he was crazy about Mom and that’s just what happens. There were four of us and Mom was the boss. Dad’s job was to go to work, earn the money and little else. He filled his evenings with Lawrence Welk, cheddar cheese sandwiches, and Cokes. Never really eating anything at dinner, he just sat at the head of the table, smoking one cigarette after another, drinking a Coke, watching the Lazy Susan turn endlessly clockwise and counterclockwise, and trying to wind down from the pressure cooker that was New York City.  My siblings, Judy, Sue, and Kenny, ate, as did Mom and I. Mom always made “a nice dinner”, a key to success in life according to her. Dad was exempt from Mom’s food rules though.

On weekends, dad went casual with a sport coat and slacks.  He loved our dogs and would get down on the rug and roll around with Weenie, then Lucy, then that little white dog they had after I went off to college. But with me, it was never more than a handshake. No hugging, no admissions of love. That wasn’t the way men behaved in those days and my dad wasn’t wired for it anyway. He hadn’t grown up with any sports, so neither did we. Other than good grades in school, which I never brought home, Dad and I had nowhere to connect. I had to grow up to meet him because he couldn’t come down to me. The family dog, yes, but not a kid.

By the time I was in college, masquerading as an adult, Dad and I could talk. I had come to the mountain. We could hit it off just fine, especially if a limerick or two were involved. That stuff was part of his world. That was the key to opening doors that had been closed when I was young. I wrote letters to him and he answered in kind. I know he looked forward to getting my letters. We both wanted to be close, but neither of us had known how to do that, until he sent me this limerick one day:

An Amoeba from old Potawatomi,

Was beset by recurrent dichotomy.

He split and he split,

And he said in a bit,

My God, there’s one hell of a lot-o-me!

And we were off and running. After an unexpected heart attack that forced his retirement, Mom and Dad moved to the outer Banks in North Carolina. Dad did almost nothing more than surf fish for two years straight. After hearing so many stories about his fishing tales, I sent:

An old salt went fishing most days,

Catching fish in incredible ways.

The fish he was gleaning,

Were like ovens, self-cleaning!

And some days he caught just fillets!

This kind of thing broke the ice, and after it did, we had long, great conversations whenever I visited. Making up for lost time, I guess. But Dad was 43 years older than me so we didn’t have all that much “adult” time together before he was kidnapped by the Alzheimer’s that ultimately ended his life. He died 22 years ago and would have been 111 years old if he were alive today.

Although I’m not a religious person, once in a while when a bad limerick pops into my head that I know Dad would appreciate, I concentrate real hard and try to send it to him, wherever he may be. I believe he looks forward to getting my letters. Certainly it helps me to feel closer to him in ways that I was never able to feel as a kid.