Category: Dad

The Sea Captain

Posted on by Carlos Declan

The great tales of our lives are always a matter of perspective. For example, the white-haired man I am today looks back on an excursion with the family from Seattle through the Puget Sound and on to Vancouver Island in British Columbia. We are on board a vessel carrying scores of folks. Not quite the Queen Mary but fit for inland cruising. There was wind, rain, and impressive waves, but it was altogether a cheerful and exhilarating day as we made our way along.

The old man’s memory is colored and contoured by a lifetime of other experiences, but there is still that six-year-old boy inside of me. He had never been on a ship and certainly never been anywhere near out to sea.

On that long-ago day he found himself on what seemed a mighty vessel running up through the Salish Sea and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The geographical names mesmerize his mind and challenge his tongue. They are out of sight of land, so surely the lad is forgiven for concluding he is a mariner far out on the briny main.

At first, he is a little frightened at harsh weather. The bow of the ship pauses in the air and then falls, crashing into the waves. The boy’s mind slips easily into the role of Captain.  He looks about him. Only the experienced seamen are left on the deck – everyone else, passengers and non-essential crew have been ordered below. Many are sick. 

A beautiful lass looks over her shoulder as she is bustled below by a seaman. “What a strong Scottish captain, you are! So brave! Keep us safe!”

“He will” the sailor says, as another wave crashes down on them. “Now, below with you, girly!”

“Honestly,” thinks the tiny captain, “those landlubbers and green sailors have not seen rough seas.” His eyes are bright and his cheeks red, whether from high excitement or the wind does not matter.

He is standing at the bow of the ship, his towering helmsman holding the wheel steady just behind him. The waters rise like a mountain, then crash and fall with such weight and force the sprout struggles a bit to maintain his hold on the railing. He laughs wildly. He is covered in sea mist and his shoes are soaked through.

He spares a glance at his first mate as the next cascade of water batters them.

“Steady there,” the captain calls. “I have seen many a storm worse than this!”

“Aye! Aye!” comes the nervous reply.

The captain gives the jittery helmsman a wink. “All will be well. Just hold on to that wheel and follow my commands.”

© 2019 Carlos Declan Pharis

The Packing Solution

Posted on by Carlos Declan

A trip to the farm was not something that appeared on the kitchen calendar after a family planning session. It was always wonderful, but it just up and happened. My father would call home toward the middle of the day on a Friday and announce to Martha that we were off to Knox County. As soon as elementary school turned out, I would be piled int the back of the car, rushed home and shortly thereafter, off we would go, speeding east out of New Mexico toward my aunt and uncle’s farm in Texas. 

It was about a 5-hour trek. If we got going quickly and only stopped once for a bathroom break, then we got there in time for a late meal.  Course, when you crossed the New Mexico/Texas border you automatically lost an hour. So supper was going to be late, no matter how fast we went. The time change seemed to fuel my Dad’s focus on getting out the door. 

“It’s 4:30 in Texas!” he would holler out to no one in particular, as he waited at the back door for my mother to get whatever we needed to travel with.

Once, after we had got going and were traveling down the road, I heard her say to him:

“Bill, scooting out the backdoor on short notice for several nights in Knox County isn’t like running into town for an ice cream cone at Dairy Queen. Things have to be collected and packed. The car has to be taken care of. I have to get a snack packed and coffee made for the thermos. And you don’t give me any warning.”

He listened and then said quietly, “You make too much of all this, Sugar. When I call and say we are going to the farm just get yourself and the boy together and I’ll take care of the rest.”

There was a long pause before my mother responded: “Okay, fine.”

My Dad never seemed to get that phrase. They were married almost half a century. I never saw him snap on the reality that “okay, fine” actually meant that retaliation was looming. He never got this. Never. Well, he wasn’t getting it this time either.

It was on our next trip to the farm, some months down the way, when the ax fell on my father. 

I came out the backdoor of Will Rogers Elementary at the final bell and there my mother was in the car parked along the curb in approximately the usual place. I remember vaguely having a plan to go down the road to one of my bud’s house to ride bikes after getting home.

“No,” mother said. “We’re off to the farm.” 

That was fine with me. I loved to go.

I immediately noticed a difference in my mother as she drove us home. She was remarkably pleasant. Absent was the kind of tension that always came with the scurrying about that was required to get us off on these trips. She asked about my day and listened attentively.  We talked about the books I would need to take on the trip because, farm or no farm, I would have to get my homework addressed over the weekend.

When we got to the house I expected to be told to get out of the way, so she could tilt around the house like a whirlwind before my Dad rolled in. It didn’t happen. We walked in the back door, she went down the hall and shortly emerged with her small travel bag and a little cosmetics container that she always called her ditty bag.

She then turned her attention to putting together my little suitcase. She even called me into my room where she was working and very pleasantly engaged me in conversation about what I would like to wear.

After we packed my little bag she said, “Let’s have a cool drink and wait for your Daddy to get here.” We retired to the kitchen and she poured us both a tall glass of iced tea. I sat at the table and watched her calmly drink her tea and smoke a cigarette. 

Presently we heard my father’s old work car leave the pavement and roll up the dirt and gravel road to the back door.  At these sounds she began to clear the table and tidy up the sink area. When he walked in the back door, she had finished and collected our things. We stood ready to depart. 

My father breezed right past us with hardly a glance on the way to the bathroom. When he returned, my mother had installed me in the backseat of the car and the little dab of luggage was tucked away in the trunk. She stood outside the car and smoked another cigarette.

Coming out the backdoor, my Father had a puzzled look on his face. He looked at her and she said, “Lock that back door. There’s the boy and I’ve got what I need.”

For just a moment he looked startled. But that passed quickly. He locked the back door and scurried down the steps and into the car. We were on our way toward Texas.

We had just rolled into Seminole, not far over the Texas line, getting ready for the longer run over to Snyder when my Dad happened to glance at the fuel gauge. He was surprised to notice that it didn’t indicate full. 

“Gas gauge says we’re nearly out of gas,” he exclaimed. He then looked over at my mother with a kind of look that seemed to indicate that he expected some word of explanation would issue forth from her lips. But she simply continued to gaze out the window with a casual and serene countenance. 

He pulled into the Conoco station on the outskirts of town. I slipped out of the back seat and found the rest room. I didn’t need to go all that much, but when my Dad was driving on trips you didn’t want to pass up an opportunity. My mother stayed in the car. Shortly, we pulled out of the station and the trip was resumed.

Another hour into the trip and we were really into rural country. It was dinner time now, and my Father asked for his thermos of coffee. And maybe it was time to have a sandwich? Martha said there wasn’t any.

Dad was puzzled. Nothing? Really?

Martha shrugged and looked out her window.

I could tell Dad was puzzled and working on how this turn of events came to be. I watched him carefully. He just kept staring straight out the window, watching the road. But his hands were working on the wheel in an agitated manner. He finally took a plentiful breath, gave a long exhaling “well” and then lapsed into silence. We were all quiet now.

Finally he announced, “We’re almost to Snyder, and I’m hungry. Guess we’ll stop there and get a little something. How would that be, Shorty?”

I was enthusiastic, of course. A second stop on a trip was unprecedented, let alone getting to eat out somewhere.

We made to the farm about an hour and a half later than usual and settled in for the night right after.

I came around the corner into the kitchen the next morning to find my father sitting at the table, cup of coffee in hand and a perplexed kind of look on his face.  My uncle, Charles Meek, sat on the other side of the table with his chair tilted back against the wall, his arms folded across his chest, grinning like a Cheshire cat. Aunt Gladys was at the stove and Martha was serving biscuits onto the table. 

Bill looked up at her and said, “You didn’t bring any of my things?  Nothing?”

“Well, like I said, no, I didn’t bring any of your things.”

My Dad turned his face and gazed at his brother-in-law who, still grinning, nodded almost imperceptibly.

My Mother continued, “Bill, you told me to get myself and the boy in the car with whatever we needed, and you would take care of the rest.”

“Well,” my Dad said and then just let that word hang in the air like an orphan.

“You know,” my uncle offered, “it sure is nice to have a wife who will obey.” He continued to grin broadly.

My Dad looked over at him and said quietly, “Yeah.” Then, “A blessing sure enough.”

Aunt Gladys approached the table with the eggs while my mom got the rest of the things in place. “You boys eat some breakfast and we’ll get you outfitted while Charles is out tending to chores” my aunt directed.

By now I had taken my place at the table and noticed my Dad was wearing the same clothes he had driven down in, that he needed a shave, and that his hair wasn’t all that tidy. But he was quite a sight to see once he had been equipped with a new wardrobe and kit for the weekend!

Dad usually wore his fishing cap, which was really an old ball cap that was stashed in his tackle box which was, of course, back in the storeroom at home. One of Uncle Charles’ straw work hats fit after a fashion.

A cotton work shirt, again from Charles’ closet, was pressed into action. It served but did not fit all that well.  It was more than big enough around the chest and girth. Charles was a stockier man than Bill Pharis. He was a good deal shorter as well. So, the shirt was bigger and baggier than needed, and the sleeves were short. Real short. That was remedied by simply rolling up the sleeves.

It was not so easy to disguise the height and weight differential when it came to trousers. Charles had plenty of denim work pants not being used. But the same challenge had to be faced as with the shirt. The waist was plenty ample. Gladys produced a length of rope that allowed Bill to cinch up the waist. But the legs were a different matter.

“Why you look pretty good in pedal pushers, Bill,” chortled Charles when Bill appeared from the bedroom with breeches legs that barely covered his calves. He still had his long black socks on that he had worn to work the day before, so these covered up the exposed part of his legs. 

It was spring so no jacket was required.

The problem of shoes could not be fixed. Bill had exceptionally long and narrow feet. He would simply have to make do with his dress shoes he had worn down. 

“Let’s look on the bright side,” he said to Charles.  “Man can’t do chores in dress shoes.”

“Fair enough” Charles said with a grin.  “Don’t want to see you sloshing around near the hog trough in those” pointing at his shoes. 

The process was complete when Gladys produced a toothbrush still packaged up which she had back in the closet. Bill and Charles could share a razor.

On Saturday afternoon Bill, my uncle and I piled into the truck and went down to Paul’s Store to pick up some bait before heading over to Lake Kemp for some fishing.

My Dad’s dress caught Paul’s attention the minute we walked through the door, but he didn’t say anything. Charles just grinned when he caught Paul eyeing my Dad. “Town folk dress funny,” Charles remarked. 

My Dad took the invitation to tell the tale. The men all joined in commiserating about the challenge of dealing with wives.  They ended the whole thing with the old proverb: “women — can’t live with them and can’t live without them.” It was good natured. 

The next time an occasion to go to the farm presented itself, my Dad’s approach was a good deal different. 

It was a Monday morning at breakfast. My Dad said to my Mom as he was reaching for another biscuit, “I’m thinking about calling Charles and seeing if he could do a little fishing this weekend if we ran over there. What do you think?” 

Mom looked thoughtful for a moment. “You talking about going on Friday after work?”

“That’s my thinking,” Dad said.

“I believe we could,” she said.

“You up for that, Shorty?” my Dad asked me.

“You know it.”

“Good,” my mother said. “It’s settled. I’ll have everything packed and ready when you get in on Friday.” 

Grandma Vinnie

Posted on by Carlos Declan
grandma vinnie
This is us. There is a lot of hair under that hat, I swear.

I have a clear memory of my Grandmother Vinnie sitting at the dressing table in our guest bedroom, brushing her exceptionally long gray hair. It was fascinating to watch this process, and I did it almost every day when she visited.  After the brushing, she would go through the process of winding it up into a bun that set demurely on the top of her head. I was always astounded that hair that came all the way down to her waist could be tucked up into such a small package.

I no longer have a clear memory of how our game got started. It is simply there full grown in my mind. I would know it was coming, because instead of winding her hair up, she would rat it into a startling sight. Her hair became a huge bush that had suddenly been stuck into a light socket and the switch thrown. She would rise from her dressing table and slowly creep about with both hands out as if she were flying in slow motion.  She would stoop over and look up from under her bush of hair.

She would make this low noise, “Oooooooooooh” but it was not a long ‘o,’ it was more of a ‘u’ sound, like “youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.” Then she would start to move slowly around as if she was coming to get me. I would shriek and flee, only to sneak back shortly, peering around a door frame or down the hall, waiting to see if she was going to find me.  Having affirmed the chase was afoot, I would giggle, scream, and run again. All of this would go on until I was exhausted. She would call the game to a halt, return to her dressing stool and transform from the Old Witch back in to my Grandmother.

One morning, the game had worked us around into the kitchen. I grabbed a broom by the bristles and poked playfully at the Old Witch. I wasn’t trying to hurt her at all. I knew we were playing. But then, in the process of making a poke, I slipped, lurched forward, and (happily, I suppose) missed my Grandmother.

KA-THUNK!

This brought us both up short. The broom handle had popped a right clean hole in the drywall. My grandmother and I stared at it for a moment.

“Well,” Grandmother said quietly, almost under her breath. She calculated. She looked at me. “You go get on with cleaning up your room and leave this to me.”

I slunk to my bedroom on trembling knees. I knew my Father was not going to see the hole in the wall as an event. My recent activity around the homestead had produced a dark view regarding my cavorting around in him. He was going to see the hole in the wall as a continuation of a spree of marginal juvenile delinquency that needed to be ended. I knew the end of days were descending on me. Grandmother cleaned up the crime scene and went about the activities of her day, but I stayed in my room, wrote my will, and reflected on my short life.

My Mother got home from work around five o’clock and my Father just moments afterwards.

Sure enough, the hole in the wall drew him like a tractor beam. He did not take time to read the paper, smoke a cigarette, or drink a cup of coffee. He came to my room and said, “The bathroom. Now.” I marched to the execution chamber mechanically, feeling like seven years of age was too young to receive the death penalty.

When we turned into the bathroom, we pulled up short. Grandmother was right there in the little room, standing quietly. We were both surprised and a little embarrassed. We were afraid we had caught her in the middle of something bathroom-ish.

“Come on in,” she said pleasantly. “I was just waiting on you two.”

My Father seemed confused. He stumbled over his words, trying to explain. I remember the big words, like “culprit,” “deserve” and “punishment.” He stepped aside and seemed to think she would walk on out so he could close the door and throttle the suds out of me.

She stood utterly still.

She looked at my Father and said, as best I can recall, “Bill, Little Bit poked that hole in the wall in the kitchen and surely some kind of response is due. But that means I need to stay, because whatever punishment is determined needs to be administered to me as well. I was playing with him. We created that hole in the wall together.”

My father was flummoxed, hooked on the horns of dilemma. He would not spank Grandmother Vinnie. That wasn’t even close to being on the table. But the notion of letting me off the hook wasn’t something he could embrace. I watched intently. I could feel him thinking.

When he finally looked at her again, she offered, “Perhaps if we fixed the wall and took efforts to make sure this doesn’t happen again?”

“Oh, I could fix the wall without any trouble at all,” Dad said with a touch of pride in his voice.

“I know you could,” she said, and patted his arm. “But that’s not the point. We did the damage,” she said with a nod in my direction, “and we need to fix it.”

He relented. And that quickly, she moved us past the issue of whether or how some kind of corporal punishment was going to take place. The angels sang! I almost did a jig. Of course, I was giving no thought to how tough it would be to fix that wall. I was too busy watching the execution chamber fading away.

Everyone Likes Sugar on Their Tomatoes

Posted on by Carlos Declan

Grandpa Pharis was a tall and slender man who, with the aid of his cane, stood very erect. His movements were careful and creaky. When he turned his focus to anything not right in front of him, his entire upper body, as if locked together, would slowly rotate. Nonetheless, he did not groan as he moved. He seemed essentially free of complaints.

His face was weathered and lined by the time I knew him. I think he was always serious. Only once I saw him on the verge of something that could have been a smile — if he had forced it.  I never heard him laugh.

Observing him, as grandchildren will do from an awed distance, I noticed he did not argue or offer disrespectful commentary in conversation with others. He did not interrupt people and appeared to wait patiently until they were finished. His responses, always brief, were offered then. He never cranked out woeful stories about how things were when he was a kid.

All these qualities set him apart. But the most remarkable trait was that he never spoke to me as if I was a child. I was a child, but he did not seem to think this changed anything for him. His tone was the same as he used with adults. Occasionally, he would use a word I did not understand. If I asked him to explain, he did so matter-of-factually.

But we all have our “things,” – judgments, baggage, assumptions — and I finally found one of his.

My family was having Sunday dinner and my grandfather was present. The fact that he was at our house was noteworthy. It hadn’t been long since my grandmother passed. When she was alive, they had stuck fast together at their home where I usually encountered him. With her gone, his children wrangled him out and about some.

This Sunday’s dinner fare was not uncommon: fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans and a basket of biscuits. But then – as a final act before seating herself — my mother brought over a large platter of sliced tomatoes and placed them right in front of Grandpa.  We had eaten tomatoes before, of course, but I had never seen such a heaping platter full. Equally puzzling, the platter was presented to Grandpa Pharis, as if it had the Thanksgiving turkey and he would be doing the honors of carving it.

He acknowledged the arrival of the platter with a nod. Then, Grandfather reached for the sugar bowl, took off the lid, and dusted the whole platter of tomatoes thick as a hard frost. Taking some for himself, he then passed the platter to his left. Everyone speared three or four slices and passed it on.

When it got to me, I just looked at the platter. I was perplexed. I had never seen or been offered such. Frankly, it looked disgusting.

I appealed directly to my Grandfather.  “Papa,” I said. “I don’t want sugar on my tomatoes.”  I was expecting him to give me a pass. I was disappointed.

Grandfather looked up sharply and drilled me with his eyes. With irritation in his voice, he said: “Boy, everybody likes sugar on their tomatoes.”

I was stunned. I blinked. I looked at the platter. It still looked pretty disgusting to me.

I looked over at my father to appeal my case, but that went nowhere. He just nodded his head and pointed toward the tomatoes with his fork. Now my father was fair and considerate about things, and he would usually not think a disliked food was something that a person should be forced to eat. Yet there he was, expecting me to do it. Essentially telling me I had to do it.

It was hopeless.  I forked a slice onto my plate, and I managed to eat that tomato, sugar and all.

Grandpa Pharis will never know it, but there really is at least one person who has no interest in having sugar on their tomatoes.

  • Note: Carlos made me wash the sugar off these before he would eat them. He is not kidding around. — Cyd Morgan, Photographer

Holding On

Posted on by Carlos Declan

Suddenly I became aware that the baby they were talking about was me. I looked up from where I was playing on the floor to find my mother and grandmother smiling at me.

“I looked at those beautiful sparkling blue eyes and knew that sweet boy was going to be fine,” my grandmother said. Then she leaned forward with her needle point gathered to her, looked right down at me, and said in a hushed tone: “That’s exactly what I said. I knew you were going to be alright.”

My mother was nodding her head, as she smoked a cigarette and drank a cup of coffee. She grinned and leaned her head back a bit to blow the smoke upward.

My father was bent over a jig saw puzzle at the card table set up near the heater in the living room. He smiled broadly and nodded his head gently.

What in the world were they talking about? I looked at my grandmother quizzically.

When her eyes came up from her needle point, she caught my gaze and cocked her head a little to the side. “I don’t believe Charlsie has any idea what we are talking about.” Then she looked at my mother and waited.

“Well, I guess he doesn’t,” Mother said. She was silent for a moment, gathering herself. “When you were born, you were okay at first, but then you got real sick. You had diarrhea. You couldn’t hold anything down. You were just wasting away.”

She got somber. “The doctor said if you couldn’t keep your formula down and some water….”

Grandmother Vinnie watched her daughter’s face grow dark, and pitched in.

“But we weren’t going to let that happen,” she said with a smile at me. “We set in to doing everything we knew to try and get you comfortable. You would take a little of your bottle, but you would start crying directly and then…..Well, you would just burp it back up and what little you kept down came out pretty quick like dirty water from an old drain pipe right there in your diapers.

We didn’t really know what we were going to do. We had a lot of prayers going up but nothing was coming down. And then,” she said with a smile, “one came right on down.” And she looked at Bill.

My dad continued to examine pieces for his puzzle. He put a piece in place. Then, he smiled quietly, almost to himself, and said, “Yep.”

Now I was looking back and forth between Grandmother and my dad. “What came down?” I asked.

“The answer to our prayers,” Mother inserted.

“It’s like this,” Grandmother said. “You were just crying like a banshee.  We would hold you and rock you and sing to you and walk the floor with you and nothing would help. Then one of us, I don’t remember, either me or Martha Lois, put you back in the crib. We were just exhausted.

Your daddy tried to comfort you. He took his hand and reached into your crib and gently rubbed your little chest as you lay there looking up squalling and so distressed. And that’s when it happened.”

“What?” I cried, the drama getting to me by now.

“Well,” she said, “you reached up that little hand of yours (and here she demonstrated with her right hand going up in the air) and you grabbed hold of his finger.”

At that moment my dad held up the index finger on his right hand and waved it in the air gently for a moment or two.

Grandma continued: “You grabbed that finger, and the second you did, you took a deep breath, closed your eyes and went right to sleep.”

My dad was almost imperceptibly nodding his head up and down again.

“Martha Lois thought you had died.”

My mother got stirred up and seemed offended. “Well! He hadn’t been quiet for one second in days. What was I to think, him just suddenly closing his eyes and getting quiet as church during prayer time?”

Grandmother ignored her. “We just stood there amazed as could be. I whispered, ‘Thank you Jesus’.”

She stopped talking and the living room was as quiet as could be except for the sound of the heater motor pushing some warm air into the room.

Eventually I couldn’t take the silence. “What happened next?”

Everyone grinned, and Grandmother kept telling the story. “What happened was you hung on to your daddy’s finger as tight as could be for three days. You would wake up a little every once in awhile and we would feed you and you would slip right back to sleep.”

“And I hung on to his finger the whole time?”

“The whole time,” she affirmed. “I mean a couple of times we had to get old Bill repositioned and had to pry your little fingers off for a second, but you would start to tune up instantly. We got that finger back in your little paw right smart quick,” she finished with a chuckle.

“Sure did,” Martha said.

“Yep,” my dad said.

“Right, smart quick” Grandmother said again. “You were getting some good old sleep and keeping your food down and in.”

“But then,” Mother said, “we had two boys to take care of.”

They all chuckled together, leaving me to say “Huh?”

“We had to get pillows and blankets and a chair there for your dad to set in. He couldn’t move very far what with you having his finger tight as if it were in a bear trap,” mom started the story this time.

“We practically fed him like we did you. He was a one-armed man,” Grandma jumped in. “And then there was the issue of having to get the two of you into the bathroom. You wouldn’t let go of that finger,” and here grandma’s eyes flew open for dramatic effect, “so we could work things out for Bill to use the toilet.”

Martha added, “It took both of us helping your daddy, holding you and helping Bill.”

“Well, enough said about that,” said Grandma with a wink to Martha, and then she chastised us: “You two boys were a handful.”

They went on joking about how much trouble men were whether they were big or small, old or young.

My dad looked at me while they went on giggling and complaining. He smiled at me, and then he winked.

“What finally happened?” I asked him.

“Well,” grandmother said dramatically, pulling my attention to her. She put her needlepoint down in her lap and lifted both her hands out and open. “I guess you got rested up enough and got enough food in your little belly to stick to your ribs.”

Mother interrupted here. “You just let go of your daddy’s finger and opened your eyes. Grandmother looked down into your eyes and announced they were bright and clear and that you were going to be alright.”

Grandmother was looking at me real steady. “And you were.”

“You took a little bit of your bottle and went right to sleep,” said Mother.

“And your daddy got his finger back,” said Grandmother.

“Did you go to sleep then, Daddy?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said. “I had to go to work.”

Grandmother started chuckling again. “He was so tired his eyes just looked like two charcoal smudges.”

More laughter all around.

“I gave him a pair of my sun glasses to wear,” said Martha. “The sun hurt his eyes so, and lord he looked awful. Tired and wearing women’s sunglasses!”

“Downtown, they thought I was a movie star from Hollywood,” my dad defended.