There are people that you get to know who make you feel incredibly fortunate: Gwen is one of them. She is brilliant and funny and beautiful and (by anyone’s standards) has lived a vivid and fascinating life. She is one of the best writers out there, and one of the wisest. I originally posted this on Gwen’s blog, after she invited some of us in the blog world to do guest posts while she was traveling this summer. The theme she challenged us with was the word “naked.” This is my take on it.
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As a kid, I marveled at the fact that my dad was the only person I’d ever met who had no belly button. I would occasionally see his belly when he would take off his shirt to shave, lathering up his face with soap and an old-fashioned shaving brush. I didn’t know until years later that the belly button had disappeared when Dad had hernia surgery decades before, covered by scar tissue from the incision.
Dad always dressed modestly around his family. I have two photos of his exposed calves: one from a visit he made to Lake Erie in 1947 as a young man, and another in the Pacific ocean in 1984, his pants rolled up to the knees in both pictures. Those two photos constitute the sum total of all the times I ever even saw my father’s calves. I know he had more to his legs than just ankles; I just never observed them in person.
Dad didn’t show leg, and in a similar vein, he kept a stringent lid on personally revealing statements to anyone other than his wife. He worked hard, he relaxed at the bar, he shouted his opinions, he told stories and jokes, he played music and danced the two-step and the polka with my mom. For us kids, interaction with Dad mainly consisted of him yelling up the stairs for us to do something, or listening to his assessments of our character based upon how we worked and ate, or what music we listened to.
He didn’t look at our homework, he didn’t take movies of our school concerts (if he even went to them). He didn’t play catch and he didn’t ask how we felt about things. That’s what siblings were for. Dads were for paying the bills, reading newspapers, carving the turkey, enforcing the rule of Mom’s law, and fixing the car.
He wasn’t a complete bastard, though. He enjoyed his family. He always relished a good Scrabble or cribbage game, and would talk your left leg off if you went with him to cut firewood or look at the garden. He was full of anecdotes about people he’d met, or snippets of bawdy songs, silly puns, German sayings, and observations about the world around him.
But my dad was not a person who allowed exposure. What you saw was what you got, all right, but you didn’t see much. Strong arms, farmer’s tan, the public persona, the conversation joking or opinionated; very rarely did he display hurt feelings or more tender emotions. It was as though his lack of a belly button had rendered him incapable of insight: navel-gazing had become a literal and figurative impossibility.
Even as he lay in a hospital bed awaiting cancer surgery last year, he was stoic in the face of the tearful words of his daughters and sons. He’d hold our hands and squeeze, allow a kiss on the cheek, say “I love you, too” in response to us, but otherwise, I’m sure he felt he’d said as much as was obvious, and didn’t feel the need to expand on the medical facts.
In the recovery room after surgery, he was in and out of lucidity, but couldn’t speak because of the ventilator in his throat. Gesturing for a pen and paper, he wanted urgently to write down what was on his mind: we watched in confusion as he drew a diagram of an electrical circuit and the curtain around his bed, and then printed a request for a proper handkerchief instead of worthless goddamn Kleenex.
Going through his papers after he died last month, I found old spiral notebooks where for decades, he had faithfully recorded daily briefs about the weather, crops, work, who died, who visited, where he played music or what was happening in the world. Every year on his birthday, he would note his age with a proud exclamation point after it.
Dry facts were sometimes interrupted with glimpses of his thoughts. In 1978: “Business slow these days…I don’t understand.” For him to admit perplexity and anxiety in this way (week after week of slow business when he had five or six kids still living at home could make him very nervous) was unheard of. He might yell about it, or curse, but never would he say something so vulnerable.
In his last months, he continued to keep a journal. He wrote that “they tell me I was in the hospital for 70 days.” Little about the cancer was mentioned, other than the size of the tumor (“about as big as an apple”) and that overall, he’d had a pretty rough go of things.
On a page in February, Dad noted once that my brothers had worked hard on some recent bathroom remodeling at the house.
“Bless them,” he wrote.
I stared at it for several minutes, my heart in my throat. By the time I read those words it had been almost a month since Dad had died, leaving behind mountains of belongings but not many clues into his mind. Reading such a small sentence so filled with humble gratitude from a man who had spent so much of his life being brash and in charge…well, it was a little like seeing him wearing no pants at all.
