Blessings of my father

One of the blessings of my father is Mom - and his great love for her.

My experience with my father may be somewhat rare these days. I thought of this today, when our pastor talked about the blessing that Jacob gave to the sons of Joseph, saying that our culture has lost something in our family life, in our omission of the opportunity to bless to our children.

But I was blessed, very much as in Old Testament times, though Dad did not wait until he was on his death bed to pronounce his blessings. I remember several occasions when my dad gave each of us, in turn, his blessing, his recognition of our talents and desires, and his predictions for the directions we would choose in life. I didn't think much of it at the time. It was just a Dad thing. But I've always remembered it, how Dad blessed us, even putting his hand on our heads as he blessed us, and prayed for us after he blessed us.

Dad was an old-fashioned doctor when I was growing up. He drove a VW bug and went on house calls. He charged between $4 and $6 for office visits in the late 1960s when I worked for him. He wanted to spend time with us children, but with the expense of putting us through church school and the needs of his patients,  he was seldom home when we were awake. He did early morning rounds at the hospital before opening his office, so he wasn't home for breakfast, and he went on house calls in the evenings after spending all day with his patients, so he wasn't home for supper, and often not before we were sound asleep. Weekends were often filled with house calls, and sometimes. on the way to a family outing, we had to stop and see a patient. I remember going into the hot and stuffy homes of his patients who were all too eager to ask many questions of the very shy Doc's daughter.

Dad knew that this wasn't a good deal, his being so absent from us during our growing up years. The fact that we knew he loved us, even liked us, made up for a lot of the lack of presence. We always knew he had our best in his heart, that he preferred us to everyone except Mom, and that he would do anything for us. 

At one point Dad thought we might be interested in wood working, a skill of his that might provide a bonding point.  It turned out that involved too much of us standing around and watching his too-exacting (we thought) measurements, cutting, adjusting... And sanding, sanding, sanding. It just didn't seem like fun, and we edged toward the door at the earliest opportunity.

The next idea was gardening. He gave us each a rather large plot, probably about 30x40 feet, if memory is any good, in which we could grow anything we wanted. I was about 11 at the time, my sister 10, my brother 6. So we enjoyed our gardens, or at least I did. My most successful crop was castor beans, highly poisonous, but very decorative. I spent a lot of time observing insects in my garden - trap door spiders, spiders of all kinds, and beetles. My sister grew blue flowers she had planted at the bottom of a trench. "But the package said to dig the soil down for a foot, Daddy," she said when he laughed, but he let her grow them as she wished. My brother grew weeds. He fondly remembers his own garden to this day, but none of the rest of us remember him doing anything more than the initial planting.

The gardens, however, could not bond us, because gardening can be a solitary enterprise - which it turned out to be. We served as the harvesters of Dad and Mom's very large garden. "Go out and pick beans for supper," Mom would say. And one of us would do it, all the while wondering if we really liked beans all that much.

Then Dad came up with the solution: Snow skiing. The winter after the gardens, Dad took us to a ski shop where we were outfitted with used equipment. My skis were wooden and reached up to my wrist when I held my arm straight upward. I painted them yellow with large red polka dots of varying sizes, and ended up using them all the way into my college years. Dad had a pair of tremendously-long Yamaha skis, also yellow. He had skied some before, but wasn't an expert by any means.

Skiing in Colorado at about 13, showing off my bad form

Our first big trip was to Buttermilk in Aspen. Dad took us down the bunny slope a few times, and when we had mastered snowplowing and the art of falling (must know how to fall), we took the chairs to the top of the mountain, or at least as high up as the beginner/intermediate slopes were. It took us half the day to come down, especially since we were working on our turns, and often, instead of turning after traversing the slope, we would sit down, reposition our skis in order to traverse in the opposite direction, and stand up again. Dad was always patient. He made the learning a lot of fun.

At lunch time we parked our skis in the rack and hiked out into the snowy parking lot for cold sandwiches, Tricuits, an orange or apple, and the pies de resistance - a candy bar, usually one or two, divided to share among the four of us. We never got candy at home, except at Christmas, so this was a special deal. We often shared a bottle of pop, 7-Up usually, even though there were always a few comments about the backwash after my brother took his turn. Floaties in the 7-Up kind of ruined it for us girls, but my dad and brother didn't seem to mind.

At least every other Sunday during the skiing season for the next few years, until I went away to boarding school, we drove from Colorado Springs to Breckenridge, a couple hours drive if I remember right, and had lots of time to talk, comment on the scenery, and hear family stories. Mom came sometimes, but she disliked skiing, so it was a day off for her. Each trip cost Dad more than just the gas and the lift tickets (less than $10 at the time) - it meant he had to let another doctor see his hospital patients and take his house calls, so it was money the family needed that he wasn't bringing in. But he knew how important it was to connect to us kids. In this way he blessed us without saying a word. 

The longer I live, the more I understand all the blessings my father gave me.

Thank you, Dad! I love you!