My Dad and Barney Google

My father was Norwegian and German, not Irish.  My DNA shows that I am 13% Irish.  He died of congestive heart failure at age 89 on St. Patrick's Day in 2003. While looking for an image with which to honor him today, I came across the above photo among his slides that had been transferred to a computer disk.  I don't recall ever seeing this particular photo before.  I thought I had looked closely at all of his old photos.  Odd how everything is tilted.  My father and I had a difficult relationship, although I know he was very proud of me.  I am his firstborn daughter and was named after his mother.  I am the only daughter who inherited his blue eyes.  Like him, I needed glasses beginning in grade school.  In many ways I was unlike him, and there was conflict. When I was very young and playing on the floor, I heard him say proudly, "She is going to be a lawyer like her grandfather."  I thought to myself, "I won't be a lawyer."

He was fond of these words:

"This the day the Lord has made.  Rejoice and be glad in it."

He said that the best movie he ever saw was "The Ten Commandments," with Charlton Heston.  

He loved gardening and archeology and playing Solitaire and traveling and good food and baseball and puns and Snoopy.  He loved his wife and his daughters and our dog, Star.  He was proud of the work he did as a systems analyst for Chevron.

I just remembered that he used to sing this song which he must have first heard as a 9-year-old boy:

He sang this song, too, from that same era:

When I remember my father singing these songs from his childhood, I feel some peace in connection with him.  I hope he found some peace in connection with me.  

I am grateful that my last visit with him was a good one.  I lit a candle for him today.  

St. Patrick's Day 2013 / Thinking about our father

Our father died of congestive heart failure on St. Patrick's Day of 2003. In the above photo taken in April of 1977, our father was 63 years old -- the age I am now.  The photo was taken by our mother somewhere in Mendocino County, California -- probably not far from where they lived in the tiny coastside town of Gualala.

I'm thinking about our father today and his life's journey beginning with his birth in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1914; his travels to the East Coast with his father and a historian in the 1930s; his move to Los Angeles, California, in the late 1930s; his first marriage (which was a secret until after our mother died); his marriage to my mother and their move to San Francisco in 1948; their moves to San Mateo, Palo Alto, Taft, and Redwood City, California, before I was 8 years old; their move to Gualala when he retired in 1974; his retirement travels to Norway, the Orkney Islands, the Middle East, China and India; his move to where I live in Bellingham, Washington, after the death of our mother in December of 1994; his move in August 2001 to Seattle, Washington, to live near his youngest daughter, her husband, and their son (our father's only grandchild); and ending with his ashes being buried, at his request, in Minneapolis, next to our mother, his younger brother, and his parents.

I don't think of his spirit as being in Minnesota, though.  I still think of him and our mother living their quiet and private lives close to the Pacific Ocean.

Here is more about our father from a previous post:

"On the day after my father died, I walked alone on a beach in West Seattle and looked out at the relatively calm expanse of salt water, which suddenly appeared to me to be much like my father. I could only see its surface from my place on the shore. I knew nothing of its depths and neither did anyone else."

Here is the view from my porch today:

Generous listening

Dad and me in 1949:






















My father died in the morning on St. Patrick's Day in 2003 at age 89. Hard to believe that 9 years have passed. Today I was looking at the autobiography that he completed in 2001 and wrote for his only grandchild, my nephew Lee. I am grateful that my first and last communications with my father were positive. All that remains of my father is love.















A friend forwarded this via email:


































(photo by am, taken late in the day yesterday, looking to the southeast from my porch)

My father would be 97 years old today

If my father were still alive, he would be 97 years old today. My father was a senior in high school when this photo was taken.

Here is some of the music he would have heard between during the 1930s. In 1932, he was the same age that my nephew is this year. Amazing!

Happy Birthday Day, Dad!

Aleph Series: Bhagavad Gita / Psalm 104 / Lao Tzu (2003)

My father died at age 89 on St. Patrick's Day in 2003, just before the Iraq War began. During the last years of his life he wrote his autobiography and chose this photo of himself at 30 years old for the cover:






















My father didn't consider himself an artist, but he was.

The Aleph Series is the only art work I did in 2003.

Today the swallows arrived at the cattail pond I look out on from my computer desk. Today to the east are the kind of clouds my father said were one of the many things he liked about Northwest Washington.