Rick’s List
Rick Koster offers weekly lists of ideas, notions and things that must be seen to be believed.
My father, who died in 1991, would have turned 94 this week. It’s funny how, as the years mist by, the memories I have of my dad are, more and more, reduced to disconnected shards and “greatest hits” anecdotes. I wish I could close my eyes and recreate just one entire afternoon or evening spent together, even if we’d been doing something as mundane as driving two-lane roads in rural East Texas on routine errands.
Regarding those “memory shards.” My father was always reading — from Cellini, Kipling, Longfellow and Churchill to his muchloved John D. McDonald and Robert B. Parker paperbacks. Dad would often strike a facetious pose and, in a full-throated, faux-thespian baritone, deliver a quick quote from ... well, who knew where? Over the course of the years, many became familiar and comforting. Here are a few, in no pattern or thematic context or for any particular reason other than, happily, they pop up in my brain from time to time. 1 “Ten thousand saw I at a glance / Tossing their heads in sprightly dance” — William Words worth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”
2 “You missed a spot” — Dad, sitting on the back patio with a cocktail, watching me mow the yard. 3 “Ontogeny tends to recapitulate phylogeny” — German biologist/ philosopher Ernst Haeckel.
4 “Darlin’, that lawn’s not going to mow itself” — Dad, to my sister after I’d left home for college and she’d inherited the landscaping chores.
5 “If dogs have a heaven, there’s one thing I know / Old Shep has a beautiful home” — Pet-enamored father singing Red Foley’s “Old Shep.”
6 “I’ve driven more miles backward than most men have forward” — Dad, to my mother any time she questioned his depth of knowledge on any subject.
7 “You wouldn’t believe it. I just had the most amazing Duck L’Orange!” — Dad, in a hospital bed, hallucinating a meal that didn’t happen. It was the last thing he said to me.
8 ”When the chill waters of the River Styx close about my ankles, let me say that I have lived the Good Life, I have fought the Good Fight.” — So far as I know, this was of my father’s own quote. Not sure he intended to write his own epitaph, but it works. Happy birthday, Dad. I miss you.