JAN JOLLY
Through My Father's Glasses
I don’t know why I waited until no one was looking to take my father’s glasses. I stealthily removed them from his face—waxy in the open coffin—and slipped them into my pocket. It seemed like a crime. Like I was shoplifting. Did anyone see me?
The funeral lasted for what seemed like hours. Standing room only. More people were inside the slowly dying Baptist church than had been in that building for years. All to pay respects to my father, to give condolences to my mother, to let me and my sister know how much they would miss him. They have no idea.
⌘
My father’s glasses, now secretly resting in my pocket, are neither fancy nor expensive. Like his other purchases, he mostly looked for a bargain. “These were 47 cents cheaper than the ones your mother liked,” he’d explain. They are semi-rimless. Much like the ones issued to him by the Marine Corp during World War II. He needed them to read the endless stacks of books that were his constant companions throughout his life.
For a while, when I was a young teenager, he wore glasses with thick, black rims. Horn-rimmed, we called them. My sister and I thought they made him look like Buddy Holly.
⌘
Buddy Holly was the first young rock star to wear glasses around 1956. His distinctive, black-rimmed frames were a part of his identity. Later, teen icons like Roy Orbison (tinted lenses, dark square frames) and John Lennon (round, pink-tinted wireframes) found inspiration from Buddy's trademark look. I think a comparison to Clark Kent would have better suited my father. Mild-mannered but more powerful than a locomotive, at least in my memory.
⌘
“Looking through these glasses is like staring down a tunnel.” He complained about those horn-rimmed glasses until Mother made him splurge on a new set.
He came home with the wire-rimmed ones. The lower half was cut with half a hexagon shape while the three angles on the upper half were rounded over. A tiny wire frame attached the earpieces to the top of the lenses and across the nose rests. The lower half was unframed. Bifocals to accommodate his voracious reading habit. A habit passed down to me. A habit every father should pass down to their child.
While he might have had the lens prescription changed over the years, he kept the semi-wireless frames. The ones I stole from his casket were the last he bought more than a decade before his death at age 90. They now occupy a quiet shelf in my dining room—an ever-present yet subtle reminder that he is watching. That my words and actions still matter to him.
⌘
My father saw a lot of life through his glasses. As a young man growing up on a farm in southern Pulaski County, he watched as crops of watermelons and peanuts matured to sell at the local general store. He watched the milk flow from the juicy udders of Jersey cows as he gently squeezed them each morning, then watched that same pail of milk become mounds of butter and pitchers of cream. He watched his mother save the sweet milk for a treat at supper. He watched his mother die of what they mysteriously called “brain fever.” At age 16, he watched his older brother enlist in the Marine Corps to fight in World War II. Daddy’s books like The Ransom of Red Chief lost their appeal as he and Papaw scoured the newspapers and sat beside the radio for news of the war.
⌘
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the increased need for fighting men quickly became hampered by the rejection of nearly one-third of volunteers for bad teeth and bad eyes. In an article for the Army's First Division Museum, author Michael Ellis reports that the military had to lower their standard so that men with poor vision could enlist. The military provided Classic "P-3" style glasses to new recruits. These had rounded lenses and wireframes with flexible earpieces that attached to the top of the frames. This design allowed full peripheral vision and would fit under a gas mask.
Through his P-3 glasses, my father saw the jungles of Guam, New Guinea, and Bougainville in the South Pacific. A member of the Marine Raider division—the precursor to today’s special forces—my father saw the horrors of jungle warfare, the bravery of his comrades, and the welcome arms of my mother when he returned, whole but not unharmed. He joined the Marines when he was only a boy of 17 but returned as a man at 23. Books like The Sword in the
Stone now replaced, I imagine, with titles like For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Grapes of Wrath.
⌘
Through his glasses, my father watched his family grow, watched his daughters turn into young women—the sort of life he and thousands like him fought a war to preserve.
With his military bearing and steely stare, my father exuded a strength that inspired both respect and admiration. Like many soldiers in the war, he didn’t talk with his daughters about things he saw or things he did. “You girls don’t need to know about that stuff. There were just lots of mosquitos and mud.” I often wondered if he would have shared his war stories with us if we had been boys.
The word “literacy” is one that probably never entered my father’s mind or, as far as I know, came out of his mouth. But through his own love of books, love of reading, and love of words, he taught me the importance of reading and appreciation of a well-turned phrase, a surprising sentence structure, a lyrical paragraph. He launched me on a life-long journey of books and learning—not to pass a test or advance another grade. But to make myself a better person, one he could be proud of, one who could survive in a world without him in it.
⌘
If it is true that people make time for things that are important to them, reading was certainly important to my father. After moving back to Arkansas in 1960 when I was eight, the Arkansas Gazette came daily, and he read it front to back including the classifieds and real estate listings. He liked to read Dear Ann Landers and our daily horoscopes to us over dinner.
“Jan, you’re a Leo. Don’t let a persnickety co-worker ruin your day.”
“Mother: Scorpio. Stay cool and calm today. Danger awaits!”
We loved the comics: Alley Oop and Snuffy Smith and Dennis the Menace. As I got older, he let me help with the crossword puzzle and the daily Jumble. By age 12, he had me reading the op-ed pages and columnists writing about Vietnam and Cuba and Khrushchev and John Glenn.
Reading was not an activity confined to home or school. Trips to the library on Saturday mornings with Daddy were the highlight of my weekends. I loved the art deco building of the Little Rock Library filled with row upon row of exotic titles, wooden card catalogs, perplexing microfilm readers, and the special children’s area that always felt like a fantasy land. I was so grown up with my own library card—almost like having a driver’s license. While he headed for the history and biography stacks, he allowed me free run of the place and never restricted my choices of books. A Cricket in Times Square. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Harriet the Spy. Endless Trixie Belden mysteries. Anything by Dr. Seuss.
We had a small collection of books that Daddy kept in our rickety pine bookcase along with an outdated set of encyclopedias. He liked Aesop’s Fables because they taught straightforward life lessons with no need for explanation or discussion. The Ant and the Grasshopper (always prepare for the hard times); The Bundle of Sticks (find strength in unity); The Lion and the Mouse (small friends are important). As I grew older, Daddy pulled out old paperbacks of Treasure Island and Sherlock Holmes. I can still hear him start the story, “To Sherlock Holmes, she is always the woman,” and off we flew to Baker Street to read about A Scandal in Bohemia.
Poetry was not overlooked. Daddy’s favorite poet was Robert Service, an Englishman who spent most of his life in the Canadian Yukon Territory and wrote bawdy ballads about the frozen tundra, the miners who lusted for gold, barroom brawls, and love of the wilderness. I favored The Cremation Sam McGee and the opening lines, read in Daddy’s affected rasp, never failed to make me shiver.
“There are strange things done in the midnight sun, by the men who moil for gold.
The Arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold.”
When he read these uncomplicated narrative poems to me, his voice took on a haunted tone and he became quietly reverent. Even at an early age, I sensed that these poems held a special place for him. Maybe they triggered memories of Iceland, where he was stationed for a while during World War II. The ballads and poems told simple stories of men leading adventurous lives in a frozen, far-away place. No hidden meanings. No existential conundrums. Just old tales told in a predictable rhythmic cadence, sometimes funny, sometimes haunting, sometimes scary. But never complex or philosophical, just the way my father liked them.
⌘
After my father retired, he made it his personal mission to mow grass for his elderly friends, relatives, church members—anyone he knew or heard about who couldn’t take care of their own lawns. He mowed his and his next-door neighbor’s lawn. “Butler doesn’t mow his right,” he’d justify his encroachment onto Mr. Butler’s yard by his strict adherence to a higher standard of grass maintenance. He’d come in after mowing, drenched with sweat. After a shower, he’d put his glasses on and go out to admire his work. “Now that’s how a lawn should look.” Satisfied. Smug.
Harold Wright’s Rules of Lawn Mowing
1. Set mower high enough so the blades cut only the top 1/3 of the grass
2. Mow only when the grass is completely dry
3. Use a push mower (self-propelled is OK), but never a riding mower
4. Mow on a diagonal pattern: east to west on a north to south angle on Week 1; west to
east on a north to south angle on Week 2; rotate pattern paths each week
5. Clean mower blades and undercarriage after every mowing session
6. Sharpen blades, change engine oil, replace spark plugs and filters at least annually
I often dropped in after he’d spent the day mowing his or someone else’s lawn. Relaxed in his recliner, book in hand. I’d leave with one he had just finished, sometimes for the second or third time. Treasure Island. Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Shogun.
“Can you help me balance the checkbook?” When my father was in his eighties, he became increasingly confused. “I remember there is some way to check subtraction by re-adding the numbers, but I can’t remember exactly how it works.” From then on, I paid the bills and balanced his checkbook (to the penny!) each month.
He soon began seeing strangers in the house. My mother covered the mirrors with blankets so his own reflection would not frighten him. He could no longer read, could no longer see the words clearly. His glasses didn’t help.
⌘
On a hot July day in 2011, my 90-year-old father is lying in bed in the hospice unit. Once a strong yet gentle giant, the frail body under the sheet belies his former strength. Just yesterday, he was alert and talking, complaining of cold hands, bony and thin like the onion skin paper of his well-thumbed Bible. I immediately rushed to the nearest store for gloves. Returning to his room, I helped him slip the warm fleece onto his hands, now folded on top of the lightweight blanket as I sit near the head of his bed.
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” I sit in the quiet hospice room and read the familiar words aloud, not knowing whether my father can hear me. I strain to see the words on the yellowed pages in the fading summer light. Daddy read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy three times during his life. He hated the movies. “Too loud,” he complained. I occasionally goaded him into a debate over the power of the ring—Gollum’s “Precious”— as a metaphor for sin and to argue about good versus evil as symbolized by Frodo and Sauron. Ultimately, he convinced me that the trilogy was just a wonderful tale of a group of friends out on a grand adventure.
The heat from the mid-summer sun makes the room uncomfortably warm and a bead of sweat trickles from his hairline toward his ear. No longer speaking; no longer watching; his eyes closed; his breathing shallow. I know he is still in there somewhere, hearing me read the familiar lines: “The poor little hobbit sat down in the hall and wondered what had happened, and what was going to happen, and whether they would all stay to supper.” The page blurs as I choke back tears, but I take a deep breath, turn my eyes back to the book, and continue reading aloud.
⌘
As I approach my 60th birthday, reading to him seems wrong. He always read to me. He read to everyone in our family. Wherever he drove—to and from our home in Colorado to visit our Arkansas cousins, on vacation to the Smoky Mountains, down the street to Traveler’s Field—we heard his rich, silky voice from the front seat of the car.
“Big Texan Steak Ranch. Free 72-ounce steak if eaten in one hour.”
“A peach looks good with lots of fuzz; But man’s no peach, and never was; Burma Shave.”
“See Ruby Falls on Lookout Mountain.”
He read billboards, real estate signs, grocery store ads.
“Schlitz, the beer that made Milwaukee famous.”
"For sale by owner- three bedrooms; built-in radar oven."
“Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.”
Now the roles are reversed; I am the reader, he the listener.
⌘
At least I hope he is listening. Dabbing the sweat from his temples, I feel an urge to repay him for the countless hours he spent reading aloud to me. The simple cadence of narrative poetry. Stories with clearly stated morals. Adventure. Escape. I learned to love books and words from him, not because he was highly educated—he wasn’t—or because he forced me to read—he didn’t—but because he quietly picked up a book every night after Gunsmoke or Sugarfoot went
off the air. If I was lucky, Daddy invited me to join him in the overstuffed green rocking chair with a book he had tucked away for me beneath the pillow. The chair barely held his tall, muscular frame, but he squeezed me in between him and the chair’s cushy arm. I was safe and loved and warm with Daddy and our books.
⌘
As the summer dusk turns to darkness, I watch my father’s essence fade away. I reflect on his down-to-earth ways that provided our family with a stable and secure life. I still love words; I still love books and poetry. I still read billboards and wish Burma Shave was back in business. I still love the English language with all its structural complexities.
Without a conscious effort, reading became a daily part of my own parenting habits. While I continued to read Dr. Seuss to both my children, we added Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and stacks of Amelia Bedelia beside the many adventures of Frog and Toad. Today, I share book recommendations with my adult children, enriching our relationships and paying homage to Daddy and his inadvertent lessons on the importance of literacy.
Books are still scattered around various rooms in my house, sometimes even in my car or purse. I still do a crossword puzzle every day. Bookshelves in my office are stuffed with favorites I can neither bring myself to give away nor trade at the used bookstore. I read for pleasure, for escape, for adventure, but rarely do I seek to interpret the symbolism in the words. Doing so, my father taught me, might interfere with what is truly important—the story.
⌘
Daddy never looked for hidden meanings in the things he read. We never discussed the lessons taught by Aesop or the allegory of Yertle the Turtle. In books, as in his life, things were always exactly as they seemed, including his beloved Bible. He was a Jesus-flying-out-of-the-sky Missionary Baptist; he believed the stories in the Bible were true in a completely literal sense. Fact: Shadrach and his friends spent the night in a fiery furnace and came out without so much as a singed eyebrow. Fact: One minute the jars at the wedding in Cana were filled with water; the next minute—wine. John the Revelator saw exactly what we will all see at the end of time. Jesus will return one day, floating on the clouds, and every person will see him, regardless of his or her global position. King David’s poems about shepherds and mountains are exactly that— poems about shepherds and mountains.
King David and Robert Service were not the only poets my father loved. Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s Casey at the Bat was a favorite, and I often begged for a reading of the iconic ballad, especially when it was time for the World Series. Daddy had been a pitcher for his Marine Corp team in San Diego before deploying to the South Pacific. He never talked about the war or his baseball prowess and, having been taught to respect his privacy and his reticence, I never asked about that time in his life. But I knew—from his military bearing, the respect I saw shown to him by other men, the dusty trunk in the attic full of baseball memorabilia, medals, and photographs—that my father was a talented ballplayer and a Marine with an honored past.
After his death, someone shared a story about his Marine Corp baseball team playing an exhibition game with UCLA around 1941. Daddy struck out a college player named Jackie Robinson not just once but twice during that game. It is a story he never shared. Like his service in the war, he must have feared a sort of “observer effect,” where simply telling the tale would somehow cheapen or alter it. I think he identified with the pitcher in Casey at the Bat and kept the memory of striking Robinson out hidden in his heart to preserve and nurture the experience.
⌘
I must have dozed for a few minutes. The Hobbit has fallen to the floor and my neck is sore from resting against the back of the plastic chair. Daddy is still with me. Barely. I can see the blanket move up and down with each labored breath. It is now dark outside but still sultry beside the window, the air conditioner rattling as it attempts to cool the room. I reach for his still-gloved hands, hands that held me when I was hurt or sad, hands that turned the pages for over 90 years. I imagine he squeezes my hand just a bit. I lay my head on the pillow beside him and thank him for being who he is and for making me who I am. For all he saw. For all he did.
I remove the glasses from his sleeping face and set them on the end table beside the Gideon Bible and a pink plastic pitcher filled with tepid water. As he fades with the sunset, I think about all he saw through those glasses. I put them on. But the world is just a blur. The glasses won't improve the eyesight of someone less brave, less strong, less worthy than my father.
⌘
Daddy passes away later that night. Quietly. No drama. Mother is by his side when he draws his last breath. I arrive about ten minutes later. He planned his passing with his usual efficiency: insurance policies ready for signatures, living trust in place, his will signed and registered with the courts, funeral paid in full. In death, as in life, he took care of business, took care of his family, took care of me.
Returning home, exhausted from grief, and digging for strength to face my new world without him, I reach for the faded and cracked volumes of Robert Service and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, loose pages held together with paperclips. I carefully unfold my copy of Casey at the Bat, published in 1957 in the Sunday News magazine section, cracked, faded, taped together— the version he always read to me—a phantom whiff of Old Spice on the page. I read the wrinkled
lines, “But there is no joy in Mudville; Mighty Casey has struck out,” and think I might have those words carved on his headstone. Or better yet, Dr. Seuss’s words, “You can find magic wherever you look. Sit back and relax. All you need is a book.”
⌘
A few days later, I take the glasses from his lifeless face and slip them into my pocket. I know that each time I see them, each time I touch them, each time I hold them, I’ll be seeing and touching and holding a piece of my father’s soul. And each time I pick up a book—adventure, mystery, memoir, poetry, history—I’ll think of him and the gift of literacy he left to me and his grandchildren: our love of a good book. A good story. A good life.
The funeral lasted for what seemed like hours. Standing room only. More people were inside the slowly dying Baptist church than had been in that building for years. All to pay respects to my father, to give condolences to my mother, to let me and my sister know how much they would miss him. They have no idea.
⌘
My father’s glasses, now secretly resting in my pocket, are neither fancy nor expensive. Like his other purchases, he mostly looked for a bargain. “These were 47 cents cheaper than the ones your mother liked,” he’d explain. They are semi-rimless. Much like the ones issued to him by the Marine Corp during World War II. He needed them to read the endless stacks of books that were his constant companions throughout his life.
For a while, when I was a young teenager, he wore glasses with thick, black rims. Horn-rimmed, we called them. My sister and I thought they made him look like Buddy Holly.
⌘
Buddy Holly was the first young rock star to wear glasses around 1956. His distinctive, black-rimmed frames were a part of his identity. Later, teen icons like Roy Orbison (tinted lenses, dark square frames) and John Lennon (round, pink-tinted wireframes) found inspiration from Buddy's trademark look. I think a comparison to Clark Kent would have better suited my father. Mild-mannered but more powerful than a locomotive, at least in my memory.
⌘
“Looking through these glasses is like staring down a tunnel.” He complained about those horn-rimmed glasses until Mother made him splurge on a new set.
He came home with the wire-rimmed ones. The lower half was cut with half a hexagon shape while the three angles on the upper half were rounded over. A tiny wire frame attached the earpieces to the top of the lenses and across the nose rests. The lower half was unframed. Bifocals to accommodate his voracious reading habit. A habit passed down to me. A habit every father should pass down to their child.
While he might have had the lens prescription changed over the years, he kept the semi-wireless frames. The ones I stole from his casket were the last he bought more than a decade before his death at age 90. They now occupy a quiet shelf in my dining room—an ever-present yet subtle reminder that he is watching. That my words and actions still matter to him.
⌘
My father saw a lot of life through his glasses. As a young man growing up on a farm in southern Pulaski County, he watched as crops of watermelons and peanuts matured to sell at the local general store. He watched the milk flow from the juicy udders of Jersey cows as he gently squeezed them each morning, then watched that same pail of milk become mounds of butter and pitchers of cream. He watched his mother save the sweet milk for a treat at supper. He watched his mother die of what they mysteriously called “brain fever.” At age 16, he watched his older brother enlist in the Marine Corps to fight in World War II. Daddy’s books like The Ransom of Red Chief lost their appeal as he and Papaw scoured the newspapers and sat beside the radio for news of the war.
⌘
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the increased need for fighting men quickly became hampered by the rejection of nearly one-third of volunteers for bad teeth and bad eyes. In an article for the Army's First Division Museum, author Michael Ellis reports that the military had to lower their standard so that men with poor vision could enlist. The military provided Classic "P-3" style glasses to new recruits. These had rounded lenses and wireframes with flexible earpieces that attached to the top of the frames. This design allowed full peripheral vision and would fit under a gas mask.
Through his P-3 glasses, my father saw the jungles of Guam, New Guinea, and Bougainville in the South Pacific. A member of the Marine Raider division—the precursor to today’s special forces—my father saw the horrors of jungle warfare, the bravery of his comrades, and the welcome arms of my mother when he returned, whole but not unharmed. He joined the Marines when he was only a boy of 17 but returned as a man at 23. Books like The Sword in the
Stone now replaced, I imagine, with titles like For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Grapes of Wrath.
⌘
Through his glasses, my father watched his family grow, watched his daughters turn into young women—the sort of life he and thousands like him fought a war to preserve.
With his military bearing and steely stare, my father exuded a strength that inspired both respect and admiration. Like many soldiers in the war, he didn’t talk with his daughters about things he saw or things he did. “You girls don’t need to know about that stuff. There were just lots of mosquitos and mud.” I often wondered if he would have shared his war stories with us if we had been boys.
The word “literacy” is one that probably never entered my father’s mind or, as far as I know, came out of his mouth. But through his own love of books, love of reading, and love of words, he taught me the importance of reading and appreciation of a well-turned phrase, a surprising sentence structure, a lyrical paragraph. He launched me on a life-long journey of books and learning—not to pass a test or advance another grade. But to make myself a better person, one he could be proud of, one who could survive in a world without him in it.
⌘
If it is true that people make time for things that are important to them, reading was certainly important to my father. After moving back to Arkansas in 1960 when I was eight, the Arkansas Gazette came daily, and he read it front to back including the classifieds and real estate listings. He liked to read Dear Ann Landers and our daily horoscopes to us over dinner.
“Jan, you’re a Leo. Don’t let a persnickety co-worker ruin your day.”
“Mother: Scorpio. Stay cool and calm today. Danger awaits!”
We loved the comics: Alley Oop and Snuffy Smith and Dennis the Menace. As I got older, he let me help with the crossword puzzle and the daily Jumble. By age 12, he had me reading the op-ed pages and columnists writing about Vietnam and Cuba and Khrushchev and John Glenn.
Reading was not an activity confined to home or school. Trips to the library on Saturday mornings with Daddy were the highlight of my weekends. I loved the art deco building of the Little Rock Library filled with row upon row of exotic titles, wooden card catalogs, perplexing microfilm readers, and the special children’s area that always felt like a fantasy land. I was so grown up with my own library card—almost like having a driver’s license. While he headed for the history and biography stacks, he allowed me free run of the place and never restricted my choices of books. A Cricket in Times Square. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Harriet the Spy. Endless Trixie Belden mysteries. Anything by Dr. Seuss.
We had a small collection of books that Daddy kept in our rickety pine bookcase along with an outdated set of encyclopedias. He liked Aesop’s Fables because they taught straightforward life lessons with no need for explanation or discussion. The Ant and the Grasshopper (always prepare for the hard times); The Bundle of Sticks (find strength in unity); The Lion and the Mouse (small friends are important). As I grew older, Daddy pulled out old paperbacks of Treasure Island and Sherlock Holmes. I can still hear him start the story, “To Sherlock Holmes, she is always the woman,” and off we flew to Baker Street to read about A Scandal in Bohemia.
Poetry was not overlooked. Daddy’s favorite poet was Robert Service, an Englishman who spent most of his life in the Canadian Yukon Territory and wrote bawdy ballads about the frozen tundra, the miners who lusted for gold, barroom brawls, and love of the wilderness. I favored The Cremation Sam McGee and the opening lines, read in Daddy’s affected rasp, never failed to make me shiver.
“There are strange things done in the midnight sun, by the men who moil for gold.
The Arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold.”
When he read these uncomplicated narrative poems to me, his voice took on a haunted tone and he became quietly reverent. Even at an early age, I sensed that these poems held a special place for him. Maybe they triggered memories of Iceland, where he was stationed for a while during World War II. The ballads and poems told simple stories of men leading adventurous lives in a frozen, far-away place. No hidden meanings. No existential conundrums. Just old tales told in a predictable rhythmic cadence, sometimes funny, sometimes haunting, sometimes scary. But never complex or philosophical, just the way my father liked them.
⌘
After my father retired, he made it his personal mission to mow grass for his elderly friends, relatives, church members—anyone he knew or heard about who couldn’t take care of their own lawns. He mowed his and his next-door neighbor’s lawn. “Butler doesn’t mow his right,” he’d justify his encroachment onto Mr. Butler’s yard by his strict adherence to a higher standard of grass maintenance. He’d come in after mowing, drenched with sweat. After a shower, he’d put his glasses on and go out to admire his work. “Now that’s how a lawn should look.” Satisfied. Smug.
Harold Wright’s Rules of Lawn Mowing
1. Set mower high enough so the blades cut only the top 1/3 of the grass
2. Mow only when the grass is completely dry
3. Use a push mower (self-propelled is OK), but never a riding mower
4. Mow on a diagonal pattern: east to west on a north to south angle on Week 1; west to
east on a north to south angle on Week 2; rotate pattern paths each week
5. Clean mower blades and undercarriage after every mowing session
6. Sharpen blades, change engine oil, replace spark plugs and filters at least annually
I often dropped in after he’d spent the day mowing his or someone else’s lawn. Relaxed in his recliner, book in hand. I’d leave with one he had just finished, sometimes for the second or third time. Treasure Island. Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Shogun.
“Can you help me balance the checkbook?” When my father was in his eighties, he became increasingly confused. “I remember there is some way to check subtraction by re-adding the numbers, but I can’t remember exactly how it works.” From then on, I paid the bills and balanced his checkbook (to the penny!) each month.
He soon began seeing strangers in the house. My mother covered the mirrors with blankets so his own reflection would not frighten him. He could no longer read, could no longer see the words clearly. His glasses didn’t help.
⌘
On a hot July day in 2011, my 90-year-old father is lying in bed in the hospice unit. Once a strong yet gentle giant, the frail body under the sheet belies his former strength. Just yesterday, he was alert and talking, complaining of cold hands, bony and thin like the onion skin paper of his well-thumbed Bible. I immediately rushed to the nearest store for gloves. Returning to his room, I helped him slip the warm fleece onto his hands, now folded on top of the lightweight blanket as I sit near the head of his bed.
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” I sit in the quiet hospice room and read the familiar words aloud, not knowing whether my father can hear me. I strain to see the words on the yellowed pages in the fading summer light. Daddy read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy three times during his life. He hated the movies. “Too loud,” he complained. I occasionally goaded him into a debate over the power of the ring—Gollum’s “Precious”— as a metaphor for sin and to argue about good versus evil as symbolized by Frodo and Sauron. Ultimately, he convinced me that the trilogy was just a wonderful tale of a group of friends out on a grand adventure.
The heat from the mid-summer sun makes the room uncomfortably warm and a bead of sweat trickles from his hairline toward his ear. No longer speaking; no longer watching; his eyes closed; his breathing shallow. I know he is still in there somewhere, hearing me read the familiar lines: “The poor little hobbit sat down in the hall and wondered what had happened, and what was going to happen, and whether they would all stay to supper.” The page blurs as I choke back tears, but I take a deep breath, turn my eyes back to the book, and continue reading aloud.
⌘
As I approach my 60th birthday, reading to him seems wrong. He always read to me. He read to everyone in our family. Wherever he drove—to and from our home in Colorado to visit our Arkansas cousins, on vacation to the Smoky Mountains, down the street to Traveler’s Field—we heard his rich, silky voice from the front seat of the car.
“Big Texan Steak Ranch. Free 72-ounce steak if eaten in one hour.”
“A peach looks good with lots of fuzz; But man’s no peach, and never was; Burma Shave.”
“See Ruby Falls on Lookout Mountain.”
He read billboards, real estate signs, grocery store ads.
“Schlitz, the beer that made Milwaukee famous.”
"For sale by owner- three bedrooms; built-in radar oven."
“Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.”
Now the roles are reversed; I am the reader, he the listener.
⌘
At least I hope he is listening. Dabbing the sweat from his temples, I feel an urge to repay him for the countless hours he spent reading aloud to me. The simple cadence of narrative poetry. Stories with clearly stated morals. Adventure. Escape. I learned to love books and words from him, not because he was highly educated—he wasn’t—or because he forced me to read—he didn’t—but because he quietly picked up a book every night after Gunsmoke or Sugarfoot went
off the air. If I was lucky, Daddy invited me to join him in the overstuffed green rocking chair with a book he had tucked away for me beneath the pillow. The chair barely held his tall, muscular frame, but he squeezed me in between him and the chair’s cushy arm. I was safe and loved and warm with Daddy and our books.
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As the summer dusk turns to darkness, I watch my father’s essence fade away. I reflect on his down-to-earth ways that provided our family with a stable and secure life. I still love words; I still love books and poetry. I still read billboards and wish Burma Shave was back in business. I still love the English language with all its structural complexities.
Without a conscious effort, reading became a daily part of my own parenting habits. While I continued to read Dr. Seuss to both my children, we added Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and stacks of Amelia Bedelia beside the many adventures of Frog and Toad. Today, I share book recommendations with my adult children, enriching our relationships and paying homage to Daddy and his inadvertent lessons on the importance of literacy.
Books are still scattered around various rooms in my house, sometimes even in my car or purse. I still do a crossword puzzle every day. Bookshelves in my office are stuffed with favorites I can neither bring myself to give away nor trade at the used bookstore. I read for pleasure, for escape, for adventure, but rarely do I seek to interpret the symbolism in the words. Doing so, my father taught me, might interfere with what is truly important—the story.
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Daddy never looked for hidden meanings in the things he read. We never discussed the lessons taught by Aesop or the allegory of Yertle the Turtle. In books, as in his life, things were always exactly as they seemed, including his beloved Bible. He was a Jesus-flying-out-of-the-sky Missionary Baptist; he believed the stories in the Bible were true in a completely literal sense. Fact: Shadrach and his friends spent the night in a fiery furnace and came out without so much as a singed eyebrow. Fact: One minute the jars at the wedding in Cana were filled with water; the next minute—wine. John the Revelator saw exactly what we will all see at the end of time. Jesus will return one day, floating on the clouds, and every person will see him, regardless of his or her global position. King David’s poems about shepherds and mountains are exactly that— poems about shepherds and mountains.
King David and Robert Service were not the only poets my father loved. Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s Casey at the Bat was a favorite, and I often begged for a reading of the iconic ballad, especially when it was time for the World Series. Daddy had been a pitcher for his Marine Corp team in San Diego before deploying to the South Pacific. He never talked about the war or his baseball prowess and, having been taught to respect his privacy and his reticence, I never asked about that time in his life. But I knew—from his military bearing, the respect I saw shown to him by other men, the dusty trunk in the attic full of baseball memorabilia, medals, and photographs—that my father was a talented ballplayer and a Marine with an honored past.
After his death, someone shared a story about his Marine Corp baseball team playing an exhibition game with UCLA around 1941. Daddy struck out a college player named Jackie Robinson not just once but twice during that game. It is a story he never shared. Like his service in the war, he must have feared a sort of “observer effect,” where simply telling the tale would somehow cheapen or alter it. I think he identified with the pitcher in Casey at the Bat and kept the memory of striking Robinson out hidden in his heart to preserve and nurture the experience.
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I must have dozed for a few minutes. The Hobbit has fallen to the floor and my neck is sore from resting against the back of the plastic chair. Daddy is still with me. Barely. I can see the blanket move up and down with each labored breath. It is now dark outside but still sultry beside the window, the air conditioner rattling as it attempts to cool the room. I reach for his still-gloved hands, hands that held me when I was hurt or sad, hands that turned the pages for over 90 years. I imagine he squeezes my hand just a bit. I lay my head on the pillow beside him and thank him for being who he is and for making me who I am. For all he saw. For all he did.
I remove the glasses from his sleeping face and set them on the end table beside the Gideon Bible and a pink plastic pitcher filled with tepid water. As he fades with the sunset, I think about all he saw through those glasses. I put them on. But the world is just a blur. The glasses won't improve the eyesight of someone less brave, less strong, less worthy than my father.
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Daddy passes away later that night. Quietly. No drama. Mother is by his side when he draws his last breath. I arrive about ten minutes later. He planned his passing with his usual efficiency: insurance policies ready for signatures, living trust in place, his will signed and registered with the courts, funeral paid in full. In death, as in life, he took care of business, took care of his family, took care of me.
Returning home, exhausted from grief, and digging for strength to face my new world without him, I reach for the faded and cracked volumes of Robert Service and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, loose pages held together with paperclips. I carefully unfold my copy of Casey at the Bat, published in 1957 in the Sunday News magazine section, cracked, faded, taped together— the version he always read to me—a phantom whiff of Old Spice on the page. I read the wrinkled
lines, “But there is no joy in Mudville; Mighty Casey has struck out,” and think I might have those words carved on his headstone. Or better yet, Dr. Seuss’s words, “You can find magic wherever you look. Sit back and relax. All you need is a book.”
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A few days later, I take the glasses from his lifeless face and slip them into my pocket. I know that each time I see them, each time I touch them, each time I hold them, I’ll be seeing and touching and holding a piece of my father’s soul. And each time I pick up a book—adventure, mystery, memoir, poetry, history—I’ll think of him and the gift of literacy he left to me and his grandchildren: our love of a good book. A good story. A good life.
Copyright © February 2023 Jan Jolly
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Jan Jolly is from Little Rock, Arkansas and recently completed a master’s degree in nonfiction writing from the University of Arkansas Little Rock. She retired in 2017 to pursue a new career as a writer, and her work has appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Salvation South, The Write Launch, Quills & Pixels, and The MacGuffin. She enjoys adding her septuagenarian voice to the current literary conversation. Her website is
https://jkjolly.wixsite.com/jan-jolly. |
