Hard not to think a lot about my Dad this time of year. Last Monday was the third anniversary of his
death, obviously today is Father’s Day and tomorrow would have been his 75th
birthday.
It makes me especially sad that my nieces and nephews will never
get to know him. Juliette and Owen did,
briefly, Kiu and Leelawadee will know only stories and pictures of Pepere.
My laptop recently crashed and due to a miscommunication
with the fixer, I lost my entire hard drive.
One of the hardest things to lose was a text copy of the eulogy my
sister gave at his funeral. She was in
Thailand at the time and because my brother and I were too much of a mess to
give it (he’s too selfish and I have a crippling performance anxiety), she
had to do it by Skype. It perfectly
described the imperfect relationship we had with our Dad. Was he objectively a great Dad? Nope, although parenting is imprecise and hard
to measure. He always saw his role as
financial provider and left the provision of attention and affection to my Mom
for the most part. When we were younger,
he always told my Mom he thought he would be a better father when we were
older. When we were older, he mentioned
that he thought that he was a better father when we were younger. He was horrified when at age 23, I pointed
out to him that I played 12 seasons of varsity sports in high school and 4
seasons of varsity softball in college, and yet he had never seen me play a
game (in any sport). To his credit, he
attended my very next softball game for my summer league, but it was at night,
when he wasn’t working. On the other
hand, I had to ask my Mom to stop attending games because at one point in
college, she was so exuberant after a (rare) big hit from me that she rushed
the field and gave me a hug on the bench.
So while my Dad’s attention and affection may have been lacking, he had
the great sense to marry a woman who had more than enough of everything to give
her children the emotional safety and consistency that all children need.
So I never wanted for anything I needed throughout my childhood
and adolescence (to be clear there were many things I WANTED, but were not
needed, that went unprovided). He even
took a second job while we were in college so we wouldn’t graduate with an overwhelming
debt load. My senior year in college, all
three of us were at school and he was trying to manage three tuitions,
including the whole boat for my sister whose college offered no financial aid. And I thank my father for the advice he gave
me in my youth when I pitched a fit over not being able to get $45 adidas Gazelles
or a Champion sweatshirt or whatever then trendy and expensive clothes I wanted:
if you want it, get a job and pay for it yourself. So I did.
I had a paper route the day after I was eligible at 11 and a weekend job
as soon as I could get my working papers at 14.
A post for another time will be the awesomeness of my college job in the
mail room, in which I worked as often as my class schedule would allow. But suffice it to say that one of his
greatest gifts to me was his work ethic.
That and a love for animals.
But back to the eulogy.
The theme was that while my Dad may have struggled to physically or
verbally show affection, he did so effusively through his hands. Whether it was working two jobs, tending his
garden in honor of his father (below is an article from the Globe from
September 4, 2005), repainting my condo 2,000 times or even changing a light
bulb, he would work tirelessly. I came
to understand and appreciate this as an adult.
As a result, I have a now tragic learned helplessness for relatively
simple household tasks. It was my
opportunity to spend time with him and his opportunity to show me he loved me,
so we both fostered my ineptitude, but it is unfortunate now that he is no
longer here.
A perfect example is when I came home late from work to find
my beloved kitty had passed (RIP Sophia). He was the one I called at 1:00 AM
that night. He came over, wrapped her in
her favorite blanket and took me to the MSPCA where he took care of the
logistics. My Mom would have been too concerned
about my complete emotional decompensation and need for consolation that she
would have missed the immediate need of making sure my cat’s body was properly taken
care of. As an adult, I realize that this
was just as loving as a hug and shoulder to cry on.
We had become very close by the time he got sick and I took
a leave of sorts from work and moved back in with my parents to help out. We instantly resumed our childhood nightly
ritual of watching Jeopardy! – I was the fastest, but when my Mom and I were
stumped and he had time, there was rarely an answer he didn’t know. I was at his bedside on June 10, 2010, the
night that he died, and as usual, Jeopardy was on in the background. The Category was Short Stories and clue was:
"In
an 1842 tale he wrote, "Down--still unceasingly--still inevitably down!...
I shrunk convulsively at its every sweep" .
My Dad’s last words were the answer: “The Pit and the Pendulum”, which technically was wrong because the answer was supposed to be Edgar Allen Poe, but also more correct because he not only knew the author, he knew the exact story it was from. And if you haven’t read it, the story is about a man sentenced to death who must endure the torture of being bound while watching a scythe slowly descending to its ultimate arrival of his demise. He ends up saved at the last moment, but there would be no French Legion to save my Dad. His last words were uttered at 7:59 pm and he had passed by 8:15. He had had enough and his slow torture ended after two long, hard years, with his children all present and loving, which I guess in retrospect, does indeed mean he was a great Dad by any standard.
Boston
Globe - Boston, Mass.
Author:
|
Keith O'Brien, Globe Correspondent
|
Date:
|
Sep 4, 2005
|
CITY WEEKLY JAMAICA PLAIN
Paul Desharnais plants vegetables in his yard.
Tomatoes here. Basil there. He has sage and chives, too, and winter squash and
cantaloupe, beets, and eggplant.
Then there is the cornfield.
"Field" probably isn't the right word for
it, of course. It's not much bigger than the Buick Century that sits in his
driveway next to the tiny patch of yard. Small though it may be, however, the
crop attracts attention.
"It's mostly amazement," says Desharnais,
"that it can be done."
Around the Hall Street neighborhood where Desharnais
has lived since 1961, he and his wife, Irene, are known by strangers as the
"corn people."
And as Nicole Desharnais, one of the couple's grown
children, recently realized, the memory of the perfectly planted corn in the
small yard in the city stays with longtime residents.
"You lived in the corn house?" someone
familiar with the neighborhood asked Nicole, 32, not long ago, after connecting
the description of her childhood home with the memory of the corn. "I
never really thought about it," she said. After all, she and her two
siblings grew up with it, planting the seeds in tidy rows every June with their
father.
Paul Desharnais, 67, a retired painter, estimates that
he has been growing corn in his yard for almost 30 years. This year's crop is a
good one, he says maybe his best steady and plentiful. He and Irene, a
first-grade teacher, don't mind the people who stop and stare.
"Usually, it's a conversation starter,"
Irene said.
Not that she and Paul find anything amazing about
their urban "field."
"Corn has always been a crop around this
area," Paul says. "People stop and say, `Oh, that's interesting. Corn
right in the middle of Jamaica Plain.' Now stop and think about it. . . . This
is where it started. So why not?"
The garden took shape, almost by accident, he says,
after his father, Wilfred, died in 1975. Until then, Wilfred Desharnais had
kept the yard meticulously manicured, according to his son, possibly to remind
him of the sprawling green pastures of his youth on a dairy farm in Canada. But
after his father died, and Paul finally found the time to begin working on the
yard again, he decided to rip up the lawn altogether and plant vegetables
instead.
The way he figured it, "You can't eat
crabgrass."
So in went the tomatoes and the peppers, the
strawberries and the carrots, and the corn. By the end of the month, he and his
wife will have picked from their yard some six or seven dozen ears of corn.
Irene will already have the sugar water boiling when she goes down to pick it.
"You can't get it any fresher," she
explained. As it is, the corn is already juicy. The ears, Irene likes to say,
are getting full. She can tell just by feeling them as she did one recent
evening, standing among the green sun-dappled stalks with her husband looking over
her shoulder. There were people coming to dinner, and she wanted to make sure
there was enough corn to go around.
"Everybody," she said, "loves the
corn."
