Rebooting Dad
Lots of Father’s Day paens out there, but it was Nicholas Kristof’s “My Fathers’ Gift to Me,” in today’s Times that inspired me to write about my old man.
George H. Fleetham was born in a Michigan farm house in January of 1925 and died in Rockland County New York in September of 1974 after falling off his bike at a railroad crossing. It was a “one in a million” tragedy. I was twenty-one when we laid him in the ground in the country cemetery in Sunfield, Michigan. I’ve often wished that I had a list of his sayings that I could give to my kids, but I don’t have many to pass on. Either Dad wasn’t a talker or I wasn’t a listener. I suspect it was a lot of both.
He worked as a chemical engineer for Mobil Oil at Lexington and 42nd, but he was a carpenter at heart. I remember the summer of 1965 when he took a month off to work on the old farmhouse in Michigan. In those days, before I enlisted in the East Coast Hippie Revolution, I was still his number one helper and for three weeks I pounded nails, lifted windows, held ladders, and cut boards. I learned how to measure twice and saw once. We worked sun up to sun down and the pay off for me was a promise to play golf before we returned to New York.
On the last day of his vacation, after he had squared in the last window, he took me to the Portland Golf Course. I can still remember him wandering down the fairway in orange shorts, shanking every other shot, and grunting all the while how much he hated golf …. because he couldn’t control it. We finished in the setting sun and walked into the club house bar, crowded with laughing men. I can still see him chugging down cold beers while I tore into the best cheeseburger of my life. I remember he looked at me with his warm brown eyes and told me that I had worked hard and that I was a fine son.
Thanks for posting this Charlie.
Thinking about my dad after reading your tribute to your own…I was remembering a few funny episodes. I had a friend named Bill P. (trouble-maker) who would always come by the house and drive across the lawn (ignoring the driveway) up to the front door to pick me up, and it would make my dad go absolutely apoplectic.
I remember one night when Bill and I were driving off in Bill’s orange Pinto and my dad came raging out of the house in his pajamas, shaking his fist and yelling as we sped off. It still makes me smile to think about it.
My dad loved me to pieces, but I used to drive him to distraction with my willfulness and lack of convention, attraction to defiant characters and my ability to argue with him late into the night…actually, I think we both enjoyed those conversations, when I’d try to come up with philosophical, reasoned workarounds to his objections of whatever plan of mine he was opposing at the time.
I remember telling him, earnestly, that it was my intention to quit school and join the peace corps. His retort: “You want to save the world but you can’t even take out the garbage.”
(Odd sidenote: it’s “garbage night” here in Ann Arbor and I have yet to take it out. He was obviously more prescient than I ever gave him credit for.)
It was a semi-constant battle as I would attempt to surprise him with me “deep and passionate intellect” and he would try to dial me back with his “better judgment.” It’s a dynamic that is sorely missing from my world these days.
Thanks for writing up your own thoughts about your dad…I guess Kristoff inspired you and you inspired me.