Adams Wife’s Weblog

“Welcome to Slice of Life Sunday -

a meme dedicated to preserving the accounts of events cut out of the lives of average people just like you from all over the world.”

I‘m running a couple weeks behind with my Slice of Life. I’ve chosen a topic from Week 13, June 15 to write about today. It’s been that kind of month. My father is one of my favorite subjects and I have not yet made a post about him. It’s time I did.

For a few days I have been thinking of events and people in my life in terms of the music that surrounds them in my memories. My father was a great lover of good music, and he had a wonderful baritone voice. I loved to hear him sing - and in our family we sang a lot. When we worked we sang, when we played we sang, and when we were happy or sad music was frequently the medium by which we expressed those feelings.

The one piece of music that I associate most with my father is “Invictus” a poem by William Ernest Henley set to a powerful melody. I heard my father sing it on many occasions. The power in the words and the music and in dad’s performance moved me each time I heard it beginning when I was a very small child. I still get chills just remembering. He believed those words - he was his own master, captain of his life’s ship. That is one of the reasons he was so loved by his family - we knew we could count on his strength and his integrity no matter what.

Dad was a product of the Great Depression. He had learned at a very young age that eating depended on hard work and preparation. And he worked hard. He was a postal clerk for most of my life, a farm worker before that and frequently worked a second, or even third job when needed. Not only did he work hard at his job, but he worked hard at home, too. Each year we grew a large garden and canned the vegetables we grew for use throughout the winter. We picked fruit and gleaned potatoes from the already-harvested fields that also went into our basement for winter storage. As a result of this hard work we never went hungry, nor did any of our less-fortunate neighbors. Dad had a broad definition of who his neighbors were and if any of them were in need he would go into the basement, to the shelves of bottled fruit and vegetables and the potato pit and fill up a box with good, wholesome food which he would then leave anonymously at their front door.

In addition to the food we grew dad would often go hunting and fishing to supplement our winter’s supply. We used whatever he caught or killed. For him there was no sport in taking life. As he got older he no longer hunted. Some of the men he worked with loved to hunt, but did not use all they got. Knowing that Dad would take care of anything they didn’t want for their own use, a knock would come at the door late in the evening and the man standing there would say, “Tell Carl I’ve got a couple deer for him.”

Dad would get out of bed (he went to work at 3:30 am so was in bed at about 7:00 each night) and do the preliminary butchering and hang the meat, then come back to it in a couple days and we would all gather ’round to wrap the roasts, steaks, and chops for the freezer as dad finished cutting up the animal. One year these friends of dad’s, along with their teen-aged sons, brought so many ducks and pheasants to the house that, in the interest of time, mom began saving only the breasts, which she then browned in the frying pan before putting into jars and preserving them for later use. Have you ever had a duck-breast sandwich or some pheasant soup on a cold winter day?

Though he worked hard, Dad was not all about work. As a family we also played hard when the work was done. Some of my best childhood memories are of fishing, picnicking, and camping with Dad and the family. We were a small family - Dad, Mom, my sister and me (later a young brother joined us, too), but Dad gathered people around him. When we went into the woods to camp we never went alone. We had Dad’s mom and dad, friends of the family, and aunts, uncles, and cousins galore. Always as many of them as could get away were there with us.

My father was a big man. It has been said that he was not only large in stature, but large in spirit. He had a quiet, abiding faith in God and lived his life in accordance with the principles taught by Jesus Christ. He was a man who loved much and gave freely. He was my rock, my defender, my shelter from the storm. To me he epitomized the truest and best definition of the word “father.” I loved him and never doubted that his love for me, for my mom and sister and for all he considered family, was as large and strong as he was.

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