Some Bittersweet Memories of Life With Father : Men on the Moon

Father. Fathers loved and fathers feared, close fathers and distant fathers, famous fathers and “ordinary” fathers. No matter what the relationship, he’s special. In the remembrances that follow, Times writers tell something of what that relationship has meant.

Dad was determined to paint our house before he ran out of time.

Already, diabetes had cost him one leg. So each morning, as soon as he’d read two newspapers, he pulled on his plastic leg and climbed a ladder. Before long he had scraped the wood siding as raw as his dying left foot.

Dad put the surgeons off until he could coat the wood with linseed oil and then apply fresh color to the battered old house we rented on a bluff above the beach at Santa Cruz.

Rum-Soaked Cigars

One day in 1967 he finished the job and I drove him to the hospital. He smoked cheap rum-soaked cigars and I told him about my memory of the first time he went into the hospital, nine years earlier when I was 10 and Eric was 7.

My mother left us in the waiting room because Dad’s room was on the other side of a sign which proclaimed “absolutely no one under 16 admitted.” Then one day a nurse marched Eric and me right past the door with its ominous sign. I just knew it meant we would never see him again.

“Well, this won’t be the last time you see me either,” he chuckled, humor burying his fury at the prospect of early death. “Painting that damn house isn’t the last thing I’m going to do. I’m going to see men walk on the moon--and my second grandchild born.”

In fall 1967 I brought Dad home to his freshly painted house. We put a hospital bed in the dining room with its picture windows, even though his eyes were so ravaged, he could barely make out the waves.

Every day Dad telephoned to ask about my second child. Fifteen hours before she came, five months before Neil Armstrong’s giant step, Dad’s time ran out.

Sometimes I sit on my deck with a cigar, look up at the man in the moon and feel Dad.