My Father was a Carpenter

My father was a carpenter.  He learned to build houses from a book entitled How to Build a House for $1300 … and then he built one and another and another.  Dad couldn’t afford to send us kids to college, so instead, he built each of  us a house.  Part of the deal was that we had to work alongside him.  I learned to tape and sand and paint walls while country music or Paul Harvey (Dad’s favorite radio show) mused over the radio waves in the background.

In his spare time, Dad was a musician.  Had he been born twenty years later, he would have had a garage band, but instead he cobbled together a group of neighbors and they played in the basement every Saturday night followed by a potluck dinner.  Dad could play any stringed instrument by ear, as well as the spoons and the harmonica.  After he retired, he joined a band at the Senior Center called The Renegades.  They performed at nursing homes and in shopping malls during the holidays.

My dad bought his first guitar from a pawn shop on Lake Street in Minneapolis — a circa 1950’s Gibson.  Later he added an electric guitar, a banjo, and eventually a Fender Dobro.  At some point after he retired, he purchased a violin from the Sears Roebuck Catalog, but he didn’t like its tone — so he researched the specifications of a Stradivarius violin, disassembled his Sears model, shaved his down to match, and reassembled it.  It sounded much better, he said, though not by Stradivarius standards.

My Dad’s music was the soundtrack of my childhood.  Even after dementia robbed him of language, and his short-term memory, he remembered music.  It’s as if the notes were embedded in his cortex. Even when he struggled to remember me — I would greet him in his last year by saying “Hi Dad, it’s Lin, your youngest daughter” — he remembered how to play Blue Moon or Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. When he began hospice, a musical therapist came every two weeks to play her guitar and sing.  He remembered all the words to his favorite songs and though he could no longer play along on his bass guitar or his violin, he either sang or played his harmonica.

When my dad died, there were only two things I wanted: his violin and his Gibson guitar.   These two instruments are here with me on the North Shore, and my husband is learning to play the Gibson. When I am lonely for him, I run my hands over their worn wood and think of the day my husband and I brought him home from the hospital to die.  He sat in his recliner, laid the violin across his lap and plucked out a simple tune:

“There’s a place in France where the ladies don’t wear pants.”