A long time ago I was visiting my dad in a nursing home after his last amputation. I had left my bride, but brought our young dog Henry. We drove from Aspen to Phoenix in the big brown bomber, the '84 Landcruiser with big mud bogg tires. It was a rough time those tears when they took his toes and then his foot and then finally the leg just bellow the knee. The heartbreak and the strokes were bad enough, but when he lost his balance and his feet started dieing things really started to spiral. I was there for ten days with the secret mission of getting him home to mom's home-cooking so he would eat and stay alive. He had gotten so skinny. That skeletal kind of skinny. I think his weight when he was a freshman at Maryland was probably a buck 50 with dark eyes that had seen action in the war (I picture in my mind the team picture from his freshman year yearbook that I had looked up online when I first started this blog, I thought he looked skinny and haunted). Now he was far below that weight in bed, missing a leg, greatly diminished in size and looking skinny and haunted). He still had a presence about him. Here was a real man, but most of the time that first day he seemed like he really wasn't sure where he was and he much preferred being asleep than awake trying to figure it out. Most of his awake time was spent getting used to the idea of only having one leg. He was not himself, but Henry recognized him right away. Jumped his front paws up on th bed and sniffed the stub. He gave his knee a friendly little lick. Henry loved what I loved and I loved my dad more than anything and man did I love that dog. Henry was a golden retriever with an incredibly old soul. He could out run, out jump, out fetch or swim any dog alive. He was eighty pounds of mountain bread muscle and had a blond silky main with red highlights you could just bury your hands into. All this mattered little to the patients and staff of this institution, what matter to them was his huge heart and ancient soul. We'd visit my father first thing in the morning and then we would go all around his floor.
Sunday, August 13, 2017
The View
Thursday, August 10, 2017
The Hero's Story
I've been wondering what this is all about lately and I have to admit not knowing. Deep inside me there is this need to tell the story. Not just any story, but his story. My dad's story. I love this blog because time and time again I've come here and tried and failed. I share a picture or a memorie that stirs in me some inspiration to give it another try.
Recently one of those memories has surfanced from when I was really young. This memory is a faded picture. One of those 4x4 inch, rounded on the corners, 1970s, faded color photos, that may have never existed, but I think it did. Carol shooting the picture or maybe Karen took it but both are there. In the memory one of them took the picture with one of those little rectangular cameras with the plastic cartridge film that was easy load and not expose the film. One of the ones you could stick a little square disposable flash cube on and shoot 4 flash pictures with and the cube would rotate on quarter turn each time you pushed the film forward with the thumb slide thingy on the bottom. If I actually saw the picture it would have been over 40 years ago.
We were in Birmingham, Alabama, where my father was born. It wasn't for a funeral which seem to dominate my memory of that place, but for a convention. An AMSA convention. The American Metal Stamping Association's annual convention, my dad wast the Executive Director. We were in the Presidential Suite on the top floor of the nicest hotel in town across the street from the Convention Center. We were looking down and across the street at the big sign out front of the Convention Center and it had a big flashing marquis that ran through the middle of it. The words would roll out and stop, "Birmingham Welcomes Home..." the words would roll off then the next line would follow, "Her Favorite Son..." then in all caps, "JEFF KEITH!!!" I remember my sisters timing it so they could snap a shot of each of the sections of the message.
That's about it. A snap shot memory. Of my sisters taking a snap shot of my dad's hero's welcome home. There had been others before I was born. I remember a news clipping of when he came home from the University of Maryland before going off to play in the Sugar Bowl the honored him with a parade. Hard to imagine, but that's what the newspaper clipping had said. I'm sure when he came home from the war before going to Maryland there must have been some kind of hero's welcome then too I imagine.
I remember him being a little uncomfortable about seeing his name up on that big sign. I vaguely remember him grumbling something like I'm really going to hear it from the board that that's why we're here in this sweaty little town instead of Las Vegas or New York or Cleveland. It's probably one of my earliest Penthouse Hotel Suite Convention in a big city memories of which there were a lot. Until I became a teenager and they stopped and my dad's life started getting a little rough.
Telling the Hero's story is tough. It isn't easy to get right. You have to start in the right place. Here again I have failed. I needed to start at the beginning him leaving home a down-trodden son of an alcoholic ,16 years old, off to become a Marine, but being found out too young having to ride banana boats up and down the Panama Cannal as a Merchant Marine for two years before becoming a real Marine in the Pacific Theater during the Big One. Overcoming one adversity over another, achieving one unbelievable level of success after another and finally returning home the hero. Well, maybe I'll get it right next time.
I remember one time we were at a convention in Dallas and Jay and I were up on the sun deck of this sky scraper hotel fooling around on these massage tables when one of them fell over and crushed my ankle. It was all swollen and black and blue but I still got to go out to the dude ranch and shoot shot guns and ride horses. Good times. Funny how writting about a memory somehow unlocks a few others.
Saturday, August 5, 2017
The Rabbit
Emma was chasing a rabbit and closing in on it as they reached the crest of a ridge. Didn't capture this on film, but the image is blazin on my mind. The rabbit leaped its body fully extended slightly arched with the curvature of its tragrectory. Emma leaping a split second later. Jumping higher fully extended arcing with a trajectory, depending the length of flight would intersect with that of the rabbit. From my perspective below the ridge the rabbit sailed over the edge about three to four feet off the ground and Emma crossed over at least six feet above the edge. As they sailed the arc of a double rainbow over the cliff and out of sight I literally lost my breath. I saw it in slow motion the prey and the hunter the rabbit mid-flight turned an eye back and saw his nemisis flying in his blind spot. Then they float out of sight over and down the ridgline. I ran to the top and saw Emma about fifteen feet from the crest with her head fully jammed down a rabbit hole. For a second it looked like the rabbit maybe landed a Bullseye directly into his hidie hole and Emma just shot directly in behind her jamming her face so deep into the hole she was stuck. But she backed out and looked back up at me with a did you see it dad look? Yeah, I Saw it Em. Looked like Superman and Mighty Mouse or a sene from Mutual of Omaha. I know, Emma, your too young to know what any of that means, but trust me, it was cool. Way cool. Ask Tyler, he saw it too.