Wednesday, July 14, 2021
- I Am From Raymond -
It’s possible that my oldest visual memory of my father is seeing him walk away from his family during an evening at Suburban Park, an amusement park in Manlius, NY that was a source of great joy in our early years growing up in the nearby village of Cazenovia, NY.
He was walking away under the lights that filled the park’s nighttime midway, walking toward the back of the park where an old wooden roller-coaster loomed over the scene, dwarfing my daddy, a broad-shouldered man wearing a light jacket and jeans.
In front of him, a police officer who was at least a couple inches shorter than my father, who was about 5 feet, 9 inches tall, had his left hand on the right arm of a much larger man who was wearing a black-leather biker’s jacket. The biker dude was staggering a bit, and had both hands behind his back, in handcuffs.
I think I was about four.
Dad soon returned and assured his four young children that all was well, that the police officer was taking a bad man away for the night, and he–my dad–just wanted to “make sure they got where they were going.”
It was my first lesson in looking out for others, and the image was burned in my brain and stamped on my conscience.
Of course, it doesn’t necessarily follow that everyone my father ever tried to help actually needed his help, and if he taught his children to think of others first, it was left to us to learn through trial and error the difference between helping and interfering. But I suppose no lesson is perfect.
My father, Raymond Newton McDowell, died on April 10, 2021 at the age of 86. One day earlier, I had visited him along with his childhood sweetheart, my mother, Vera Anne (Estey) McDowell. It was their 66th wedding anniversary, and Mom spoke to him long and low about their many years of happiness and her continuing love for him.
She held his hand, stroked his hair, touched his face. He didn’t respond, breathing in spurts and sputters while his unseeing, half-opened eyes stared at the ceiling of the room at Waterville Residential Care Center. The place he had called home for more than three years, since Alzheimer’s and his declining mobility made it impossible for Mom to care for him at their nearby apartment.
I had watched my father disappear slowly over the five years since we moved them north from Zephyrhills, FL at their doctor’s urging, prompted by their failing health. There was the day in 2016 that I knocked on their apartment door and Dad opened it, looking blankly at me in a way that told me, for the first time, that he didn’t know his middle son. That early episode would be followed by others, as his short-term memory waned and even his long, detailed stories of his early years on the farm and in the Navy became more halting and finally ceased altogether. In my last half-dozen visits in late 2019, just before COVID-19 shut us out from visitations for more than a year, my father looked at me with a startled fear, not recognizing me at all.
My mother, who suffers from acute COPD, soldiered on throughout Dad’s decline, never ceasing to remind him that he was her “hunka’ hunka’ burnin’ love” and seeing to his daily grooming and feeding. She visited him for more than two years, twice a day almost without fail, sharing with her five children stories about his more lucid moments, never dwelling on the disappearance of the man she had loved since they were in 8th grade at Cazenovia High School.
When we got the call from the nursing home that Dad had passed away three hours after our visit during which Mom and I took turns reading him the 23rd Psalm, one day after his 66th anniversary, Mom and I hugged and cried and I let my brothers and sisters and my mother’s brother and sisters know the news we had all known was coming.
The nurses at WRCC had come to know my father as a cat with more than nine lives, as he had survived a half-dozen bouts with pneumonia and even a COVID-19 infection during his three years there. In January of 2021, his charge nurse had finally suggested a cessation of most of his meds in favor of comfort care, and his wife and children reluctantly agreed that it was the right thing to do.
Of course, my Dad was not so much these last five years as he was the 81 years that preceded them. He lived a modest life that included, in retirement, seven years of travelling the lower 48 in a FORD F-250 and 28-foot travel trailer with his “Annie.” He was hard work and music and vacations at Eatonbrook Reservoir, and solemn talks with the children who worshipped their father as their first hero.
He was spirited arguments about philosophy and religion around the kitchen table that were only interrupted by the protestations of our mother, who had been reared in a quieter house and didn’t understand all the shouting. He was hours of playing catch, throwing pop flies and grounders for us to field. He was our introduction to golf at a former cow pasture of a course in the nearby hamlet of Delphi Falls, where other men from the country schooled their kids dressed in jeans and t-shirts and sometimes no shirts at all. He was fishing and basketball.
He was our introduction to all these things, maybe music most of all. He played Roger Miller and Earnest Tubb and the Beatles and the New Christy Minstrels and Bob Dylan and Conway Twitty on his electric and acoustic guitars, and we sang along and played our half-sized guitars as he taught us. Later, our frequent Friday-night singalongs would be accompanied by trombone, trumpet, baritone, flutes, and even my bassoon. Music was one of my father’s greatest gifts to his children, and he took great joy from hearing us play and sing.
He was the oldest of his parents’ sons who was sent at age 10 to live at his grandparents’ farm in Fenner, NY because his parents could not feed all three of their children at home in Syracuse. The six years there, during which he saw his parents and siblings sometimes on weekends but mostly lived the harsh schedule that defines farm life, shaped his stoic attitude and tireless work ethic.
Dad was Honor Man in his company at Navy boot camp prior to his three-year stint during the Korean Conflict, which included a yearlong world cruise during which he wrote a letter every single day to his young wife, Anne, who studied in college and waited for their reunion. On weekend shore leave from his home base in Newport, RI, he would hitchhike 500 miles to Buffalo State Teachers’ College, visit Anne for six or seven hours, then start the hitch back to the base.
He was the company man who rose at 5:30 each day to “shave, bathe, dress, and go” as an employee of Carrier Corporation in Syracuse, a 45-mile daily round-trip commute from our Cazenovia home.
He was the grown man who laughed in that rich baritone voice until he couldn’t breathe as his young children attacked him in the hallway most nights after work, tickling him mercilessly until he collapsed on the floor and our mother made us stop.
Dad wasn’t perfect. He was given to outbursts of anger–perhaps a product of his strict upbringing as the son of a laborer whose own father had led the stark life of a traveling Baptist minister. The years softened him, and he reached out to his adult children in some ways that he had not known as a younger father.
A triple bypass after his heart attack in 2003 gave him great pause to reevaluate things, as it almost always does. Not long after that, he gave our mother a sealed envelope and made her promise not to open it unless he died before she did.
The envelope was marked simply “Annie,” and Mom kept it faithfully in a lockbox for more than a decade. She finally opened it the night he died, when sleep proved impossible and her restlessness became unbearable.
She read for the first time the words my father had left his one love:
My Annie,
I regret leaving you in this life mostly because I can no longer protect you from harm. I will wait for you to join me in our next life.
I love you as I have loved you since we first met. You are all I ever needed in my earthly life.
You have been a caring and loving wife, mother and friend. You kept me from harm’s way and I thank you for that.
Have a happy life until we meet again.
Your guy,
R
As one who chose a career in writing, I have always credited my mother and maternal grandmother with my interest in journalism and literature. But my father had always had an elegance in his simple writing style, and I was surprised to find that his eloquence grew as dementia took over his mind. He once told me wistfully, in the early days of his decline, “Sometimes I feel sorry for people who get confused, forget things, show signs that they’ve lost a step. Now I realize that they are me.”
Upon my last pre-pandemic visit to my father in December 2019, just before the nursing home closed its doors to visitors as COVID-19 raged, weeks after he had begun to greet me with only a blank stare, I asked my father if he knew who I was.
He looked at me silently for a long time, studying my face, not moving the tiniest bit. Finally a slight grin came across his face and he turned his head to the side a little, never taking his eyes off me. Those steel-blue eyes now squinted ever so slightly, as they had always done through the decades, just before he said something whimsical or mischievous.
“I know,” he said softly at last, “that you’re from me.“
More than 55 years after my father taught me that first lesson about helping, he taught me one last lesson. It’s this:
I’m Brian. I’m husband to Margaret. Son of Anne. Father to Megan. Brother to Jennifer, Mark, Jeff and April.
And I am from Raymond.
https://bmcdowell0.wordpress.com/2021/04/12/i-am-from-raymond/
