Life With Fathers
June 9, 2005

As Father's Day looms, dutiful offspring face the perplexing annual question of what to get the old man on his designated day. Candy and flowers are so Mom, while department stores and newspaper ads promote such dad-friendly merchandise as the dreaded tie, or maybe a CD of Dad's favorite geezer rock (like, from the '80s).

Those of us former children of a certain age whose fathers are no longer with us are left out of this merchandising melee. But that doesn't mean we no longer think about our dads. Quite the opposite. Liberated from earthly life—and no longer confined to the one day a year set aside to honor them—our fathers are more present in our lives now than ever.

This is true of anyone we've loved and lost, but especially a parent, with whom we've formed such an influential and complex bond. Art Boy and I are both fortunate to have been very close to our respective fathers while growing up. We wish we'd had more time to spend with them, of course, but we have no other regrets about the quality of our paternal relationships.

Art Boy's father, Fred Aschbacher, ran his own general contracting business out of his basement for 50 years in the suburban Illinois town where he lived all his life. We used to call him the Indestructible Man; he lived to age 85, and worked right up to the end. (When he passed away in 2002, he had jobs booked for another year.) But a lifetime of climbing ladders, hacking out drywall, and crawling around installing tile played havoc with his joints. After he turned 65, he grudgingly went in for a hip replacement, which they guaranteed would last for ten years. Fred, of course, outlasted the new hip, and had to have the operation redone later.

None of Fred's three sons took over the family business, but all of them learned invaluable building and construction skills from working summers with their dad. One became an architecht. One became construction supervisor for a school district. One became, well, an artist, but Art Boy still channels his inner handyman all the time. He not only fixes stuff around our house, he gets calls from our friends to help them knock out walls, rehang shower doors, or build cabinets.

When we upgraded our kitchen last winter, Art Boy did all the work himself, except for installing the new window and the new counters. But after building a new upper cabinet for a previously unused corner, he was stymied as to how he was going to screw it into place without a crew to hold it up—until he remembered his dad's ingenious solution in a similar situation. After some on-the-job mishap or other, Fred tore the ligaments in his shoulder and was never able to raise that arm above his head. When he had a cabinet to hang on a job, he got a tire jack out of his truck, propped it on the counter and jacked the cabinet up into place. But that was Fred. Nothing ever fazed him, and he never wasted time and energy getting upset; he just figured out a way to solve the problem. "It'll all work out," was his motto.

My dad, Art Jensen, has been gone for 14 years, but I think about him every night as I'm turning off the kitchen light to go to bed. As I pass the gas stove, I touch every knob to make sure the burners and oven are all turned off. This was my dad's bedtime habit for years—and I'm the only one who ever saw him do it.

For awhile when I was a pre-tween, my dad worked nights as a maintenance engineer at a card club in Gardena. He left for work at 8 in the evening, in a bottle-green jumpsuit with "Art" stitched on the pocket. He got home a little after 4 am, when the rest of us were all sleeping. Except me. I was going through a phase of sleeping on the living room couch, after too many episodes of Twilight Zone made me afraid to walk down the long, dark hall to my bedroom.

I always woke up when I heard my dad's car in the driveway, but I always pretended furiously to be asleep when he came in the door. I didn't want him to think he'd disturbed me, much less have to explain what I was doing on the couch again. (As if he didn't know.) Daddy would rustle around discreetly in the kitchen for a while, putting away his lunch box and thermos. I would watch him through my squinted-shut eyes as he came to the stove and turned off all the knobs. He was never a religious man in the churchgoing sense, but he always paused at the stove to say a little prayer for the safety of the family.

Then he'd come out to the couch where I was curled up, bend down over me, and kiss me on the forehead. "Goodnight, Possum," he'd whisper.

Those we love are always with us, in the memories that reverberate in our lives, and the rituals by which we keep them close.