I'm Back

I'm back in sunny Austin after a week home in Columbus with the folks. My dad died on Tuesday. At first I thought this wouldn't be an appropriate place to mention that because the tone of this blog tends to be so flippant and...wildly insincere, but then I thought, why not? I write about everything else that's happening in my life. It's not a secret.

It was sudden. He had a massive stroke last weekend and his body gave out a couple days later. The stroke destroyed his higher brain function instantly so none of us had a chance to talk to him again and say goodbye, but honestly that's better. Not better for us but better for him. In all likelihood it was completely painless. There was no time to be frightened, or to worry about my mother or the rest of the family--no time, knowing my father, to wonder if the gas tank in the Accord had dipped below 2/3, or who would maintain his tools (which he hadn't used in years) after he was gone. We mourned in the Schreiber way, which mostly consisted of stuffing our faces and laughing about his quirks. That's the way we do it. There's no hugs or I love you's or long tearful talks about how much we'll miss him in my family. They're really not necessary, we all know.

His obituary says he enjoyed photography, woodworking, and spending time with his grandchildren, which of course aside from being wildly incomplete is a huge understatement. It has to be, you only have a few sentences to sum someone up in those things--but to say he enjoyed these things doesn't acknowledge the magnitude of his operations. He used to put up this kind of winter wonderland of Dickens Village porcelain houses every Christmas, a HUGE one with dozens of pieces that literally took over our entire dining room on tier after tier of tables constructed specifically for the purpose. It was truly impressive and it would be impossible to describe the attention to detail that went into it to someone who hasn't seen it. Anyway, every year before he took it down, he'd take pictures from every angle to document exactly how things were that year. These were inanimate houses, snapshots would have sufficed, but my dad got out the tripod, the flash diffuser, he manually focused every frame, and filled God knows how many rolls of film with shots upon shots that he would likely never look at. He just liked taking the pictures.

As for spending time with his grandkids, that one was pretty obvious. My dad didn't get outwardly excited about much. Everything was "decent" or "not bad", but he was pretty open about his affection for the little ones. I remember one time Gwen got it in her head that Grandpa shouldn't be watching TV right now, and she kept running up and turning off the set while he was watching the evening news. This, if you knew my father, is madness. In anyone else this would be suicidal behavior, but he just laughed every time she did it. Generally when I called home it'd just be smalltalk before he passed me on to my mom, but if I got him on the grandkids he'd talk for a good long while. He obviously really enjoyed being a grandfather and I'm glad he had the chance to have babies living in his house again.

The woodworking is probably what I will remember most, and definitely most frequently, but it wasn't really just woodworking. He knew how to do just about everything. When it was time to fix the roof he didn't hire a roofer, he just bought some shingles and did it himself. He repainted the entire exterior of our old house on his own. He retiled our hallway. He replaced the upstairs toilet. When we were growing up we had three bedrooms, one for my parents, one for my sister, and one for the four boys. When the boys got too big to fit in one room, he just went to the basement and built a new one. Studs, drywall, wiring, ventilation, painting, carpeting, everything from scratch. He had tools for everything. This Christmas Eve I was putting together a little shopping cart for Gwen and I accidentally nailed a pronged spacer washer onto the axle...on the wrong side of the wheel. There was no removing it, and her present wasn't going to work right, but my dad said don't worry, I've got just the tool to pull that right off. Of course! Of course he would have a tool to pull a pronged washer off of a metal dowel! Comes up all the time! But fixing mistakes is the exception, for the most part I do things like that right the first time. Measure twice, cut once is the old adage, and lots of people give the advice, but my dad actually showed me. Any job worth doing is worth doing right is another standard, and I can assure you it means much more when you see it than when you hear it. No one could ever accuse my dad of not being careful, or prepared, or mind-bendingly thorough. 800 years ago when I was engaged to Kelly we bought a condo together. It was a real shit hole. Some athletes lived there before us and they had torn the place to shreds. I worked hours every day after work to fill in all the holes and dents, rehang the doors, reinstall the closet shelves, replace the bad sockets, mount the new blinds, repaint every single surface in the place, and quite frankly when I was done it looked great, even professional. Because it wasn't the first time I'd done all that stuff. My dad had already shown me how to do it right.