Oh, the Things I Learned from Daddy-O

A Birthday Present for My Father

I told my father I wanted to be a writer when I was fourteen. “Write what you know,” he replied. I didn’t understand what he meant. I thought he was mocking me.

What would you write about? You know nothing. You’ve lived a boring life.

At twenty-six, I am finally beginning to understand what he meant. I am finding my voice in the thousand little memories in which it hides and drawing from the countless lessons unknowingly learned from my father over the years.

My father rarely calls me.

When he does call, my phone flashes Daddy-O. Our conversations are short and to the point because neither of us has much patience with nonsense. It’s not that he and I have nothing to discuss, but we communicate with each other in quiet ways.

When my father pulls his car into the garage he typically turns the engine off but leaves the keys in, the power on. He sits there until the song he’s listening to ends. Coltrane, Mulligan, Benny, Louis, and Dizzy keep him out there, tapping on the steering wheel and humming.

After Ship won the State Championship Game, 2009.

If I am with him, I stay in the car and tap my hands too. It’s a jazzy form of Morse code, a secret language we both speak.

In 2004, I dropped chemistry from my junior schedule to take jazz band. It was an almost existential crisis for my chemist father. I could see the conflict on his face when I told him.

But he didn’t say what I expected.

He didn’t tell me that jazz—like writing—came from experience and I didn’t really have any to draw on. Instead he said “OK, if that’s what you want to do,” and paid the monthly rent on my saxophone.

The famous Huxley quote comes to mind, “after silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” My father taught me that silence is a form of communication and being a quiet, calm person can be the loudest statement in a room filled with meaningless chatter.

The phrase Peripatetic Ferroequinologist means Wandering Student of the Iron Horse. I don’t know if my father invented the phrase but he’s the only person I’ve ever heard say it. Googling it takes you to the only reaches of the internet my Luddite father journeys to.

His hobby, if you missed the Latin pun, is chasing trains. Nearly every weekend he follows radio signals and timetables to junctions throughout the region. There, beside the tracks, he waits with a camera in hand for an Iron Horse to rumble by. Some people consider it a strange hobby.

“There are worse things a man could spend hours away from his wife doing,” my mother told me once.

Is there a more epic image possible?

I have a single photograph on my bookshelf of my father. He’s wearing a yellow Star Trek uniform, posing sternly beside a pixelated Leonard Nemoy.

I asked him about the picture once. Apparently my mother made him go to the opening screening of one of the Star Trek movies in the early 90s. Based on his facial hair, my bet is on 1991's Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. I would have been just shy of four years old and with some babysitter while my parents went to Star Trek for date night.

At the theater there was a photo booth. All that remains is the tchotchke Polaroid with my father’s straight face looking out from it.

My father has never seemed uneasy with who he is. I continue to struggle with being myself in the way many young people do. But my father has shown me the abject futility of trying to be anyone else except the sometimes-serious, sometimes-goofy person I am at heart.

My father never cooks, but he’ll eat anything and he always does the dishes.

Daddy-O & Momma Putz at a family gathering in 2012.

Correction: My father will eat anything except Brussels sprouts or boiled okra.

Momma Putz correction: “He does eat Brussels sprouts if I cook them!”

When my brother and I were younger and less grateful, we would turn our noses up at some of my mother’s dishes. She wouldn’t make us eat, but there was never a second dinner for the picky either.

The only thing my father would say was “de gustibus non est disputandum.”

“To each his own,” he’d translate. Then he’d return to eating his entire plate, believing his Latin admonitions were adequate scolding.

“I can’t tell you what to like but stop complaining. Someone cooked you dinner,” his noisy chewing meant.

Though my father rarely reads for pleasure, he always read to my brothers and I as children.

My father rarely reads. He would push back—and has, repeatedly—on that claim every time my mother and I make it. He reads The Economist religiously and books about trains on occasion, but I’ve never seen him read a work of fiction or the Life section of the newspaper.

Perhaps it’s because he’s a chemist, or because he is not terribly prone to flights of fancy.

Yet he married my mother and she is a prodigious reader. Before we owned Kindles, she and I would have to mail boxes of books home from even the shortest vacations. When I finally moved out I sold more than 300 of my books to the used book store. I kept 75 for my personal cannot-get-rid-of collection.

This is what people in the 1990s looked like.

Early in their marriage, my father gave my mother a copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology. It now sits on my shelf. Beside the blue Bulfinch tome is my copy of the Kalevala. This, too, was a gift from my father—not a man famous for his gifts by any measure.

The Kalevala is the Finnish national epic. It is the first book I can remember my father being excited about. When he came back from working in Turku, Finland for the better part of a summer he handed it to me and bubbled over with information.

He told me about Elias Lönnrot, who compiled the Kalevala from poetic oral traditions in eastern Finland. Its 1835 publication sparked a wave of nationalism contributing to the revival of the strange Finnish language and inspiring the movement ultimately resulting in the independence of modern Finland from Russia in 1917.

The Kalevala is to Finland what Beowulf is to England, what Gilgamesh was to Mesopotamia.

My father may not enjoy reading, but he certainly recognizes the place of literature in the human experience or at the very least, recognizes that art is an individual passion.

At twenty-six, I finally understand what he was trying to tell me when I was fourteen. He wasn’t telling me not to write—as I’d interpreted—he was telling me to be honest in what I wrote. To write about what I knew. He was telling me to be myself—at all costs—because I was someone worth being. If I was filled to bursting with words and jazz, a wandering, lost, confused woman—I was still his daughter. I was still amazing.

He may not have understood what drove me to writing—what lived in the books I spent countless hours devouring—but he knew it was important. He gave me the only good advice he could: be honest, be earnest, and write what you know.

Happy Birthday and Thanks for Everything Daddy-O.

My father turns 71 on May 23. He’s somewhere between Green Bay and Duluth on a solo road trip. He’ll be reading this in the evening after a day wandering the trails of his past, waiting for trains, and making new friends over beers in random bars. He won’t get many gifts from the family—he’s not a guy who needs many things and we can only give him so many socks.

This is my gift.

I love you.