BETWEEN
TWO TREES
This story is
about a man whose lifetime was spanned by two trees. One planted by
his Dad in honor of his birth: a mighty oak tree. The other tree is
a graceful, flowering dogwood given in his memory to Christian
Brothers University by my cousins Kathy Hughes and Mary McCallum.
These trees are perfect symbols of him and his life. He grew to be a
strong man with deep roots and strength of purpose and in his later
years the hardships of life came to fruition with all the beauty and
wonder of the dogwood in a Southern springtime - a flowering of
wisdom and gratitude. He was not a perfect man, but he was perfectly
splendid in many ways.
When you have
been close to someone all of your life, it can be hard to look at
them without seeing yourself. That is how it is for me. You see,
this man was my Dad. There is so much of me that came directly and
indirectly from him. My love of poetry and appreciation of music, a
lively interest in ancient history and my enjoyment of literature
were gifts he gave me. One of my earliest memories is of Dad reading
the Sunday funnies aloud to me as I sat on his lap. He recited
poetry to me too such as "The Walrus and the Carpenter" and
"Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)". He would
sometimes sing to me in German. I still know most of the words to
"The Merry Widow" in German. He even taught my sisters and
me to waltz. I remember well the feeling of twirling and turning to
the music of Strauss.
I do think about him a lot these days. It may be because of my time
of life. I am alone. I am no longer married and my children are
grown. I came to know my Dad as an adult after he retired and came
back to Memphis to live. My Mother had died some years before so he
was alone and very lonely at times. Looking back, as I am sure many
people do after a parent has died, I wish I had made more of an
effort to include him in my life then. I have to remember not to be
too hard on myself. Dad would never want me
to feel sad or
unhappy over what he would have referred to as "spilled milk".
Instead, I try to appreciate the time we did have together. I am
still benefiting from his wisdom and generosity of spirit. I think
it is because of his generosity of spirit that I am able to forgive
myself. He really was one of the most forgiving people I have ever
known.
One of the
things that I cherish most about the time I had with him are the
stories he shared of his growing up years in Memphis and about his
family life as a young man. This was how I learned about the oak
tree. He showed me the tree, but the house where he was born had
long been torn down. There had been a brick wall that had separated
Dad's home from that of his friend, Harry Lee, at the back of the lot
the house had stood on. Dad and Harry decided to tunnel through the
brick wall and to that end had removed a large number of bricks
before quitting (or being stopped, I am not sure which anymore).
Even fifty years later the damaged wall was there. Today there is a
fast food place where the palatial home of the Lee family once stood
and the wall is gone. But the oak tree endures like my memories of
Dad. I never tire of telling this story to my own grandchildren.
Dad's friends
called him "Skippy" when he was a boy. Skippy was the
apple of his parents eyes, their only son and their first born. There
are many, many pictures taken by my Grandfather, "Pop"
Windler (also known as "Gaga"). The pictures that
fascinate me the most are those of Dad in long dresses holding a
doll. When Dad was a toddler all boys wore long dresses until they
were big enough for short pants. There are pictures of Dad, at about
age 10, sitting on a stone Lion outside a public library in New
Orleans and another with him standing boldly, arms akimbo, barefooted
on a seawall somewhere. There is even a picture taken in Overton
Park during a World War I fund raising rally. He is holding a flag.
One picture I have seen of Dad was printed in a local newspaper. It
shows Skippy and a some of his friends in a wooden wagon drawn by a
mule named "Sassafras". You can almost feel the lazy heat
of the summer afternoon when you look at the picture. To me, his
early childhood was close to perfect. Skippy didn't know about
hunger, pain or sorrow. This all changed when he had a serious
illness as a teenager. This illness was perhaps the source of many
of his lifelong problems. The illness began when Dad was a student
at St. Bernard Academy in Cullman, Alabama. He was injured playing
football then developed a mysterious fever. My Grandmother came took
him home on the train. He remembered being too weak to sit up and
being transported on a litter. There never was a clear diagnosis,
but I heard Dad call it, "Dengue Fever". This illness left
him with a limp. Dad spent an entire year in bed. His recovery was
very slow and difficult. As an adult, arthritis set into his leg and
hip causing him tremendous pain. He did not let the pain or the
limp stop him doing what was necessary to take care of his family,
but the constant pain drained his energy at times and he never played
ball with his son like other Dads or took us on fishing trips. It is
amazing to me that he managed to serve in the Navy during World War
II with this condition. I think it makes a statement about just how
desperate the country was during the War that they would accept him
with this disability. As the years wore on, his leg gave him more
and more trouble. He had a partial hip replacement in 1968 and a
total replacement in 1982. The first surgery allowed him to
continue working until my sister was out of college. He retired the
year she graduated.
Some of the
things Dad told me about life for a boy growing up in the South of
the early nineteen hundreds, painted a vivid picture of a very
different world from the one I knew growing up. Perhaps this was
especially true for me, because we moved around so much. He told me
that when he was growing up, he knew everyone around and they knew
him. Anything and everything you did was known and discussed by
friends, family and neighbors. One was seen as "so and so's"
child. Certain expectations were set
according to "who
you were", meaning, who you were "kin" to. This could
be good or it could be bad, depending on whether or not you had the
"right kin". People were often judged by their place in
the social structure, their religion and relationships of blood and
marriage - not to mention skin color. There was very little mixing
of various ethnics and religions. Dad had a "maiden" aunt
that never married because the man she loved was protestant. They
corresponded for years, but for them marriage was an impossibility as
far as they were concerned. Even when I was grown Dad would tell me
to "Tell them who you are" and he meant whose daughter and
granddaughter. This was important in the world he knew, but it also
made it even harder to overcome a negative image. It is no wonder
that people went to great lengths to avoid certain stigmas.
In the life of
the city of Memphis too, cruelty and fear of harsh judgment could
rule the day. For instance, during the first World War the name of
one suburb, Germantown, was changed to "Neshoba", the old
Indian name for the place, to avoid connection with the enemy.
People changed their names too, dropping "Von" or
anglicizing a foreign sounding surname. It was much safer that way.
Anti-Germanic feelings ran very high. Feelings against the Japanese
in World War II did too. During World War II, citizens in their
zealous anger destroyed the Japanese Gardens and bridge in a local
park. I can see where much of the intolerance of Dad's generation
could have resulted from this atmosphere.
Despite
this there were many happy times in Dad's early years. Dad described
one of the best days of his life as the day he saw Babe Ruth and on
same day, a statue of our Blessed lady carried in procession through
the streets of Memphis. I haven't any idea what year this happened,
but I would be willing to bet it was the year the Babe set his home
run record . It may also been the same year he and his best friend,
Billy Burke, put onions on the radiators in a classroom at Christian
Brothers the morning exams were to be held in that same room. They
got in a "pack" of trouble for it, almost getting expelled.
Not only that, but the exam went on anyway. The Brothers were a
tough breed back then. They didn't take any nonsense from the
students. According to him, this helped correct many an errant
attitude. He had a great fondness for the Brothers and remembered
his school years with joy. To him, they had provided a wonderful
education and reinforced the moral training he received at home.
Dad made
education a priority the lives of his children too. As I said, we
moved around the country a good bit while I was growing up. this was
because Dad was an engineer. He moved with the contracts and moved
up in his business with every move. He had to do this because he had
been unable to finish college due to the Great Depression. As a
consequence, he went to night school and worked during the day,
seeking advancement by accepting increasingly challenging jobs. He
finally earned a college degree by mail, something I thought was
funny, not understanding the importance of it. He was doubly proud
of the Professional Engineers designation he received as a result of
his lifework in Aeronautics. His work on the tooling of the Apollo
tail section was the crowning glory of his career.
I
realize many of these things are simply a reflection of who my Dad
was to me. Others knew him in different aspects. He was to others a
friend, a son, a brother, a sailor, a scholar, a husband. At times,
he was a mystery to others and to himself too, I think. His faith
was very deep and revealed itself in many ways. He tried to pass
this faith on to his children. Everywhere we moved, on the first
Sunday in our new home, we would go to our local parish church to be
enrolled as members. We always went to Catholic
schools, no
matter what financial hardship this created. A Catholic Education
meant more to him than regular trips to the dentist or doctor. There
were times he "doctored" us himself, swapping our sore
throats or giving us paregoric for stomach complaints. According to
him, a good, Catholic education was priceless. This philosophy has
borne good fruit in the lives of his children and grandchildren.
It is true, he
never stinted on education whether in a classroom or the larger arena
of life. He never stopped learning himself. He read Dickens novels
over and over. He said he could always find something new in them.
He studied many other things too, such as antiques, Roman coins,
stamp collecting, and painting. He took his children to museums, art
galleries and various exhibits in order to educated them. Anything
we brought to him for an explanation became a broader lesson. It was
not that what he said was veiled rather that he had a way of putting
things into a broad context thus making the principals applicable to
many things.
Much of Dad's
true beauty and generosity were hidden from the glaze of casual
onlookers and even his own family. For instance, he spent years
building up a collection of ancient Roman coins. He collected Denari
with the portraits of the Emperors. It took him most of his adult
life to amass this collection. He did it, not by buying the pieces,
but trading and dealing and identifying a lot of coins for dealers
just in order to be allowed to pick a few to keep. Among his
possessions, after his death, I found a hand written
ledger, tracing
out the history of each coin in that collection, where each had come
from, the value of it. Dad sold that collection to pay for my
sister's wedding. I didn't know this until she told me about it just
a few years ago. To Dad, people were important, never things. It
was a lesson he taught me with his quiet, unselfish ways.
Perhaps it is
his abundant courage that I admire most when I think about his life.
It took a lot of courage to love again after the early death of my
Mother. He loved her so dearly and suffered so greatly when she
died. But he did love again and married at the age of seventy. My
Step-Mother, Virginia Townshend Hutzler, was only sixteen and Dad was
twenty when they first met under what could be termed "unfavorable"
circumstances. She was among a crowd of young people who watched him
jump off the Spring River Bridge at Hardy, Arkansas, on a dare. Had
he not been drinking, he would never have done it he once told me.
Virginia's Father put a stop to their budding romance by telling Dad
that he was too old for his daughter. So, Dad went on with his life,
meeting my Mom, falling in love and being married for thirty years,
raising a family and then enduring some bitter years of widower hood.
It was those years alone that made a profound change in this man who
was so strongly rooted in faith. During this time, he revealed to me
later, God had made him a promise. Someday, he would be a happy man.
Looking back on that time during which Dad battled alcoholism and
depression, I realize it took tremendous faith to believe this
promise. Dad did believe and it pulled him out of the depths of
despair. He did this and when the time was right, Virginia came back
into his life. The story Dad told of their meeting again after all
those years was so far fetched that the family could hardly credited
it as truth. As the story went, it all began with a telephone call.
Dad was now retired and living back in Memphis, after living away
from here his entire working career. It seems that Dad was selling
an oil painting. The dealer who was handling the sale was named
"Virginia". Dad dialed the dealer's telephone number and
identified himself saying, “Virginia, this is Frank Windler”.
The voice on the other end of the line exclaimed, "Frank
Windler! I haven't spoken to you in forty years!" So began the
blossoming of love again in the December of his life. He never
forgot where this wondrous gift came from and he never stopped being
grateful to God. Virginia brought Dad the happiness God had promised
him. I pray that God grants me the courage to be open to His
promises like Dad.
At the end of
his life, I came to know Dad on an even deeper level. The day the
tests were back and my sister, Mary had to break the news to him that
he was dying, instead of feeling sorry for himself, he tried to
comfort her. When she begin to cry while telling him that nothing
could be done, he patted her hand and told her, "It will be
alright. Everyone has to die someday. I will be with your Mother
again and see all the people I love who have died . Don't cry, Baby
" (We girls were always his babies). Here,
he was dying, but
he could reach out and try to comfort someone else. There had been
times in our lives that he had been unable to do this, but time had
brought him this remarkable ability. His faith and his courage did
not fail him in this time of need. Yet, I remember he did worry
about what heaven would be like and about "all those mixed up
relationships". I quickly realized he was referring to his
marriage to Virginia. At one time my Mother had made him promise not
to marry again if "something" should happen to her. I am
sure they were very young when he made this promise. Mother was
only fifty-two when she died very suddenly. I told Dad that I
thought Mother didn't care about him having remarried as Jesus tells
us there is "no marrying or giving in marriage" in heaven.
I felt like she would be glad he had found joy and comfort in his
later years. Dad then confessed to me that he had never realized how
loved he was during his life. Now, here he was at the very end of
his life, surrounded by his children and some of his grandchildren,
who had come great distances to be with him. We gathered to be with
him, to console him and one another, and in some measure to celebrate
the life he had shared with us. Yes, we loved him dearly. What a
surprise to learn that Dad, who had spent his life loving and caring
for others, as imperfectly as it may have been, had never known that
he was so deeply loved. Even without this great knowledge, he had
the faith to withstand attacks of depression and alcoholism, and the
courage to believe God's promise of happiness. And even more, he had
the love and generosity to share so many of the things that mattered
to him with those he loved. Yet, he did not know until the last days
of his life how much he was loved. No wonder life was so hard for
him at times. I know God has rewarded his faithfulness, his courage,
his loving generosity.
I say this
Father's Day, "Thank you, Dad, for all the love you gave me, for
all the knowledge and wisdom you shared with me. Your life has been
a blessing to me and many others too. I am still learning from you,
Dad every day. I know that even if wisdom and understanding come
late, they can turn any tide. More than this, joy and happiness can
fill the heart and spirit no matter what age the vessel. I will
always remember these things, Dad, and more, much more.
So, it is the
image of the dogwood tree that comes most clearly to my mind when I
think of Dad now. In my mind's eye, I can see a beautiful dogwood
tree, blossoms dancing in the wind, in the freedom of another
Springtime, radiant with joy.
