I wrote this a year ago, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of my father's death. Like his memory, it has withstood the test of time.
My Dad and Airplanes
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| Roger L. Miller as a boy, early 1920s. |
My Dad and Airplanes
by G. Wayne
Miller
I live near an airport. Depending on wind
direction and other variables, planes sometimes pass directly over my house as
they climb into the sky. If I’m outside, I always look up, marveling at the
wonder of flight. I’ve witnessed many amazing developments -- the end of the
Cold War, the advent of the digital world, for example -- but except perhaps for
space travel, which of course is rooted at Kitty Hawk, none can compare.
I also always think of my father, Roger L. Miller,
who died ten years ago today.
Dad was a boy on May 20, 1927, when Charles
Lindbergh took off in a single-engine plane from a field near New York City.
Thirty-three-and-a-half hours later, he landed in Paris. That boy from a small Massachusetts
town who became my father was astounded, like people all over the world.
Lindbergh’s pioneering Atlantic crossing inspired him to get into aviation, and
he wanted to do big things, maybe captain a plane or even head an airline. But
the Great Depression, which forced him from college, diminished that dream. He
drove a school bus to pay for trade school, where he became an airplane
mechanic, which was his job as a wartime Navy enlisted man and during his
entire civilian career. On this modest salary, he and my mother raised a
family, sacrificing material things they surely desired.
My father was a smart and gentle man, not prone to
harsh judgment, fond of a joke, a lover of newspapers and gardening and birds,
chickadees especially. He was robust until a stroke in his 80s sent him to a
nursing home, but I never heard him complain during those final, decrepit
years. The last time I saw him conscious, he was reading his beloved Boston
Globe, his old reading glasses uneven on his nose, from a hospital bed. The
morning sun was shining through the window and for a moment, I held the
unrealistic hope that he would make it through this latest distress. He died
four days later, quietly, I am told. I was not there.
Like others who have lost loved ones, there are
conversations I never had with my Dad that I probably should have. But near the
end, we did say we loved each other, which was rare (he was, after all, a
Yankee). I smoothed his brow and kissed him goodbye.
So on this 10th anniversary, I have no deep
regrets. But I do have two impossible wishes.
My first is that Dad could have heard my eulogy,
which I began writing that morning by his hospital bed. It spoke of quiet wisdom
he imparted to his children, and of the respect and affection family and others
held for him. In his modest way, he would have liked to hear it, I bet, for
such praise was scarce when he was alive. But that is not how the story goes.
We die and leave only memories, a strictly one-way experience.
My second wish would be to tell Dad how his only
son has fared in the last decade. I know he would have empathy for some bad
times I went through and be proud that I made it. He would be happy that I
found a woman I love: someone, like him, who
loves gardening and birds. He would be pleased that my three children are
making their way in the world, and that he now has two great-granddaughters,
wonderful little girls both. In his humble way, he would be honored to know how
frequently I, my sisters and my children remember and miss him. But that is not
how the story goes, either. We send thoughts to the dead, but the experience is
one-way. We treasure photographs, but they do not speak.
Lately, I have been poring through boxes of
black-and-white prints handed down from Dad’s side of my family. I am lucky to
have them, more so that they were taken in the pre-digital age -- for I can touch
them, as the people captured in them surely themselves did so long ago. I can
imagine what they might say, if in fact they could speak.
Some of the scenes are unfamiliar to me: sailboats
on a bay, a stream in winter, a couple posing on a hill, the woman dressed in
fur-trimmed coat. But I recognize the house, which my grandfather, for whom I
am named, built with his farmer’s hands; the coal stove that still heated the
kitchen when I visited as a child; the birdhouses and flower gardens, which my sweet
grandmother lovingly tended. I recognize my father, my uncle and my aunts, just
children then in the 1920s. I peer at Dad in these portraits (he seems always
to be smiling!), and the resemblance to photos of me at that age is startling,
though I suppose it should not be.
