My Father.
Summer tales: “A cool glass of water”
Back behind our house, at the crest of the gentle hill, Dad tended for countless hours to his enormous vegetable garden. Not only during the season of planting and harvesting, but also on dimly lit winter nights, where at the kitchen table he would passionately pore over the mail-order catalog from the Harris Seed Company in Rochester, making important decisions and anticipating next spring’s plantings.
With his years of experience, he planted his rows of vegetables in the best combinations, in the most favorable part of the garden, and knew the optimal planting times for early and late harvesting of his delicious sweet corn, thanks to which we were able to enjoy for weeks their wonderful, tender kernels straight from the garden to the table. Together we stretched long straight lines and he taught me how to place three seeds in each precisely spaced hole in the ground. He knew which flowers to plant in proximity to help keep the bugs away from his juicy, ripe tomatoes, so delicious that we would sometimes bring out a salt-shaker and just stand and enjoy them right in the garden! His cantaloupes, or “muskmelons” as he called them, became a local legend because one year he had produced so many enormous melons that Uncle Leo, Dad’s brother, put them up for sale right there at the grocery store, down by the stoplight. Leo’s wife Eve – a favorite aunt of mine – always claimed she had never eaten better ones in her life. “Geez, they were good, and so big!” she said grinning to me so many times, claiming that in those days she could eat a whole one of Dad’s juicy muskmelons at one sitting.
But the garden work was just one of my father’s chores in the summer. There was also “the yard,” as we said up in Western New York: the lawn had to be mowed, which could be a killer job in the muggy heat of July and August, a situation that just got worse if you made the mistake of letting the grass get the better of you by skipping a week or two during a wet spell. The task of doing the yard would take him around two and a half hours from start to finish, all the time pushing his roaring gas-powered rotary lawnmower. It was the kind you had to rev up to get it going by pulling the starter cord several times, with one foot on the mower, and with your pipe held in your mouth just so…
But Dad always got the job done, and again, his gift to me was his example. As a kid I would often tag along behind him as he diligently worked to leave a trail of straight, alternating rows with that noisily rumbling contraption, while I was figuring out how to stay clear of the flying, freshly-cut grass or out of the danger of a stray pebble. From those endless summer days, how I remember him on this green earth is sporting a kind of baseball cap, a pair of Bermuda shorts and dark socks with his work shoes, and with his ubiquitous pipe clenched in his mouth.
There is one little lawn mowing story I’d like to tell, a simple story that says so much about my father, his style, and his kindness: After he would finally finish up at our house, and it was getting to be around nine o’clock – still light out and not quite twilight – he’d say to me “Suppose we go down to Mrs. Van Deuser’s.” The little two-room affair where she lived was a humble sight indeed, just below the slope on our quiet back street. Overgrowing that house was a large gooseberry bush, and sometimes she gave some berries to Mom to make jam or a pie. I recall that, to me, Mrs. Van Deuser looked a little like Dad’s mother, small and fragile, somewhat stooped. Her hair was grey and tied up in back; she’d be wearing an apron – and seemed kindly. She would make her way onto the front porch from behind her squeaking screen door and reach out to shake my father’s hand, and while out of my earshot they made a little deal. Apparently she would offer to give him a small amount of money, to which he’d take his pipe out of his mouth, return a beaming smile as he moved from one foot to the other, and say that the mow job was for free if he could have a big glass of that fresh, cool, well water. That’s where I saw him point over in the direction where an old-fashioned pump was right there by the doorstep. So, while Mrs. Van Deuser made a fuss to go inside to get a tall glass, Dad made short time of her overgrown grass – maybe fifteen minutes – on the two narrow side yards and finally the front yard, using her own old, manual, push-style mower.
Naturally, by this time my father, in his fifties, was hot and winded. He’d roll up his sleeves and perhaps reach for a handkerchief to wipe his brow as he sat on the single stone step in front of her porch, enjoying the drink of pure water in the evening air as he looked off to the sky at dusk. Nor did he ever refuse a second glass, freshly pumped up from below the ground. This little scene was repeated before my eyes several times over the summer, and with no one ever telling about it, until now.
That was all around sixty years ago, maybe more. Last time I was there, I saw that the old Van Deuser place had been redone with white siding and a new roof. The gooseberry bush was gone. The creaking hand pump from the well was also gone, and the well was covered over; the spot was only recognizable by a few petunias planted there in a washtub.
Now, if by twilight on a still summer night you were to set out by foot from that forgotten spot and walk toward downtown Pavilion along the same street, in less than three minutes you’d arrive at the place where my Dad is long buried and peacefully at rest since August, 1977.
(The illustration shows a peach tree I planted with Dad back then. I painted this watercolor in 1974.)