My father, Paul Sherfy, died on February 24, 2002, at eighty-nine in the health-care wing of the Cedars Retirement Community—a Church of the Brethren facility in McPherson, Kansas. I’d seen my dad several weeks before his death when I flew home to move him from an assisted living apartment to that nursing home bed. Furious at me for engineering the transfer–for delivering him physically to his final living space–his last venom-laden words to me were: “I hope you never make it back to Montana.”
Coupled with his dismissive and sometimes callous treatment of my mother in her last years, my dad’s parting sally struck a chord. An unforgiving, unbending, angry one. If you’ve been reading these essays, you’ll know that Paul hasn’t appeared much in my writing.
A week ago, I had the gift of a visit from a close friend, and I dug out the photo album that my parents had assembled—maybe while I was in college. My folks gave my sister one too. Our names were engraved on our elegant albums and they showcased individual and family photos mostly from our early years. Little Kodak prints studiously meted out from the photo envelopes that lived in the bottom right-hand drawer of my dad’s desk. The scrapbooks were emotive and deeply thoughtful.
In recent years, I’ve turned to my album with some frequency as I gathered images for essays. But I’ve not lingered over it. In particular, I’d not reread the note that my folks included. My visitor took time to read it and allowed as how–based on his own experiences and my writing–Mother must have written it. Except it’s in my dad’s handwriting and writing prowess:
Dear Marcella,
Life is made up of so many things—too many sometimes. But there is fun and sorrow, good health and sickness, relaxation and hard work, confidence and anxiety. And love and pride—and because this is written to you there are no opposites to write for these.
We thought you might like to look, once-in-a-while, at what the camera recorded now and then. We had fun getting this far. You may want to add others to it.
May God bless you and watch over you as you grow into a helpful, kind, understanding and beautiful woman.
Your proud and loving
Mother and Daddy
Those words—read aloud, read carefully, in context—brought me up short. I spent that evening falling asleep—or rather not—gently peeling apart 56 years of memories. Not just the last couple dozen.
Born in 1912, Paul was John and Leona’s second child. John was essentially an itinerant Church of the Brethren minister—paid by his small Kansas and Iowa congregations mostly with the use of a small acreage and some animals. Another son and another daughter followed—none, I think, physically abused but all sternly raised: expected to behave, to live the faith, and to advance academically. Home may not have been quite joyless—but close. The Weddle boys in Bloom, Kansas, were the playmates that introduced fun into Daddy’s childhood. By the time my dad attended McPherson College, his folks ran the College farm, while he got up at four in the morning to milk cows on the other side of town.
Paul graduated from college in 1934, the heart of the Depression, intending to be a biology teacher. Securing no such position, he found parttime work that included washing dishes in a 24-hour local café that catered to the area’s small oil boom. When his folks took a preaching job in Iowa, my dad visited and met my mom, Esther Pyle.
In 1940, Paul and Esther married in Salina, Kansas, honeymooned in Kansas City. My sister was born in April 1942. My dad found work proofreading for our local newspaper until he had no choice but to join the Navy—in a noncombatant role. (Raised pacifist, my dad felt that if he opted for the Civilian Public Service, he would face discrimination and never find work again in McPherson.) He ultimately served as a weather observer on-board ship in the Pacific. I arrived in 1946—a proper amount of time after he was discharged. Although he returned to the newspaper for awhile, he found better paying work at the Alliance Insurance Companies—a homegrown property and casualty company.
My coming-to-consciousness memory of Daddy was in the church social rooms—in a circle of standing trousered legs. I ran to the wrong pair and was greeted with laughter before my dad scooped me up. In fact, church played a central role in my dad’s life and in my memories of him. Thursday nights always meant choir for Mother and Daddy. For years, my dad stayed after Sunday morning services to count the offering. He served several terms on the Church board–wrestling with new pastor choices and the wisdom of air conditioning and wrangling over the budget. He and Mother were deacons—responsible for helping folks in special need. Daddy undertook research so the congregation could better understand the building’s incredible stained-glass windows. We didn’t miss any service—Sunday evening, special fellowship nights, love feast and communion. Called on to offer prayer for a group or explain his thoughts, my dad never hesitated. Especially in church, he was at home in the play of language. My sister, who became a minister, always thought that Daddy felt he’d disappointed his parents for not becoming a pastor himself.
My dad was a typical 50’s and 60’s father. In memory, he’s absent in most everyday childhood scenes while my mom is ever present. I can see him, though, on a chilly morning, as he drove our ancient Plymouth to the hospital so that Sonja and I could have our tonsils removed. I remember how he instructed kindergartener me in the fine art of tying shoelaces that wouldn’t come undone. He was the perturbed parent trying to get me to take Dr. Dyck’s recommended sulfa tablets when Mother was off in Indiana at her friend Rachel’s funeral—albeit with his own mother’s fussy oversight. And how on summer nights, when he and Mother took us for car rides to cool off, I remember them conversing in pig-Latin to decide if we could stop for A & W root beer. And I remember my dad churning ice cream in the green wooden tub as a Sunday evening treat.
Every day ended with my dad sitting at his second-hand desk—surrounded by Mother’s sewing projects and shelves of gloxinias and violets and calling out, “What did you spend today, Esther?” He expected a precise recital—with exact numbers. At the end of month, he tallied income and expenditures down to the penny—and stomped around the house in frustration if he couldn’t resolve discrepancies.
Daddy is ever present in memory dutifully doing lawn and car care and small home tasks. I don’t remember him complaining; but that aura of reluctance as he changed the oil or fiddled with the lawnmower or raked leaves lingers. I remember that same sense when he knew he HAD to cope with Grandma Sherfy’s–his mother’s–grass and garden and trees. Duty. Obligation.
His friends—and then Mother’s and ours—were the folks he’d most enjoyed in college and the community: the Dreshers, the Kellys, the Wilbur Yoders, the Hayes, the Lloyds, the Sunquists. With them, my dad was at ease—could laugh, tell jokes, anticipate the fellowship. For instance, I picture him at the wheel of that bucking Plymouth as we navigated a sea of mud driving to the Dreshers, who lived out in the country. I saw and felt Daddy’s joy in summer when he would take a day or two off work to help Don and the Dresher boys with wheat harvest. When he could be a man among men. I see in my memory the horseshoe games he shared with those church and college fellows, too. And among our homes, we consumed dozens of dishes of ice cream—the ever-present dessert option available at a moment’s notice for short, casual evening visits.
There were two other institutions—beside the church—that commanded my dad’s attention and affection: his alma mater and Kiwanis. McPherson College was a small Church of the Brethren institution, steeped in the belief that everyone—including farmers—benefitted from higher education. It dominated the east end of McPherson. Daddy held a fierce loyalty for it; served for years on its Board of Trustees; gave generously to its fundraising appeals; and attended every basketball and football game. This fall season, I am returned to the College’s small cold metal stadium, sitting next to my dad as he physically scooted into his seatmates’ spaces in whatever direction the ball was moving. Utterly engrossed.
Kiwanis—for most (but not all) of his years—was a bastion of male camaraderie. Daddy prized his perfect attendance records, loved eating a restaurant lunch, and did his day-long, wearying duty every March when the Kiwanians held their annual pancake feed. Ultimately, he received statewide recognition for his faithful participation.
Work was another matter. My first memories are gentle. On hot summer Sundays, he’d walk us from our bungalow on Marlin Street to the insurance company’s downtown, air-conditioned office. I can’t “see” him there, but I smell the heady aromas of paper and ink and small machines and cigarette smoke. I was in second grade when the insurance company built a huge new building north of town and my dad’s place in its world seemed to get darker. As I grew older, I remember him getting up at five in the morning, returning at seven to join the rest of us for breakfast, and going back to work until noon when he ate quickly and retreated to the living room floor for a quick nap to ease his headache. Those headaches were literally and figuratively the hallmark of his years worrying about his job at the Alliance. Never feeling confident in his underwriting decisions. Never emptying his in-basket the way others did. Never feeling at home among the managers there in their glass-enclosed outer offices.
About the time I graduated from high school and headed to McPherson College, my dad had the opportunity to leave the Alliance Insurance Companies and be the College’s assistant business manager. He leapt at the opportunity only to discover that working for his new boss—a longtime church friend with a reputation for intractable decisions and behavior—brought its own nightmares. Tail between his legs, my dad asked for and got his old insurance job back. Such was the stress he felt, that Mother recommended that Sonja and I host a 45th wedding anniversary celebration for them rather than risk my dad’s survival until they reached their 50th.
When Alliance Insurance moved from their downtown office to their big new headquarters, we moved as well. From our wonderful Marlin Street bungalow and a neighborhood full of playmates to the house on Ash Street. A baby Tudor with a knotty pine sunken living room and an unworkable kitchen. Daddy wanted that house. It was close to his work. And to him more stylish—a little more on par with what a businessman should own. Within a month of living there, my folks discovered that the basement leaked buckets in every rain and that termites had riddled the joists. The dream house became his nightmare. The joists got replaced. Mother coped with basement flooding, but never got a functional kitchen. I’m not sure that my dad ever quit castigating himself for the move.
We usually took his two weeks vacations in August—most often driving to Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, and Colorado Springs for family visits. Trips that began at five a.m. to get cool miles behind us. Trips that for my dad began at one or two in the morning with his hand-wringing worry over the car’s reliability. Twice my parents rented a cabin in the South St. Vrain drainage of Rocky Mountain National Park. And those weeks were as idyllic as any other time in our family’s lives. My folks got to relive their childhood chores but for fun—cooling our food in a spring box, cooking on a wood stove, burrowing under quilts at night, lighting oil lamps, playing games, assembling puzzles, and hiking during the days. To my eyes, they both became “young” again.
Daddy did reach his own retirement as well as my folks’ 50th anniversary, though time had taken its toll: heart bypass surgery, the start of macular degeneration. He took to walking a mile a day. And he signed on to work for an insurance agent—photographing property to be insured or that had suffered damage. He loved this chapter of work: it required no decision-making, included interesting drives, was useful, and never consumed eight hours.
Daddy’s formal retirement also allowed Mother and Daddy to travel to my sister’s home, to mine in D.C .and Montana, to gather with siblings for family reunions, and to take history professor Raymond Flory’s bus tours. Pitched to a penny-pinching, practical Church of the Brethren crowd, those outings brought my folks new landscapes and stories and much joy.
Several years before her death in 1995, my mother also got macular degeneration. And hers was far more debilitating, advancing more quickly than Daddy’s. Ultimately, as Mother withdrew into herself, she became tinier, less able, sadly disoriented. Fighting his own aging, my dad lost patience with her and her inabilities. Her confession in my kitchen on Choteau Street that Daddy wasn’t always kind to her broke my soul. I flew back to Kansas with them so that Mother wouldn’t need to experience his angers and impatience in the confusion of travel. My sister witnessed an example one noon when she walked in to find my dad haranguing Mother to dress for an event quickly and well. To my sister, as well, he made no bones about feeling put-upon to make their bed, fry an egg, or heat up soup. He shared the sentiments of others in the church congregation, that he SHOULD NOT have to be responsible for Mother—that that was what the Brethren nursing home was for. Given Mother’s blindness, Sonja and I resisted and tried, instead, to find enough help to give Daddy some freedom.
As Mother died on the adjacent sofa, my dad read the newspaper in his easy chair. Looking up after her last breath, he asked my sister if she would care for him.
There were patterns. Appearances and status mattered. In all the years of my dad’s worry about work—and whether he measured up to the “men on Main Street,” Mother lived her life with verve. She launched a 4-H club and a homemaker’s organization. She ran the College’s annual fundraising banquet and church wedding receptions and funerals. And she accomplished all that outreach not missing a beat at home—all the meals, cleaning and preparation for company, gardening, freezing, canning, dandelion eradication, Christmas letter writing, errand running. Confidence to his insecurity. Throughout, Daddy always wanted mother to buy striking outfits for church and social occasions. To get her hair done professionally. Instead, she opted for home perms and, when she decided to shop for dresses at Morris & Son’s, she brought options home for my dad’s approval. Toward the very end of his life, my dad confessed that he had had an affair in the early 1950s. My sister and I never knew whether Mother was aware.
As I’ve visited and revisited what I know or remember or believe about my dad—as is the case with every life—the pieces don’t fit. This father whose actions and words so angered me was also the father who met me with open arms when I raced toward him coming home from work. Who helped me get a summer job in the Alliance offices. Who secured my first car. And, when I despaired of driving from Kansas to Maryland for my first teaching job, took time off work to drive with me. He’s also the same dad who wrangled his friend Clifford into driving over glare ice in Clifford’s pickup so both could pick me up at the Wichita airport. Who treasured our childhood awe at the twinkling lights of a modest Christmas tree. The provider who worked at a job he disliked, that robbed him of ease and joy so that he could support all of us. The father who sent valentines and birthday cards with handwritten notes. Along with Mother, the man from whom I learned to love words and their power. Who loved me. Who did his best living and fathering by all the wisdom that he knew. Within his era. Within the framework that he’d experienced. Through the joys and disappointments of his own days. And who penned that message in the album of photos. ©
