“I bought a new pair of skates today,” Dad told me.
“Good!” I was happy to hear that my then-60-something year old father was joyfully planning to continue playing ice hockey.
“These will be the last ones…” he said with a chuckle.
“Don’t say that, Dad,” I chided him.
“Well, how much longer can I play?” he laughed.
He played another decade, into his early 70s.
Those were, indeed, his last pair of skates.
I’m not a hockey player. I am a sailor.
Last fall I noticed that my foul weather gear pants were getting frayed. The jacket – a men’s cut – had never fit me right, but I made due and just never bothered to replace it.
The set was 20-plus years old.
This spring, I bought a new set of gear. As I tried it on, I thought, “Well, if these last me 20 years, this is probably the last set of foul weather gear I’ll be buying.”
And I flashed back to the conversation with my dad.
We lost my dad three years ago. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of him and am thankful that he was my father.
I didn’t grow up sailing. My parents never owned a boat.
Instead of time on the water, they took my brother and me on quintessential “family road trips” in a station wagon towing a pop-up camper. We saw the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and visited Yellowstone in Wyoming. We explored the Mammoth Caves in Kentucky and Acadia National Park near Bar Harbor, Maine where they met when my dad, who was born and raised in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and was an enlisted man in the Navy stationed nearby, walked into the Bar Harbor diner where my mom was waitressing as she worked her way through college.
It was raining that day. My mom told my dad the rain was liquid sunshine.
He was hooked.
Within a year, they were married, and just over two years after sharing that first cup of coffee, I was born. My brother arrived three years later.
If ever there was a man born to be a father, it was my dad. As my brother so eloquently stated at his funeral, Dad was a big kid. He loved to play, whether it was lining up little plastic Army men and rolling marbles across the floor to knock them down, or flooding our backyard in the winter and showing both my brother and me how to “stick handle like Gordie Howe did…” or keeping records of our winter-long family tournaments of tabletop ice hockey games, or pitching a baseball or softball to us in the backyard, Dad loved to play.
Though my dad didn’t teach me how to sail, his love of hockey, whether watching his beloved Red Wings, or playing until he just didn’t feel he could keep up anymore, taught me the importance of finding a passion for a sport and loving the hell out of it.
Though my dad didn’t teach me how to sail, his love of hockey, whether watching his beloved Red Wings, or playing until he just didn’t feel he could keep up anymore, taught me the importance of finding a passion for a sport and loving the hell out of it.
My brother still plays hockey. He’s about to turn 60.
I’m 62 and I just bought my “last” set of foul weather gear, so my sailing tank is full for another 20 years.
Thank you, Dad, for all of the life lessons. You are so missed and so loved.
I’ll be thinking of you, today, when I pull on the foulies as I head out to the race course on Lake Huron.
Love, your favorite daughter (as he always signed my autograph book),
PIC: Dad and me at one of his two visits to Joe Louis Arena to watch the Red Wings.
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