The Big Heavy

My dad was busy when we were growing up. He ran an auto-parts business and also had several hobbies , or ventures, that kept him occupied.  On the  occasion when he included the kids , he was always teaching. My father missed his inherent calling in life because he is one of the best teachers I have ever had. He loves facts ,has a brain for them and likes to know how things work or function. Of course this is a beautiful thing when you have a genius level mind for mechanics. In other subjects he struggled, but my dad was and is a savant when it comes to mechanical engineering.  Pistons, heads, and spark plugs. These were his mantras while the engine block was his canvas. He had a great friend named Dick Martinez who lived just down the road. Dick had converted his garage into a car painters paradise. My dad would fix the edsel or the Studebaker or the '57 chevy and Dick would put on his fumigation type mask and set to work. They came up with many a masterpiece and my dad would let me polish them. My favorite was a beautiful Cadillac valued at close to 50 grand in it's heyday.  I will never forget the smell of it's red leather seats. For some reason I still think ALL leather should smell that good. It doesn't,  however, and maybe it takes the sun  shining through tinted car glass to manufacture such a fragrance. The Cadillac was one of the only cars he held onto from the restoration-type period of his life. It came to my mind a few months ago and I suddenly wanted to just go sit in it at my parents house out in the garage. I called my mom and she told me my dad had sold it. I told her that that was "a big deal" and was probably quite hard on him...kind of like selling a kid. She agreed it had been kind of traumatic seeing it leave the drive.

Later in my dad's life, things got too busy and Dick's lungs got the better of him. My dad left his car restoration career and turned to us. He built zip-lines and play houses. He taught us how to garden and weed to care for the garden. He had us raise pigs in 4-H and we even had a baby lamb named "Timer" who baaaaed everytime he heard his bottle done in the microwave. I do not remember what happened to "Timer's" mother, only that he needed to be fed from a bottle with a strange black nipple that smelled like a tire.

My parents took us vacationing every summer in a bus turned into a motor-home. As one of Dick Martinez's last projects, he had emblazoned a dragon on the outside of the bus. We rode in the belly of the gross dragon on a 21 state tour with the Smith Family from Bend Oregon. Some of the highlights of that trip were driving through New York, New York and not being able to stop, the traffic was so bad. Mr. Smith was behind the wheel at that time and I remember he had his eyes fastened directly ahead while his white knuckles gripped the steering wheel. I think he preferred not to drive after that. The kids and I were in the back of the bus and we waved briefly at lady liberty and were fairly disappointed we did not get to meet her in person.
 There also seemed to be some electrical problem and if you came onto the front steps of the bus from the KOA swimming pool with a wet suit, you received a painful shock. One time,my brother, Chad, was stuck to the stairs and could not speak, the current was so powerful.  A member of the Smith family, named Kathy, tried to help him, but she became stuck too. I was only in 3rd grade, in the back of the bus and could not understand the garbled speech and strange sounds coming from the front of the bus. My parents had to "unplug" the bus from the RV outlet and this released poor Chad and Kathy. Chad was hopping mad when he got off the stairs and came at me wondering why I didn't save him. 

This past weekend my parents visited to see our 2nd daughter graduate.  We took a trip up to Mount Charleston and were looking at the trees and I was reminded that my father's love of how things work extends beyond the world of mechanics. My parents asked me what kind of evergreens surrounded us.The red bark and sage-green needles were unusual.  When we said we had better head down to the visitor's center to find out about the trees, we heard groans from the backseat.
"You taught me,  young, dad," I said.
"Yes, we dragged you around to museums and art displays before you could protest,"he chuckled.
"Yeah, but when I spent that summer in Europe as a teenager, no one else wanted to go to the museums! Some missed the Louvre in Paris because they were drunk. I was amazed that people just weren't interested in these things. MAYBE I would have been like them if you had not dragged me around when I was young."
When we got out at the visitor center half the group stayed in the car. Mom, dad, Jess and I started reading about the native trees. We discovered that the trees we had been looking at were called Ponderosa Pine and that they had 5 other names as well. Our favorite was "the big heavy". These beautiful trees also had the added feature of smelling like vanilla or butterscotch if you scratched and sniffed them! The occupants in the car were watching "The Lightning Thief" while we were out scratching and sniffing giant trees.

The last night my dad was here he wanted fish for dinner. He wandered out looking at restaurants by himself as everyone was tired from the Mt. Charleston escapade. After he became lost by himself,I decided to go with him to the Red Rock Casino buffet. He LOVED it. His love of beautiful things extends into the world of food. He marveled over the eggplant that had been prepared with ginger and teriyaki sauce. The burnt carrots with a hint of rosemary he took several servings  of. We reminisced about the time we had gone to "Circus Circus" on a business trip to Las Vegas when I was twelve. It was only 3 dollars then!Everyone else had been too busy to go. It was on THAT trip that my dad told me he loved me for the first time. I think I had been a difficult child full of unpredictability and unusual moods. I had been an edsel-polisher for a reason. If I was not kept busy I was teasing or crying or in trouble. On that trip we made amends and decided we were more alike than different. We decided I liked seeing how things worked too and I just had to be kept busy to stay out of trouble. He revealed to me about his juvenile deliquency days and his troubled past. 

I do NOT know how many more buffets my dad and I will get to sample. I do not know how many more "Big Heavys" we will get to scratch and sniff, but to my dad now and forever...your REAL genius was not in mechanical engineering, but in raising kids to think, love and SEE God in everything from trees to burnt carrots. 
" Everything is beautiful in a person when he turns toward God, and everything is ugly when it is turned away from God"
FR. Pavel Florensky

I love you daddy!

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