Seven sons and a dad who could fix anything. One said, Dad never took the car to a mechanic and so now neither have I, and described starting out sitting on a chair handing tools over as directed, to actually helping his dad do the task, to, many years later, his dad sitting on a chair holding the tools and handing them over and doing the watching.
Their dad was a friend to every human being he ever laid eyes on. He told bad dad jokes to embarrass his kids, because that’s a dad’s job. To anybody. His ice breaker question was, What kind of music do you play?
George was an electrical engineer and a tinkerer. One of the sons called out my husband on the time he and his dad were shopping electronics parts and ran into him. We were all nerding out, he said.
When one kid described his dad taking the dashboard apart on his car to hunt down an electrical short and the adventure that took them on (they did get it fixed), I quietly laughed: my husband did the same thing back in the day, only in his case he couldn’t quite claim the same success. He got the turn signal working again–except that the inside lever and the outside signal were now switched, so you had to remember that signaling left was actually signaling right. He was not going to go through all that again just for that: up lever or down. You know, you do. Good times.
As a boy George started off with piano and quickly went to fiddle and guitar. Loved him some high brow, loved him some bluegrass. Went to every music festival he could. One of his kids described his own friends in high school going, What are you *listening* to! to then deciding, since he kept playing it, that they liked it.
That kid plays professionally now and he described meeting one of his bluegrass heroes.
The man looked at him and exclaimed, You’re George’s kid?!
He took off his battered hat, threw it into the dust, stomped it with his foot, picked it back up, put it on his head and said, Kid? You’re alright.
While the young man (with his own signature suede hat with a feather) watching this, thought, What just happened here??
George is the friend who’d been checked into the hospital just before Richard got checked out. In the months since, nobody was completely sure he was still in there very much but they all came to see him and they say the hearing is the thing that stays when all else goes.
So they played the music they’d jammed with their dad so many many times. They kept him and their mom company. They strummed those strings. They sang. They talked to him. They brought their kids.
One of them was singing to his dad and playing his own instrument when, he told us, I don’t know. Telepathy? He just felt like he needed to put it down and play his dad’s favorite guitar. So he did.
His dad’s breathing relaxed and slowed down. Slower. And then quietly, with love, he slipped away from them. He was just shy of 84.