Father's Day

 

June 19, 2022

Father’s Day. Looking at old photos prompted me to remember the wonderful contraptions that my dad came up with. Sometimes they were to compensate for his polio. Sometimes they were simply jeux d’esprits. I inherited none of his engineering skills. Linda did.

The terraces at Goodview: big stone terraces covered with flowers where others’ lawns would be, because he couldn’t mow up and down a slope.

A magical tool house. It disappeared when we got the garage.

A root cellar dug into the hill at the back of the garage. Mostly creepy and musty, but dad loved it because they had that kind of thing when he was growing up. Great for hide-and-seek, except nobody dared turn the light off inside.

The Big Slide: The biggest sliding board anybody had ever seen. The neighborhood thronged to it. My sister and I became living synecdoches: “Oh! You’re the Big Slide!”

An Indian teepee made out of burlap. He made me set fire to it when he thought I didn’t use it enough. 

A fake bedroom wall that I could use as a bulletin board, and then lower to reveal an electric train set bolted in place on top, ready to go. 

A dog house for our dog.

An elegant mesh cage for my anoles when I went through a lizard keeping phase.

An elegant rabbit hutch for when I went through a rabbit keeping phase.

An elegant hamster citadel for when my sister went through a hamster keeping phase. 

A three-storey lazy-Susan tool rack that doubled the storage capacity of the garage.

A playhouse for my sister that, when it was built, she and her friends could stand up in.

An enormous pebble stone trash burner (for back when you burned your own trash) that doubled as a barbecue. We never barbecued. 

Several gigantic & immovable workbenches. I assume they’re all still there.

A big patio, accented by a fish pond and a tiny mountain that he turned into a fairyland by installing Christmas elves and play animals in plastic boxes, and when you flicked a switch they would light up and dance. Also, a fountain in the fish pond came alive. When I added dinosaurs to the elves he thought it was wonderful.

A recreation of the Solar System on the basement ceiling. 

A den for himself in the basement. He napped there, because it was cool, until he couldn’t use the stairs anymore.

Various pulleys and levers and wheeled apparatuses that allowed him mastery over his environment long after post-polio syndrome began to take its toll. 

I’ve probably left stuff out, things so useful and necessary that they weren’t even noticed.

Pretty good day in the garden, where it was, after several days, cool enough to function. Got the hose to the back flower bed just in time, before rainlessness pushed it past redemption.