Reflections on the Ninth Week of Summer – My Father’s Eyes

Dad Christmas 1972

I gave myself permission to daydream about Dad all day Monday, the thirty-first anniversary of his death. While I sewed fabric sea turtles to card stock for notes, I remembered how he lifted new objects to his nose for an investigatory sniff. While I used smooth, frosting-a-cake strokes to shape worm compost into a drying pyramid, I remembered the way he chuckled at my shenanigans. While I stared through goggles at rising bubbles during lap swim, I remembered Dad’s expressive, hazel eyes―especially on that summer day when I was about ten and we visited his mom and sister in Erie.

With the family packed in the station wagon, Dad had driven us back from a grocery store. Crouching with my hands on the back of his seat―no seat belts in those days―I watched Dad steer into Grandma’s driveway, ease past her two story house, and park by the row of garages. As soon as his foot lifted off the brake pedal, I opened my door with the intention of dashing to the tailgate and grabbing a bag of groceries―preferably the bag holding the cherry vanilla ice cream.

My feet hit the ground.

I grabbed the door frame, slammed―

―and my right index finger crunched.

A searing stab radiated through my hand.

Wailing, I stared at dripping blood.

Dad’s hands clutched my arm and wrist. “How’d this happen?”

“I did it myself.” I sobbed. “I closed the . . . ”

He picked me up. “Dot, hold her.” He slid me to the middle of the front seat.

Mom put her arm around my shoulder and pulled me close. She wrapped a lavender handkerchief around my finger and held it tight.

In his no-nonsense-I-mean-now voice, Dad said, “The rest of you go into the house.” He jumped into the car, started the engine, and hurtled us backward down the driveway.

Aunt Jane shouted, “The emergency room entrance moved to State Street.”

Dad nodded and backed onto Fifth.

Mom opened her hand. “There’s a lot of blood, Bob.”

Keeping one hand on the steering wheel and reaching into his pocket with the other, he pulled out a folded white handkerchief, shook it open, and handed it to Mom. “Use this. Keep the pressure on.”

Mom wrapped his handkerchief on top of hers. “Do you think she’ll be able to use the finger?”

“I need to concentrate on driving, Dot.”

We lurched around a corner.

My finger throbbed. I curled up on the seat, lay my head on Mom’s lap, and watched the tops of telephone poles pass like train cars at a crossing.

My next memory? Standing between Dad and Mom. A man wearing baggy green clothes said, “Only one of you can come with her.”

Dad said, “Wait here, Dot.”

Mom slumped into a chair.

Dad put his hand on my back and propelled me after the man in green who hurried down a bright hallway.

Another memory lapse.

Laying on my back somewhere, I saw Dad standing close. His hazel eyes, as strong as the steel he helped design, stared to the side of me. I heard male voices but didn’t distinguish words.

“What are they doing, Dad?” I raised my head to look.

Taking my chin in his hand, he eased my face toward his. “Watch me. Let them work.”

Staring into Dad’s compassionate eyes calmed me.

His eyes switched focus to above me. “She’s a piano player. Do a good job so she can play.” He lowered his focus. As if his hazel eyes could heal my finger, Dad stared at the doctor’s work.

I kept my eyes on his.

Later, Dad, Mom, and I got out of the station wagon by the row of garages behind Grandma’s house.

Grandma, Aunt Jane, my sister Anita, and my brother Bob, gathered inside the back door. Their faces looked long and pale like tragedy masks at a theater.

“She’s fine.” Dad took my forearm and raised it so they’d get a view of my finger curved on a metal splint and wrapped in brown cloth tape. He sniffed the tape then released my arm.

I hustled toward the house. “Did you leave any cherry vanilla ice cream for me?”

Aunt Jane pointed to the tailgate. “You had it with you the whole time. We didn’t have time to get the groceries out of the wagon.”

Mom put her hand on her forehead. “Oh, pain. Now it’s cherry vanilla soup.”

Dad chuckled.

So decades later, while I brushed my teeth at the end of daydreaming Monday, I paused and stared at the scar in the middle section of my right index finger. I’d played piano and organ, written stories, and sewed quilts with that finger. My gaze shifted from the finger to my hazel eyes in the mirror. For about the hundredth time that day, I sang, “She’s got her father’s eyes.”

My husband Spence walked up behind me, massaged my shoulders, and said, “You’re far away. Where are you?”

I told him. “I’m lost in my father’s eyes.”

Dad, Daughter Ellen (about JW's story age), and Janet