My friends call me an odd duck and that is a compliment. My father was an odd duck, so any similarity to him gives me pride. I don’t know why he was such a character or where the trait came from. I never knew my paternal grandparents who were dead before I was born. In some ways my dad seemed hatched from no one or no where in particular.
When my sisters and I were ages one, two and three, my parents bought a former farm on a run-down parcel of land in Worcester, Massachusetts. Just four miles from Main Street our six acres of heaven included oak trees large enough to support tree houses and large swaths of hilly lawn surrounding a 1910 clapboard home.
My mother realized pretty quickly that four acres of lawn were too much for an at-home mom to handle alone so she told my dad she needed help. Rather than take the normal action of cutting the grass too, or even hiring a lawn crew, Dad had a better idea. He bought a sheep.
Dusty was to be an outdoor roomba, the vacuum cleaner you turn on and forget, except Dusty didn’t know he was supposed to eat the grass evenly. Some of it he pulled out from the roots and killed, other grass didn’t interest him at all and it grew to a foot in length. Eventually Dusty became too large for my Mom to handle so Dad had another idea. We took him to the butcher and ate him.
Growing up we also learned to love the dump. No one I knew was as lucky as we to be able to bring as much home from the dump as we brought to it. Dad packed us into the station wagon with the wooden trailer filled with junk and when we arrived at that stinky mountain of treasures he set us lose to collect the junk of others. In bringing home dirty and unwanted toys, dad reasoned we wouldn’t demand new ones. And he was right. Those dump runs felt a little like Christmas every time. It was only after several conversations about rats and disease with other parents that dad thought it best to keep us home.
But I do have one more dump story and it involved an adventure when we were teenagers. We were driving my sister Karen to a sleep-over, with a stop at the dump on the way. My dad removed all the paper bags of trash and heaved them as far as he could down the steep cliff of garbage beside the car. Suddenly my sister cried out that her “overnight bag” was one of those brown paper bags. Dad had tossed her best stuff over the edge.
No problem. Dad found an old hose in the debris, tied it around Karen’s waist, and sent her rappelling down the cliff of garbage. Dad knew the danger of avalanche and wouldn’t let her scamper down without that dirty hose.
We created quite a spectacle that early summer evening, a small crowd gathering to witness the girl amidst the trash, dad shouting instructions, my mom asking Dad how he could have been so careless, and Susan and I demanding to know why we didn’t get to climb down there too. Karen did find her things and we went on our way and my lingering impression was not that my dad was dumb for throwing out the bag, but that he was smart for knowing that a hose can save your life if you ever get caught up in an avalanche of garbage.
Which leads me to a similar story involving risk and ropes. I was about 12-years old, awkward and not particularly confident back then, until Dad gave me the opportunity to do something he was unable to do. In those days the only thing I could do that he couldn’t was to hula hoop and it didn’t seem like a skill he valued for himself anyway, so this indeed was special.
Dad needed me to carry a brand new gold-leaf weathervane to the peak of the barn roof and place it into a hole he had drilled from inside. He feared the aging structure would not support his weight, so the job fell to skinny me. He tied a thick scratchy ship rope around my waist and sent me up an extension ladder to the roof, where he had managed to rest another extension ladder on the roof itself. The end of that ladder was hooked around the peak of the roof, so I had to climb up the ladders, and hold that weathervane high enough that the 10-carat gold didn’t scrape off onto the shingles.
The Barn
Dad had the risks all figured out. If I lost my balance at the peak of the roof, I wouldn’t fall down the other side because dad had a firm grip on the rope. And he told me if I tumbled off the roof on his side, he’d simply catch me on the way down. As my children say, “yeah right”.
I could go on and on with stories about my dad. As a little girl I didn’t see him as quirky. I saw him as cool. Adults seemed to too, but I attribute that more to his Harvard Law School degree than the nutty stuff he did at home.
In some ways I have very traditional values. But I really love swimming against the tide, finding my own way and not doing what everyone else is doing. I find myself questioning if Dad would have thought this is a good idea, and if the answer is yes, it’s good and odd enough for me.
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