My paternal great-grandfather John Welker, who was a Union soldier when he was only 17, came to Oklahoma in the Cherokee Strip land run, April 22, 1889. Fifty years later to the very day, his youngest grandchild, my father, was born. I can't help thinking that the timing was not an accident; Dad must in some ways be very much like the grandfather he never knew. But that's something I can never really know, since John Welker's story has been difficult to trace. I can only know what I have seen.
I remember when I was very young, maybe a toddler, seeing him come in the back door in the evening, calling me "Catfish" for no reason that I've ever known, a play on my name, I guess. I ADORED him and thought he was so funny. He would do silly stuff like putting a bowl on his head to make us laugh; it worked every time. Even then, I sensed what I would later come to understand clearly: that he was only truly comfortable with kids and animals. Something in him was and still is spiritually more connected to them. But that didn't make him weak. I can also remember when I stood at the door of the breezeway in the middle of the night, a storm raging outside while he watched to see what was brewing. I was so little that, standing next to him, I wrapped my arm around his knee. He was a tower of strength to me, capable of mastering even the winds of a prairie cyclone that threatened his grain elevator business and our little town.
With no seat belt laws in effect, I would sit on his lap to drive to the elevator or out to check cattle, and I remember standing next to him on the pickup seat as well. We would sing Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, and Merle Haggard songs with complete abandon. That was only the beginning of hundreds of thousands of miles we would travel, hot-hot summer trips, trips to the mountains, all over Canada, anyplace with cooler air and fewer people. Once when I was a pre-teen, very quiet and withdrawn, we were on our way to the South Dakota farm, and we had to pick up a pup trailer in Omaha for the grain semi up there. Dad always likes to get to a business first thing in the morning because no one else will be there then, so we were driving overnight to arrive in the city at 8 a.m. I was doing my shift of sitting up to make sure he stayed awake; we were somewhere in northern Kansas or southeastern Nebraska, and we had the 8-track going on a Johnny Horton album. We didn't sing because we didn't want to wake anyone up. But the song "Whispering Pines" came on as we drove through that dark June night, windows down, heat lightning off to the west, and in that moment I felt a sense of connectedness to Dad that I would not have felt if we had been singing along. It was a powerful enough event that I can still describe the moment nearly 40 years later.
There are just a few important compartments in life that really seem to drive Dad. One is his love of music, which is only superseded by his love of work. He can raise, doctor, and work cattle with an encyclopedic understanding of them. He's a speed demon on a four-wheeler (or a two-wheeler for that matter) when it comes to moving or herding animals. Until implements and tractors went metric, there was little he couldn't fix, and he's a pro at welding. He's designed and built many working pens and chutes of all sizes here in Oklahoma, Kansas, and South Dakota. Pole barns, too, have sprung from his mind and design, all over the place, with only the family and a few close friends to assist him.
Dad also values family more than many people realize, and although people in general can annoy him, he's learned the value of and earned friendships as he's gotten older that he was missing when he was younger, working nonstop. He won't touch a computer, but his cell phone has become attached to his ear whenever he has to sit in one place, keeping him in touch with a rogue network of retired and semi-retired people he's gathered over the years as he and Mom have traveled. He likes to be at the center of their mischief, and he's become something of a social butterfly now that pleases me a great deal. All I ever seemed to see of him was work; that he will sometimes take time to have fun now makes me more confident that he's enjoying life.
I could write a thousand different qualities about him, in song and verse form, even. For example, everyone that he feels close to gets a nickname from him eventually, something based on an experience, a story, a quality that person has. According to Mom, he chose my name so that he could call me CJ, which he did for a long time, though he's called me Fred for years now. Everyone in my family has had their nicknames for years, right up to Allie's "Alley Cat" name that Dad started using before she was even born. Another remarkable detail about him is that he can switch his eating habits up on a dime; one day he can wolf down big farm meals, including ice cream two or three times, and the next, he will subsist on salads, coffee, and water. He developed that habit after his only brother was diagnosed diabetic. It's also lost on no one that he adores babies and would take his grandchildren traveling with him anywhere, any time, for as long as he could get them to go. Logan and Nolan, in fact, probably spent up to three months out of the year with Mom and Dad every year until they started school. While we were brought up to spend time with our family, to respect and honor that time, Dad's desire for us to all be together is part of what keeps us celebrating the holidays all in one place. I'm proud and happy that we can do that for him. And he never (neither he nor Mom would EVER have) spoiled us, but he believes he has a responsibility to watch over us to make sure that if something drastic ever happens, he can step in and help. That quality alone leaves me staggering with the weight and worry of what parenthood, fatherhood, must be.
I have no illusions about his being only a human being, though it took me a long time to realize that he was not God, that he made mistakes. I know his flaws---his sense of control he keeps by withholding information until the last minute, his pride, his moodiness, and Lord knows his stubbornness---because I share almost all of them. Sometimes, yes, I would like to be rid of some of the more difficult qualities in trying to negotiate with him. Then again.....that's almost the same as wishing him gone, and I can't bear to think of what life would be without him in it.
If we tend to idolize our fathers, I surely must have a temple in my heart just for mine. A fire on the altar provides the light that keeps me on the path of good that he raised us with. There is no heresy in this; only a pure, clean love of the one earthly man who will always love me more than any other man this side of heaven.
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