Birthday Tribute

My Dad the Dreamer

Looking out second-story windows we saw city sunsets cut through with telephone wires and pierced by electric poles. Exhaust fumes hung heavy in the air, except in those first few moments after a rainstorm. My dad is a dreamer.
“We’ll have a house in the country one day with fresh air and a big wide open sky. Every night sunsets will be painted all the way across as far as we can see,” my dad said. In my eight-year-old mind, God’s watercolors washed across the heavens. How could my Dad see beyond now into the future? I saw swatches of firmament between tall brick buildings and neatly rowed two-story houses. I didn’t see our new house in the country.
The summer after I turned ten, Dad bought a piece of country land with a real dirt road along side. We stood atop our knoll, surrounded by five acres of goldenrod, milkweed and thistles. Facing west, we watched the sun dip behind the maple woods. When the colors began to rainbow across the clear expanse, he winked at me. That moment, a dream became real.
“The front window of our new house will face the sunset and we’ll watch them every night,” he said, unwrapping another dream for me. One day we’ll leave our three-bedroom walk-up and live in a four-bedroom ranch-style home with a family room.
Before I started the sixth grade, we moved into our new, not-quite-finished house. Aside from the appliances and a cold-water sink the kitchen hadn’t been constructed.
“All you kids will get to help me build the kitchen,” Dad said. “When it’s done we’ll have a big banana-split party and you can each invite a friend.” For two years he made mounds of oak sawdust. He mopped up small white puddles of hide glue after clamping precision-cut pieces of wood together, making all the cabinets, doors and drawers. We kids sanded miles of board feet and rubbed off the fine grit from reams of sandpaper, making sharp edges soft. When we finished our project, an eat-in bar stood between the kitchen and the dining room with honey-stained, solid-wood cabinets above and below on all four walls. I was fifteen.
Just as I dreamed, friends came over for a banana-split party. My dad scooped everybody’s choice of flavors into banana-lined bowls. We topped ice cream balls with caramel, strawberry syrup and chocolate sauce. All afternoon, my dad practically glowed with pride in that kitchen. Our friends saw the sunset through the front windows of our new house.
“I want to accomplish so many projects,” Dad said. “I’ll have to live to be to get them all finished.” Just like that, another dream planted itself in my head, where it lived until I turned forty-two.
Then, Dad had a heart attack. Because of complications, the doctors didn’t expect him to live through the night. I drove a hundred miles to stand by his ICU bed. I tried to think of something to hold his unconscious body to this side of Heaven.

“I always dreamed you’d live to be a-hundred-and-twenty. You still have fifty-one years left.” I said. He kept right on living. Four years later, my dad is still a dreamer. Because of him, I am too.