David, lovely and heartfelt as always. I don’t have time for a longer response
(I’m at my daughter’s with toddlers) but you made me think about my father’s
premier wisdom: to know the difference between wants and needs....because not
being able to distinguish (or not bothering to distinguish) leads to
self-inflicted misery. My father died while I was in my 30s, suddenly and far
away. No time for last thoughts or questions or goodbyes. I’m glad for you
that you had that....
Ursula
In cold and snowy Boulder...
On Oct 14, 2018, at 10:37 AM, david ritchie <profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Here’s an excerpt from the speech I wrote for my father’s funeral:
He was a private man. He valued the handshake. There was a moment in
Trinidad, early in his career, when he had to decide whether or not to accept
delivery of some large object. In my memory it was a storage tank of some
kind, something that had trouble passing the last small bridge that led to
the middle of nowhere in the jungle where he was the boss of people. They
had no X ray machine to reveal faults in seams or joints or O rings or
whatever. I’m sure he read all the paperwork beforehand, thought about how
to proceed, did his best as a young engineer thrown at the deep end. The way
he told the story, it all came down to a handshake and face to face contact.
“Do you, sir, certify that this tank is sound?”
He believed he could cut through nonsense and arrive at the truth. That, to
him was one point of education and life’s experiences. He believed in a
meritocracy, opening opportunity for people. Like me he was delighted by one
of J.’s friends, not only because she is young and charming and beautiful and
obviously intelligent, though we noticed that, but because as the daughter of
a coal miner she’d been given an opportunity to express all of that at
Oxford. She has just finished a Ph.D. in Chemistry. She sings, she dances,
she is what the world should celebrate. Dad did.
Romantic though he was in some circumstances, mostly he didn’t “do” emotion.
Which is not at all to imply that he wasn’t nice and generous and good. I
tell students that getting the punctuation and so on correct is not a virtue,
it’s a duty. We all get some of that wrong. Being nice and generous and
good in my father’s world was a duty, and then what? He wanted to know what
had been achieved; he called that practical.
He was the son of parents who had very little education. He achieved a
degree in war time. He rose through the corporate post-war system to achieve
stability beyond the imagination of the pre-war world. He owned a house,
began to save, went camping on the Continent. I’m not sure I can sum up what
he achieved.
I can tell you what he read.
Dad liked books. Everyone who visited the house knows this. What you may
not know are the titles he was most fond of, the ones he insisted I read.
The Education of Hiram Kaplan.
The Phantom Major.
I Heard the Owl Call my Name.
The Way of a Transgressor by Negley Farson. (Who has a name like that any
more?)
Anything by Damon Runyon.
I didn’t dislike any of these, but I can’t say I ever saw why they were so
powerful and memorable to him. We agreed on P.G.Wodehouse and Burns. And
that we disliked Byron.
I can tell you what he said. Dads say strange things. Well, I do, and he
did. Many of you will have heard the following, launched into the air with
an invitation to puzzle out what might be meant:
Keep it simple.
He used to play for Charlton.
Do you know why I like a hot plate?
What is the purpose of a saucer?
Not my style.
As Harry the Horse once said, “go where the big potatoes are and a small
potato may roll your way.”
There’s none so strange as folk.
Do you think I came down the Clyde on a bicycle?
You can’t eat scenery.
Aim for the left lip.
Golf is a very simple game: you take the club between your right ear and
shoulder, you unwind and you finish between your left ear and shoulder.
If you want to grip the club like that…
People tell me that a tree is ninety percent air…not on a golf course
Maybe I can sum up his life in three maxims?
One: If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.
He wanted to be more flexible than his father and life gave him opportunities
to see the world and consider it. He admired his mother’s ability to cook
but felt absolutely no desire to learn that. He felt that even difficult
duties must be acknowledged, shouldered, performed without hint of complaint.
Each of the children has his or her own way of expressing inheritances from
this world view adventuring physically or mentally, pushing limits, doing
what must be done. At the end he enjoyed that, said how grateful he was for
that.
His father had advanced theories of golf, having watched the greats, but
couldn’t play because he’d lost one eye to being struck by a ball and because
he was a stubborn and immovable man. My father tried to be different and
succeeded.
Two: Grass doesnae grow on a busy street, meaning that bald people think a
lot.
For Dad education and thinking and curiosity are at the core of living.
Flip side: for him some things simply weren’t worth thinking.
Three: Why not?
In the expansive period after my mother died, when you asked if he wanted to
go to the Galapagos or back to Macchu Pichu or Hawaii and he’d answer, “Why
not?”
A life is so much more than three phrases.
There are a lot of books we feel we ought to read but we don’t. There are a
lot of victories in sport that ought to have been easier, and losses that are
inexplicable. Another’s death ought to give perspective, but it doesn’t. At
least immediately. There’s how you feel you ought to feel, and how you
actually feel.
It’s been harder than I imagined, and there was plenty of time to imagine.
The good part... one of the good parts, is that my father was able to live
independently until six weeks before he died, and at 93 drive himself to play
golf, shoot under his age on many occasions, beat me. I think we halved the
round last time we played. A wonder of nature was I think his aim, and I
believe he pretty much got what he wanted.
A hard thing to write when you are doing a little better with this grief
thing is a note supporting another who is in the same spot. The female half
of the couple that hosted my talk at the Smithsonian, died on September 25.
She was a very charming woman who lived with inoperable pancreatic cancer far
longer than many—more than a year. She managed to get to last summer’s
conference in France by taking a ship across and we had a dinner together,
just the four of us. They talked about how painful it had been to break up
their vast collection of books on military history and technology and I
thought, “I’m glad I took photographs of their shelves." Just seeing volumes
side by side was inspirational to me in ways that students who think
everything can be found by web search cannot understand. It was this coming
weekend a year ago that we flew back to see their final joint exhibition.
Time well spent.
I’m back in the U.S., back in the classroom, back feeding and watering
chickens. Life goes on. Whaaaaat?
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
