Happy birthday, Dad

Today would be my father’s one hundred and thirteenth birthday. Although I never met the man who died more than eight months before I was born, I think about him often, and always on his birthday.

Back on June 22, 2007, when I mentioned in an email to my siblings that our dad would have turned ninety-five that day, my brother Greg wrote back, “Dad would be ninety-five? Holy crap, what’s that make me?”

I'm sure that in the minds of my sister and brothers, our father is frozen in middle-age, exactly as he was when he died, a week before his forty-sixth birthday, and it must have seemed strange to them as each one reached and passed that age.

Not surprisingly, not many concrete artifacts of my father’s life remain after sixty-seven years. I have only a relatively few pictures of him, and it occurred to me recently that, although I would easily recognize my mother’s handwriting anywhere, I don’t believe I’ve ever read a single word written in my father’s handwriting.

I have his gold pocketwatch, a gift to him on the occasion of his graduation from Gould Academy in 1930; in high school I added to my reputation as an eccentric by wearing it on a chain around my neck.

Here at camp there is a homemade four-foot spirit level with “W. Wight” engraved into the wood; it was handed down to my father, William, by his father, Walter, and, before that, to Walter by his father, Walton, who worked for a time as a stonemason in Boston.

There’s a formal portrait of the whole family (minus me, of course), taken when my sister, the youngest at the time, was about six, and the three boys were awkward adolescents. When I was growing up, the portrait always hung in my mother’s bedroom, where I would often go to look at it, and I confess that my own absence from the carefully posed group always rankled.

Today I am thinking about the man who, without ever knowing me, has had such a profound influence on how I’ve turned out, not just through the obvious fact of genetics (“I remember your father...he had a round face, too,” one older lady told me when I first moved to his hometown to live), but also through the ways in which he shaped the other members of my family, and the folklore about him with which I grew up.

“Everyone who ever met him loved your father,” I remember my mother saying, and it made me want everyone to love me, too. “Your father could do anything,” she said, and my mother could, too. Between them, they made me determined to build bookshelves, rewire lamps, hang my own sheetrock, paint my own house.

Today it is also forty-three years from the day my mother began writing her “retirement journal,” the journal which began, “Your seventieth birthday, Bill, and a very good day to close out my Milford life and get ready to carry out our dream of retirement on a hill in Bethel!”

When my siblings and I discovered that journal after our mom died, I think it was the first time that any of us realized that throughout her forty-six years of widowhood—nearly three times as long as the sixteen years they had together before our father’s death—our mother had never stopped conversing with our dad.

Perhaps more than any other single thing, it was those first lines, written by my mother on my father’s seventieth birthday, that made me decide to write a book, and to tell her story in her own words, as I imagined she would have written them.

Not long after my mother’s death, my best friend, Donna, wrote to me, “I’ll never forget when Greg read out loud the first line of your mother’s journal at her funeral. It was a side of your mother I feel guilty saying I never thought about—a woman who missed her husband and thought about him always. Her dreams had gone wildly off track, yet she forged ahead and created a happy, funny family that love to be together, and other people love to be with them.”

Tonight, on my dad’s birthday, I sit on the porch of the camp my parents built together, with the help of my siblings—because to be a Wight means to be able to do anything—and I am, as always, filled with gratitude for their legacy.