Father's Day
Jun. 15th, 2008 10:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gvdubI wrote about my mother just last month, for Mother's Day. It being Father's Day, I'd like to share a little about my dad.
My dad's life was very much formed by his bout with polio in his teenage years. He never talked much about what his life was like pre-polio, so I have no idea if he played baseball, swam in the creek, went fishing, or any other of the pastimes of rural youth in the early '20s. Born in 1915 in an old Dutch stone house that had been the family residence for a long time (and I don't know quite how long, but over 100 years wouldn't surprise me), he was part of a family that had roots in New York's Mid-Hudson Valley stretching back to 1652 when Aert Jacobsen arrived from The Netherlands determined to make his way in the New World (Van Wagner as surname was shortened from Van Wageningen, or "from Wagening", after the town in eastern Holland the family came from). When his uncle (my grandfather's brother) decided to move to California in 1917, the family moved half a mile down the road to the 1820's farmhouse in which I grew up and where my dad lived until selling the last of the farm and moving to a Friend's retirement community in Mount Holly, NJ in 1992.
Dad was a man of many interests and many seeming contradictions. His Masters was in biochemistry and genetics (not a common major in the '30s), which he put to practical use by breeding prize-winning poultry. His interest in science was broad and lifelong. As was his interest in matters of faith. He had made the decision while bed-ridden with polio that he was going to lead a spiritual life, and was an amateur scholar of Quakerism and Quaker history, eventually becoming the official historian of New York Yearly Meeting and contributing heavily to several books of Quaker history. For him, religion and science were two sides of the same coin. Both explored life's mysteries and he wanted to know. Though he rarely left the farm, he traveled widely in books and thought. He had every issue of National Geographic dating back to when he was first given a subscription as a boy in 1922. One of life's great tragedies was, when selling the farm and cleaning out the attic, he could find no one who wanted 70 years of Geographic - no school, no library, nobody - and it all had to go in a dumpster.
He really shouldn't have been able to walk at all after the polio. There was virtually no muscle tissue left in his legs. But he did, through sheer force of will. It wasn't until later that I realized he must have been in tremendous pain almost every day of his life, but you would never have known it. His good-natured stoicism kept the evidence of that from the world. He led a more active life than many more abled people ever did. Our various dogs always followed him around, since he was doing more interesting things than any of the rest of us.
He never really understood, I don't think, my need to make music. Although he was a very creative person himself, it was always with a physical form and to a specific purpose. Being a farmer, he knew how to do a smattering of everything - plumbing, electrical work, construction, architecture, woodworking, and his creative impulses would be bound up in designing and building new things. When he decided that, to remain competitive with larger poultry farms, he would have to switch over to a cage system rather than letting the chickens roam the floor freely, he designed and built a whole system out of plywood, 2x4s, and wire with a custom manure scraping/disposal system rather than buying a package from one of the many companies that were pitching them to farmers. Later, he designed and helped build a new building for our Quaker meeting and hand-made new benches for the meeting house in our woodshop.
My final memory of my dad was seeing him in the hospital at Woolman Commons on that mid-December day after I had received the call that I'd better come back East. When I arrived, he was too weak to speak, but was able to squeeze my hand to let me know that he knew I was there. Other family members arrived that day from distant points, and we gathered around his bed and sang Christmas Carols for him. His indomitable will had let him hold on until the whole family had gathered, and later that night, he passed away. The nurse came and got us about 2am, and we went to see him one last time. The next morning we went back to his room to pick up a couple of things and they had removed his body, but hadn't remade the bed. There was a perfectly dad-shaped indentation on the bed and I realized that a thing could be as well defined by its absence as by its presence.
His presence, though, is with me every day – in my interest in science, my desire to explore the mirror world of faith, my commitment to working at living my life in the light, my respect for and interest in history, my love of reading – in all the gifts he left us.
So long, Alson. It was a privilege to know you and a gift to be your son.
My dad's life was very much formed by his bout with polio in his teenage years. He never talked much about what his life was like pre-polio, so I have no idea if he played baseball, swam in the creek, went fishing, or any other of the pastimes of rural youth in the early '20s. Born in 1915 in an old Dutch stone house that had been the family residence for a long time (and I don't know quite how long, but over 100 years wouldn't surprise me), he was part of a family that had roots in New York's Mid-Hudson Valley stretching back to 1652 when Aert Jacobsen arrived from The Netherlands determined to make his way in the New World (Van Wagner as surname was shortened from Van Wageningen, or "from Wagening", after the town in eastern Holland the family came from). When his uncle (my grandfather's brother) decided to move to California in 1917, the family moved half a mile down the road to the 1820's farmhouse in which I grew up and where my dad lived until selling the last of the farm and moving to a Friend's retirement community in Mount Holly, NJ in 1992.
Dad was a man of many interests and many seeming contradictions. His Masters was in biochemistry and genetics (not a common major in the '30s), which he put to practical use by breeding prize-winning poultry. His interest in science was broad and lifelong. As was his interest in matters of faith. He had made the decision while bed-ridden with polio that he was going to lead a spiritual life, and was an amateur scholar of Quakerism and Quaker history, eventually becoming the official historian of New York Yearly Meeting and contributing heavily to several books of Quaker history. For him, religion and science were two sides of the same coin. Both explored life's mysteries and he wanted to know. Though he rarely left the farm, he traveled widely in books and thought. He had every issue of National Geographic dating back to when he was first given a subscription as a boy in 1922. One of life's great tragedies was, when selling the farm and cleaning out the attic, he could find no one who wanted 70 years of Geographic - no school, no library, nobody - and it all had to go in a dumpster.
He really shouldn't have been able to walk at all after the polio. There was virtually no muscle tissue left in his legs. But he did, through sheer force of will. It wasn't until later that I realized he must have been in tremendous pain almost every day of his life, but you would never have known it. His good-natured stoicism kept the evidence of that from the world. He led a more active life than many more abled people ever did. Our various dogs always followed him around, since he was doing more interesting things than any of the rest of us.
He never really understood, I don't think, my need to make music. Although he was a very creative person himself, it was always with a physical form and to a specific purpose. Being a farmer, he knew how to do a smattering of everything - plumbing, electrical work, construction, architecture, woodworking, and his creative impulses would be bound up in designing and building new things. When he decided that, to remain competitive with larger poultry farms, he would have to switch over to a cage system rather than letting the chickens roam the floor freely, he designed and built a whole system out of plywood, 2x4s, and wire with a custom manure scraping/disposal system rather than buying a package from one of the many companies that were pitching them to farmers. Later, he designed and helped build a new building for our Quaker meeting and hand-made new benches for the meeting house in our woodshop.
My final memory of my dad was seeing him in the hospital at Woolman Commons on that mid-December day after I had received the call that I'd better come back East. When I arrived, he was too weak to speak, but was able to squeeze my hand to let me know that he knew I was there. Other family members arrived that day from distant points, and we gathered around his bed and sang Christmas Carols for him. His indomitable will had let him hold on until the whole family had gathered, and later that night, he passed away. The nurse came and got us about 2am, and we went to see him one last time. The next morning we went back to his room to pick up a couple of things and they had removed his body, but hadn't remade the bed. There was a perfectly dad-shaped indentation on the bed and I realized that a thing could be as well defined by its absence as by its presence.
His presence, though, is with me every day – in my interest in science, my desire to explore the mirror world of faith, my commitment to working at living my life in the light, my respect for and interest in history, my love of reading – in all the gifts he left us.
So long, Alson. It was a privilege to know you and a gift to be your son.