Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house.
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
By Robert Hayden
Please feel free to parse, share personal insights or just contemplate.
That’s one of my all time favorite poems. Aww, I miss my daddy. It’s so heartbreaking, the part, ‘what did I know, what did I know’. I wish I could go back and appreciate my dad in the moment just a little bit more.
Yeah, that’s the thing about missing a loved one, I think. It involves a mix of emotions - the positive and not so positive all stirred together in an honest package of grief.
I miss my dad too. No one ever made me feel quite so special as he could.
Those austere offices of love? The day my dad retired he told me, “I hated every day of that job.” I’m still speechless about that.
My first husband was never a candidate for Father of the Year.
No wood fire to bank, but he spent many hours babying an oil-burning furnace, priming, cleaning, priming some more, at night, after working construction all day, after the kids had gone to bed, because he didn’t want them to be cold.
More hours spent in the basement, in secret, working to make three secondhand bikes look, if not new, at least decent – painting, pin-striping, removing rust. I have a photo of the kids with the bikes. Big smiles, and maybe I’m imagining the disappointment in their eyes.
I had a photo of my father (gone 21 years, now) when he was working on a power line up in the Owens Valley for the LA Department of Water and Power. The photo was taken of him and a dozen or so men gathered around a camp fire (This must have been in the early thirties). The men were a steely-eyed, rough and ready looking bunch; boots, leather jackets, Indiana Jones fedora hats, cigarettes dangling from corners of mouths–you wouldn’t want to mess with them.
But each one was wearing a necktie.
I commented on this to my dad, and he pointed out that just because a man was doing hard, tiring and occasionally dangerous work, that was no excuse for him not to look his best.
A great guy.