My older brother Sam wrote this tribute to our father in 1986. Obviously he was the far, far better writer, and he spent much more time and effort on his tribute. Compare with my previous entry.

I have one very clear early memory: sitting on a small bed, pushing around a little red hook and ladder fire truck through the gentle contours of the bedspread, while my mother and father talked softly. It was morning, and my father was preparing to go somewhere. I recall being fascinated with watching him lace up what seemed to be very tall boots.

I was just over a year old, then. [Note: this very early memory took place when my father was still in the army.]

Later, I remember my father as the head in front of my sister and I in the car as we made various mysterious journeys. I remember him as the wraithlike studier of late nights and empty Pepsi-Cola bottles and impossible books and papers. I recall the newly ordained father, and I remember being fascinated with the number of strangers (to me) that thought him important enough to make little speeches about, to shake hands with, to pray over, and to wish well. And I recall learning that many of these were quite distinguished men, and that they considered my father something special.

I remember wondering what it was that was special.

I remember the first pastorate in the tiny town, and how I suddenly seemed to have developed two fathers; one was the overseer of yard work, the inspector of pulled weeks, the driver on Saturday shopping expeditions, and the other was a man of some mysterious calling that kept him absent from the home from six in the morning until sometimes after ten at night.

I remember resenting the ones who kept him away from us.

Things stand out from later years:

Other peoples’ fathers would allow them many freedoms, permit many indulgences; I had to fight for every one of mine. Other fathers wouldn’t fuss at their sons for all sorts of small things around the house.

But in the moment of real trauma, as floors dropped away below me, and crisis was at hand, when the fathers of those other boys would shout and harangue and throw up their hands, wailing, “Oh, what have we done to deserve this? Where did we go wrong?” — but not my father, no. Not the slightest hint of recrimination passed his lips, there was no reproach in his eyes; he said: “You are my son. I love you. Are you okay? We’ll work this out…”

And I decided that I had the best father.

And I realized I had something special. I could send friends to my dad. When their parents would stop hearing them, even throw them out, my dad would listen…

I remember fixing a spring on the garage door and having it rip loose, catching his hand and almost tearing his thumb away. And the young man that was there helping us said, “I thought for sure I was going to get to hear a pastor swear. That must have hurt horribly!” But my dad just smiled and shook his head.

Later, when I was old enough to realize what it all meant, and when I had lived through the repeated shame of violating many of the principles I held dear, I was amazed that my father had the strength never to violate his. Even in ways that would have been dismissible, forgivable.

What he said it was right to live by, what he meant to live by, he lived by.

I remember joining the army, over everyone’s objections. “Air Force,” they said. I didn’t tell my dad that I had to join the same branch of service that he had. I couldn’t imagine it any other way. And later, in the misery and agony of the training, I was incredulous that my father, at the age of seventeen, and the towering height of five six, had endured it all before me, and then had gone off to a horrifying Asian war. But the thought of him having blazed the trail kept me slogging on through the mud and sweat and tears…

I remember the father of the hideous hats of family fame. Sitting at the airport with my sister, waiting to pick him up as he returned from Israel, and one of us remarking to the other as we spotted a particularly ludicrous piece of headgear on someone, “Oh, I hope Dads didn’t see that hideous one. He’d want it for sure.” And then he was there, striding to meet us in that fast paced walk of his, and perched triumphantly on his head was the very same hat, a little abomination that made us cry out in a strange, delightful mixture of glee and horror, “Oh, Dads, how could you?”

I recall the amusement when I tell friends that after 31 years of marriage, my father still has a violent crush on my mother. “He’s not just in love with her,” I tell them, “he’s infatuated with her!”

“Still?” they ask.

“Still.”

My father delights in small ironies and out of the ordinary joys: putting a special manifold and carburetor on my mother’s Dodge Dart so that the little green “granny car” was suddenly a sneaky stoplight killer. How he would laugh at the thought of her leaving behind some swaggering lout in his Camaro! [Note: Sam had owned two Camaros.]

He’ll sit for hours with his grandson on the couch, shameless in his devotion and pride of parentage. [Sam is referring to my eldest. My father was equally gaga over all the grandchildren that followed.]

In the right sort of clothes, he gives the appearance of a bumbling and harmless gardener, yet in a three piece suit he has conferred with heads of state and luminaries of the highest order. And they remember him. And seek him out again.

He is a man who will venture into the icy iron heart of the Soviet Union and play I-Spy in clandestine meetings with outlawed church leaders and pull it off, a man whose personal library is vast and impressive and rather intimidating, a man who used to type his sermons out and memorized them because he disdained preachers who were too lazy to really prepare, a man who can never be beaten by illness or bad fortune, and yet, my father is a man whose unsuccessful attempts to strike a wasp in a car with a straw hat has passed into legendary status, a man who is, by his own admission, mechanically and athletically declined.

And I guess the most important thing is that when he was ill and near death a few years ago, and I was sitting in quiet vigil by his bed in the intensive care unit, I realized that I wasn’t yet old enough to be without my father in this life, and that I never would be.

[My brother Sam died at the age of 48.]