Final Father's Day

"Can we have some music?" Mother asked

Photo by Dr. Anna Maria Wolfe with permission from child, now an adult

Although Father’s Day fell on a workday, my parents never understood that I teach on-line during specific hours. Yet I agreed to my sister’s elaborate plan to attend a matinee where my sister Brynne played the lead. As I live just through the forest from my parents, I would serve as first chauffeur.

The only way to reach the Edmonds theatre is to cross a bridge that might, without warning, be closed, and then to catch a ferry, also sketchy.

Assuming all goes well, it’s a two-hour trip.

My father liked padding, and as his loyal eldest daughter, I like padding too.

To start that warm June morning, Dad was cheerful. An outing! To see Brynne in a play! When I pulled up beside their house, just a quarter mile through the woods from mine, my parents were perched on the kitchen window seat. Dad wore his theatre garb, a brown corduroy sports jacket over sagging polyester slacks and a little peaked cap. Mom wore two shirts, one blue and one yellow under a Scottish wool sweater, topped off with a red wool jacket. She too wore a jaunty cap.

They looked like little white-haired twins.

Though I arrived at the exact moment we had agreed on, my father glanced at his watch. “It’s about time,” he said.

“We have over an hour to spare.” I was determined to remain upbeat, my mother’s lifelong ploy. Like a polite suitor, I ushered them out the door, ensured it was locked, and escorted them to the car.

“Sit in front,” Mother instructed my father, as if introducing him to someone he was meeting for the first time. “Talk with the driver.”

“I’ll sit in the back,” my father said.

As I helped her in and buckled her seat belt, Mom said “Can we have some music?”

My parents played a classical station twenty-four hours a day. Every ten minutes or so, advertisements blared at high volume. Before I built my house, when their offspring were spending a weekend in Mom’s and Dad’s cramped cottage, my sister Lisa and I could not sleep with the radio blasting beside our heads. We asked if we could shut it off.

“I thought I taught my children to love music!” Mom said, weeping. Brynne inherited her theatrical bent from our mother.

Lisa and I dragged our sleeping bags outside. I tried to hypnotize her so she could sleep, but instead she had a panic attack. So much for my healing abilities.

“I can’t turn on the radio yet,” I told Mother. This would hold her off for about five minutes, when she would repeat her request.

“It’s too warm in here,” she said. “Can we have some air?”

“You’re wearing a wool sweater and jacket,” I said. “It’s June.” I leaned over to peel off the jacket. “If you get chilly later, you can put it back on.” Ever since a transient ischemic attack, she’d been like this, but why couldn’t my father help her dress?

When we reached the Mt. Walker summit, I turned on “Prairie Home Companion.” Mom surprised me by singing along and laughing at the right places. “We used to listen to this,” she said. “Why don’t we listen to it anymore?”

Brynne wanted to do more for our parents. She’d heard music is one of the final passions retained by those with memory impairment. “How can I help?” she asked. “You’re out there all alone with them.”

I suggested a radio. Their old one broke, and Dad refused to buy another. Brynne found a simple radio and DVD player, but Mom and Dad couldn’t figure it out. I bought stacks of classical DVDs at Goodwill, but Dad rejected these. “Let’s just listen to silence,” he said.

As we descended Mt. Walker, my mother turned toward me. “Let’s take the back way to the bridge,” she said. Across the region, she scouted remote roads that passed through forests and along shorelines. The routes are scenic and lovely. Often, we didn’t pass a single car. I was happy to comply.

At the bridge, traffic was backed up for miles. After September 11, 2001, families welcoming or saying farewell to active-duty military were no longer allowed on the bridge when it opened for submariines to pass through, and the wait can last forty-five minutes.

We still had plenty of time.

As we arrived at the ferry terminal, I called Celia. She had not yet left her Seabeck home. With our complicated logistics, I was to leave my car in the parking lot, and she would drive onto the ferry while my parents and I crossed as foot passengers. “You’re early,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “But please get here quickly.”

Now I could order an espresso and sandwich at a cute little Kingston café. Brynne and Lisa had booked dinner reservations at an Italian restaurant for after the play, but I had to log into work at five, which meant rushing home the moment the play was out. “Would either of you like a snack?” I asked. “A cup of tea?”

“Tea!” Mother said. She hauled out her red leather purse stuffed with dozens of expired credit cards. She peeled off a dollar. In the back seat, Dad looked sullen.

“I thought Celia was meeting us here,” he said.

I dialed up the charm. “She’s on her way!” I ran into the café, but the wait stretched to ten minutes. Outside, I heard a car alarm. When I returned with Mom’s tea and my coffee and sandwich, I saw my mother had somehow set it off.

Dad was furious. “You left us locked in the car with all the windows up.”

“The doors are unlocked, and all the windows are down,” I said.

Mom grabbed my sandwich and gobbled it down.

“Let’s go ahead and get into the ferry line,” I said. I called Celia and told her to meet us at my car. The ferry lines were longer than expected, but we still had padding.

When we reached the toll booth, another problem arose. I hadn’t planned on driving onto the ferry, so I hadn’t brought cash, a debit card, or even a checkbook. After coffee, tea, and sandwich, I had only a few dollars and some loose change. Mom fumbled through her purse and came up with a few more bills. “Dad, do you have anything?” I asked.

“So that’s what this is about,” he said. “I thought it would come to this.” He pulled out a battered ten. Between Mom’s and my cash, quarters stashed in the glove compartment, and Dad’s ten, we made the fare.

I pulled into our assigned place in the holding lot, but it now appeared we might not make it onto the early boat. In my tiny Honda Civic, I felt trapped with a lifetime of rage. Then I saw Celia advancing toward us. She was smiling. My mother had an IQ over 160 and now couldn’t remember our names. Celia had the same IQ and full scholarships to Ivy League schools. Surely she would know how to handle our parents.

She climbed into the car. “Here, Daddy,” she said, offering a sack of cheese and crackers. Dad snarled and turned away. “Daddy, if you’re going to be negative and refuse to eat, you’re just going to spoil the day for all of us,” Celia said. We exchanged glances. I would never dare stand up to Dad. On the rare occasions I tried, he simply escalated.

“I see what you’re up to,” he said. “Brynne’s sisters want to sabotage her play.”

Now even Celia was speechless. She paid twenty dollars for each theatre ticket. She arranged for me to drive Mom and Dad to the ferry, and later, she would drive them home and then another hour and a half to her own cabin. From the time Brynne started acting in high school, we rarely missed a performance. This continued through adulthood when we all drove hundreds of miles to attend plays across the greater Puget Sound region.

“I thought this was going to be such a great day,” Dad said bitterly. “Then Kirie had to ruin it.”

“If you want to blame someone, blame me,” Celia said. “I’m the one who ran late.”

Maybe it was the espresso and missed sandwich, but I was shaking so much I could hardly breathe. Mother, always the healer, sensed the tension, but she could no longer form complex thoughts. Instead, she made comforting sounds.

Later, when I complimented Celia on her ability to remain cheerful and calm, she said, “Are you kidding? I wanted to throw open the door and jump off the dock.”

We reached the theatre just in time. The rest of the family was there too: my elder brother Hans and his girlfriend, Lisa and her daughter, Brynne’s husband and children, and clusters of Brynne’s students and fans. I was still shaking. However, I was gradually pulled into the early Woody Allen comedy. Despite myself, I laughed.

In New York, when my husband and I saw “Dinner with Friends,” a woman in front of us turned and frowned at me for laughing. She got up and moved.

“Nobody does that here,” Mark said. I had trouble believing any actor would not appreciate a laugh.

“She created more commotion than I did by laughing,” I protested. But he’s the New Yorker, born and raised.

He’s also Jewish. When I first brought Mark home, my father told his usual stories about those Jews in New York from his days as a young artist in his Village loft. Dad’s comments seemed based on jealousy. They (the Jews) were successful in the art world in which my father was just starting out.

After the play, we all waited in the lobby for the star. I understood Brynne’s need to emote based on the one time I performed in a play. In high school, I played the lead in Brian Friel’s “Lovers,” not because I auditioned or had any talent, but because the lead got pregnant. In those pre-abortion days, that meant she had to leave school. The director pulled me out of class to inform me I would take her place.

After the first night’s performance, I arrived home keyed up. I was showing off for my younger siblings when, for some reason, my father became furious and knocked me down. Then he picked me up and threw me out the door.

Eventually, I’ve stopped replaying my father’s rage inside my head. When I visit the grave Lisa and Celia planted with rose campion, purple cosmos, and succulents fat as babies, I instead hear Mother’s melodious voice. When we discussed their final wishes, Dad wanted his ashes scattered below our cabins on Dabob Bay.

“No, you’ll be with me,” Mother insisted. She preferred to be buried in the settler’s cemetery atop the hill. At the last minute, Lisa asked the funeral home to tuck Dad’s ashes in with Mom.

When I was two, toddling beside the buggy that held Lisa, the first of three sisters to come, Mother said, “That’s a Johny Jump Up.” She pointed to tiny blossoms beside a gigantic nurse log. I thought she meant John, my father, and Daddy would emerge from the ground to continue on with us up the hill.

Holistic veterinarian, friend, and neighbor Dr. Anna Maria Wolf takes many of her photographs while hiking with her dog, riding her horse in the Olympic Peninsula wilderness, or around her home and farm.