by Midnight Freemason Contributor
RWB Michael H. Shirley
When you go to a place where you spent a lot of time as a
kid, and now take your own kids there, time has a way of pulling memories from
you. We just spent two weeks at YMCA
Family Camp Nawakwa, where we’d first gone in 1967, and arrived back home
on the day before Father’s Day. My kids love the place now as much as I did
then, and it’s wonderful to be there as a family, but I kept thinking about how
much my dad would have loved to be there with us, to see his grandchildren
having fun, to overeat at Paul Bunyan’s,
to fish, to read, and generally just to be.
My father, Robert Lloyd Shirley, died in 2008 after a
ten-month fight with kidney cancer, and, while the pain has dulled a lot, it
hasn’t gone away, nor do I expect it to. He was the smartest, kindest, and most
decent man I’ve ever known. He loved his family, was addicted to golf, couldn’t
wait for tomatoes fresh from the garden, and was never too busy to stop and
listen to people. He was humble down to his socks, and was interested in
everybody he met.
I’ve been thinking a lot about him over the past couple of
weeks. We stopped going to Nawakwa in the early 90s, but started again in 2006
as a way to celebrate my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. We all had a
great time, and decided to pick up the family tradition again, but dad was
never able to return. And so my family, all of us, go back year after year, in
part because we enjoy it, and in part because it would feel a bit like losing
him again if we didn't.
And here I am on Father’s Day, with the best, most loving
kids any man could ever want, wondering what my own father would think of the
job I’m doing as their dad. I’m pretty sure he’d approve of a lot, disagree
with some of my decisions, and above all be there. Just about everything I know
about being a father I learned from him, and the most important thing I learned
was to love my kids constantly, just as he did me.
Not long after he died, I wrote a poem, which was published
here two years ago. It says a lot about the way fathers and time blend
together in the way we feel across the generations. Here it is one more time:
First Day
On the day we arrived
at camp,
a snapping turtle,
looking for a place to lay her eggs,
rested on the dirtpack
by the wash house,
lying down like
something from the deep past,
her ridged back
unaltered from dreams of my childhood,
when first I saw her.
My son, on eager feet,
halts panting at my side,
eyes wide at this new
wonder,
as I hear my own
father calling me, his voice eager.
"Look here,"
he says, pointing down,
and I, hand firmly
held,
standing where memory
and childhood meet,
inhale an air of
water, trees, and sky,
as the turtle,
ignoring us, moves scabrously toward the lake.
We finish unpacking
the car,
ready for summer,
my daughter splashing
in the shallows by the dock ,
calling for her
brother to join her
as I untangle the
fishing gear.
This is where I
learned to fish,
sitting on one side of
the boat,
my father on the
other,
our lines still,
waiting for perch or walleye to show themselves
in nibbles from the
deepest part,
then bites, the rod
tips pulling quickly down.
We set our hooks by
feel
 |
| Robert Lloyd Shirley, 1933-2008 |
looking over the side
to see what rises from the dark.
My son is not yet
ready for deep water.
He casts his line from
the bridge,
Where he can see the
bottom
hoping a bluegill will
strike the worm I've put on his hook.
I fish with him,
memories of my father green around us,
in this first year
without him.
Happy Father’s Day, dad. I love you.
~MHS
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