Happy Birthday, Dad

Following are excerpts from a paper written by my brother, Richard, about my Dad, Golden Stevens Anderson. It was hard to cut anything out, but I want to post at least this much so the words are never lost to my grandchildren. Richard expresses so beautifully the feelings we all have toward Dad and the legacy of love and workmanship he has left us.

Richard begins by speaking of the desk Dad built for him and of his feelings as he sits holding Dad’s hand in the hospital:

“I run my hand over its surface. I think of the hands of the man that crafted it with such skill and care.

I hold the hand of the man lying so very still in the antiseptic white of a hospital bed, tubes in his arm and nose, still breathing but other overt signs of life quite absent, and plead, Dad, can you squeeze my hand? Dad, squeeze my hand. Nothing.

I look into the fine mosaic of patterns and grains in the mahogany as I brush my fingers over its flat surface before me (it could use a dusting) and think of the beauty of finished wood, and my mind performs one of its quirky slights-of-mind: the train of memory traverses in instantaneous montage the whole terrain of what I know of my father and his history and comes to a standstill at his interest with woodworking.

Dad inherited from his brother-in-law a shop full of electric tools for the crafting of wood furniture: saws for coarse and more intricate cuttings, drills, sanders--anything a woodcrafter would need. From scratch--never a prepared blueprint--with intuition, a keen artisan's eye, and a disposition for perfection with whatever he did with his hands, he learned to make fine wood furniture of all kinds. My childhood home was filled with tables, chairs, coffee tables, end tables, dressers, and cabinets--all wrought from that cluttered, saw-dust-carpeted room in the basement he used as his wood shop (cluttered looking only to an observer; Dad knew where every hinge or length of nail could be found). From our living areas upstairs, we would often hear from below, late into the evenings, buzzings and grindings and whinings, in everchanging degrees of loudness and pitch, as he worked and played, worshiped and cursed, with his tools and the boards he'd toted home from lumberyards. After his children left home, each of us, in turn, would hear whisperings of some shop project of his that might please us for a birthday or Christmas. Each of us has now in our own homes cherished pieces of woodwork: dressers, china closets, hutches, desks.

I think of the eyes that so precisely guided those hands that created and built for his son--with electric saw and sander, glue and nails, stain and varnish, and pride and skill and love--the desk that occupies center stage and center affection wherever I live.

The doctor pries open his eyes and asks me, standing at the side of his bed, to speak to him, to check for responsiveness. Dad, Dad, It's me, Richard. Look over here. Dad, do you know where you are? Nothing. No response whatever. The illusion is shattered. Talking with my mother--his wife of fifty-six years--or with brothers and sisters, or aunts and uncles and cousins who occasionally drop by--talking, perhaps even laughing, in the long vigil hours, at some story one of us tells, probably one we've heard several times already, but needing to talk, to laugh--at such times, one of us could look at him, the vital signs registering within acceptable range in digital figures on the monitor of the machine hooked to him, and think--well, he's asleep, he needs to sleep. But those pried-open eyes reveal something else, something much more profound, much more telling: this is not mere sleep: he is far distant from us and his surroundings. Far, far away.

I polish the desk often. I love to see its soft gleam. As with every aspect of it--the steel rails that guide smooth movement of the drawers, the perfect symmetry and utility of the different sized compartments of the hutch atop the writing surface, the bevelling of edges and the rounded horizontal slats of the roll-down top--Dad also took extra care with the finish. After twenty years, it still looks as it did when it was new, a rich mahogany brown and deep soft lustre.

With intuitive good taste, Dad gilded his own life with a deep, rich finish, its rough edges sanded away and coated with a soft smooth varnish. From the hard, near indigence of growing up on the windy prairies of Wyoming, motherless at fourteen, on his own at sixteen, son of a decent but distant, morally and religiously unbending father, and from a work career with the railroad and in a steel mill--from such a background one might expect a rather rough piece. Not so. Dad is the essence of gentleness and civility. This tribute from a son, but not a child son, seeing his dad through the eyes of a small boy, but rather from a man away from home, out of the nest, for several decades, experienced perhaps more than he wants to be in the possibilities for good and evil in the human heart. Dad is as guileless, as pure in heart, as gentle and graceful in movement and thought, as any man I have ever known. He has never known it, would never admit to it--part of his refined finish--but Dad is as unique as the furniture he made that graces the homes of his children.

The doctor at the hospital is frank with us. Arteriosclerosis in the tiny vessels of the brain setting off another small stroke. Not the massive, paralytic type, but each one impairs his mind and movement just that much further. And if he pulls out of this one, he will have more. And one time he won't come out. He is in the last stages of his life.

The next morning when we enter his room, Dad is speaking, slowly, haltingly, with the nurse, and he recognizes us and speaks our names. I lather his face and shave him. I rub lotion on his face, feed him his soft diet, and touch his brow. He's come back to us, at least one more time.”

Dad did live through several more of those small strokes. As the Dr. predicted, on Labor Day of 1993 he suffered his last one and died 3 weeks later.

I, too, have treasured pieces of furniture crafted by Dad. In typical Dad fashion, my desk started when I wanted a filing cabinet. But, Dad couldn't just make a simple filing cabinet. It slowly evolved from a filing cabinet to a desk with little cubby holes covered with little rolling slats, a shelf, a slide out shelf for a typewriter, and a side cupboard for storage. No pattern, just a lot of ingenuity. I'll show pictures on tomorrow's entry.