One winter Sunday in Phoenix, I woke to the high-pitched scrape of steel on steel, my father in the kitchen sharpening my dull bread knife because “for God’s sake, it wouldn’t cut butter.” I stayed in bed. A widow for 25 days and stuck in the past because I knew my way around it, I allowed the familiar sound of the long metallic strokes on each side of the knife to transport me back to the kitchen of our house on the Dublin Road a lifetime ago, daddy testing the knife to make sure it was sharp enough to carve the Sunday roast or the Christmas turkey.
Like changing a tire or wiring a plug, this is something he thinks I should know how to do. To sharpen the bread-knife, he told me I need only exert equal pressure on each side of it and then ever so carefully test its sharpness on the inside of my thumb. Over the years, I have tried – admittedly driven more by nostalgia than necessity – but I never could get the sound right. And, the experts honing and sharpening knives on YouTube don’t talk about that.
25 days earlier, I had been in my parent’s house, packing for the trip from Belfast to Dublin and on to chilly Chicago and on and on to my little house in Arizona – its rooms sunny and quiet and changed, all changed – when I noticed mud caked on my boots. The remains of a walk at dusk though the wet leaves and muck on the Broagh road. From halfway up the stairs, I handed them to my father and asked would he take them outside and shake off the dirt. Even as I asked, I knew instinctively – and with something like shame – that when those boots were back in my hands, they would be polished to a high shine.
Through the crack in the door, I watched my father. Stoic, strong as an ox, his head in his hands – undone. He paused to cry out to God for help. He couldn’t fix this The man who had always fixed everything was no match for this – his only daughter widowed, his granddaughter fatherless. All he could do was polish my boots – as he had polished the leather brogues I wore to school.
Sitting on the stairs, those leather boots gleaming in my hands, I remembered some lines from Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays”
Sundays too my father got up early
. . . 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 . . .
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?
From “Those Winter Sundays”
I know now I knew nothing. Nothing.
Eight years later, celebrating his 84th birthday, I know my da is acutely aware of the miles between us, wishing perhaps that he was just down the road to make things and make things right for me. I know he would figure out a way to fix the old Regulator clock I brought with me to Mexico. He found it for me in a Phoenix thrift shop one Christmas. And, even though there’s a lady who comes every Friday to clean my house, my dad would still take it upon himself to make every window sparkle with newspaper soaked in vinegar and elbow grease.
My father is frugal, a maker of things. His is the artisanal handiwork that imbues the Derry townlands he crossed on his motorbike in the early 1960s. A pragmatist, he makes no bones about telling me that this began as solely as a matter of economic necessity – the potato-digging, the turf-cutting, and roof-thatching. I remember he whistled or he sang as he worked. With an ear for music, he’s one of those people who can sit down and pick out a tune on whatever instrument is within reach. He always sang in harmony to whatever was playing on the radio – which is probably why I easily find harmonies when I sing – not melodies – first. I thought that’s what you were supposed to do. When he was just ten years old, recognizing that his little brother had musical talent, da made a guitar for him. And, years later, before I was born, he bought me the violin that would one day open doors for me in far away places. My father never bought an instrument for himself.
Until I knew better, I never appreciated his frugality or the way he crafted a thing to last. In my mind’s eye, he is doing the mental arithmetic, sizing up the situation, cutting no corners. “If you’re going to do it, do it right.”
Once upon a time I had no time for what I construed as his obsessiveness, no tolerance for his sense of urgency over why all these things need fixing. I didn’t understand that each of us wants to fix the unfixable, to live forever, to make the magic last – to stretch time and close distance, and find the right words right when we need them.
If you have the words, there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.
From far away, relying heavily on photographs and phone calls, Facebook and WhatsApp messages, da has transformed into the grandfather he was so obviously always meant to be, eager for news of his grandchildren’s accomplishments that will be broadcast over hill and dale. He won’t want to admit that he likes “new-fangled” social media and technology – but it plays a role in his life now. He can read his favorite passages from the Bible on my mother’s iPad or Google the answers to questions about the lovely Japanese Maple trees he tends in his garden. He can ask Alexa if the rain going to stop or for help with the crossword or Sudoku puzzles he does every day. He can see up-close our faraway faces on WhatsApp and FaceTime. And in the nearly two years since COVID upended our ways of living, these virtual connections have softened the blow of time and distance for him – for all of us.
I always thought da belongs in a Heaney poem, with the “Midas touch” of the thatcher and the grasp of the diviner, his craft and carpentry all shaped by and shaping the place that produced him. Once, I observed, awestruck, as da “witched” water, the pull of it so strong where he stood, that the wishbone-shaped stick in his hands bent and almost tied itself in a knot, “suddenly broadcasting/ Through a green hazel its secret stations.”
Just like Paddy Heaney, the poet’s father, there’s a touch of the artist about my da too.
This Harvest Bow is for you, daddy. Happy Birthday.
The Harvest Bow by Seamus Heaney
‘As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.
Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks
And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks
Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent
Until your fingers moved somnambulant:
I tell and finger it like braille,
Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,
And if I spy into its golden loops
I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges,
Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,
An auction notice on an outhouse wall—
You with a harvest bow in your lapel,
Me with the fishing rod, already homesick
For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick
Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes
Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes
Nothing: that original townland
Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.
The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal dresser—
Like a drawn snare
Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn
Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.
