Letters from my father

My Dad didn't talk too much about his past, a feature that may well have something to do with the fact I don't know that I ever asked.

Since my mom's death a little more than a week ago, I've vowed not to leave a pile of  junk for my family to pore through.

Things that seem important at the time they were squirreled away, aren't really that important. Did I really need a dozen or so annual Oshkosh AirVenture official programs? I think not. So out they go.

I do recall, however, an anecdote about famed Berkshire congressman Silvio Conte, who died back in 1991 (aside: he came to our wedding). Upon cleaning out his sizeable desk in Washington -- he was ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee -- they found an entire drawer filled with nothing but drawings and notes from his children and grandchildren, archived through his 32 years in Congress.

That seemed like a nice thing for people to find -- proof that they mattered.

In my den, the bottom drawer of my file cabinet is filled with drawings and notes from my children. Don't tell them; let it be a surprise in the not terribly distant future.

Over the past few years, my mother has sent back to me, things that she either saved during my childhood, or things I sent her during my adulthood. Most of them don't matter much to me. But they mattered to her and this was her way of saying these things mattered to her.  This is the language the Collins clan speaks, what with sons not asking questions when they had the chance and all.

In the process of throwing stuff out today, I came across The Book of Myself, which I believe Carolie and I gave to my father one year for his birthday, to encourage him to tell his story.

My dad was big on diaries and documenting his day.

This book, however, asked a question on each page, the totality of which would be the Book of Himself if the person answered the question in the blank space provided.

My dad was not a big fan of following instructions, however.

On the page titled "One of my dad's strongest traits was..." he wrote:

"Transplated 30 boxes including Rutgers-Marglobe Tomatoes plus butternut squash. Repaired gas leak in greenhouse. Eileen went to Spags today."

"May 5, 1997," he added so that we would never forget the great butternut squash planting of 1997 in my family.

On a page on which he was to answer the question, "The Best Part About Marriage Is...", he reported that it was Monday January 3, 2000 and that it was "unusually warm outside" and that the person who had been renting my grandmother's trailer had brought him $375 for the rent. In cash.

Nothing says lifelong romance like some greenbacks you don't have to report to the IRS.

It's the most Greatest Generation diary in the history of the Greatest Generation.

Anyway, I was cleaning out a book case, denying my children and future heirs the chance to read about what was to happen at the 2009 Oshkosh Airventure, when I found these two pieces of paper tucked in the book.

My father's life. Or at least his childhood.





(You can click on the images and get a bigger version)

My father, you can probably tell, wasn't much of a storyteller. I don't know when this was written, but clearly it was a time when he wanted his story to be known, if not then, at some future date, perhaps. Now, for example.

As we clean out my mother and father's house for a last time, I'll be digitizing all the documents and photographs for whomever in the future might want them. Better, I suppose, than piles of shoeboxes and old albums.

I've got a few of those with my story, too, though one of my retirement projects is to get those reduced to the digital form.

I've lamented for years that my former employer ignored 20 years of my calls for its digital archive to be preserved before it fell to dust with web site redesigns and changing technology that made it valueless. The last dozen years of my life is tucked in there too with a blog whose archived future remains somewhat cloudy.

Then there's this blog too, which, of course, Google could decide to terminate at any time.

We are told that younger people today don't want any of their parents' -- or grandparents' -- stuff. The technology that allows us to capture every 7 seconds of our lives, is also the technology that makes it easier to delete it all.

History vanishes at an ever-quickening pace, making it harder for the future to know that we were once here.

Planting squash.

Ruth Eileen Collins, 1922-2019

When my kids were very young, they were subjected , over their strong objection, to the wanderlust of their father, who likes to find out where roads lead. These came to be known as "Dad's Dumb Detours", but it wasn't until 2005, when my mother was visiting a year after my father died, that I realized the source of this curiosity.

"I wonder where that road goes?" I said to her as we pulled out of a parking spot overlooking the Mississippi River in Hastings.

"Let's find out," she said.

Ruth Eileen Collins, 97, who died today, imbued that curiosity in at least her youngest child, who did OK with his mother's inheritance.

Nobody ever wondered what my dad saw in his wife. She was drop-dead gorgeous start to finish

In that same visit, we hit on many of her "loves". She loved going to the horse races. Her own father, who left her mother when she was young, lived a life of harness driving, horses, and hay.

Picking the ponies

Mom wasn't much for handicapping. She bet a horse if it had a nice name and usually came up empty. In her trip to Canterbury Downs, however, she did OK.

Displaying our winnings

Years later, I asked her what she wanted for Mother's Day. Growing up, all the siblings knew what was coming.

"I want good kids," she said.

"What else?" we'd plead, looking for a more realistic alternative.

She got her wish, although it took some time.

But that wasn't the answer I got the last time I asked the question.  "I want to go to the horse races," she said. So we did. One of the last visits anyone made to Suffolk Downs.

She had dreams, she revealed while we flew a Piper Warrior over Sleepy Eye, Minn., that year.  She said she always wanted to be like Amelia Earhart.

"Fly the plane, Amelia," I said as I took a picture of that moment.

A Piper Warrior is not easy for an 83 year old woman to enter. By then, it was too high a step for her to reach. But she wanted to fly with her son, so she backed herself into the wing and rolled herself up the wing and into the lone door of the aircraft.

We ended up landing at a small and quiet airport in Fairmont, Minn., where we sat on a bench surrounded by cornfields, snacking on crackers we found inside along with a refrigerator full of soda. A lone tractor in the distance was the only sound as she said the scene reminded her of growing up in Mt. Gilead in central Ohio. She seemed the happiest I'd seen her in years. Though she'd spent most of her life in New England, her inner child was at home on the prairie.

She never became Amelia Earhart, of course. 

She graduated from high school -- Gold "F", which was a perfect 4.0 GPA at Fitchburg High School -- became a hairdresser and during World War II, met a man from Ashtabula, Ohio while at a dance at Whalom Park.  He was stationed at Fort Devens before heading to England, where he was a medic at a B-17 base.

At their 60th anniversary in 2002, in lieu of a toast, I -- being a radio news talk show type -- interviewed them at the luncheon in their honor instead.

"What was the first thing he said to you at the dance?" I asked. But she would not answer.

Interviewing Mom and Dad at their 60th anniversary celebration (2002)

It was not until a few years ago when she called me one afternoon and explained why she couldn't answer the question in front of a restaurant  full of people.

"He said to me, 'I can't dance with you; you're married," she said.

I didn't pursue it  but she obviously wanted to get that off her chest. But, really, it was none of my business and I never mentioned it again, although I did recall at the time that when I called her to tell her in 1980 that my then-wife and I were divorcing, she revealed that she had been divorced too.

Arriving at 95th birthday celebration (2017)

These things have a way of working out. She and my dad were married for 62 years. When he died, we kids got to see the love letters he sent her constantly from England, where he documented his desire only to return to his bride.

He applied for the Officer Candidate School, not because he wanted to be an officer, but because he could return to the States and be with her.  On November 22, 1943, he was notified that he made it into the program and would be coming home.

He never did become an officer, though he moved from base to base and she, of course, followed. She made hose clamps for bombers and fighter planes in a factory in Rockford, Illinois and was proud of the fact she made pretty good money doing it. They lived in New Jersey and New York for a time during the war and always remarked that the people of New York couldn't do enough for people in the service.

When I  moved to New York in the '80s, I felt better about the city because of that.

A wartime letter. Click to enlarge

In her later years, she read all of her husband's wartime letters. Then, a few days later, would start reading them again.

She kept one other letter nearby. The one from his mother, pleading with him not to marry her, and citing whatever flaws she felt didn't meet her standards.

The love in those letters isn't something kids would typically recognize in parents; that's just the nature of things.

But I saw it in 2003, when she and my dad visited us for what turned out to be the last time together.  Dad was pretty much blind and couldn't walk very well.

I emerged from my room and stumbled on them in the living room; he in the rocking chair, she on her knees tying his shoes.

Between the two of them, they provided a childhood that was perfect in so many ways. She got up early to take her youngest kid to hockey practice, and drove her daughter from one county fair to another in the summer, taught her kids to live on their own, and -- as a friend of mine described it -- "sat shotgun" for them all until the day she died.

Watching the Mississippi River go by in Red Wing 2005

She raised her kids and managed her home while working as a hairdresser in a shop dad built in the basement.  She could garden with the greats and keep a grudge for  years over a perceived sleight in the gladiola judging at the Lunenburg Grange Fair.  She could play the piano even though her husband -- for reasons never fully explained -- painted it pink one year.  She could live with the pain of burying her husband,  her oldest son, and a granddaughter, and put a foot in front of the other, because "what else can I do?"

She loved the ocean and, in particular, a small trailer on a spit of land on Plum Island in Newburyport in which, somehow, a couple and their five children lived until being turned loose to explore each morning.

Twin sons, the last of the brood, did not stop mom from enjoying the beach

The trailer, beachfront property by then, was extorted from them by the brother of the local police chief who vandalized it until they sold it for $5,000, eventually giving each of the kids $1,000. I used it to buy my first car.

The multi-million dollar home that went up in the trailer's place, still stands.

In September 2016, she wanted to go to the beach one more time, so I took her back to the Parker River Wildlife Refuge (one of her favorite spots which we referred to as kids as "the other end of the island"), she couldn't walk well but we made our way up the boardwalk and there we sat for a half hour, looking out at a glorious past. (longer version here)



Before leaving the island, we stopped one more time to look at the spot where the trailer was. If she was bitter about it, she didn't let on.


Mom wanted to die in her house and got her wish. She was still in control of her faculties enough to be disgusted by the Boston Red Sox and worried about who would rake her leaves, and still winning at Rummikub, mostly because her visitors had been warned about the perils of beating her at any game.

Her father had helped build her home for her by taking down a piece of the barn. She and her husband lived there for 62 years, she raised her family there, and there was never a more stubborn Yankee than Eileen Collins.  She was not going to leave that home.

And so her children did everything they could to keep her there against the advice of others, and, I hear, the scorn of a few. But she had more than earned the right to stay.

For Ruth Eileen Collins, the most inviting road was always  the one that led her home.

'Thank you for sharing her with us'

As my mother in law's Alzheimer's progressed in the last few years, I never quite resolved a nagging question as the neurons continued to go silent, taking not only memories with them, but the filters that mask a side of people we may not have previously seen: Am I seeing what is part of a person or just the symptoms of an illness?

Oralie Thurston was as proper a Yankee as New England ever produced, a kind and thoughtful woman whose partnership with her husband, Don, set a standard in faithfulness and love; a woman who loved her church before it closed, wrote an endless convoy of notes and letters to friends and loved ones, and volunteered at the local hospital so a little less horribleness could infiltrate the lives of people in her northern Berkshire County on their terrible days.  She was generous and kind and if you didn't know any better, you might think her a bit of a pushover.

When she had a dinner-time dispute with another guest at her first memory care facility last year, banged her cane on the table and shouted, "do you want a piece  of this?" it might well have been the Alzheimer's doing the talking. Or it might have been an important glimpse into a hidden reality: Oralie Thurston, who died from the disease on Wednesday September 18, 2019 a little after 12 noon, was  Yankee Tough.

Oralie was one of the few passengers who wasn't nervous when she went for a ride in my just completed airplane. She had, she revealed on the flight, taken many rides in a small airplane of a doctor friend in Vermont.

You didn't want to disappoint Oralie, a daughter of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. A withering glance or other hint of disapproval could make a person wonder if he had an ounce of goodness himself.

Walking into the hospital room in White Plains the day after Sean was born in 1985.

I knew that before I ever met her because I already knew her daughter, whom I met in the late '70s at WBEC in Pittsfield, where I was a news guy, and she wasn't. The story goes that at first we didn't like each other that much but, truth be told, that's not  entirely correct.

Because she didn't have 40 hours in being an "FM disc jockey" (back then, being such a thing was the epitome of "cool"), the bosses made her help out in the newsroom, where she became the first of dozens -- hundreds, really -- of people in the radio business to experience my ability to be a dickhead, at least where news is concerned. And yet, she persisted.

We were a close group, those night people at the station, and we had our minimum wage fun. I'd sit in her studio from time to time to chat with her during her long album sets, and awhile after my then wife (the "marital mulligan" I call her) decided to have an affair with her boss and announce my role was no longer needed, we became a couple.

Oralie Lane and Donald Thurston

I'm not sure Carolie, who by then was working at a radio station in Middletown, Conn., ever told her mom that when she'd drive up to to visit her in Clarksburg on Saturdays, it was only after spending Friday night at my place in Cheshire, Mass.  Oralie wasn't the type to like that sort of thing. Besides, there was another problem: I was divorced, or at least soon to be.

I suspect, whether she acknowledged it or not,  this was a significant concern for Oralie when it was finally revealed that Carolie was dating a divorced guy she hadn't yet met. But as the story goes, when Carolie tells it anyway, one evening during conversation about it, Oralie said, "you love him?"

And when Carolie said "yes", that was that.  She trusted her -- as much as a mother is allowed to trust the romantic adventures of a daughter.

I don't remember the first time I met Oralie or the equally friendly, if intimidating, Don. But I know I was met at the door of their home by welcoming smiles. It was always that way at the Thurstons. They met you at the door. They smiled and hugged and embraced you as if you were their own until one day, you were if you weren't already.

During any holiday, she set a place at her table for the elderly and lonely.

When you left, Oralie would stand in the driveway and wave. And God help you if didn't wave back. When the kids were born, a vanload of Collinses waved until we were down the road and out of sight just in case she was still watching.

The years were good to Oralie and her family until they weren't late in life. Don had Parkinson's and died in 2009. Oralie's memory started to go some years later and she moved into an assisted living facility in Williamstown, Mass., which was good enough until last year when she needed more of a daughter's attention, which her daughter courageously and unfailingly provided because Carolie Thurston Collins carries the strength and love gene of her mom.

Carolie got Thanksgiving with her, then Christmas, then Easter, then a last Mother's Day.

There was grace in the dying light. So much grace.

When death was imminent in the last few days, Carolie stroked her mom's forehead, played Moonlight in Vermont on the CD player,  and waited.  Nearly 10 days passed.

"She's getting her energy from somewhere," the nurse said.

On Wednesday afternoon, according to Carolie, Oralie, who abhored silence in a room, opened her eyes wide, scanned the ceiling, took a deep breath and was gone. Whatever she was seeing in her last moments from a dimension she made better in her 92 years living in it, she wanted a piece of it.

Nurses, aides, and managers at Woodbury Senior Living, and nurses from St. Croix Hospice stopped by to see her one last time. I wished they could have known her before her disease, I occasionally mentioned, but it was clear that, by whatever way comes with their expertise and insight in their chosen paths of helping people with Alzheimer's pass from this life, they did.

"Thank you for sharing her with us," they said in a way that wasn't rehearsed, but seemed to come from a place that was very much in the spirit with which Oralie lived and loved: with a whole heart unleashed.

When the funeral home came to take her away, the staff paused in the lobby to honor and mourn her.

When the van drove away, we waved. Just in case she was still watching.

Lyft Chronicles: Grow up

I drive Lyft and I'm not exactly sure why. Sure, I need about $400 a month to pay for my Medicare coverage, which is pretty important because I'm not drawing any Social Security until at least next May, when I reach my Social Security full retirement age.

But I like stories and watching the human condition, and while I think MPR pretty much beat the enjoyment of writing out of me, I like these stories now in their anecdotal form -- the form where I don't have to do much work to tell them; the form where they are a mere springboard to bigger, occasionally deeper thoughts.

I didn't have any Minnesota Twins games to work last week or this, so I needed to get out yesterday and drive a little bit to make a few bucks, and two rides served as bookends to reach this big and deep thought: people need to grow up a little when it comes to relationships.

This is a pretty easy conclusion to reach even if strangers weren't hopping in the car. I'm watching my wife watch her mother die.  The other afternoon, I watched her stroke her mom's forehead as she tried to get her to rest, and have a few minutes when she wasn't saying "help me."

It's hard to take anything else particularly seriously in those moments or for days afterward, which is probably why I have so little patience for the drama we insist on putting ourselves through with one another.

Like the woman I picked up  at a hotel in Plymouth, for example, who didn't have time for niceties like "hello" when she hopped in. She was in the middle of a conversation with whomever she was trying to salvage a relationship with.

I only heard one half of the conversation, which lasted the entire 15 minute trip with few details other than she she cited a litany of grievances -- some real, some imagined, perhaps. She alighted with nary a "thank you" as she was still issuing her demands upon her exit.

Hours later, I swung by a park-and-ride lot for the State Fair shuttle buses to pick up a young man who had nothing to say when he got in the car.

"30th Avenue?" I had to repeat several times at increasing decibels before he pulled the earbuds out.

"30th Avenue?" I repeated.

"Yep," he said, reinstalling the plugs so that he could continue the conversation he, too, was having with someone with whom he was having a relationship.

His complaint was that the person at the other hand end of the line always talked about something with which he had no interest. He found that disrespectful of what he cared about, whatever that was, but I'm going to guess what he cared about most was himself. It was hard to tell whether he was ending his relationship or still saw embers of hope in it.

I never learned what it was he/she talked about too much but I did learn that it "didn't turn him on" and "there's much more to life" than whatever he had to listen to too much.

He/she must have said that he never said he loved him or her.

"My love is my actions, not my words," he said as we drove in the midnight darkness over the Lake Street bridge toward the destination that must not be named.  He explained that all of his life -- I'm guessing 24 years or so -- people have told him one thing and done another, and let him down, so he was done with the meaning of words.  He was telling her that her words meant nothing.

I was thankful for the darkness, which prevented him from seeing my rolling eyes.

I wanted to grab the phone and tell the secret caller that he/she should run, not walk, from this guy.

I wanted to tell my rider that my mother in law is dying, that my wife of 37 years strokes her forehead to ease her way into another place that may or may not exist, not that it really matters because  life is the right now and the way we give of ourselves to people we love, asking nothing in return but the privilege of being in the presence of such love.

The young man who may never experience such moments was still issuing his own demands as he alighted.

"Thank you," he said over his shoulder.

"Have a great night," I said so he could hear.

"And grow up," I said so he couldn't.

A fatherhood timeline

It was Father's Day today and the tributes to dads across social media can make a lesser mortal believe he could never be a halfway decent father. How could anybody live up to these testimonials?

Here's a secret, kids: we were just winging it. We'd never been fathers before and, sure, we learn a lot about being a father by our fathers but when we're young, we have only one goal: not to be our fathers.

And then kids come along and right around the time we think we could write a parenthood book, our kids turn into, well, the kids they're supposed to be at a particular age and we wonder what it is we did wrong to be so much like our father and could we please get a do-over and be better this time?



And eventually we reach an uneasy truce with each other and they go off to be the people they're destined to be and we're left with something not quite approaching satisfaction at a job well done, but an appreciation that they didn't die or -- if we're really lucky -- they didn't go to prison.

And then one year it's Fathers Day and they call or stop by and during a conversation on the deck over drinks when they acknowledge they didn't really bang up a car way back when by doing wheelies in the snow but took a corner too fast while drag racing and we don't care because they are alive, you love the everloving crap out of them, and we notice something else -- something different -- while we watch our children in their adulthood on the deck -- the ones who hold your DNA and then ones you picked up along the way: they're just the tremendous people the world needs desperately and we and our partner (again, if you're lucky) did a hell of a job.

And then they tell us that.

And then -- and only then -- do we get to experience the real euphoria of being a father.

All because we were just winging it and doing the best we could.

Thanks, Dad.

Coming up for air

Photo: Nate Ryan

A few years ago, when Meniere's Disease was leaving me in desperate shape and a doctor in Woodbury had pronounced that he had done all he could, which wasn't nearly enough, I sat in the office of a young (to me)  neurotologist who was my next best hope.

"I love you and Mary on The Current," he said as he walked in the door, just prior to introducing himself.

That's when I knew we'd become great friends.

A few weeks ago, "Bob" stopped by an open hangar door (I always leave the hangar door up to encourage people to come chat) at Fleming Field in South St. Paul. Bob is welder for Metro Transit. He's just a few years younger than me.

He likes airplanes.

And Mary Lucia.

On his last visit, he told me about listening to the 4:20 "newscast" while under his welder's hood, working on the busses that take you home.

And there you have the secret of The Current and, in particular, my friend, Mary:  there is no limit, no template, no pigeon hole into which its -- her -- listeners can be placed. Welders. Scientists. Old people. Young people.

Why? Because in an age in which we are a technological arm's length from each other, she breaks through our differences and stations in life and speaks only to us.

I know that when I talked to Mary in the few minutes we spent each day, I not only had her in my vision, I had Bob, and my doctor, and all the people who took the time to say "hello" over the years (and certainly drop messages to me the other day)  in my mind. I could see all of them listening, and it's always been that way whenever I was on the radio.

I've never asked but I suspect it's that way with Mary, too. How can it not be? Just listen to her. She's talking to you.

When Mary came down to my third floor cubicle the day she returned from her leave in November 2015, I didn't think it unusual at the time, even though she rarely -- never? -- visited the third floor.

So when she was wrapping up our time together last week and said that I was the first person she sought out, that was the first time I put the significance of her visit together. That was the moment I had to take off my glasses and wipe my eyes. That was the moment we lost it.




She pushed the button to start Ella Fitzgerald's version of "One More for the Road", turned off the microphone, and we hugged. We hugged for a good long time.

"Do you remember the last scene of the Mary Tyler Moore show," I whispered.

"The one where they all group hug to the Kleenex box?" she said. And we laughed.

We walked out of the studio -- I think Mary was heading for a well-deserved smoke break -- and there was the Current staff with champagne. I needed to hug again.


Photo: Nate Ryan

I'm not a hugger. At least I wasn't.

But being told you mattered during a person's worst times is an honor that I'd never felt before and, though I was already missing my time with Mary before our segment was even finished (note the last question in the interview she did with me a few weeks before our last show), it constituted a moment that sears into the soul.

It was the moment I learned I wasn't who I thought I was.

The Last Bob and Mary

It'll take some time before I'm able to write properly about my penultimate day in the radio business, which culminated with a 2 1/2 hour broadcast  with Mary Lucia on The Current.

The entire day was like attending my own funeral and being able to hear the eulogies.

But as great as it all was, nothing was better than spending my last days I'll ever spend on the radio, with Mary.  You can hear the entire broadcast here.

We had our Bette Midler and Johnny Carson moment. It was real. It was perfect.