Dad's Anniversary

This Monday (the 11th) was the first anniversary of my Dad's death. Now don't feel bad for me. Even though I really do miss him, it was definitely his time to go. My mom on the other hand, well, lets just say that you can feel free to feel bad for her. She just has not been able to adjust to my dad being gone. She still feels a little bit of anger towards him for leaving without her. But mostly she just misses him terribly. We all knew that this first anniversary would be hard on her.

My dear siblings have done some really nice things to help her through this time. Trust me, I do all kinds of things for her too. It's just that I, and my sister Janice, live here, so she sees us all the time. She loves and appreciates us, but it is such a nice change when she can see her kids that don't live here in the Tri-Cities.

My brother Mike and his family came up to see her two weekends ago. They weren't able to spend as much time with her as she would have liked but it really wasn't their fault. They had five kids with them. Those kids wanted to swim and be otherwise entertained. My mom lives in a Retirement home. She has a very small room. Two adults. Five kids. One small room. One lonely Grandma.

Well all I can say is "You do the math".

I have two brothers. They are both much younger than me. Mike is the oldest; I'm like eleven and a half years older than him. And Brian is the youngest; I was fifteen when he was born. So I will always think of them as my baby brothers.

So what did Brian do this last Saturday?

He showed up, out of the blue, at mom's door with flowers, having come all the way from Colorado! Mom was thrilled! Well actually more than thrilled, I just don't have a thesaurus handy so the word thrilled will have to do.

Now mom thinks that nobody knows this.

Brian is her baby; he is her precious baby boy. He has pretty much been her favorite for like forever. We all know this but she thinks we don't. Come on mom you just aren't a very good actor. Fortunately, Brian is such a wonderful, loving, kind and generous person that all the rest of us kids love him too.

I don't want to make you feel bad though Mikey, you know how much I love you. And mom too.

So here is Brian, fresh off his flight and drive from Spokane. With flowers in hand. We have dinner that evening at my sister Janice's house. It was a very enjoyable evening. Mom had a lovely time and I think she was even happier knowing that she had all of the next day (Sunday) to spend with Brian. Brian had to leave Pasco at eight o clock in the morning on Monday to drive two hours to Spokane to catch his flight at noon.

Next.

I just received a phone call about an hour ago. It was my younger sister Karen. Karen lives in Bellevue. That is over in the Seattle area for those of you who are asking, Bellevue? Karen has the week off so she came to spend it with mom. Isn't that great? I'm sure that all these timely visits will do wonders for mom, as she copes with this sad anniversary.

Well, this as usual was just a lot of background. I would like to tell you a little bit about my dad.

He was the oldest child in his family. His name was Jesse Reed Brinkerhoff.

Now to make it really confusing, they called him Reed at home because he had been named after his father (my grandpa) Jess. My grandma was a practical woman. She didn't want to deal with a Jess and a Jesse, so my dad was called Reed.

That is until he got out into the real world.

As soon as he became an adult and started going to college and after that, working as an engineer at Boeing, he started being known as Jesse. I'm not sure if he wanted it that way, or if everyone just looked at his name and saw Jesse and so that was what they called him. All I know is if you want to completely confuse a kid, then you call her father a completely different name than the one she has always heard at home.

Really.

I was probably 12 or 13 before I actually knew what my dad's name was. I hated to be asked, "what is you fathers' name?" I hated it because to me it felt like a trick question. I never knew what to say. Sometimes I would tell them his name was Jesse. That never felt right though because 85% of the time I heard him called Reed. Around family, whether it was his side or my mom's everyone called him Reed. But at church and things like company picnics he was definitely Jesse.

You see how much confusion that would cause for a kid?

Now this is, I'm sure, going to sound like bragging, but really it isn't. My father was a genius. He actually was a certified genius. He had been pretty much a child prodigy, and when he grew older he was still just as brilliant. All his brothers and sisters are also very intelligent, with the exception of my Uncle Richard (the one who owns the cabins on Lake Mason) Richard is also a true genius. In fact my dad insisted that Richard had him beat by a mile. Richard is so humble though that he doesn't like to be called a genius. It makes him uncomfortable.

So please forget I ever mentioned it.

Dad was an electrical engineer. At Boeing. He was kind of a sacred cow there. Here is a little story I told at his funeral.

In the days that he worked at Boeing everyone was required to wear a shirt and tie. Everyone. My dad hated wearing that tie and, buttoned up to the neck, shirt. As he explained to me, it's pretty hard to work on your latest project while wearing a stupid tie. So to solve the problem he just stopped wearing that tie. The thing is, they (that would be BOEING) needed him. No one else could do the things he could do. His poor supervisor had the job of trying to enforce the tie rule with my dad.

Dad refused.

The supervisor decided it would make it easier for everyone if he just looked the other way. So he did. Now of course this didn't sit well with my dad's co-workers. They apparently felt it was unfair that Jesse got away with no tie and they still had to wear ties themselves. Before too long they started showing up sans ties as well.

I really feel for that poor supervisor.

Finally it was decided that the section of Boeing where my dad worked could go without ties. Every one in his group was thrilled with this provision. It all made dad quite popular.

There was one ticklish little problem though.

There were a lot of people that worked for Boeing. Eventually word got around that the engineers in dad's building were not wearing ties. Further more it was found out that they had permission to ditch the ties. All of a sudden there was a lot of discontent in all of the other Boeing departments. Dad's group was told that the no tie rule was going to be cancelled. Dad let them know that nothing could make him go back to tie wearing.

Well I bet by now you have guessed the outcome of this little story.

That's right! It was decided that from henceforth employees at Boeing were no longer required to wear ties.

This was one of my father's proudest moments, to be the reason that tie wearing was abolished at Boeing.

My dad was an extremely humble and honest man. He never was unkind to anyone. In fact sometimes he was nice to people that did not deserve it.

Jeanette told me a story about her dad a few weeks ago in my comments section. He went out of his way to help some homeless guy, who it was later found out didn't deserve the help at all. I had to chuckle when I read it because my dad had done the same kind of thing many times.

When I was twelve, dad took me, my five sisters and our foster sister (long story) to Disneyland all by himself. Well that's not quite right. My aunt Carolyn who was like four and a half years older than me came along to help out. My mom wasn't there because she and one of her sisters had gone down to Texas to see my aunt Phyllis who had just had her first baby, my cousin Brent.

I look back on it now and I can't believe mom let us go with just dad in charge. We had so much fun. Dad was so relaxed and easygoing that we had a lot of freedom on that trip. There was one point in the trip when it was decided we were going to go swimming. For some reason my Aunt Carolyn needed a swimsuit. We were in a rather seedy section of Hollywood. There didn't appear to be any stores that looked like they sold swimwear as we walked up and down the different streets. Finally we came to one that my dad figured looked pretty promising.

We went in. All of us. We ranged in age from 15 down to 3.

It was one of the fanciest stores I had ever been in. Everything was fluffy and pink. And most interesting of all were these mannequins who had nothing on their boobs but these pointy, tiny, little cups with tassels on the end. We were fascinated by them. Well for some reason my dad gathered us all up and told us we were leaving the store immediately. It suddenly became clear that we had just visited, for our very first time,

Fredrick’s of Hollywood.

Dad, obviously, was pretty unworldly.

I loved talking to my dad on the phone. These last few years when I knew his time was almost up I really enjoyed it. We would talk sometimes for an hour or more. We had many, many philosophical discussions about all kinds of things. We discussed church issues, current events, music and any number of other topics. I always felt so much smarter after talking to my dad about those things.

I mentioned music. Dad loved music. He had a wide range of tastes. He loved Classical. He really loved a lot of Rock music. Mostly from the seventies, the stuff that my sisters and I exposed him to. And in his later years he started to love Country. He actually got me to love a lot of Country myself. We would talk for hours about the songs and music he loved. Then I would download those songs and make CD's for him and my mom.

He had a carrier route with a bank, picking up deposits and taking them wherever it is that bank's deposits go. That was actually his very last job. His eyesight got so bad that he had to give it up. That was so hard for him. That was one of the reasons that I was burning CD's for him. To listen to, while driving the long distances he had to drive. It was also how he introduced me to the Country music I love now.

He started listening to the Country stations because he said the Rock stations played too much crap.

At first I was a little annoyed to have to download all those Country songs for him, but then I realized how much I liked some of them. That was how I became such a fan of Toby Keith.

Dad had a brain tumor. It was benign. Benign, in the fact that it wasn't cancerous. But deadly in the fact that it couldn't be removed and it just kept growing. Still though, he had it for around ten years, (actually longer than that, but ten years from the time it was discovered.) It slowly robbed us of Dad.

By the time he died he was almost completely deaf. He still had his eyesight, but it was very poor. That tumor also took a lot of his great mind away from him. He still had a keen knowledge and ability with things like math and science. He still worked on his inventions. He actually held a couple of patents. But a lot of the time, he was not really in touch with reality. There were times when he could be quite demented. It was sad but believe it or not sort of funny too. We knew he was slowly dying, but it was so sad to have him taken from us piece by piece.

He really was a great man. He loved his family, he loved the church and he loved everything that was good and decent. I will forever miss him but it is such a comfort to know that when I die he will be there to greet me.

This was my dad and I am really glad I could introduce you to even a small part of who he was.