Gloves
I treasure the gloves my father used to wear. Dad died in 2015 and I found a pair in a closet of my brothers house after he died in October of 2018. I kept them and now wear them in the fall and winter. These are the ones my Dad wore for years. They are brown leather, well worn, stitches intact. Soft and comfortable. Not particularly heavy enough to protect my hands from the often bitter cold of Idaho winters, but warm enough for short walks or for driving to the store.
I have two pair of his gloves. One pair is from the 1920’s. These are very small gloves for very small hands, not mittens. They were made for the hands of a child, and were my Dad’s gloves when he was a child. I cherish those gloves as much as the ones I now wear.
I love these small gloves because when I look at them, when I hold them, I think of what it might have been like to be a child in those years. Those years prior to the Great Depression, just a few years after World War One. I smile as I can see Dad in my minds eye, being dragged to church on a cold winter Sunday — a Lutheran church in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He’s dressed up, wearing those gloves, but reluctant to get into their Tin Lizzy only to sit for what seems like forever, being bored by words and music foreign to his ears, when all he wants to do is be at home, sit by the fire and draw. Maybe with the radio on listening to music. Always classical. Then I see him as the years roll on. He is with his childhood friends.
It is the Depression, they are gathering wood, scrounging through alleys hoping to find some that are flat and long. They sit for hours whittling, carving, and carefully constructing airplanes. They are all Lindbergh. They are all traversing high above the earth. They carve and shape the wood for hours. Sometimes laughing, sometimes quiet.
Then I see him as a young man. It’s December of 1941. Pearl Harbor. The country is seemingly brought together with a singular purpose, and though my father was a pacifist, even he felt the need to to join and serve in any way he could. He knew what was happening in Europe and the attack on Pearl Harbor was wrong. I see him in his uniform; I have a great photo of my Dad standing next to my Grandfather before leaving home. It is haunting as I think about the thousands of similar photographs of Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines taken with their parents and siblings and how many of those were the last photographs of them.
He and my Mom eloped a few months before he left for basic training in Texas. They drove from Fort Wayne to Columbia, Indiana. They obtained a marriage license at the courthouse then drove around in a light rain looking for a Justice of the Peace to perform a quick ceremony. They found one, were married and before heading back to Fort Wayne they stopped and ate a hot dog. Something they did every year on their anniversary.
Now I see him after basic training. He’s now a member of the Army Medical Corps. I see him taking the long train ride from Texas to California where he and hundreds of other Army soldiers board a ship and head out on the long journey to the Pacific Theater. Each wondering about their own survival. Each scared but willing to make this sacrifice in order to stabilize a world gone mad.
I see him on one of the islands in the South Pacific. I see him diving for cover as the enemy planes strafe the beaches. During his down time I see him with his drawing books and pens and pencils and sometimes his watercolors. He is drawing and painting the other servicemen. The hospital personnel in makeshift surgical tents, frantically working to save lives. Many, too many, die. None of these drawings or paintings survived. He destroyed them all as if to wipe the memory of war. I’m sure it didn’t work, but I understood his motive.
I cherish those two pair of gloves as much as I do several of his English caps. The ones he wore in cold winters past. I look at those caps, some of which I now wear and I travel back in time. It’s now the 1960’s and early 1970’s. I can see him don one of those caps, put on his gloves, and drive his British Racing Green MGB-GT down the Lodge Freeway heading to downtown Detroit. He’ll park the car in a lot he’d used for years then walk a block to the studio in the Fisher Building where he worked as an illustrator.
That’s also the reason I keep his old pipe. I can see him working with that pipe clenched in his teeth, only occasionally putting it down when he had to lean in close to his work in order to draw or paint tiny details. Then he’d lean back, squint his eyes to see the outcome and then put the pipe back in his mouth. Smoke rolling out in thick clouds from that pipe. He would sit in that chair at the drawing board working for hour after hour, always making his deadlines. Never complaining when a client would want a last minute change and needed it yesterday — he would just charge them more. To this day when I hold the pipe to my nose and inhale there remains the faint smell of the tobacco he had mixed for him at a tobacconist shop in Birmingham, MI. I went with him to that shop a few times. In that faint odor I smell all the mix of tobaccos inside that shop.
I will never let these things go. Those gloves, the pipe and his English caps remind me of him, his life as an artist and painter, the love of his life — my mother — and his love of humanity, his deep desire to do no harm to this world or its inhabitants. He would be appalled at what we are now facing — the same sort of fascism that he fought against in World War II. I wish he were still here, but in light of the abhorrent behavior of so many in government I am glad he is not.
As I look at these treasures I only hope that my own life and my actions and performance, even as offensive as I can often be — especially in my political stances — do his memory and his life justice. That he would approve.
I don’t know but I hope so.
