My father, Fred Willis, turns 70 years old today. He was born on December 30, 1942, in Mt. Vernon, Washington. I have never been to Mt. Vernon—in very northern Washington—but it is in “my bioregion” so I imagine it to be similar to the place where I was born, to the place where I live now—wet, grey-green, laced with Douglas fir and spruce, criss-crossed by rivers, overflowing with hard-working and self-reliant—if sometimes iconoclastic—citizens. While he was born in Washington State, my father has lived most of the rest of his life in Oregon, in fact, with the exception of a few years of college and the very first years of his teaching career, he has lived nearly his whole life in Springfield, the city where I was not born but was raised.
Legend has it that my father and mother met in their sophomore biology lab at Springfield High School. She: social and serious and studious. He: quiet and serious and athletic, very athletic really. When the district built the new high school across town—Thurston—he was in the first class, lettering in three sports, or maybe it was four. And it was to Thurston that he was destined to return. After just three years of teaching in other schools, he circled back to Thurston, and he taught there until he retired, which must have been going on ten years ago now.
Here—and other places—I have written about what it was like to come up in my family. My grandmother—my mother’s mother—was the eldest of seven sisters. My mother is the eldest of two sisters. I am the eldest of two sisters. I have two daughters, those little ones part of the family of sisters now. In a tribe like that, full of talking and cooking and swapping stories and advice—some solicited, some not—it is easy to locate yourself amongst the women. And I do. But, my dad was the cornerstone of this crazy chattering house of women. He could do anything—fix the oven when it went out on Easter Sunday, figure a way to bail water from the leaking basement, translate geometry—slowly, patiently—into a form that I could both visualize and pass. He worked hard, provided for us, and here’s the thing, he made us feel like nothing bad could happen that he couldn’t fix. He made us feel safe.
My father has two basic rules for living, though he never really says them outright. First, above all else, be kind. When in doubt, make the kind choice, the choice that would serve another. The other has two parts: do the right thing; don’t draw too much attention to yourself. I struggle with both those rules, in all their parts. I want to do better, be kinder, be more upright, talk less, take myself out of the center of the room. I want to do those things and often I fail, but they are in there somewhere, rattling around my psyche, because Fred Willis put them there.
Unlike most fathers and daughters, high school was a high-water mark for us. We rode to school together most everyday, he was my calculus teacher, my basketball coach, my confidante, my best advocate. When I was having trouble with a teacher, he would make me tough it out but helped me strategize on how best to succeed. He made me laugh with tiny bits of gossip about my friends’ antics in his classroom. He knew that I had a sweet spot just outside the perimeter of the key but couldn’t shoot if anyone was too close to me, so he designed plays that gave me an extra second to get the shot off. He saw me, and he helped me succeed. Sure, we had our bumps—there were Friday nights when I thought he was a little hard on his linebackers. He could not understand why I seemed incapable of remembering that the white basketball jerseys were the home jerseys. He thought I may have focused a little tiny bit more on the word-driven disciplines like literature and history rather than applying myself fully to his beloved math and physics.
And, then I moved away to college, and we didn’t share an ecosystem like that again. Then, there was law school and marriage and grand-daughters, and me yakking on and on, in person, in poems, on this blog.
A few years ago, my father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. It is a nasty companion, that disease. It affects him every day, probably every minute of every day. It is harder to do everything—walk, work in the garden, chase his grandson, coach his grand-daughter’s basketball team. And yet, yet, he does it. He does it all, more slowly than he would like, I am sure. But he does it with grace and kindness and good humor. He doesn’t complain or rail against the fates, he just accepts and works with it. He is kind. He does the right thing without drawing attention to himself.
Now, we have settled in to a way of being. I tell my mother what is happening “up here” in Portland—with work, with the girls’ school and dance and social life. I tell her about books and essays and poems that are published or forthcoming. She peppers me with questions—on both of their behalf—and then shares the answers with my dad, maybe when they’re eating dinner together, just the two of them, or maybe when they’re lying in the dark, thinking about the future.
My dad was an incredible teacher and an inspiring coach. He is a lover of small dogs and German chocolate cake. He still watches after his wife and daughters, his grand-daughters, his son-in-law, his one little grandson. He cleans the gutters and hangs the Christmas lights. He makes wicked peanut brittle and can teach an eight-year-old how to shoot a mean free-throw. My father, Fred Willis, turns 70 years old today, and we are lucky to love him.
