The Woman Who Called Him Grandpa

My father had not been on an airplane in almost twenty years. He told me that in the car on the way to the airport, the way he tells me most things, sideways, looking out the window instead of at me, like the fact belonged to somebody else. “Last time I flew,” he said, “your mother was still with us. We went to see the Grand Canyon and she cried at the rim and I pretended I didn’t.” My mother has been gone eleven years. So this was a big thing, my father agreeing to fly to Denver for my daughter’s wedding, and I had promised him I would be right beside him the whole way, every line, every gate, every step.

I want to tell you what happened at that gate, because I have thought about it every day since, and because I learned things about my own father that morning that he had kept from me for my entire life, and I do not think he ever meant for me to learn them at all.

My name is Dana. I am fifty-two years old, and I grew up in a small town in Indiana where my father, Earl, ran a hardware store on the square for thirty-one years. If you needed a specific size of bolt or a part for a mower that had not been made since 1978, Earl was the man who would climb a ladder into the back and come down with it in his hand. He coached Little League. He plowed the church parking lot with the blade on his truck every time it snowed and never once let anyone pay him for it. He is, and has always been, the most stubborn, quiet, unshowy man I have ever known, and if you had asked me a week ago to tell you the most interesting thing about my father, I would have told you he once fixed the town’s Christmas star when nobody else could figure out the wiring.

I did not know the most interesting thing about my father. I did not know it because he had spent fifty years making very sure nobody did.

We flew out of Indianapolis on a Tuesday morning in October, my daughter Megan’s wedding four days out in Denver, my father in his good flannel shirt and the faded ball cap he wears everywhere, the plain dark one with a small pin on the front. He had a cane that year, after a fall the winter before had left his hip not quite trustworthy, and he hated the cane the way a proud man hates any object that announces he needs help. I had called the airline ahead and arranged for assistance, and when we got to the gate there was even a wheelchair waiting, which my father refused with a look that could have curdled milk. “I can walk to a jet bridge, Dana,” he said. “I stormed worse than this.” I did not think anything of that. He said things like that. Old men say things like that.