The Friday I Drove Dad to Rolla

Where Dad Was

I should tell you about my dad, so you understand why a man like him would let a thing like that be settled for him.

Augustin Klassen was drafted in 1966, when he was twenty-four, and he went to Vietnam with an Army engineer battalion.

He built roads, and he built bridges, and he cleared ground so other men could put things on it.

He came home in 1968 and went to work for the county road department, and he stayed there until he retired. He married my mother in 1970. I came along in 1975, the only one.

He is a quiet man. He does not like a fuss. If you hand him a plate at a potluck he will say it is the best thing he ever ate, even if it is not, because he does not want anybody to feel bad.

When my mother got sick, he took care of her for three years without once saying it was hard.

When she died, he sat in the front pew at the funeral and held my hand like I was six.

He married Bonita in 2012. She was a widow from church, sixty years old then, a good cook and a hard worker.

I want to be fair to her. She kept his house nice and she got him to the doctor.

But Bonita liked things a certain way, and Dad’s life before her was not one of the things she liked.

My mother’s pictures went into a box in the basement the first year. Dad’s Army things went with them.

The reunion was the one thing Dad would not put in a box.

Every October he drove to Rolla, because the battalion’s reunion group had settled there years ago, close to Fort Leonard Wood where the Army trains its engineers.

For years Bonita rode along and sat in the car with a magazine. Then she quit riding along.

Then she started saying the reunion was getting too small to bother with. This was the first year she said no outright.

Dad’s eyes are still good enough for town. He drives to the feed store and the bank and church.

But two hundred and ten miles of interstate and highway at eighty-four is another thing, and I could not even fault her for that part.

What I faulted her for was the rest of it. She would not drive him, she would not pay for the gas, and she told him the men he served with would not know him anymore.

I did not argue with her. I have learned that arguing with Bonita only ever ends one way, with Dad apologizing for wanting to go.

He would rather give up a thing than have people fight over it.

So I went inside the co-op office and found my foreman. He was eating a sandwich at his desk with the radio on, looking at the outage map on his computer.

“I need the first Friday in October,” I said.

He looked at the board. October is our busy month, with pole changes and right-of-way clearing, and the first cold storms. Nobody takes days off in October without a good reason.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

“My dad’s Army reunion. He’s eighty-four. Nobody else is going to take him.”

He set his sandwich down. His own father had been in Korea. He didn’t ask me another thing.

He said if I took his Saturday standby shift the week after, the Friday was mine, and he wrote my name in marker on the board right there.