Some time in
the late morning of November 23, 1973, John Janovy, petroleum geologist, age
59, received the last of his morphine injections, administered by his son, who
gently slipped the needle into his father’s inner thigh, about the only place
on his body where there was enough flesh to receive it, and slowly pressed the
syringe until it was empty. Later that afternoon the men from the funeral home
would arrive, place John’s body in a zippered vinyl bag, and leave. It’s best
when they die at home, in their own beds, the doctor had said; they’re more
comfortable, more at ease, than in the hospital. The son would then pour
himself a large glass of Jack Daniels and begin wondering what to do next
beyond filling out an obituary form for the Daily
Oklahoman. Thirty years later I, that son, would open a box containing my
father’s papers, start slowly reading them, and thus discover a man I’d known
no better than the woman who was my mother.
Upon being given
a similar prognosis—You have only six months to live—and asked the same
question—If you had just enough strength to do one remaining thing, what would
it be?—Bernice’s husband John, by now a widower married to another elegant lady
who’d also pulled herself up from modest working class beginnings, would
answer: build a greenhouse. I had never thought of my father as a particular
heroic type until he was given those final six months and embarked on this
amazing, courageous, venture, either a gamble that he would actually have the
strength to finish it, or an obsession so strong it would keep him alive long
enough to finish it.
In the end,
it is impossible to distinguish between these two alternatives. I push him in
his wheel chair out through the garage to the greenhouse—his greenhouse—open the door, push him in, and let him just look at
his work. I take the cigarette from his fingers; he is too weak to hold it as
it burns close to his fingers. There, surrounded by his plants, he lives an
hour in the company of the latest and most consuming of his several
concurrently indulged passions—alcohol, tobacco, music, stamps, coins,
photography, cactus, his family, his grandchildren, and the oil business. Then,
at the ancient age of 59, he dies. Unlike my mother, he leaves a swath of a
trail, but I would not find it for another thirty years. When I begin to
explore this jungle, I find another stranger.
“How did he
do all this stuff?” I wonder one day, telling our oldest daughter, home for a
visit, about her grandfather’s files, about the stamps carefully mounted on
loose leaf pages upon which he’d drawn, with the exquisite skill of a superb
draftsman, small India ink rectangles to frame them, then added labels—actually
personal catalog numbers—lettered in his perfect steady hand.
“Obsessive
compulsive,” she replies, converting him into a case study.
My father’s
first job after graduating—in 1935—from the University of Oklahoma with a bachelor’s
degree in geology, was out in Pampa, Texas, working for Skelly Oil Company. He
never mentioned whether he or my mother ever ran into Woody Guthrie, or heard
about him; the music in our house was classical—Jascha Heifetz and the like,
not folk singer protest with flattop guitar. My father’s second job was with
Louisiana Land and Exploration Company, and so he and my mother moved to Houma
where I must have been conceived and certainly was delivered, although by whom,
and with whose help, I do not know. A fire in the parish courthouse destroyed
my original birth certificate, but the State of Louisiana issued a replacement
with no questions asked. This replacement I use to obtain and renew passports,
again, no questions asked. My last renewal was prior to September 11, 2001; we
will see, over the next few years, whether a long-ago fire in Houma, and a
not-so-long ago hurricane named “Katrina,” make any difference in the life of a
post-Patriot Act American seeking proof of citizenship.
Among my
father’s souvenirs from his Houma days were two tarpon scales that he kept in
his fishing tackle box. Again I wonder, as in the case of the cameras, why this
young man acquired a tackle box, but by the time I was old enough to understand
fishing, he had one filled with all sorts of wondrous lures in addition to
these tarpon scales. Among the photographs I salvaged from my parents’ house
after they died are ones of men and a boat, not a large boat, but one large
enough to have a small cabin. I think I went out on this boat once; I have a
hazy image of being helped down a ladder into a dark space. I don’t know
whether we actually went fishing, or even whether the boat moved after I was helped
down the ladder. Nevertheless, either on this boat or some other, my father
went fishing, caught a tarpon, and saved some scales. Or, perhaps, and just as
likely, someone else caught the fish and he saved the scales.
Why might he
have saved these scales? That is, what can we learn from a couple of strange items
in someone’s tackle box? My guess is because the scales were so large that they
challenged our very idea of a fish, at least for a person accustomed to inland
bass as I was at the time. I want to believe that to him these scales were
metaphorical reminders that our preconceived ideas—about fish, obviously, but
actually about anything—could easily be overturned by observations if one
allowed those observations to talk and listened to what they had to say. Again,
it’s somewhat of a stretch, but those scales might well have been the
equivalent of 3 x 5 cards with the words BE OPEN MINDED, NOT SURPRISED,
printed in bold letters, a simple but important lesson about making your
living by searching for naturally-occurring resources. At least those were my
thoughts every time I saw them as a child, which was fairly often. Fifty, maybe
sixty, years after discovering those tarpon scales in his tackle box, I still
think the same way—suspicious of preconception, unusually respectful (some of
my colleagues would say too much so) of plain observation—and wonder whether
such a thought pattern is inherited, or was taught to me, by my father, and by
example, beginning down in Houma with a couple of scales.
BERNICE AND JOHN is available on all e-readers
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