Captain Pike's Ship Log II

When I was a kid, my dad was this great big man who seemed to be really smart. I didn't think he was any different than anyone else's dad, at least not until I got a little older. My dad always had a job and always came home at night and always slept with my mom. I never saw him drunk. He never hit my mom. He was never sleeping on the couch when I got up. Nothing like that ever happened.

My father taught me everything I knew about math, science, art and just everyday living. He told me once how when he was young he made a light bulb. He explained, in detail how by using glass tubing, dripping drops of mercury down the tubing created a vacuum inside this special piece of tubing in which he had sealed up two wires. Once the vacuum in the tube with the two wires had been created, it was then sealed off by melting the glass tube leading to it.

Later, when my dad was a young man, he made a 6 inch telescope mirror. You start by sending the way for special, optical glass. Then you use varying grades of this grinding compound known as Carborundum and painstakingly walk round and round this flat, thick, circular piece of glass, grinding down and deepening its center into a parabola. After this is all done, it takes weeks, then you send it away, to be aluminized. When they send it back, then you have the mirror, you still have to build the telescope!

My dad told me all kinds of things like this, that he had done in his life. I remember looking through the telescope, seeing the rings of Saturn. He made everything seem easily doable. When I was in high school he constructed an etching press. You've seen etchings. Well, they're made by first "doping" a flat copper plate with a paint like substance. Once you've scratched your design through the paint, exposing the shiny copper underneath, then you're ready to dump the whole plate underneath nitric acid, very carefully! I can still picture the fuming nitric acid, my dad using a feather to swish away bubbles coming from the deepening action caused by the acid eating into the copper plate. I always thought it was funny that while the nitric acid could eat away copper metal, it did nothing to the feather. The longer the plate remains in the acid, the deeper the etches become. Next, you wash the plate off to make it safe to touch, and then, you use some kind of paint thinner to remove the coating of paint. Now, all that is left is to "ink" the plate, wiping off all the ink from the plate leaves nothing but the ink that is down in the etches. Just like, even after you wash your greasy hands, there is still black stuff in your fingerprints and if you pick up a piece of cheese, you'll leave behind a print. And finally, this plate, along with a special piece of handmade paper is run through the etching press, a thing very much like an old wringer washer. The etching press my father made was as big as the kitchen table and had a huge wheel on its side. The wheel actually came off an old train car, when you turned this huge wheel, it pulled a massive steel table between two steel rollers, compressing the paper against the ink filled copper plate. That's what gives an etching that three-dimensional look, where the image, the picture, seems offset from the plane of paper.

And the painting! My dad was always fooling with oils and watercolors. Today my home is filled with his work, he's actually very good. I remember charging exorbitant fees for the "sittings". Just sitting in a chair, for hours, while my father painted me. Now days, some kids don't even get looked at by their parents.


See, I always figured other kids dads were doing this kind of stuff out in their sheds too. I never imagined that dads were getting drunk and beating their wives. It wasn't until I went to college that I found out that girls got raped, quite by surprise, got raped by boys they knew, boys from their own hometown. In college, I heard horrible tales that happened just because drinking was involved. I always thought that rapists were probably drug-induced maniacs, perverts, crazed by sex, hiding in the bushes, leaping on their strange prey, something like cunning tigers, like on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.

It took some time before I realized that I really had an ideal upbringing. We were never really well off or anything, just middle-class, I guess. My mom never worked until most of us kids had gone. We had a camp on a lake where I always had a lot of fun in the summer, learned to sail and swim. Both my parents got their pilots licenses. When I was in high school, other kids were begging for the car to take their driver's test in, I was taking flying lessons in the family plane.

I suppose I knew at some level, as I was becoming a man that, compared to him, I was very average. Lots of times, it seemed like I didn't measure up too well at all. In fact, I was quite the flub-a-dub. Along the time that dad was making his etchings, I figured out how to make laughing gas and amyl nitrate. That made me quite popular among my more lower companions, but it didn't set me in good stead for child raising.

It was just the other day I caught myself thinking something that reminded me of an old Woody Allen adage: I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have a person like me as a member. My thinking ran approximately thus: "I hate the idea of my child being raised by a person like me." Ouch, this hurts. I missed the class on child-rearing. I guess sometimes I get down on myself. I haven't been able to be the father that I had. I'm just trying to be the father that I am.

But God does have a sense of humor. A little over three years ago, my mother died of cancer. It was very sad, and I was glad to be able to be present for her. I was there, with her when she died. That wasn't the humorous thing. The weird thing is that this great dad I have has become very forgetful and uncertain. Turns out, Mom was kind of "covering for him" in the later years. The truth is, dad has become completely dependent on me. Oh, he'd hate to hear me say that. But it's the truth, and he simply isn't nursing home material. He still lives in his own house, but he spends most of his time at our place which is just across the corner from him. We usually have breakfast together, and he comes and goes several times during the day. It's really strange how things turn out. Had I had a big career job in the city during the time that my mother was dying, he'd be in a rest home and I'd be away, important somewhere feeling guilty. It isn't all peaches and cream. These days, it's as though I'm the father to him. Sometimes I feel frustrated and even grow angry repeating things over and over. Some moments, I have to just bite my tongue and member the great dad he is. Then there are those times when we sit out on the deck and wonder if there aren't two other fellows 2.5 million light years away, somewhere in the Andromeda nebula, looking up and wondering about the existence of a couple of guys like us.