We celebrated Dad’s life on Saturday with the support and contributions of so many important people. And then we had a big party with all of his favorite foods: pizza, pretzels, Oreo cookies, Tootsie Rolls, microwave popcorn, Diet Pepsi and Ramen Noodle packages for party favors! Thanks to my soul people who always show up and go the extra mile and to so many folks who traveled long distances and gave us some of their holiday weekend. And big thanks to Pastor Joel who only met Dad briefly but masterfully and intuitively wove everything together. I think Dad would have been very pleased with everything, especially all the stories and laughter. What follows are the reflections and readings, music, and slideshow.
Family Reflections from Kim
Thank you all for being here today. It feels like a particularly monumental occasion because, with Dad’s passing, all of our parents and many of our like-a-parents have gone on ahead and we are becoming elders. Such a significant transition takes a community and ours has truly shown up. Howard and Stephanie visited Dad regularly in the hospital and rehab and far away family members called him there, James and Sharon gave him a haircut, and shave, Mike, Corinne, and Collie stayed present to and comforted Dad through his dying process, Howard has mowed Dad’s lawn for months now, his neighbor, Ron, brings in his mail and starts his truck regularly, Adam and Lauren took vacation time to drive down from New York to help work on his house, Pastor Joel and the church have welcomed us in, and all of my Soul Friends, as usual, were the first to show up and help out and contribute in so many ways. Thanks for traveling big distances and giving up some of your holiday weekend to celebrate Dad with us. It means the world. I want to share reflections from my family.
Dad discovered the Buffalo Science Museum when he was just 7 or 8 years old. He used to sit in the dinosaur exhibit alone and read books. He said he “haunted” the library there and one of the librarians eventually gave him access to magazines like Sky and Telescope. One of the curators took him under his wing and worked out a trade with him for which he could handle the snakes and be present for their feeding if he cleaned the fish tanks. Kids from the neighborhood would knock on the museum windows and tease him by calling him a bookworm. Later, when his family moved further away, he would have to cross neighborhood lines to get to the museum which meant he’d have to engage in little scuffles and fist fights to gain passage.
At home, his parents would scold him for staying in the house reading too much and send him outside to get dirty. But when he did go outside, really weird energy would surface. He loved to tell the story about when his cousin, Charlie, jumped over a chain link fence and tore some of the skin off his leg. Dad then charged kids in the neighborhood a nickel to come see the flesh on the fence. Or the time that he bewildered even himself when he suddenly went to the house of his friend, Gary Kotcavic, and told his mother that Gary had been hit by a bus and she nearly passed out. Gary had not been hit by a bus. Dad said he never understood why he did that. He was part nerd, part bad-ass, and part plain weird.
It was his desire to go to college and become a history professor. But as a third generation German American immigrant, with a stereotypically gruff and practical mother and a solidly blue collar clan of tradespeople, his wish was not supported. A well-meaning uncle intervened and advised his parents that my dad needed a trade. So, off to technical school he went where he learned electronics and, along with 6 proud years of overlapping military service, he then spent 35 years as a TV technician by day and a self-taught scholar by night. He devoured physics text books, as well as books on military history, natural history, astronomy, and weather.
On top of all of this, he took on a huge responsibility for family at a very young age. My mother was one of the few people in his life who truly saw in him and shared with him a fascination with the world and a love of life-long learning. They bonded in a relationship that would last most of a lifetime. But my parents’ love was complicated and my siblings and I both suffered and benefitted from it in a myriad of ways. Despite all of our family messiness, I believe they created interesting, funny, and kind people, if also all a little weird.
In the early days, Dad could be withdrawn, angry, and unpredictable. He was a vessel that everything got poured into (knowledge, facts, and ponderings) but whose contents had nowhere else to go. Over time, I came to see him as somewhat of a trapped intellectual. I’ve witnessed him listen politely when someone endlessly rambled on about a topic for which he knew a great deal like aircraft builds or weather patterns, yet never indicate that he knew as much if not more than the speaker. He was artistically gifted and could paint and draw, though very few people ever saw his sketch books, and he was skilled at building model airplanes. When he would send out emails alerting us to astronomical events, I would appreciate them but could not get as excited as he was and I would wonder how lonely he might be not having someone to share that enthusiasm with him. Our cousin Jillian remembers him as a walking encyclopedia. I would expand that to say he was like an old library with shelves overflowing with dusty books that only occasionally got checked out for others to benefit from. I believe that all that bottled up curiosity and knowledge oozed out in big emotions and weird energy that proved to be intriguing, difficult, and character shaping for all of us kids. We’ve carried the work of disentangling his messes from his delights.
Maybe in part due to the great grace of all of us kids and the goodness he did infuse in us, he was also a model of the possibility of change. Through many avenues, his demeanor softened and his edges became smoother. His sense of humor surfaced and his compassion, too. With our mom, he created a home that so many of our friends considered their second home where they felt welcome and free to be themselves. He and Mom became part of a friend group with Mary and Darryl, Charlie and Ida. He returned to church where he made great friends like Howard and Stephanie, was intellectually stimulated, and, following my mother’s lead, participated in lots of programs and volunteer work. I came once to a service for which he was a greeter and thought, “Who is this man chatting people up and laughing with them?!” He became…happy. And in the last years, as he was losing Mom, he learned to say “I love you”…with words…out loud.
There’s so much we value, love and miss about Mom and Dad who have now both gone on ahead. Let me share with you some things you may not know about Donnie.
Dad quite literally gave us the Universe through an awareness of and wonder about the stars, planets, and the mysteries of life. We remember Carl Sagan’s Cosmos being on the television along with the endless blue screen of the original weather channel and Dad calling us out to the yard to look through his red telescope at a new object he’d just brought into view. He could tell you the precise moment and place to look in the night sky to see a satellite whizzing through space and explain the theory of black holes. He shared his fascination with flight by taking the boys to the old Norfolk airport and parking at the end of the runway where they would watch planes take off and land. As a result, James and Mike can identify all models of planes up in the air from a distance.
He turned us on to the best music, strange films, and the world of book worshipping. His own book collection numbers in the thousands and includes titles like The World’s Great Tanks, Anatomy for the Artist, The Moody Handbook of Theology, Nothingness: The Science of Empty Space, and The Family Handyman Encyclopedia, though I’m pretty sure that last one never got cracked open, because he repaired our own TV from his recliner by throwing his slipper at the one spot on the television that would clear the picture. Even in the leanest of years, there were always books in the house, frequently documentaries on the television, and regular trips to the gardens. Mike remembers our summer Sunday trips to Croatan Beach, Delta Dawn playing on the radio as Dad drove south past the miniature golf and all the hotels. Stowed in the back of the station wagon along with all the kids was the stinky rubber smelling raft, the green jug of koolaid, a bag of white bread and a jar of peanut butter. We’d all spend hours swimming and body surfing and leave joyfully exhausted. On the way home, as a rare treat, Dad would sometimes pull into the McDonald’s drive through and order 13 cheeseburgers only to be told he’d have to come inside for that order.
Dad gave us permission to be our whole selves by being his whole strange self. He loved to shock people by bringing in a bullfrog from his pond on a summer night and dangling it in your face without warning. Or to capture everyone in the car for a mystery outing. Like the time he acted on a co-worker’s suggestion rerouted our regular trip to Croatan, and took us to Club Lake Ahoy–a pond-like setting with very tall, straight playground-type slides where he proceeded to slide down legs straight, toes pointed up, one hand holding his nose and the other arm straight up in the air while he slid down over and over until he wore a hole in his swim trunks. His cousin, Carol, says he used to find things in his National Geographic that he thought she and his sister, Diane, would find gross. Adam remembers his Sears uniform and the same blue shorts he would wear pulled up past his waist to his bare chest and said that, for years, he thought that was his whole wardrobe. And he remembers his ribbit burps, which Adam has adopted, and the whole array of strange sounds he made whenever the spirit moved him.
Dad could be surprisingly spontaneous like when he would turn out all the lights on a weekend night, light candles and incense, and play Simon and Garfunkel albums. Or when the power went out, reading a National Geographic article with us by candle light about the memory power of scent and having us investigate all of the scratch-and-sniff swatches on the magazine page to guess what they were. Followed by having me read a science fiction story aloud from the Twice 22 anthology by Ray Bradberry.
He was one of my very favorite people to go for a walk in the woods with. The silence he held there was always comfortable and would only be filled to tell you important things like who owned the animal tracks in the dirt beneath your feet, or to alert you to and identify a creature sound, or to point out a bird in a tree on the distant shore. It became a family game in the backyard habitat at Azalea Gardens to see if you could beat him in finding a water snake sunning in a tree or at the water’s edge on a warm spring day. And if the snakes weren’t there, he had no hesitation in turning over logs and rocks to look for them.
Though he was never the most conventional of fathers and he wasn’t great at expressing it with words, Dad showed his love in many ways. He rarely missed a day of work and provided for a big family on a modest salary. Dad always showed up when you needed him, whether it was a little league baseball game, a ride when your car broke down, or a visit to the house to take care of the dogs when you were working late. He’d defend you against any outside threats with colorful language. Perhaps, most importantly, through his care of my mother through years of her cognitive decline and then many months of her dying process, he nearly never left her side and showed us what true, deep love can look like. And in staying here with us as long as he did after our mother passed away and enduring the daily, deep pain of her absence so that we didn’t have to grieve both of them at once, he was loving.
Dad, I will think of you and feel your presence every time I walk in the woods and hear bird and frog song, when I look into the sparkling night sky filled with the stardust of our ancestors, while listening to the Everly Brothers or Roy Orbison, when I go to the oceanfront before a storm to see foam blowing down the beach and feel the exhilarating power of building winds, when I hear the train whistles in the near distance, and a million other moments.
I know I’ll miss you most every time I start to call you to ask about something in history or the natural world or to tell you about a curious observation I’ve made and get your theory about it. And each time I realize there is no one to send me a text asking if I got home alright.
Dad, I know you were ready to fly. I am certain that you joined a big starlit celebration with our sister, Sandy, your sister, Diane and Mom, your life-love. Like you did here on Earth, I imagine you all together, zipping around town on a marathon adventure of visiting craft and book stores, eating beef on weck, and having ice cream sundaes. I hope you also stop to pick up Millie and Linda and all our beloved puppies and pets and that you laugh all along the way. Farewell our delightfully weird, crusty, interesting, curious, funny, complex father. See you later in the stardust.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Vicky and I consider myself so very lucky that I’ve been one of Kim’s closest friends for about ⅔ of our lives now and that dear Donnie and Louie welcomed me into their circle of warmth and love those many moons ago.
We will share selections from writings by American astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Edward Sagan, to help us remember and honor Donnie’s deep wonder of our vast universe.
FROM The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.
When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr.
The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.
FROM Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Look at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.
On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. …
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.
To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
Corinne reads “The Peace of the Wild Things’ by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Rhonda reads from Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
And ‘Tis a Fearful Thing by Judah Halevi
‘Tis a fearful thing
to love what death can touch.A fearful thing
to love, to hope, to dream, to be –to be,
And oh, to lose.A thing for fools, this,
And a holy thing,
a holy thing
to love.For your life has lived in me,
your laugh once lifted me,
your word was gift to me.To remember this brings painful joy.
‘Tis a human thing, love,
a holy thing, to love
what death has touched.
Music Played for Dad’s Service
“The Only Living Boy in New York” by Simon and Garfunkel
“Bookends Theme” (Reprise) by Simon and Garfunkel
Dad’s Slideshow made by Collin
Leave a comment