“Sure, Dad,” I said.
“Go into my room, next to my bed, and bring me the box you made me.”
I walked across the hall and found it on the bed table, beside his flashlight and alarm clock. It was my first time seeing it since eleven months earlier when I mailed it to him for his eighty-eighth birthday. I was never quite sure what to call it. It wasn’t fancy enough to be a jewelry box, and besides, Dad had no jewelry except for a couple of pairs of cuff links and his wedding band, which had not left his finger in fifty-six years. It wasn’t really a keepsake box. It was just a box, handmade by me from hardwoods
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I had salvaged from the forest behind my house in Pennsylvania.
Squat and solid, it had a drawer in the bottom and a lid on top that swung open.
Woodworking had always been a hobby for me, though one for which I had no particular gift. Over the years, I had made picture frames and cutting boards and toy cars for the kids. In recent years I had begun scouring the woods for fallen logs of particularly beautiful varieties—red oak, black walnut, black cherry—
sawing them into planks, and planing the planks into boards.
Dad’s box was more than a year in the planning and making. My whole life I had given him predictable gifts: aftershave and neck-ties and fat biographies of dead presidents. But he wasn’t getting any younger, and there was no denying we had grown apart in the years since I had married. It was our lifelong cross to bear together, the burden of our religious differences. Dad was blessed with the gift of faith; I was born with the curse of skepticism.
He was hardwired to believe, I to doubt. Making the box, just like planning the garden, had been my attempt to pole-vault the chasm, to let him know I still cared.
I picked up the box, which was heavier than I remembered, and stroked the satiny, hand-rubbed finish. Mom was asleep on her side in the bed, her legs tucked up in a half curl, childlike. I didn’t want to wake her, not that there was much danger of that.
I tiptoed out with the box and set it on Dad’s knees.
“I thought you’d like to see what I’m using it for,” he said and lifted the lid.
Inside was a trove of family treasures, many of which I never knew existed. He pulled them out one by one and gave me a brief rundown on each: his grandfather’s silver and ebony rosary; his father’s wire-framed eyeglasses; his mother’s driver’s license; both parents’ wedding bands. From a small manila envelope, he poured out a pile of military insignias and bars he had earned in the navy. “We used to call this fruit salad,” he said.
He opened the little bottom drawer and pulled out the gold
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watch his father received from the Rapid Vehicle Motor Company in 1909 for being on the first expedition to reach the summit of Pikes Peak in Colorado in a motorized vehicle, and the lucky rabbit’s foot my grandfather had carried with him. In a small pouch was a collection of General Motors service pins, each with a small diamond, marking various milestones in his forty-year career.
Dad described each item to me. So I would know. So someday when I rummaged through the box with my children or grandchildren, or they with theirs, these objects would mean something, would be something more than faded bric-a-brac. Each had a story to tell, the story of our family. Each was a strand connecting us to our past. I could tell that Dad did not want them to slip into oblivion.
From the very bottom of the drawer he removed a folded sheet of paper that I recognized as the note I had slipped into the box before shipping it to him. Now he held it in front of us and read aloud the words I had written almost one year earlier. My note described the process of building the box, from selecting the logs to rubbing on a final coat of wax. It described how I beveled the lid and chiseled out recesses to fit the hinges. I confessed how many mistakes I had made along the way, and the resulting compromises I was forced to accept in what had begun as a quest for perfection. The box was a lot like life in that way, I suppose.
I ended the note this way:
The kids watched the box slowly take shape, and that was good.
They knew it was for their grandfather, which made it all the more special for them. Colleen, in particular, took an interest and built a simple pine box of her own, with my help, beside me. It was a good opportunity for one-on-one father-daughter time and reminded me of the hours you and I spent together at the workbench in the basement. I learned a lot from you down there.
That is the story of your box, Dad, built with humble hands and an open heart. I have no idea what you possibly will use it for,
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and I bet you don’t, either. But I hope you will place it where you will see it in the morning, or perhaps late at night. And each time you see it, I want you to know how much I appreciate all you have been—and continue to be—to me. You’re all any boy could ever ask for in a father.
Dad refolded the note and returned it to the bottom of the box. “It means a lot to me, John,” he said.
Then Elizabeth called from downstairs that dinner was ready, and I said, “I guess it’s time to eat.”
After dinner, while Michael and Elizabeth did the dishes, I gingerly broached a topic I had been rehearsing for days. In my suitcase was a video camera that I had packed with the intention of interviewing Dad on tape for posterity. Mom was the family chronicler, a natural-born storyteller. Her tales were burned into all her children’s memories. But Dad rarely offered glimpses into his past, not because he was secretive but simply so modest he couldn’t fathom anyone wanting to hear about his life. I wanted to capture his story in his own words before it was too late, but therein lay the awkwardness: before it was too late. Once the chemotherapy kicked in, I fully expected Dad to beat his leukemia, but how could I ask him for this interview as he battled a potentially fatal disease, without sounding like I had already given up?
I might as well be asking him to record his last will and testament. No matter how you dressed it, the request was what it was.
Children ask their parents for these things only when they know time is running out. I stammered around before finally spitting it out.
“Say, Dad, I was thinking,” I said. “I’d like to interview you about your life. I brought my video camera.”
“That’s fine,” he said, not missing a beat. “I’d be happy to.”
I set up the camera on a tripod, framed him in the viewfinder, and pushed the record button.
“Where should we start?” I asked.
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“You’re the interviewer,” Dad said.
“Okay, how about at the beginning. When and where were you born?”
“December 10, 1915. On the Franklin Road in Pontiac, Michigan. Two-forty-one Franklin.”
“Were you born in a hospital or at home?”
“At home. A doctor would come to the house back in those days.”
“Let’s back up. Who was the first of our Grogans to come from Ireland?”
“James. My great-uncle James was the first. He came over right after the Civil War and bought a small farm on Scott Lake Road, just about ten minutes from here. A few years after he got the farm, James sent for his younger brother Patrick,” Dad continued. “Patrick was my great-grandfather.” Dad loved that I had named my firstborn after the family forefather.
“What’s your first memory?” I asked.
“That’s easy,” Dad said and told me a story I had not heard since childhood. When my father was still a toddler, his mother contracted tuberculosis and was shipped off to a sanitarium in Ohio to recover. Dad was sent to live with his grandmother while his father stayed behind to work. His mother—my grandmother Edna—was gone for two years, and Dad knew her only from the letters she wrote home. Then one afternoon he awoke from his nap to find a stranger leaning over him.
“I opened my eyes and there was this kind-looking lady gazing
down at me. She was smiling at me, and I knew it was Mom. I knew right away. I don’t know how but I did.”
His voice cracked, and he forced a small laugh to shake off the emotion. “I get choked up, even now, when I think about it,” he said. “That was my first memory.”
I continued to lead him chronologically through the steps of his life: his childhood as a Catholic schoolboy; the births of his sister and brother; his father’s heyday as a sought-after crack-
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erjack mechanic in the nascent days of the automobile, followed by his long, discouraging struggle to rebuild his career after the Depression hit. He described the family moves to Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia, and back to New York as his father chased short-lived jobs, and the string of apartments, neighborhoods, and schools that came with the family’s itinerant lifestyle. I was amazed at the detail of his memory. He recalled the street addresses of every place he had lived, some for as little as a few months, and the names of teachers he had not seen in eighty years.
When Dad was halfway through his junior year in high school, in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, his father lost yet another job, and this time had run out of options. The family moved back to reclaim the homestead on Franklin Road in Pontiac after its new owner defaulted on a land-contract loan. They arrived to find the house of my father’s birth being used as a brothel. My grandfather chased off the prostitutes, plowed up the lawn for a vegetable garden, and took a job as a field hand, fixing cars in his driveway at night for extra money.
Dad’s plan was to graduate from Pontiac High School and try for a job in one of the auto factories to help support the family.
“College wasn’t even a dream,” he said. “We didn’t have any money.” But as the school year drew to a close, an amazing thing happened. As Dad liked to point out, it illustrated the life-altering impact a single kind act by one individual can make.
“My French teacher, Miss Blanche Avery, bless her soul,” Dad began, and then paused for several seconds before continuing.
“She called me up after class one day and asked, ‘What are you going to do after you graduate?’ I said, ‘I don’t know; try to get a job, I guess.’ She said, ‘You really ought to go to college.’ I told her, ‘Well, I don’t have any money or anything.’ That’s when she offered to—” He stopped in midsentence and I could tell he was fighting to maintain his composure. “She offered to pay my tuition out of her own pocket.” His voice broke again, the magni-
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tude of this teacher’s generosity still overwhelming him all these decades later. “I said, ‘No, no. No, I couldn’t. My father would never allow that.’ Then she started talking to me about scholar-ships. She said, ‘Let me talk to the principal.’ It turns out the principal was friends with the personnel manager over at Pontiac Motors, and the next thing I knew they were talking about me being a good fit for GMI.”
“General Motors Institute in Flint,” I said.
“Yes. It was a cooperative. You worked one month, went to school one month, and earned your way as you went. You had to be sponsored by a GM plant or division.” Pontiac Motors sponsored my father, and he spent the next four years alternating between classes in Flint and working in various automobile jobs in Pontiac. “I made fifty-five cents an hour, and my tuition was thirty-five dollars a month, plus room and board,” Dad said. “If you were careful, you could even save a little.”
GMI was not accredited to offer academic degrees, but Dad was able to transfer the credits he earned there to the University of Michigan, where he graduated with honors from the College of Engineering in 1939, making him the first of our line of Grogans to receive a college degree. I asked how his father had reacted to such a point of pride.
“Dad wasn’t much for showing his emotions,” my father recalled. “He wasn’t what you’d call gushy or demonstrative. But I think he was proud. I’m sure he was proud of me.”
With his newly minted degree, my father returned to Pontiac Motors as a junior draftsman, living at home and helping to support his family. Not long after, his father succumbed to prostate cancer, dying at the age of fifty-six, a broken man. “We were all right there around his bed with him when he drew his last breath,” Dad said.
My father settled in as the sole breadwinner for his mother and younger brother and sister. Then came December 7, 1941, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. My father could easily
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have ridden out the war in safety and without even losing face.
He had ironclad double deferments. Not only was he supporting a widow and two dependents, but his plant had rapidly retooled to serve the war effort, and he was put to work designing large armaments. He was needed on the home front, by both his family and his country. He enlisted anyway.
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
Dad ran his fingers along the tablecloth and thought for a moment. “It just seemed like the right thing,” he said.
“How are you doing?” I asked. “Getting tired?”
“Mouth’s a little dry.”
I got him a glass of water and changed videotapes, then asked,
“Tell me about meeting Mom.” A slight smile spread across his face, and I could see how in love with her he still was. I had heard her version of their courtship many times, but I wanted to hear it from him.
After the war, Dad returned to Pontiac, reclaimed his old job at Pontiac Motors, and moved back in with his mother and younger sister and brother. As was his habit, he resumed attending Mass each morning before work, where the associate pastor, the Reverend Joseph Howard, befriended him. Part of the reason Dad caught the young priest’s eye, no doubt, was my father’s generosity. Dad always believed in sharing whatever money he had with the Church. The entire time he was in the South Pacific, he kept track of the weekly offerings he was missing back home.
Upon his return, he dropped a check for the accumulated lump sum in the collection basket. Not long after, Father Howard invited the newly returned navy lieutenant to the Howard family home in Ann Arbor for Sunday dinner and to meet his mother.
What the priest failed to mention was that his younger sister, Ruth, would also be there. She had spent the war working at the Willow Run fighter-plane factory outside Ann Arbor and at age thirty was still single and living at home. My uncle Father Joe was playing matchmaker.
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As Mom countless times told the story, she was not at all interested in the quiet, bookish man. She was pretty and confident and too proud to swoon over the first eligible bachelor her older brother dragged home on that August day in 1946. My father, on the other hand, was smitten by the petite brunette with the slightly off-kilter sense of humor. She had a natural way of filling his awkward silences with her laughter and endless banter.
He felt comfortable around her. In his methodical, bashful way, Dad began courting her and eventually won her heart. (Mom’s version always included a hilarious account of her shy suit-or’s weeks-long attempt to summon the courage to kiss her for the first time.) They married a year to the day after that first dinner, on August 16, 1947, with Father Joe and Father Vin officiating. Eleven months later they brought Marijo home from the hospital.
For two hours Dad talked as I recorded. He described the early blissful years of their marriage in a one-bedroom apartment in Detroit with a cardboard box for a dining-room table.
He described their first house, on Pembroke Street in Detroit, and how he built a sandbox in the tiny backyard. He described the heartbreak of losing Mary Ann, and the promise of moving to Harbor Hills when I was one year old, where his children would enjoy the advantages he never experienced. He filled me in on everything he could think of that came before the point where my own memories began. Then he said, “I’m feeling a little tired now,” and I turned off the camera and watched him, cane in hand, slowly climb the sta
irs to his bedroom.
Before dawn the next morning, the whole house was awake and bustling. Elizabeth fried eggs; Michael warmed up the car and scraped frost from the windshield. I would soon be leaving for the airport. It was time to return to my own family. Even Mom managed to crawl out of bed and come downstairs in her bathrobe to
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see me off. She sat at the kitchen table nursing a cup of instant coffee, and I kissed her on the cheek and said, “I’ll try to get home in the spring, okay?”
“That would be nice, dear,” she said.
Dad was in his pajamas and bathrobe, too, but he insisted on walking me out to the car. I loaded my bag in the trunk and turned back to him, standing in the garage, looking fragile. I walked over, extending my hand for the customary Grogan handshake. As I did, he hooked his cane over his wrist and extended both arms to me. I hesitated for a moment, then stepped into them. I felt them wrap around me, and mine around him.
“Aw, Dad,” I said, “this has been great.”
“Thanks for coming, John,” he said. “I know it’s not easy to get away.”
As we stood there embracing, I remembered the last thing Jenny had said to me as she dropped me at the airport three days earlier. Her words rang in my head: “If there’s anything you’ve been wanting to say to him, you probably should say it this trip.”
Now here I was leaving and I had not said the one thing I knew was long overdue. I drew a breath and summoned my courage.
“I love you, Dad,” I said.
His words came back so quickly, so instantaneously, they seemed almost an echo of my own. They burst from him like water bursts from a broken pipe. It was as if they had been poised there for decades, hovering just inside his lips awaiting permission to be released.