Back at it — Yeah, we lost Dad – Genesis9:2-4 Ministries

There’s that old bit of glurge about footsteps in the sand. You look back and see only one set of prints although you know someone was there helping you along. I just looked back and there’s nothing in this weblog for October except a piece on buck fever on the Third and a prayer request for my Dad mid-month. October is normally my busy month for posting. There really is some stuff in this about deer hunting. Just bear with me for a bit.

Dad Died

Well, let me cut to the chase. Dad died. We buried him last week. It looked like he was turning around, but all of a sudden all his organs just gave out and he passed on peacefully and suddenly. Dad drove himself to the VA on the Fifth for a routine test. He breathed his last on the 23rd. In a lot of ways, I am kind of happy it came this way. Dad slipped out of full wakefulness after about a week in the hospital and had not shown any sign of consciousness in over a day. Mom was spared a lot. Probably if Dad had been calling the shots, he would have had us all together watching football and yucking it up anyway. We got the call during the 4th quarter of the Packer/Vikings game. None of us were at the hospital. Nobody knew this was coming. I had taken Mom back to my house for dinner, and then she had entertained the kids for a while back at her place, feeding them sundaes.

So there you have it. I really truly miss his stories. Most were laced with names of local Cincinnati glitterati, but a surprising number included folks you might know.

“.. .so Jack Lescoli, Bill Nimmo and I met up with Jackie Gleason and go back to his place to play pool . . . I wake up on the boat to Hamburg. I don’t know how I got there.. .”

Growing up, I was always amazed at the number of local TV people he knew. Bob Braun had been his best friend when Bob was still a lifeguard at Sunlight Pool. He’d managed to date most of the cast of Midwestern Hayride. What had happened was that he was building apartments back about the same time the local TV stations were first coming on the air. Word got around that my Dad had good clean places at a reasonable rate and soon a good number of the local talent were tenants. Rod Serling was there. I remember meeting Gene Shepherd and Kenny Price when I was a kid.

For all my life, I’ve been walking into bars and restaurants and having folks recognize my name and tell me how much they love my Dad and my Mom. He was a guy who just knew how to have fun and how to make fun for the people around him. He just made you happy.

But as the old Chinaman says:

Quote:
‘ There was a fire. It burned brightly once, and now it is gone. It may burn elsewhere in this world, I know not where, but these sticks have burned out and grown cold. ‘”

From Eulogy for Big Stick

Angus Sighting in for Yute Season

Back to Deer Season

We actually got out and hunted in October. However, it was not a full-hearted effort. Yute Season was a bust. Angus and I went out on the Opener and did not see a thing until Saturday night. 3 doe came out of Dead Skunk Hollow and grazed in The Saddle. We walked home in the moonlight and grilled steaks. It was about as great a father/son outing as you can have without a dead deer. That night we got the first of what was going to be a series of bad phone calls and rolled back to town in the fog on Sunday morning. Angus had never seen fog like that before, and he was quite taken aback by the idea of descending off the ridge into the shiny blanket that was hugging the Ohio River.

The next weekend was sort of a repeat. It was the early Muzzleloader Opener. SuperCore came out . Moose and his little Sparkplug came out. Dad was doing better and we all decided to take a breather. The wind was terrific, and again we hardly saw a thing. Moose switched from his muzzleloader barrel to his squirrel barrel on his Mossy 500 and went back out to hunt squirrel. He came back with four nice ones. At sunset the neighbor came down on his quad and said he had seen 50 deer just standing in the middle of the road. Just after he left Mom called. Dad had taken a sudden turn for the worse and she needed me back to help get him transferred from the VA over to Christ’s Heart Failure Center. We emptied the guns and headed back to town. That’s when things really started to swirl.

We buried him over in Spring Grove with an honor guard brought up from Ft Knox– a flag, a bugler and the whole works. Angus played the pipes. There were only a few of us. Mom did not want to make a big fuss.

Oxpho-Blue and Eezox

Aftermath

Losing Dad was bad enough, but I found a lasting reminder when I opened up the gun cases. Yikes! Leaving guns in foam-lined cases is not a good idea, but there must have been an extra dose of moisture. There was a nice bloom of rust on several barrels and one shotgun receiver. Normally I would have had them all out and cleaned and back in the safe by Monday night after a weekend hunt, but several had sat in cases most of the month. I found out after coming back from the funeral home and the cemetery after helping Mom make the arrangements.

In most cases I could use Ed’s Red and some rubbing to get the rust off. In a few cases, it was worse. I looked around and found two products: Eezox and Brownell’s Oxpho-Blue. The Eezox does a really good job of digging deep to get out the last bit of rust. For the places that had lost bluing. . . well, in case I had to take it down to the white with some automotive sand paper– #220 and then #400 and then a final buff with #600. After that I used Brownell’s Oxpho-Blue. It took 4 applications with the barrel warmed up with a hair dryer before I got it back to something vaguely resembling the factory blue. Yeah, there’s a couple of pits, but it is an old deer rifle that I completely reworked 20 years ago. There’s nothing original on it anyway.

Pooh Corner 10/23/2011

Back at It

Angus and I came back down to deer camp this morning. We’d kind of been in a rush to close up, and I did not want to let it go another month. Sure enough, we’d managed to leave the cooler fully packed on the kitchen floor. The rest of the place was in good order. I’ve got a couple of rifles to sight-in tomorrow. Today I just got the fire lit in the wood stove and decided that was enough and took a nap. I’ll spend the rest of the day puttering around and listening to all his stories rolling around in my head.