Dad's Birthday at 86

Fourscore and seven years ago, Martin and Ethyl Inderbitzin brought forth a new son named Milton, conceived in love and dedicated to the proposition that he would be the jolliest baby on the Kalamazoo River.

Now we are all engaged in retirement, testing whether this family branch or that can remain as active and productive as he continues to be. We are met this New Year’s Eve to celebrate the start of his eighty-eighth year. We have come to dedicate ourselves to following his example as husband, father, fisherman, gardener, hunter, breadwinner, rabbit keeper, World War II sailor and lover of jazz.

The world will little note what any of us can say here, but his children, his grandchildren his great grand children and much of Muskegon will always be touched by Dad’s presence in their lives.

Love, Gib (December 31, 2003)

Private Memorial

I took a stool and sat there quite a while, gazing at the flowers Jan had sent along with me.The stone had not changed except for a new date, but a flood of images flashed on my screen.

Dad still walked the downtown mall at the change of the millennium, too fast for me to stay abreast. He cut no corners and marched along as if still in boot camp. We’d lived not far from there in 1936, on Terrace Street, but with everything changed beyond recognition the Oxford Hotel was gone. It was Grandma Rogers’s place of business, where I learned to tie my shoes, say the ABCs, write my name and answer the phone. Dad at twenty was not yet quite my dad and tended bar just across the street. He got Mom a job there too, waiting tables. I visited often and sat in a booth. A penny always brought me more pistachios in salty white shells than I could get open in an hour. In the evenings they frequently went window-shopping and came home with a grapefruit to share over yesterday’s Chronicle. A nickel date.

Dad’s first hip transplant did not slow him down for long and when the mall was torn out for still another revitalization experiment he walked his neighborhood, a mile of dogs and curbs and gutter surprises. Sometimes he came home with pocket change, but once it was with a discarded (or lost) filleting knife that he gave to me. I made a leather sheath for it. I can slice raw salmon thin enough to see through. For one of my birthdays in the 60s he gave me a rabbit-skinning knife in a factory-made sheath. I keep it sharp for tomatoes. Dad and knives. Dad and knives and me.

I tried to do that power walk with him once, but only once. I couldn’t match his furious pace.

Before his second new hip he joined me in my ‘90 Lebaron convert for a top-down trip up to Newago County. We slowed enough to note the changes in Uncle Ben’s and Uncle Edd’s old places, ate a meal in White Cloud and came home. It was an easy afternoon and the long ride didn’t bother him too much. Images flooded both our heads that day.

Our times alone grew sparser, but one morning we had a nice breakfast on Lakeshore Drive, Muskegon Lake just beyond the window. Only three years ago we went out to the Lake Michigan Ovals and sat for most of the afternoon at Captain Jack’s. Beer and sandwiches and sunshine. And laughing. I went back out there yesterday afternoon, but there was only the beer.

Dad still took good care of his garden in the middle of the decade, but Larry and I helped him more and more with it. Eventually, I put in his tomato plants.

We shared his birthday, Christmas and New Year’s of 2009, but it was at DeBoer’s Nursing Home. He needed me then to position his eating utensils and tip his plate toward him. I rescued some things from home (it was on the verge of becoming someone else’s) including a tie adorned with jazz trumpets that I’d gotten for him in Philadelphia. He chose it from a huge assortment. Last June Lynne rescued it again, this time for me.

I took him one of his best mountings of deer antlers and the maintenance man hung it for us. I also brought in some salmon I’d smoked at home. He liked it though I knew it was nowhere as good as his.

Yesterday evening I hitched up my jeans and went to VFW 446. People there miss him too.

Mom's birthday is the 18th.