Before We Begin, Some Instructions

My late father-in-law, Bert, was a very particular man. As my husband noted at his funeral, for a man who was never in the military, he operated with impressive precision and an unwavering belief in the need-to-know basis. Bert never asked for something to be done; he briefed you. And he did it all using military-type jargon with very precise, formal wording. (It might be worthy to note that he was a school teacher!)

A simple task came with a full orientation. He would spend a good fifteen minutes explaining which tools to gather, where to stand, how to position your body, and the proper order of operations, all before finally revealing the actual assignment.

“Get a ladder. Place it here. Get a screwdriver. Climb the ladder. Reach over your head…”

At which point you would ask, “What am I doing when I get up there?”

“You’re going to remove that fixture, unscrew the bulb, get a new one from this package of bulbs, screw it in, and replace the cover.”

“So,” you’d say, “I’m changing a lightbulb.”

Exactly.

He also had a fondness for documentation. If Bert needed to tell you something, he would begin with, “Procure a writing implement and a piece of paper.” This was usually followed by information that did not, by any reasonable standard, require being written down. Still, he wrote everything down. After he died, we discovered notebooks, legal pads, binders, scraps of paper, all meticulously filled with lists and notes, documenting everything from household expenses and chores to how much a road trip to the East Coast cost. (By the way, in 1977 it cost about $2,000 for the family to drive across the entire country and back.) Bert, having been raised in the Depression, was a very frugal man.

My favorite example of Bert’s military-style direction came one day when David went to visit him. Bert needed help with the blinds over the bathtub in the master bathroom. Instead of saying that, he greeted David at the door with, “Grab a coffee can and a pair of pliers and meet me in the bathtub.” David still says that if he ever wrote a book about his dad, that would be the title.

I am a bookkeeper by trade, which means I appreciate order, schedules, and knowing what is supposed to happen next. Not as strict as Bert, of course, but I appreciated the idea. David and I lived just a few blocks from Bert’s house. This worked out well, because Bert was in his nineties and needed some extra help now and then.

By “some,” I mean errands, appointments, and a little bookkeeping. Nothing dramatic, just enough to keep things running the way Bert preferred. I stopped by his place a few times a week, and on the days I didn’t, he often walked over to ours. It was a system that suited all of us.

One afternoon, as I was getting ready to leave my office for the day, my phone rang. It was Bert.

“Hi, Dad,” I said.

“Hi, Stef,” he replied. “Are you planning on stopping by today?”

In the background, I could hear his housekeeper vacuuming, which told me everything was, at least on the surface, normal.

“I can,” I said. “What do you need?”

“Well, you don’t have to,” he said carefully, “I was just thinking you could maybe run me over to the hospital for a minute.”

That felt like a shift.

“Oh,” I said. “Did I miss an appointment on your schedule?”

“No,” he said slowly. Then, after a pause that told me something important was being considered, “I… uh… I may have had a little stroke this morning.”

“This morning?” I said. “Today?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re just calling me now?”

“Well,” he said, reasonably, “I didn’t want to bother you at work.”

I was already out the door.

When I arrived at his house, he was sitting at the kitchen table as if nothing unusual had occurred. The housekeeper was still moving from room to room, and everything looked exactly the same as it always did. I asked him why he hadn’t called me earlier.

He looked genuinely confused by the question, as though this sequence of events made perfect sense.

“I knew you were busy,” he said.

I took him to the hospital, where it was confirmed that he had, in fact, had a minor stroke. Minor enough that he was fine, thankfully, but significant enough that it probably should have been mentioned sooner than late afternoon. I scolded him gently on the way home. Enough to register that nothing he ever needed was a disruption.

He listened, nodded, and seemed relieved. As far as Bert was concerned, the situation had been handled correctly. The right person had been notified, transportation had been secured, and no one’s schedule had been unnecessarily disrupted. In his mind, it wasn’t a crisis. It was simply something that required instructions.

A little grace, a little grit, plenty of laughter,

~Stef