You will find short stories on this site. Most are autobiographical. Some are fiction.

DAD:

The father in my life.

Dad was a student at the University of Oregon during prohibition. He often played jazz piano at parties and speakeasies. He spent too much time having fun and dropped out of college. He married mom. They moved to California during the depression. Jobs were very difficult to find. He said that in order to get a job, he located the residence of a man who owned Chevron gas stations in San Diego. Every morning Dad parked outside this man’s house and waited for him to come out on his way to work. Each morning Dad would approach him and ask for a job. After several mornings the man gave in and hired him. A year or two later my sister, Julia, was born. Having a child jolted Dad into looking at the trajectory of his life. He didn’t want his daughter to tell her school friends that her dad was a service station attendant. So he returned to U of O where he completed his bachelor of science degree in four terms and earned a phi beta kappa key in the process. He entered U. of O Med. School that Fall. I was born in 1938, his final year of medical school. My younger sister, Kappy, was born two years later. Upon graduation, Dad joined the Eugene Hospital and Clinic, where he remained for the rest of his life.

It was always a source of pride for me to respond to the question “What does your dad do?” Or, when asked, upon meeting someone, “Are you related to Dr. Lundy?” However, there was a downside to his being a doctor. He worked a full day in the clinic and then did rounds in the evenings at the hospital. He was known for spending all the time with his patients that the patient needed. Consequently, he would usually come home well after we children were done with dinner. He and Mom would frequently have their dinner after we had gone to bed.

The doctor’s lunches were another source of pride for me. As a boy, I was occasionally invited to have lunch in the physician’s lunch room. By that time Dad had become a leader in the organization, He sat in an oversized chair at the head of the long table of doctors. I was impressed that the doctor’s conversation at lunch was not on trivial matters such as golf or the stock market. Rather the they focused on difficult cases. Typically one of the doctors would present a case and the others would then question and discuss the symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment plan being proposed. It was clear that their primary interest was in the health of their patients. Over the years, I would occasionally see Dad in his office. There, I would be greeted by his pleasant and pretty red-haired nurse, Kay. She had been his nurse for as long as I could remember.

My family, mom, my sisters, and I, spent a month each summer at Surftides motel in Lincoln City on the Oregon coast. Dad would stay in Eugene to attend his medical practice. He would join us for a three day weekend once or twice during those beach months.

A patient of Dad’s, Prince Helfrich, told him that he was planning a one-week camping trip in the high Cascades for boys of my age. Dad signed me up. Prince invited Dad to come along as the camp doctor. The kids were fond of him. They called him “Doc.” On a day hike from camp, Doc slipped and gashed his right hand on sharp rocks. Doc was a bit of a showman. When we returned to camp, he sat at the folding kitchen table and sutured the wound closed using only his left hand. The boys stood around watching in awe and admiration. He and I attended these camps for three years. Prince also offered a girls’ camp which my sister Kappy attended. Dad was there as well.

Around the time that I was ten, I remember lying in bed, hearing Mom and dad arguing. Soon afterward, he moved out. I had a vague notion that he had a girlfriend, his nurse Kay. Over the summer of 1949 Mom took us to Carmel California, where she had an old friend. The former wife of one of the doctors at Eugene Hospital and clinic. I heard nothing from Dad during that summer. When we came back to Eugene in the Fall, Dad moved back home. But this try at reconciliation did not last. Soon they were arguing again. It was then, when I was 11, that Dad pulled me aside and said “Tosh, I am leaving the family. From now on you will be the man of the house. You will have to take care of the women.” “The women” were mom and my sister, Kappy. My older sister, Julia had gone to college.

Because of his long hours of work, Dad had not been a daily presence in the lives of us kids. So his leaving was not as traumatic for Kappy and me, as it was for Mom. She became depressed and began to drink too much. There were times when Kappy and I hid the booze out of fear she would become alcoholic.

I didn’t see much of Dad after he left, though he would occasionally call. There were two exceptions. Once he took me deer hunting in the Steens Mountains with several of his friends. The other exception was when he took me on a white water trip down Oregon’s Rogue River. This was particularly memorable because I was able to see him enjoying the male companionship with his two best friends. They were also whitewater boatmen. On that trip, we stopped to look at a miner’s cabin up river from Blossom Bar. We proceeded a short distance and camped below a small riffle, across from Zane Grey’s cabin. The next day I wandered away from the camp to explore. When I returned to camp, Dad was not there. I asked about him and was told “We don’t know what happened. He kind of went berserk. He took off all his clothes and hiked into the woods heading upstream. I was concerned, but not for long. Soon we heard a yell “YA-HOO!” coming from the river. We turned to see him, in the middle of the river, floating on his back drifting towards the white water. He went threw it and for what seemed like a minute he was out of sight. I thought he must have drowned. But then he emerged down stream and swam ashore to the camp. He loved to be dramatic.

Those were the few interactions that I had with Dad throughout my junior high and high school years. He paid for my first year of college at Oregon State. But that led to disputes between him and Mom over her not paying her share for my education. So I moved back to Eugene and took two jobs with which I was able to pay for my food, rent, car, drafting supplies, and tuition. Neither of my parents paid for anything related to my education after that. A university education was a lot less expensive then. I received a B, a C, and in spring term a D in organic chemistry. I could not get into medical school with a D in “organic”. This was a big disappointment for Dad as well as for myself. His hope was that I would become a doctor.

Dad was in charge of shepherding the hospital through a problem-filled remodeling project. I had two part time jobs and was dedicated to succeeding in the School of Architecture. Our infrequent contacts became even more rare.

On a Sunday in the Fall of 1965, Dad phoned me to say that he had suffered a heart attack and was in the hospital. That evening I went to visit him. He was in good spirits joking about how his river running buddies had smuggled a fifth of bourbon into his room. They had enjoyed a cocktail and lots of laughs. Around 2:00 AM the following morning I was awakened by knocking on my apartment door. It was Kay and one of dad’s buddies. They had come to tell me that Dad had suffered another heart attack and had died. He was 58 years old.

I hear of men who suffer greatly over the death of their father. I did not. I suppose that it is because his separations from our family were like miniature deaths of the great dad that I had when I was a grade school kid. It was a blow to my hope that we could become close again after he retired. But this was not to be. I saw him, for the last time, looking as if asleep, in his coffin.