My father was a strong man. I grew up believing my father could do anything. I am sure he believed it too. He was born November 24, 1911 in New Denmark, New Brunswick to Danish immigrants of the hardy and stern sort. People who had the pluck to pack up and leave their homeland for a new land and scrape out a living as potato farmers. My father learned his work ethic from a young age.

It was a hard life. Farming is hard work followed by more hard work followed by a hearty meal. When he was just a boy of two years of age, his father died of pneumonia, possibly caused by his too-weak lungs not withstanding the body-breaking farm chores in a Canadian winter.  I never knew my paternal grandmother, she died long before I was born, but I am led to believe it would be an understatement to say that she was not a warm person. His childhood was cold in all aspects.

When he was 14 he became a hired hand on another farm. He was 14, on his own, earning his own living. When his older brother decided to marry and leave the farm, he returned at 18, to take over running the farm and taking care of his mother.

My father believed in early rising. On a farm it is up at 5:00 AM and take care of the animals first. You feed the animals and then you get breakfast. In my whole life I never saw my father "sleep in". There were no lazy days. Work and responsibility always came before leisure. Whatever he did had to be done right, there were no shortcuts, no shirking.

His life on the farm was plagued with misfortune however. As hard as it is to keep a farm afloat financially, it is harder still when nature conspires against you. There was the barn that was struck by lightning and burned, taking the lives of several horses. He rebuilt the barn himself only to see the new construction freakishly be struck by lightning and again burn. He had inherited his father's tendency to asthma, allergies, hay fever and general weakness of his lungs. The dust of the farm was more than he could withstand. He sold the farm and in a particularly incomprehensible move, left farming to take up carpentry (apparently he had never heard of sawdust).

He left Canada too, but he didn't get very far. He was working in South Portland, Maine, when a young woman walked down the street and spied him. She asked the neighbor whose house he was working on, who that man was and if he were single. The answers pleased her and she was heard to remark that he wouldn't be single for long. She was right.

I know exactly how much money my father had when he left Canada in 1946. He told us often as we grew up, pointing out just how expensive we were to keep and what he would have had if he hadn't had all these kids. Frugality was his practice, although we never called him frugal. We called him cheap and stingy. There was a always a voice behind you reminding you to turn off the light when you left the room, telling you to turn off the water when you are not using it, nagging you to close the refrigerator door so as not to waste electricity and a raised voice insisting that you close the front door as he couldn't afford to heat the outdoors. We were made aware of the fact that money does not grow on trees.

My father's favorite turn of phrase was "over the hill to the poor house". We were always driving him there. A small child does not separate the dramatic from the real and I had in my mind a fearsome structure with an iron gate that we would all end up in one day if we didn't change our spendthrift ways. I assumed we would be made to do chores and fed watery gruel.
It didn't sound at all attractive. One day, I saw the poor house. As we drove up a hill by the ocean there it was, a large brick structure surround by a brick wall that had a wrought iron gate with lettering in the iron archway above. It was obvious this was it and that must say Poor House. I drive by it often now, it is actually the New England School for the Deaf. But each time I see it I think of our near escape from the poor house, effected solely by the efforts of one stingy old Dane.

I blame a lot of my personality on my father. He was a stubborn cuss with a very dry sense of humor and could be bitingly sarcastic at times. This was hard on my more delicate siblings but something in me always rose to match it. I remember the day he was watching TV and a show about water conservation came on. Just then my mother called him away to some task. When he returned, I had turned off the set. He remarked accusingly "Oh, you didn't want to learn how to save water, did you"? "On the contrary", I replied. "I was saving electricity, no one was watching the television".

My father never was shown love or emotion as he grew up and he never really learned as an adult. As a parent he was undemonstrative. Some of us felt unloved as children, but I don't remember ever really stopping to think about it. We weren't close in some ways but there was an understanding of each other that was real if unspoken.

Once he had a job in a very nice house in an affluent town nearby. The occupants of the house were away all day while he worked and he took me with him. This in itself was an honor, to be allowed to accompany him, it meant that you were not so useless and distracting as to be a hindrance while he worked. It was one of the most memorable weeks of my life. He worked sawing and hammering and building cabinets all day. Occasionally I would be asked to assist in something , holding a level while he marked a wall, sanding, holding a board steady while he drove the first few nails. For his daughter that was an acceptance that was beyond any words of affection. He was a perfectionist and if you were a nuisance, you would not have been allowed near what he was working on. It gave me confidence to know he thought me capable. When I wasn't being a carpenter's helper, I helped myself to the absent family's piano and sheet music. He never once complained about the racket, he loved music.

I suspect my father had a very good singing voice but you rarely heard him sing and when he did, he would do it in a comical way, but oh boy, would he whistle. I have never been able to whistle at all myself, but my father used his whistle like a fine instrument. Now and again we heard stories of a very different person than we knew, the young fellow who took the horse and wagon to the Saturday night dances and who played a mean fiddle. I never saw my father play the violin in my whole life. When he left the farm and got married, he started a new life with new responsiblity and that was not part of it. I think my mother discouraged a lot of recreational activities. I saw the young man who loved music now and again, when I would play a Glen Miller record or when we watched Lawrence Welk together. I wish it had been possible to know him better.

My father didn't ever talk of retirement, no one imagined it was possible for him to retire. He reshingled the roof on his own house and remodeled the upstairs when he was 70. My father worked seven days a week building cabinets and installing them and doing general carpentry work until he was 79 years old. He may never have stopped but for being struck with a serious condition called Guillan Barre that attempted to stop him altogether. He spent at least a week in ICU with a ventilator as his chest muscles were among those affected. There was a feeding tube as he could not swallow. Many young people who are afflicted with this disease take years to completely recover. For my father, the time between onset and his release to resume his normal activity was less than two months. Of course, when he informed me that the doctor had told him to resume his normal activities, I was suspicious that he may not have told the doctor what his normal activities included and the doctor was mistakenly releasing him to live the life of a normal 80 year old man.

He never really did get back to normal though. Perhaps it was the toll it took on his body, perhaps the several days he spent not getting enough oxygen before they realized he was not breathing well, but he lost something after that. He had never looked his age before but over the next ten years it began to show and his mind lost its sharpness. My father never carried a notebook when he worked. He measured a job and had all the figures in his head. When he returned with the finished cabinets and set them in they were an exact fit and never needed adjusting. He often would say he was just a farm boy who never made it past the eighth grade but he was one of the most intelligent and mathematically gifted people I ever knew. In those last years though, the inability to work and his own awareness of his impaired mental faculties caused a feeling of defeat and uselessness that I don't think he could overcome. My father only knew how to work, and that was taken from him.

My father died on May 28, 2004. He was 91. I have on my livingroom table a copy of a photo, scanned and enlarged, that was taken for his passport in 1946 and I know exactly how much money he had on him when it was taken.