URBANNA —
Time to ’fess up. I had a closet upstairs that was so packed with boxes I couldn’t enter. It was filled with Father’s paintings, etchings, poetry, diaries, newspaper columns, stories, magazine articles, manuscripts of published books, three manuscripts from unpublished books and everything else he cared about in his 91 years of life.
George Wakefield died in 2001. It occurred to me over summer that 20 years had passed and it was time to go through his things. Surely after so much time I could face such a task.
The boxes were filled with memories spanning from 1910 to 2001. If I did one box each week, maybe I could finish the task in 12 painless weeks.
Shakespeare expressed emotion from separation from a loved one … “Parting is such sweet sorrow …” And going through a parent’s mementos after they have passed away triggers similar feelings. I learned so much about my father. I knew he was a writer and an artist but he was also a poet. He left not a few poems penned over the years but a complete book of poetry written over a lifetime. His poems centered on his love for the Great Lakes. Here’s one that takes me back to my hometown.
To a Lake Captain
Smoking tugs, tooting whistles, gales and breakers white,
Too much current, shallow water, rocks and fog all night,
Rolling in a beam sea from Duluth to the Soo,
Punching through a nor’easter, worrying about my crew,
Gary, Buffalo, Sandusky, Conneaut and that crooked creek,
The flats, calm days, lonely river sights that yachtsmen seek,
The heavy ice, bitter weather, icy decks, and twenty below,
Pushing, turning, help at last — the car ferry — then on the go,
Coal dust, wheat, ore pouring down, men yelling under the moon,
Banging coal cars and a puffing engine trying to make room,
Stepping up at the locks, the highlands of Keweenaw,
Crystal waters and muddy Lake Erie, the straits of Mackinaw,
Isle Royal, Michipicotan, Pelee, Manitoulin and Stag,
Belle, Boblo, Grand, Drummond, Presque, Beaver, and a snag,
Bent Plates, lost anchors, missing blades, inspectors, engine trouble,
Low steam, crazy yachtsmen, office wants you on the double,
Problems, problems, weather, weather, just a mass of strife,
To keep steaming, hauling, floating throughout a Lake Captain’s life.
I also discovered Father had written a column for the Vermilion News and Photo Journal from the 1930s throughout his life. One column was titled “By George,” another was “Hearsay and Heresy” and his last column was “Vermilion Views” filled with history of the Great Lakes.
There were photographs of him as a child in one boat after another “messing about” on the Vermilion River and Lake Erie, marriage to my mother in 1936 in the midst of the Great Depression, his first house that he built himself right next to the big house, his three daughters from baby years to our weddings, children’s weddings and oncoming grandchildren. How the years of his life flew by, exactly as my life is now doing.
Family trees, a journal of his solo circumference of Lake Erie in a star boat at age 19, a diary of his bringing his father’s yacht, “Tobermory” at age 16 up from Florida on the intercostal waterway with his 18-year-old brother in 1925 when my grandfather had to take the train home in an emergency. The land was wild when the two teenagers brought the boat up the intracostal, through the canal to the Great Lakes and home to Vermilion, Ohio.
There was a love letter from Father to Mother on their 50th wedding anniversary, graduation announcements from various colleges, wedding and birth announcements of grandchildren, excerpts from his favorite English poetry, lines he knew by heart as well as much of Shakespeare.
“Shakespeare is the English Bible, ‘Mays,’ ” he used to tell me along with such as advice as “Doubt everything, insist on empirical proof before you accept anything as truth, do your own thinking, Mays, never jump on the bandwagons and especially beware of “group think.”
And his best advice …“Keep your eyes peeled always on the far horizons.”
Opening a large box tied in ribbon I discovered every article, story, book, poem and column I had ever written up to the day that he died.
I had to start tossing … high school graduation diplomas, 1928, Mother’s too, 1930, passports, photos from various cruises of yesteryear, I.D. cards, drivers’ licenses, car and boat titles … I passed on photos and paintings to family, shipped three unpublished manuscripts on Great Lakes lore to the Vermilion Historical Society and … saved all of the rest.
Who could throw out poetry?
The next generation will have to do it. I can’t. It seems writers write too much. Who will have the heart to deal with all the works that are left behind?
© 2021
