Local Dispatch: Dad may be gone, but he lives on forever in cosmos
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Every year Grand Canyon National Park hosts a star party, and when I peered through a telescope last summer I saw the Whirlpool Galaxy.
The Whirlpool is home to 100 billion stars, and one of them, at just that moment in time, was exploding as a supernova. Actually, the explosion took place over 25 million years ago. It took that unfathomable amount of time for the photons to propagate through the cosmos, enter the eyepiece and strike my retina.
A telescope is really a time machine; what I saw happened a long, long time ago. But the photons go the other direction, too: into the future. Even as you read this story, the supernova's photons are fanning out through the universe, away from you. They always will.
Two days after I saw the supernova, the phone rang at 1 a.m. and I knew it was sister Sue to tell me Pa had died.
I had last seen him alive more than a year ago. Remember the "Family Circus" comic strip where a dotted line showed Billy's zigzag path home from the woods? Pa had met me that day with a big smile, hugged me, and then led me on a Family Circus chase: through the garage, around the side of the house, between the big trees to the backyard, into my childhood home's back door through the basement, up the steps, into his bedroom and to a safe on the floor of his closet.
He kneeled down, removed an envelope, studied it briefly then handed it to me. On the outside of the envelope my name was printed. Did he really know my name, or was it just a lucky guess, a one-in-seven chance since he had seven kids?
Either way, a year before the star party some of his personality was still able to pierce the Alzheimer's haze. I still saw faint flashes of the father who raised me.
As a little boy I'd sit with him in the dark on the porch in Kittanning, listening to the chirp of the crickets and the crack of the thunder and the Pittsburgh Pirates on KDKA radio.
Around the fifth inning Ma would bring us homemade blackberry pie with ice cream. Later we'd go into the yard with a flashlight -- with cellophane covering the lens -- to catch night crawlers.
The next morning we'd take them on the boat to Keystone Lake to catch largemouth bass or walleye. At noon we'd fish from shore as he lit the charcoal-fired hibachi to fry the morning's catch or hamburgers, whichever came first.
Another summer he took me and my older brother to the last game ever at Forbes Field, where we sat in the right-field pavilion and watched Roberto Clemente throw a runner out at home. When the game was over we climbed out of the stands with everyone else and walked across the infield, where Gary asked if he could take a handful of dirt from the pitcher's mound for a souvenir, and Pa said "No."
He wasn't the smartest father; he was a flawed man, but being human means being flawed -- all of us are imperfect. I forgave him his flaws long ago. When we forgive a parent his flaws we've taken the first step toward forgiving ourselves our own.
My little sister Lisa threw a big party in the summer of 2001 to welcome me back from Papua, New Guinea, where I taught physics as a Peace Corps volunteer. Since I had spent the previous couple years in the heat of the tropics, she saved snowballs in her freezer to remind me of the winters I had missed.
At her signal, everyone started pelting me with them. They were very cold. My college roommate Doobie was standing beside my father, who looked at him, grinned, then pointed at the snowball in his hand and said: "I put a stone in this one!"
I cried when I saw his worn-out, lifeless body lying in his casket. He looked so small. But then I realized he's not small at all, he's a supernova.
Like the supernova, Pa's life force is propagating out through the universe and will continue doing so forever. In a world far in the future, someone will look through a telescope at the photons streaming from the supernova in the Whirlpool Galaxy, and in that eyepiece Pa still lives, pointing, saying: "Pull my finger!"
He's a supernova and he's immortal. We're all immortal. I cry no more since learning this. So rest in peace, Pa, and know that you're still leaving a mark, however faint, however flawed.
You did your best.
First Published January 27, 2012 12:00 am
