A Eulogy for my parents Ralph See and Dorothea See
A Eulogy for my parents Ralph See (1/16/1922-6/16/2017) and Dorothea See (11/9/1922-12/16/2016)
Given at the memorial service for Ralph See on July 5, 2017, Houston National Cemetery
Something I still find it hard to get over about Dad, that makes him still a kind of hero in my mind, is that he could practically build his own house by himself. He got quite a lot of practice on our four-bedroom house in Saugatuck [MI], renovating almost all the rooms one by one, and then adding a back room — what was to be his TV repair shop — with the help of a local builder. But that was just a warm-up. Later, in his retirement, he added to their cabin in the Smokey mountains, nearly doubling its size. He did hire contractors for the foundation and other things that required licenses, but still did the bulk of the work himself. Framing, drywall, siding, panelling, roofing, painting, basic plumbing and electricity, he did all that. He’d also get under the car, change the oil, make other car repairs, dig holes in the yard and put up fences. And more. Regrettably, not much of this impressive skill set got passed on to his children.
Dad’s actual paid gig, of course, during the Saugatuck years, was appliance repair, later specializing in TVs. While I was growing up he would sometimes take me along on his service jobs, sometimes maybe supposedly to help him with antenna work up on the rooftops, although I doubt that I was much help. I like to think that at least sometimes it was a very nice job for him. A good day at work may have consisted of leisurely drives around our swath of rural Michigan while listening to Paul Harvey on the radio, waving at the friendly police cars and having them wave back at you, stopping now and then to see customers and have pleasant and interesting chats, and incidentally swapping out occasional vacuum tubes from inside the sets to earn your keep. A bad day was getting knocked to the floor semi-conscious by a jolt from a set’s high-voltage unit, which happened at least a few times.
One day, when I was in maybe 9th grade, he and I were up on the roof of some bar in Douglas on one of those hot summer days, hot for Michigan, a great day for tanning at the Oval beach but not so nice to be on a black tar roof that is reflecting the whole infra-red end of the sun’s spectrum back at you like a radiator while you’re applying little dabs of more sticky tar to the bolted feet of the new antenna with an unwieldy wooden paint stirrer trying lamely to make them watertight. And in the middle this rather dystopian scene Dad exclaimed to me, in his mock-ostentatious voice “Dave, someday this will all be yours!” And I paused for a brief take, and matter-of-factly said “Yuck.”
I don’t really remember this event well, but Dad told me about it later, saying he was very fond of that memory. I gather it may have reflected his own feelings. In his years with the [brand name redacted] service department in the 1960s he saw things getting more profit driven and exploitative. When he came to a house and nothing turned out to be wrong with the set, they started charging an obligatory service fee to cover the time and mileage. Dad didn’t like that. And then they increased the charges, and added little new ones. They hired new, young inexperienced department managers who knew less about the service business than the service personnel did. Plus probably more nonsense that he didn’t talk about. Service bureaus, he thought, weren’t intended to be profit centers, and making them carry their weight was making an enemy out of the customer. Dad around that time also liked to quote now and then the famous line from Thoreau’s Walden: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
So once he had finished his backroom shop (which conveniently added a second bathroom to our six-occupant household, thank you Dad), he quit the big corporation and went free-lance. He bought a frighteningly decrepit old jeep with a lurching manual transmission to use as a service vehicle. And he could charge what he wanted to charge, or charge nothing. He once told me of a poor woman who, when he was on his way out to the jeep after waiving any payment for the job, rushed back into her house to fetch a dime to slip in his palm. Dad dealt honestly, was dependable, and was in demand. TVs in need of mending would appear on our porch when nobody was at home. He worked pretty insanely hard, until at the age of 57, once the four of us kids were out of the house, he and Mom left the rat race, sold out and moved up to a remote tract of land in the upper peninsula of Michigan to retire in the company of the deer, beaver, bear, loons and wild berries. Mom later said that was her favorite residence of them all, and I’d say it was probably mine too, from having stayed there for a summer. I loved the beaver pond in the back acreage, and loved the incredible sight of the clear night sky with no artificial lights to muddy the view. Dad and Mom’s retirement did a few zig zags, eventually of course landing in their “cozy nook by a babbling brook” in the North Carolina Smokies, but it lasted 38 years — that is at least as long as their working lives had been, with all but the last several in at least pretty decent health. Their marriage was 68 years long, and although it was not quite a fairy-tale romance as far as I can tell, it was good for both of them, and absolutely secure.
Like Dad, Mom was honest, hard-working and conscientious. Dad is sentimental and religious and conservative. Mom seems to have been very unsentimental and open-minded. They loved each other, but they weren’t all that effusive in praising each other, at least in front of us.
Between the two of them, Mom seems to have somehow gotten a bit better academic education. To the extent that we kids have good grammar we can probably mostly thank her. She was an avid reader her whole life. And it has been easy to forget — since so much time has gone by now — that Mom was also a pretty skilled painter, belonging to a local art club, a hobby that she left behind after starting to work full time in the late 1960s. She made portraits of her kids. She also taught me, before starting Kindergarten, how to read, and somehow — I don’t know how she did this, but she told me she did — she taught herself how to read music in order to teach me how to read music before my first piano lesson. That makes her singular in the annals of parents of music students that I’ve known or heard of, and I taught piano for over 20 years myself.
As you all know, Dad had a treasure trove of wartime stories from his Navy service in Trinidad, with snakes, tarantulas and machetes figuring prominently. This time in his life was amazing, and formative for him. I won’t rehearse it now, except just to bring up one story of a close call, actually there were several close calls. The big one was when he was caught in a deadly undertow in Maracas Bay, nearly drowned, but was spit up by the waves just in time, gasping on the shore. And another incident after the war, when he suddenly choked on a sandwich at a drug store counter, and some woman came out of nowhere, like an angel, and saved him. To those events he might have added the so-called acute catarrhal fever he caught in Trinidad that put him in a delirium for long time and made some of his hair fall out; and also the times early in their marriage when they were behind on their bills, about to go bankrupt, and a check would arrive just in the nick of time. (I probably wouldn’t count among the close calls the high voltage shocks from television sets that he had gotten acclimated to by repeated exposure, but, he told me, would have killed novices. That doesn't count as a lucky break, but I submit that that was his super power. He owned that!) Anyway, he said many times that he didn’t know why he was spared, that it must have been God telling him that he was being kept around for a purpose. Maybe the purpose was only to raise kids who would then fulfill the purpose. I see that as his maternal Burrell side of the family, with all its scholarly Calvinism, working overtime to try to figure it all out. That was also, I think, intended in his own way as his Christian witness, his claim to approach the altar of the Lord and speak for himself.
I’ve known a couple of other people who have faced similar uncertainty and badly wanted validation for their purpose in life they felt was lacking. I’ve been kind of puzzled by such people. In fact, they make me a bit nervous and can be hard to be around (though that wasn't the case with Dad). I say to them, whatever God’s purpose is, I think, it’s bigger than any one of us and resists any easy definition. During out mortal lives we get no real job description, no grade, you make of it what you can, and we’re basically all in the same boat, with each other to contend with. I did say something like that to Dad during his last several years when he was mulling over what his legacy might be. I don’t think I ever quite made it clear a sentiment which I will conclude with now, which is: Don’t worry, Dad. You did well by yourself and us. Rest easy. Rest in peace.
Next Blog entry: Farewell
Given at the memorial service for Ralph See on July 5, 2017, Houston National Cemetery
Something I still find it hard to get over about Dad, that makes him still a kind of hero in my mind, is that he could practically build his own house by himself. He got quite a lot of practice on our four-bedroom house in Saugatuck [MI], renovating almost all the rooms one by one, and then adding a back room — what was to be his TV repair shop — with the help of a local builder. But that was just a warm-up. Later, in his retirement, he added to their cabin in the Smokey mountains, nearly doubling its size. He did hire contractors for the foundation and other things that required licenses, but still did the bulk of the work himself. Framing, drywall, siding, panelling, roofing, painting, basic plumbing and electricity, he did all that. He’d also get under the car, change the oil, make other car repairs, dig holes in the yard and put up fences. And more. Regrettably, not much of this impressive skill set got passed on to his children.
Dad’s actual paid gig, of course, during the Saugatuck years, was appliance repair, later specializing in TVs. While I was growing up he would sometimes take me along on his service jobs, sometimes maybe supposedly to help him with antenna work up on the rooftops, although I doubt that I was much help. I like to think that at least sometimes it was a very nice job for him. A good day at work may have consisted of leisurely drives around our swath of rural Michigan while listening to Paul Harvey on the radio, waving at the friendly police cars and having them wave back at you, stopping now and then to see customers and have pleasant and interesting chats, and incidentally swapping out occasional vacuum tubes from inside the sets to earn your keep. A bad day was getting knocked to the floor semi-conscious by a jolt from a set’s high-voltage unit, which happened at least a few times.
One day, when I was in maybe 9th grade, he and I were up on the roof of some bar in Douglas on one of those hot summer days, hot for Michigan, a great day for tanning at the Oval beach but not so nice to be on a black tar roof that is reflecting the whole infra-red end of the sun’s spectrum back at you like a radiator while you’re applying little dabs of more sticky tar to the bolted feet of the new antenna with an unwieldy wooden paint stirrer trying lamely to make them watertight. And in the middle this rather dystopian scene Dad exclaimed to me, in his mock-ostentatious voice “Dave, someday this will all be yours!” And I paused for a brief take, and matter-of-factly said “Yuck.”
I don’t really remember this event well, but Dad told me about it later, saying he was very fond of that memory. I gather it may have reflected his own feelings. In his years with the [brand name redacted] service department in the 1960s he saw things getting more profit driven and exploitative. When he came to a house and nothing turned out to be wrong with the set, they started charging an obligatory service fee to cover the time and mileage. Dad didn’t like that. And then they increased the charges, and added little new ones. They hired new, young inexperienced department managers who knew less about the service business than the service personnel did. Plus probably more nonsense that he didn’t talk about. Service bureaus, he thought, weren’t intended to be profit centers, and making them carry their weight was making an enemy out of the customer. Dad around that time also liked to quote now and then the famous line from Thoreau’s Walden: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
So once he had finished his backroom shop (which conveniently added a second bathroom to our six-occupant household, thank you Dad), he quit the big corporation and went free-lance. He bought a frighteningly decrepit old jeep with a lurching manual transmission to use as a service vehicle. And he could charge what he wanted to charge, or charge nothing. He once told me of a poor woman who, when he was on his way out to the jeep after waiving any payment for the job, rushed back into her house to fetch a dime to slip in his palm. Dad dealt honestly, was dependable, and was in demand. TVs in need of mending would appear on our porch when nobody was at home. He worked pretty insanely hard, until at the age of 57, once the four of us kids were out of the house, he and Mom left the rat race, sold out and moved up to a remote tract of land in the upper peninsula of Michigan to retire in the company of the deer, beaver, bear, loons and wild berries. Mom later said that was her favorite residence of them all, and I’d say it was probably mine too, from having stayed there for a summer. I loved the beaver pond in the back acreage, and loved the incredible sight of the clear night sky with no artificial lights to muddy the view. Dad and Mom’s retirement did a few zig zags, eventually of course landing in their “cozy nook by a babbling brook” in the North Carolina Smokies, but it lasted 38 years — that is at least as long as their working lives had been, with all but the last several in at least pretty decent health. Their marriage was 68 years long, and although it was not quite a fairy-tale romance as far as I can tell, it was good for both of them, and absolutely secure.
Like Dad, Mom was honest, hard-working and conscientious. Dad is sentimental and religious and conservative. Mom seems to have been very unsentimental and open-minded. They loved each other, but they weren’t all that effusive in praising each other, at least in front of us.
Between the two of them, Mom seems to have somehow gotten a bit better academic education. To the extent that we kids have good grammar we can probably mostly thank her. She was an avid reader her whole life. And it has been easy to forget — since so much time has gone by now — that Mom was also a pretty skilled painter, belonging to a local art club, a hobby that she left behind after starting to work full time in the late 1960s. She made portraits of her kids. She also taught me, before starting Kindergarten, how to read, and somehow — I don’t know how she did this, but she told me she did — she taught herself how to read music in order to teach me how to read music before my first piano lesson. That makes her singular in the annals of parents of music students that I’ve known or heard of, and I taught piano for over 20 years myself.
As you all know, Dad had a treasure trove of wartime stories from his Navy service in Trinidad, with snakes, tarantulas and machetes figuring prominently. This time in his life was amazing, and formative for him. I won’t rehearse it now, except just to bring up one story of a close call, actually there were several close calls. The big one was when he was caught in a deadly undertow in Maracas Bay, nearly drowned, but was spit up by the waves just in time, gasping on the shore. And another incident after the war, when he suddenly choked on a sandwich at a drug store counter, and some woman came out of nowhere, like an angel, and saved him. To those events he might have added the so-called acute catarrhal fever he caught in Trinidad that put him in a delirium for long time and made some of his hair fall out; and also the times early in their marriage when they were behind on their bills, about to go bankrupt, and a check would arrive just in the nick of time. (I probably wouldn’t count among the close calls the high voltage shocks from television sets that he had gotten acclimated to by repeated exposure, but, he told me, would have killed novices. That doesn't count as a lucky break, but I submit that that was his super power. He owned that!) Anyway, he said many times that he didn’t know why he was spared, that it must have been God telling him that he was being kept around for a purpose. Maybe the purpose was only to raise kids who would then fulfill the purpose. I see that as his maternal Burrell side of the family, with all its scholarly Calvinism, working overtime to try to figure it all out. That was also, I think, intended in his own way as his Christian witness, his claim to approach the altar of the Lord and speak for himself.
I’ve known a couple of other people who have faced similar uncertainty and badly wanted validation for their purpose in life they felt was lacking. I’ve been kind of puzzled by such people. In fact, they make me a bit nervous and can be hard to be around (though that wasn't the case with Dad). I say to them, whatever God’s purpose is, I think, it’s bigger than any one of us and resists any easy definition. During out mortal lives we get no real job description, no grade, you make of it what you can, and we’re basically all in the same boat, with each other to contend with. I did say something like that to Dad during his last several years when he was mulling over what his legacy might be. I don’t think I ever quite made it clear a sentiment which I will conclude with now, which is: Don’t worry, Dad. You did well by yourself and us. Rest easy. Rest in peace.
Next Blog entry: Farewell
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