I found a picture the other day of my dad and me standing above the American side of Niagara Falls.
That picture was taken in 2012, three years before he passed.
It wasn’t easy for him to walk down to the railing, but he pushed on until we got there.
This was a unique period for us, one where his driver’s license had been taken due to health concerns, and I had committed to taking him on road trips once or twice a year.
It was hard for him to be sidelined, because he’d spent decades traveling for a living, and he loved long journeys behind the wheel.
Because he started traveling when I was young, we hadn’t been close. I was mad he wasn’t around — and I was a handful for my mom in his absence.
Then I went to the Army and moved to the West Coast after my stint there.
After just shy of 20 years, I moved back to the hometown, wife and kids in tow.
Those road trips weren’t easy in a physical sense. Dad’s health had turned and he wasn’t the hard-charging nuclear production inspector who’d been everywhere from fabrication facilities in Alabama to new production reactors in South Korea and Japan.
Sometimes, after riding all day, he’d teeter in a stiff breeze. When he ran out of energy, it was time to shut it down even if we were still 140 miles from the day’s goal.
But the trips were invigorating intellectually and brought us closer than we’d ever been.
Over the long miles I’d hear stories of standoffs with union reps who wouldn’t allow him to climb a ladder because someone else was contractually required to do it but had left for the day, and a time when the waitress at Bob Evans broke down in tears in grief and Dad, late to dinner after a long day, talked to her for an hour, directing her to the solace he found in his faith.
He would tell me every time we passed the Gateway Arch in St. Louis he and his crew at Pittsburgh and Des Moines Steel had built that monument, and I would tell him he’d told me that nine times already.
“And if we drive back through this way on our way back, I’ll tell you again,” he’d say, shrugging, with a sly grin on his face.
Those were healing years for us.
I’d been a terror as a teen, then a spiraling junkie in my early years in California, and he’d spent a lot of time praying for me… but I never let him get close until we were on those trips.
We talked about fatherhood and mistakes made, fears fathers have for their kids and the sacrifices and compromises everyone faces to provide for a family.
He told me once that he hated deciding that he had to take the overseas trips, but that he was the only one at the office without a college degree and always felt like he was on the chopping block if he didn’t take the work no one else wanted.
We learned who we were as men, opening up about anxieties and being vulnerable ways we never would have otherwise.
One time he and I were walking in Las Vegas, and his legs quit. He hated that town and wanted a cab back to the hotel.
The cab station was on the other side of the casino we were near, Circus Circus, and I told him it would be shorter to cut through.
As we walked through the chiming bells and flashing lights of the casino, Dad stopped.
“Hold on a sec,” he said.
He reached in his pocket, pulled out a silver dollar, and popped it into the nearest one-armed bandit, and pulled the lever.
The cherries and diamonds started spinning, and when they stopped, three oranges lined up.
The machine spit out $100 in tokens, and Dad said, over his shoulder as he started walking, pointing to the cashier window, “Cash those in, half of it’s yours.”
He was waiting for me at the cab station where I came out, smiling.
“Just had a feeling,” he said.
Dad’s been gone almost 11 years, and I think of him often.
Those trips seem like dreams now, but they weren’t dreams… they were gifts.
Gifts given to two men who’d missed the opportunity to know each other earlier, a second chance for a boy and his father to get it right.
The Rev. James Hogan is a native of Stowe Township and serves as pastor of Faithbridge Community Church. His views do not reflect the views of the West Hills Gazette.
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