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I adored my father, Robert Earl Wheeler, even though, as a child, he often spanked me – correction – beat me.
I adored him because at his core I believe he was a little kid who liked to play and wondered at the magnificence of life and knew how special little kids are.
He held on to all of those qualities even though:
- His parents were alcoholic
- His dad also was a gambler, who eventually left the family when dad was 7-years-old and never saw his family again (He died a few years later of an infected tonsil)
- Dad was put in a Denver orphanage after his mother lost her job because he and his sister, Kathleen, started a barn fire in Grand Junction (age 4 and 6), while his mother cooked for the ranch (His sister was put in another orphanage and he rarely saw her after that.)
- Dad ran away from the orphanage many times and was beaten for doing so
- Dad, age 12, sold the “Denver Post” before school started each day on corners, so that he could live with his mother
- An Army Air Forces officer, he served as a bombardier during WW II, saw many of his friends go down in planes, and suffered from undiagnosed post trauma disorder the rest of his life
- He fell in love with a woman, who would die less than 20 years later at the age of 46 from a defective heart
- Working for the same company for 43 years, Dad started in the warehouse and retired as a senior executive
- Dad was diagnosed with bladder cancer in his early 50s, had his bladder removed and eventually a kidney because of physician error
- He died at age 68 of kidney cancer in his one remaining kidney.
He used to yell at me, “You’re like a young colt whose spirit I can’t break,” (apparently, a skill he learned working on ranches as a young boy.) The truth of the matter was with all of dad’s hardship, no one ever broke his spirit, either.
Dad, who was 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighed 220 pounds, would play with me and my sister Jan, something our mother never did. One of his favorite games was running the loop between the kitchen, dining room, living room and hall, and then ducking behind a wall. When Jan or I would round the corner, he would jump out and go boo! One time he chased us with one of mom’s aluminum pots, which were so popular in the 1950s. When he jumped out at us he smacked us on the rear ends, denting mom’s pot!
At other times, he would be sitting in his big brown easy chair by the fireplace (which never had a fire in it because the smoke would darken the blond brick and invade the “expensive” living room curtains) reading the “Denver Post,” which was delivered about 5 p.m. by the paperboy on his bicycle. Jan and I would sneak up on him and proceed to put curlers in his hair!
When I was real little, say 5, I got to go “night crawler hunting” with dad and his fishing buddies. After dark, we would each have a flashlight and shine it on someone’s recently watered lawn. Sure enough a big juicy night crawler would crawl out of his hole and we would grab him and put him in a coffee can. (I definitely had some Tomboy in me!)
It was dad who taught me how to ride a bicycle and how to swim during one of our family vacations to Glenwood, Colorado. (I have a picture of my great-grandmother, grandma, and little boy dad and his sister Aunt Kay in that pool. My children were the fifth generation who enjoyed its natural springs.) Dad also taught me the joys of playing dunk in that pool and the beauty and peacefulness of walking a river, the Roaring Fork or the Frying Pan, as the sun was coming up, following him as he fished.
We went to Glenwood Springs for a vacation almost every summer. On some of the trips Dad would take Jan and me on a horseback ride up to the gangster Doc Holiday’s grave, just outside of Glenwood. Dad and his father were born on Aspen Mountain and his mother was the last of seven children born in Sunlight, Colorado (near Glenwood and the Glenwood Airport) in 1900.
I remember my dad kissing me goodbye each morning and the smell of his Old Spice aftershave. I remember his fedora hat that he put on as he left, and I remember his black rosary beads, which were buried with him. I don’t know where or when my father got those beads, I just remember him using them every Sunday. As a man who could be so harsh and mean at times, his humility of saying the Rosary always amazed me. I knew that it was his refuge and his strength.
Thanksgiving 1986
It was one of those November morns in Colorado, when the sky was so blue it was like the color of the Blue Grotto in Capri, Italy or like an outstretched ocean of prairie grasses the early Colorado pioneers experienced from the seat of the wagon etching towards those majestic peaks ahead.
Elizabeth, tired in her quilted yellow bathrobe with calico cats printed on it, standing before her kitchen sink could easily relate to the later analogy never dreaming that in 10 years she would travel to the former.
Tired – physically, but more so emotionally exhausted – it had been less than a year of the announcement of her father at Christmas, “Good news,’ Stinky,’ just saw my oncologist for my 20-year check-up. He gave me a clean bill of health from the bladder cancer,” to mid-February when her dad and his wife suddenly flew home from their snowbird perch in Arizona, and announced to the family that Dad had kidney cancer in his one remaining kidney.
From March to June, Elizabeth flew the weekly Friday and Sunday Frontier flights – the $39 serendipitous special — to see her dying father. She worked the brutal 10-hour days Monday through Thursday at the militaristic Dixson, Inc. in a contract marketing job, the income from which her family so desperately needed. Her home in Grand Junction had been for sale for two years after Exxon pulled out of oil shale. Her husband worked in Denver Monday through Friday while the home was for sale. It finally sold in June.
The final drive to Denver was nerve grating, with her16-year old daughter insisting that she drive, trying to get to her 14-year-old daughter at Girl Scout camp on top of the Grand Mesa in time despite being stopped by a cattle drive, to the new home with the gaudy 70’s wallpaper.
Her dad died six weeks later as the sun rose Aug. 6, 1986. She, her sister and her father’s wife, had been at his bedside all night. His blood pressure kept declining and his breath slowed. She was so tired. Death seemed to be taking its sweet time; but, now Elizabeth realizes what a gift it was to have her beloved father die as the sun rose on a beautiful Colorado day.
And there she stood at her window admiring the five spruce trees in her backyard. One for each of her family members – her three children, her husband and her. A basket of herbs she had bought filled the kitchen with a delightful smell. Then, lo and behold, two gorgeous blue jays landed on top of the two blue spruce trees. For a little while, that Thanksgiving morn, Elizabeth knew the word “serenity.” It was a gift from dad.
