“How I long for to muse on the days of my boyhood

Though four score and three years have fled by since then

Still it gives sweet reflections, as every young joy should

That merry-hearted boys make the best of old men”

-from the Bard of Armagh, as recorded by the Clancy Brothers.

The three small boys awakened on one of the best days of the year for small boys, and that would be in the woods of northern Wisconsin, where their little family shared a summer home with the rest of their dad’s family. For most boys, as it was for me in my youth, there are too many days in the year where school duties run the house. Too many days of obligation, of homework and tests and a hundred kinds of anxiety. The cottage days, like Christmas morning, were important and wonderful days. Days that tasted like freedom. Days filled with swimming and fishing and boating and campfires. Little boys are made for such days.

That morning, like most cottage mornings, they would awaken to the sounds of water lapping at the shore, of birds singing, and they would be drawn to the water. When you live in a city, awakening to a lake carries its own magic appeal and something in you urges you to get closer to the water, to be part of the lake, to see little minnows, hear the croak of a frog, catch the jump of a gamefish, and take in the sun dancing off the surface. But that morning would contain an added surprise.

For there on the shore was a lone bottle and inside the bottle some sort of note. Excitedly they extracted the note, only to find it wasn’t a note at all, but a map, the edges burnt and ragged. The map indicated an island and on the island the location of a buried treasure. An adventure was afoot! They got their dad and showed him the map. He thought it might be the island in the lake right in front of them and agreed that they should set sail in the family pontoon boat at once and see it they could find this mysterious treasure. Probably left by pirates.

Fairly bouncing with excitement, they boarded, while their dad fired up the engine, docking at the nearby island a few minutes later. Following the map, they soon came upon some white stones which formed an arrowhead and pointed to a spot on the map where buried treasure lay. Digging away as fast as excitement would allow, they soon unearthed the treasure chest. And inside was an incredible trove: fake gold coins, gaudy costume jewelry, play money, eye patches, bandanas, some toy pistols. A true haul of wealth for the imagination of little boys who at that point had bought in 200% to the adventure.

Of course, it was their dad, my son-in-law Luke McKee, who cooked it all up the night before, not even telling his wife. He was recreating the magic someone had created for him as a small boy, I guess. And here’s the beautiful thing about this: you get one chance and one chance only to get this magic right. They wouldn’t fall for it a second time, or if they were older and more cynical. It was exactly the right magic at exactly the right locale and exactly the right ages and it was a memorable bit of parenting genius.

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Grandpa Hayes wasn’t really our grandfather, but we called him that. My family rented a cottage for many years from the Hayes family, and both families grew close. Grandpa Hayes was a retired master pressman, once called all over the world to fix newspaper presses. I only knew him in his last years, but he fascinated me and my brothers with his tales, practical jokes, and outright whoppers.

He had us convinced that old Daniel Boone had somehow made it to Sister Lakes, Michigan, and showed us the tree in which were carved the words: “Dan’l Boone kilt a bar here.” We bought into it. He told my brother Gil that a large flat rock he had found was, in fact, an unfinished tomahawk that some wild Indian didn’t get around to finishing. Gil hung onto that rock for years. He had a hundred stories.

He was an inventor of sorts. When we needed worms for fishing bait, he had developed this device that featured a metal probe at one end and a t-shaped wooden handle at the other. You plugged it into the wall socket, shoved the probe into the ground and the night crawlers came zooming out of the ground to get away from the current. It was as fascinating as it was dangerous. He nailed the heads of large bass caught by his son or grandson to a tree, creating this ghoulish monument which we treated as if it were a sort of holy shrine. If you can recall the famous “Injun Summer” cartoon from the Tribune that they run every year in the fall (or don’t run, depending on the political correctness climate), that old man in the cartoon would be Grandpa Hayes.

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The merriest of all dads is a fellow named Pat Rohan. He is in his 60’s now, and shows absolutely no sign that he intends to grow up, God bless him. Pat is my friend and former neighbor on the south side of Chicago, and he moves through life as if it were some sort of amateur hour contest in which the guy with the zaniest idea wins. He is a true local legend, especially on Spaulding Avenue, where he once re-created an Irish Pub, complete with faux-thatched roof, for a block party. One year, with the rest of us obsessing about weed control and good sod, he dug up his entire back yard to create a miniature moto-cross range for radio controlled model cars. His garage will never fit a car inside, but is filled with pieces and parts for a lifetime of outlandish projects yet to come.

Pat doesn’t have a lot of formal education, but I have seen first-hand that he is a conceptual genius. He has the ability to look at a broken device, a construction project, or fabrication need of any sort and see the solution. Once in the early days of my business we were trying to build out a call center, and we needed to find a way to bring voice and data wires down from the ceiling in twelve different locations in a large empty room. Logistical and engineering genius that I am, my solution called for lots of expensive custom wire molding  and looked to cost about $20,000, which we didn’t have. Pat looked at it for about 2 minutes and came up with the solution on the spot. Run plumbing PVC pipes down from the ceiling, hide the wires inside and paint it to match the décor. The solution ran less than $250 and looked great.

Most of us don’t think of heating our home as a hobby, but Pat loved it. One year he had married the gas fired furnace with a wood burning Franklin stove. When the wood gave out the furnace kicked in and the damn thing actually worked, although a strong wind could push wood smoke down the stack and into the kitchen. But he liked the wood smoke smell, so it was a winner.

He and one of his brothers added a second story, complete with diving board, to a pontoon boat in Michigan, but I don’t recall that working out quite as well. He once invented a way to modify my little 5 horsepower fishing motor to accept fuel from an outside fuel tank, using, of all things, a condom. It worked well. He has built theater sets that could rival professional works.

His high holy days are Halloween and St. Patrick’s Day. His costumes take him weeks to fashion, look as uncomfortable as all hell, and he could care less, as long as it gets a laugh. His kids and grandkids worship him for his always unpredictable projects and his unconditional affection for all of them.

 

There is a world of good dads and granddads out there, each fathering in his own way; I believe there are far more good ones than bad ones. But the really great dads and granddads seem to have the ability to think like a child, to generate delight, to play to imagination and whimsy and to take the time to be silly. That’s where the art of fatherhood moves into the neighborhood of genius.

May we all strive to become the best of old men.