“Old Pete” could do a lot of things. He was my dad’s best buddy for hunting and fishing, not to mention the fact that “Old Pete” worked for my dad in his grocery store. Dad said Pete was the best meat cutter and dog trainer bundled up into one person that a man could ever be!

Pete had worked for my dad for as long as I could remember. Hunting season brought the joy to me of seeing life from a whole new perspective.

Fall was the time of year Dad seemed to awaken. My world was as different from my father’s as silver is from clay.

I lived in a world of music, songs and stories, set apart mostly, missing the brothers and sisters I never had.

My father was the flip side of the coin for me. He was everything I was not. He was deeply rooted in the earth, attached and wired to it like a lightning rod in a storm. He seemed a simple man to observe, laughing and jolly as a man could be. But I knew another side of him, only one of many.

He took me for long walks in the park I will never forget—long walks and short talks. He was a man of few words and I hung on every one of them.

He was the man who took me to see the peacock at the park. We would stand and watch this shy character until he decided to unwrap his majestic feathers or we got tired of talking to him.

He was the man who built the trapeze I longed for out of wood and string.

I swung by one leg on that trapeze every day for the whole summer when I was eight years old. He was the man who told me of the forgotten things that used to be, like candles on a Christmas tree and snow piled so high over the fence you could walk across it on a winter’s day. He cut out wooden dolls for me and painted them silly colors. He reeked of the simplicity of another time, another world, one I could never know. He spoke of buggy rides and barn raisings and people so filled with the Holy Ghost that they walked over church pews and spun in the air!

He talked of his “home place” and his mother’s cooking, his brother Charlie and the crazy adventures they had as kids. He trained dogs and broke horses so I could ride them. He took me on a trip once to visit an old lady who lived with a lot of chickens in a shack that had a dirt floor. I rode in his delivery truck from the grocery store. The “Veribest” always delivered and sometimes he would let me ride along on his route.

This was the most unusual trip I’d ever taken. Old Miss Boosey shooed the chickens off her wooden table to make room for my dad to set his grocery box down.

“Thanky, Sir”, she said
“I’ll have the money next week.
“O.K., Miss Boosey,” Dad said, “Better keep them eggs cold.”

I walked away from Miss Boosey’s place never to be the same again.

The cattails grew in wild array on the swampy side of her road. I asked my dad, “Doesn’t Miss Boosey get scared at night by herself with just the chickens for company?”

“Probably not no more”, Dad said. “She’s been livin’ with them chickens for a long time!”

He made me laugh. He could always make me laugh. He could always tell me a story like I’d never heard before.

Old Pete and my Dad would get quail at Thanksgiving. They’d take their bird dogs out early in the morning and hunt till they got their fill.

Dad was never the same when Old Pete retired. Pete had to quit working because he was sick. Dad missed “Old Pete” like a part of himself.

I prayed he’d get a new friend but instead right after Pete left we moved away.

No more trapezes.

No more stories about forgotten things.

No more trips together to deliver groceries.

I was growing up.

Pete was gone and my dad’s bird dog died.

He stopped hunting and took up golf at the local country club.

I never saw anyone like Miss Boosey again. But I did get some chickens of my own, although I didn’t live with them. They lived out back in the chicken house and I lived in the farmhouse we’d moved into, the way it was supposed to be.

There were no more park benches and no more feeding the pigeons together or talking to the peacocks. I was “growing up”. I was, after all, almost thirteen.

Dads have to change don’t they?

Life didn’t stay simple for either of us.

But sometimes when I sit on my park bench and watch the birds feeding, I can almost hear him calling his bird dog in those early morning hours, “Come on, Joe, time to go!”