Long Island

I’ve been staying with my daughter in Chicago for the last week and a half as she recovers from foot surgery. Very early Friday morning I was treated to a rip-roaring, good old-fashioned Midwest thunderstorm, and as I lay in my bed, counting between the flashes and the peals of thunder (and usually not getting above three or four in my count), I thought about when I first learned that trick (start counting when you see the lightning; stop when you hear the thunder; every four counts equals a mile between you and the strike). Thunderstorms are pretty few and far between in Portland, Ore., where I grew up (and they never boasted the duration or volume of the sort I experienced the other morning), but my dad taught me at an early age how to calculate how far a storm was from us.

The more I think about it, it’s possible that I was actually introduced to that magical formula not in the midst of a rare spring storm but rather through one of Daddy’s “Tommy, Bobby and Christopher” stories. Father of seven, busy attorney and a man of his generation (one which was far less “hands-on” in parenting than my own or succeeding ones), nevertheless I believe Dad relished those evenings when his schedule allowed him to tell us his tales of three little boys and their black Labrador dog who lived “on a great big farm down by the river.” Julie and I shared a bedroom, and we would debate whose turn it was to have Daddy stretch out on her bed (squished cozily against the wall to make room for him) while he spun another adventure of life on that idyllic farm.

Dad was born in 1916 and grew up in Patchogue, New York, on Long Island . . . not on a farm, but certainly he was familiar with the outdoors and the truck farms in the area (and one of his pleasures as an adult was tending our large vegetable garden after long days in the office). I’ll never know how much of the three brothers’ escapades mirrored his own adventures as a young boy; I simply know how much I enjoyed the way I could picture them, their parents and friends, the farm and surrounding woods in the words he wove together for our benefit.

One story we never tired of outlined the preparations Tommy, Bobby and Christopher’s family made as a severe thunderstorm barreled toward the farm. It began with some of the weather signs the boys’ father observed foretelling the coming cataclysm, continued with how each kind of animal was secured and sheltered, and reached a climax as the family hunkered down in their home, watching for the bolts of lightning and counting until the thunder rumbled as the storm advanced. The story concluded with a rainbow and a survey of the farm for damage (one big old tree on a hill always took a direct hit). That story never failed to satisfy, and though there were several others, I’m sure we requested it more than any other.

My girls have heard that story several times (along with others that I could recall with somewhat fewer of the original details), and I know my siblings have passed on Daddy’s stories to their own kids as well. I suspect in time there will be grandchildren who will grow round-eyed, as we did, when they hear how the wind rushes around the farmhouse and the windows shake in their frames as the thunder grows louder and closer with every new flash of lightning. It’s a legacy I cherish far more than my blue eyes or Irish heritage — or even my love of gardening — and one I hope many generations to come will enjoy as well.

Happy Father’s Day to all you dads out there!

–Patty Vanikiotis, proofreader