L
ate one Tuesday afternoon in November, Connie phoned me at home, and invited me for Thanksgiving. She said she knew that my father would love spending the long weekend with me, and she offered to pick me up after school on Wednesday. Somehow, Connie’s call seemed like a breakthrough. For the most part, I had made my peace with her. She seemed sensitive to the close bond that my father and I shared, and when I visited, Connie went out of her way to see that he and I always had some uninterrupted time together.

By the time I climbed out of Connie’s car the following afternoon, the sun was already casting long shadows as it descended toward the rocky foothills that separated Simi and Chatsworth. I followed Connie across the covered patio entrance and into the kitchen, where I took a seat at the little table beside the door.

My father, of course, was still out making sales calls, but Connie said he would be home sometime between 5 and 6. She put on her apron, and busied herself at the stove, browning ground beef and onion for spaghetti sauce. Connie was a good cook, and an organized housekeeper.

She seemed restless, and although she was busy at the stove, she walked several times to the Dutch door, the top half of which stood open. She paused there for a moment each time, as though she were listening. I wasn’t sure if she was just enjoying the view, or watching for something. The kitchen began to smell wonderful as her homemade sauce began to simmer.

Connie had just stirred the dried pasta into boiling water when I saw her pause, holding stock still as she looked toward the door again.

“There’s your daddy,” she said. She had heard his white Cadillac heading up the long, meandering driveway. “Let’s surprise him!” She stepped toward the far doorway, gesturing for me to follow. She led me through the formal dining area and into the living room where a wet bar faced the stone fireplace. She told me to duck down behind the dark wood counter of the wet bar, and surprise my father. “Wait till he walks in, and then you pop up to greet him. He’ll flip when he sees you.”

“What should I say?” I asked.

Connie thought for a moment, then smiled. Leaning close, she cupped her hand to my ear, and whispered.

“That’s great,” I told her.

She disappeared back into the kitchen, and a moment later I heard the sound of my father’s cowboy boots on the floor as he walked into the kitchen. The two of them chatted for a moment. He told her the spaghetti sauce smelled very good. She told him that dinner would be ready as soon as he changed his shirt and washed his hands.

I hid under the counter while he walked to the bedroom to change his shirt. As he emerged from the hallway a couple of minutes later, I sprang up on cue, a can of beer in one hand and a wine bottle in the other.

“Name your poison, partner, beer or wine,” I said, just as Connie had instructed.

The broad smile on my father’s face was a wonder to behold. He was thrilled to see me there, and even happier when Connie explained that she had brought me home for the long weekend.

Things began to happen very fast after that. I think my father was even more excited to see me than I was to be there with him, and like most everybody who knew him, I found it easy to get swept up in his zest for life. Physically he was a grown man, but in his temperament he was like a toddler in that every new and shiny thing that came into view immediately commanded his attention. As a young boy, I had often tied right in with that, but I was in my teens now, and was beginning to recognize that my father’s breathless enthusiasm for everything often left me feeling a bit giddy. The rest of that evening and most of the next day were a blur of activity. While I wish I could still call to mind every detail of that happy weekend, my memories of those four days are more like Swiss cheese, with curious gaps here and there.

It seems odd that I have such a clear memory of popping up from behind that wet bar, but no memory of what my father said. I can still see his smile, but his words are lost to me. I remember that Connie asked me to make origami place cards for everyone (peacocks with fanned tails, since I had no idea how to fold a turkey), but I can’t remember whether the sweet potatoes had marshmallows on top. I remember that Connie’s teenage niece and nephew arrived Thursday with their mother, all three of them talking about Transcendental Meditation, but I can’t remember their names.

As the eight of us took our seats at the table, the aroma of the turkey filled the room. Connie asked my father for a blessing. He smiled mischievously as everyone bowed their head.

“Here’s one that I learned on the prairie,” he said quietly.

God bless us in a minute,
Grab a potato, and skin it.
God bless us for our next meal,
We’re darned sure of this one!

I’m not sure I recognized it at that moment, but seeing him there at the head of the table offered a rare glimpse of my father as a family man. Gathered there around him were the elements of a stable domestic life that had largely eluded him in his previous marriages. His new stepdaughters were old enough that they may have harbored some doubts about him, but Connie was clearly very much in love with him.

Friday dawned bright and warm, and my father was in a mood to play. He was like a big kid in some ways, which was part of his appeal. Over breakfast, he began telling stories about his own childhood and the homespun toys that he and his siblings had played with. I loved hearing him tell his stories, but being a child of the ’60s, the idea of homemade toys seemed strange to me.

“When I was 9 years old,” my father said, “we used to live on the edge of the Yosemite National Park, about three miles from Wawona, the main little town there, with a grocery store and post office up river. Rockland Rouse owned the sawmill, and six families worked there, cuttin’ lumber, fellin’ trees, loggin’ it in, makin’ lumber out of it. There was a sawdust pile at least 40 feet high.

“Snow got 7 feet deep on the level, and us kids made our own bobsleds out of the scrap wood. The packed trail we made was three miles long. It’d take a good hour or more to hike up there, and about 10 minutes to sled down. We’d be just shootin’ like greased lightnin’ down, and we’d shoot up to the very peak of that sawdust pile when we stopped.

“Had all kinds of things like that to keep ourself amused as kids. In those days there was no such thing as a television. We used to roll barrel hoops with a T-stick. We did have an old used bicycle that we learned to ride on, and stilts.”

“I’ve never seen stilts,” Wendie said. “What are they like?”

“They’re long poles,” I told her, “with blocks for your feet, to raise you up off the ground.”

My father couldn’t believe we had never played with stilts. The idea seemed to inspire him, and before we knew it, he was heading off to the lumberyard to buy materials.

With hammer and nails, it didn’t take him long to construct two pairs of stilts. For the beginners, he fastened the wood blocks about 12 inches from the ends, which gave a 1-foot rise. For the advanced stilt walker, he constructed a second pair with two sets of foot blocks, set at different levels. On one side of each stilt, the blocks were set 24 inches from the end. On the opposite side, he positioned the blocks 36 inches from the end.

“That’s impossible,” I told him when I saw how high that would put my feet above the ground.

“You think so, do you?” he said. “Watch me!” With that, he climbed the wood fence at the back of the house, stepped onto the stilts and pushed off. He began walking around the back yard on them, his head nearly 9 feet above the ground.

Wendie and I were eager to try it, and we took turns on the low stilts while my father strode back and forth across the yard on the tall ones. At the lower height, I didn’t have far to fall. I found that keeping my balance was fairly easy and a lot of fun, so long as I kept my feet moving.

My father soon decided that the flat area just behind the house wasn’t enough of a challenge, at which point he walked to a gap in the barbed-wire fence behind the guest cottage, and headed up the hill. The house was situated about 50 yards below the crest, and the slope was steep in places. I was amazed at my father’s agility as he made his way across the hill, stepping around the scrub oaks and bushes.

“Ronnie, you should ride those stilts up here with me,” he called. “You can see the Chatsworth Reservoir from the top of this hill.”

It was unusual for my father to spend a day playing as he did. The demands of his sales calls usually won out. The stilt play seemed to kindle a sense of reminiscence in him, and for the remainder of the weekend, he stayed home, playing with my new stepsisters and me.

On Saturday, he brought out the checkerboard, and challenged me to a game. Since teaching myself to play chess that year, I had begun to think of checkers in much the same way I thought of Bingo—a game of chance for little kids—but I took a seat across the board from my father, and we began to play. I was surprised when he won. We sat in the living room playing round after round, and I didn’t win a single game.

“How did you get to be so smart at checkers?” I asked.

“Would you like me to teach you how to win?” he asked, smiling broadly. “There’s a strategy to it, you just have to learn what to look for.”

He told me about an old ranch hand at one of his first jobs in Nevada who had taught him checkers. Then he began demonstrating what he had learned, playing both sides of the board as he explained.

“The trick is that if you can’t collect all your opponent’s pieces, then to win you absolutely must have two kings. Otherwise, the best you can do is play to a draw, but if you have two kings, and the other player has only one, you can force a win.”

He spent the better part of an hour showing me how to use two kings to compel an opponent’s single king into a corner, where he can be captured. After demonstrating this several times, we set up the pieces to play again from scratch, and for the first time that day, I beat my father at checkers.

What made Thanksgiving special for me that year had nothing to do with the turkey dinner, or the conversation around the table, or the family members who gathered there. The sweet memory lingers of my father setting aside his sales calls to indulge in kids’ games with me. I will long remember the image of him striding up the hillside on the tall stilts, then later sitting across the checkerboard from me, smiling broadly as he saw my realization that he knew something about the game that I didn’t.