Father of the Man written by Dr. Peter L. Colman

One of the few memories I have of Mom and Dad together was in the old Dunbarton house the day Dad climbed to the top of an old tree to rescue a kitten that had been crying for three days. My dad looked like Jack in the Beanstalk, breaking branches as he ascended, testing their strength, then carefully descending with the frightened kitten in a burlap sack. Dad dropped the sack to the ground when he reached the lower branches. The kitten was safe; Dad was my hero that day. It’s sad that Mom and Dad were unable to rescue their own marriage.

The rooms upstairs in the old house were always cold. One large, black pot-bellied stove kept the downstairs warm in winter. I remember leaning too close to the stove one day; I blackened my left arm with a small charcoal smudge; which seemed to cover my ‘whole’ arm; I was three. On another occasion I swallowed a large, blue cat-eye marble; it looked like a small, transparent golf ball. Mom later told me that she had waited patiently, but anxiously, for several days for that marble to ‘reemerge.’ I vaguely recall that Mom and Dad would both wrap me tightly in an Indian blanket each night during the winter months. The window in that old room was sideward, since it was located over the garage roof. Dad once crawled out on the roof and shot a Mayonnaise jar off the head of a skunk that had been foraging in a small dump near the house; Dad was a fine marksman. Mom said the skunk ran off down the road without a scratch.

Other than the pictures that Mom saved, then passed on to me, the only other memories I have of my father during those years were of the chicken coop he built. I distinctly remember sitting at the table in the corner of the old kitchen one morning and finding a small, sharp black tack in my plate of fresh scrambled eggs. I still cannot explain the phenomenon. Skeptics assure me that it is biologically impossible for a chicken to swallow a tack, and for that tack to find its way to the chicken’s reproductive system. They’re certainly right. Scientifically accurate. But what about my vivid memory of that event? What about my vivid, tangible, sentient recollection of the nearly-photographic empirical evidence, long-since discarded?




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