I didn’t get to write my dad’s obituary.
That’s OK, since an obituary usually reads like a resume anyway. It’s not the measure of a life, but merely a short account of one’s existence. He was born to these people, went to school here, worked there, made a family with these people and then he died.
Walter English was so much more than a summary of life events or split-second decisions.
When I am sad and missing him, I make peanut butter toast a la Walt. To do this, you butter bread and toast it in the oven. You take it out, butter it again and then spread peanut butter over the butter. Then you cut the toast into five “fingers,” and dip them into hot chocolate.
“It’s like my hand,” he would say, “reaching out to my Peanut.”
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
I last spoke to him on an overcast Sunday evening. He called to tell me that he loved me. Unless he was unable to, he told me he loved me every day that I can remember. He died the next day, but he left a letter telling me how much he loved me.
As it turned out, his “Peanut” showed up unexpectedly at the pulpit to deliver an impromptu eulogy. The funeral program was not planned by me. In the fog of grief, I cannot remember what I said to the people packed inside the church, but I know it was about his life lessons and how, if he loved you, you knew it. I remember the nodding of heads out in the pews.
My dad was such an invincible force that I couldn’t imagine a world without him. I thought that, should he ever die, it would be from an overdose of nostalgia.
At mealtimes, he also fed me nostalgia. Those times we sat together to eat were, in fact, big moments, when he told me the history of me ... of us. We weren’t your typical family, but we were a strong unit of two.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
My dad was just a boy from Akron, Ohio, when he shipped off to Vietnam, shortly after high school. He married a woman he met at the blood bank. My mother was working dispatch. He drove an ambulance. They divorced amicably when I was 2 years old. I don’t have family photos of the three of us.
He always said that we raised each other. He was my room mom — the first male in that role that my elementary school ever had. He helped me buy my first bra, my first tampons and was there for the sad breakups, as well as all the school achievements.
We talked about those things while cooking and eating. I still can picture the torn piece of paper, yellowed by time, thumbtacked to the kitchen wall: “Do all things with love.” That was our motto.
I can sum up a lot of his love with toasts. Not glasses clinking, but actual toast.
When I was sick, the cure was tea and toast. The bread wasn’t important. The tea wasn’t important. He would bring it to me and tell me how my grandmother Selena would comfort him in the same way.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
When I give my children tea and toast, I tell them about how their grandfather helped bring an amphitheater offering free concerts to a dejected town after manufacturing abandoned it. I tell them how he jumped in with the band at my wedding, playing the drums and singing Van Morrison. He was always the guy who would sing along, the first to get up and dance.
Walt always made the best of everything. If I was heartbroken, or had been crying over calculus, while we were on the way to school he would detour to an old diner called Jack Horner’s. He’d get a slice of rhubarb pie and order me cottage cheese, served in halves of canned peaches with toast. It’s what my grandpa Kenneth always ordered when he and my dad went there.
Sometimes, toast was a dinner necessity. Instead of me knowing it was a cheese-and-toast kind of pay week, we had Welsh rabbit, beans on toast or a version of chipped beef on toast made with luncheon meat. He told me about my great-grandparents coming over from England, and we watched shows about the mysteries of Stonehenge as the cheesy sauce broiled on toast.
He loved brown bread that came out of a can. He would slice it into rounds and toast it, slathering it with copious amounts of butter while telling me about rations in the jungles of Vietnam. He loved the canned bread and would trade cigarettes for it. He also would tell me about the gruesomeness and humanity of being a combat medic. While there, Walt and the troops built an orphanage and helped vaccinate children.
We often had a lunch of hot dogs and beans, a recipe carefully honed while eating from cans in the jungle. As he stirred in ketchup, mustard and brown sugar, he told me how hard it was returning from the war to less than a hero’s welcome. He didn’t tell me about the PTSD, but I saw and heard his nightmares.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
While slicing and toasting knobs of bread for croutons, he would grab a jar of dressing and wobble about the kitchen. “It says to shake well before serving,” he always said.
He knew how to laugh. He’d cook and dance and purposely sing the wrong lyrics. He always said that if he was gone, I could find him in the music. I hear him when Pink Floyd’s “Great Gig in the Sky” plays. I buried him to that.
And, then, there’s Walt’s toast. When my kids were little, and they were sick, or having a sad day, they would ask for that same peanut butter toast. They called it “Grandpa-guy toast.”
These days, I’m still feeding them something from “Grandpa-guy” every time I tell another story of my father, and how I was raised by his unconditional, unending love.
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