My parents came down for the day. After a bit of miscommunication about the time of their arrival and the duration of their stay it turned it to a whirling-dirvish-of-baby-toddler-sleep-deprived parents meet preteens-and-teenage-plus-sixty-is-the-new-40 kind of joyful day. This isn’t really about that so much as it is about my dad and a minivan.

My dad is a interesting guy. For the first part of my life I had very little clue of who he really was. I knew he was second generation navy. He had fought in a war that he never wanted to talk about and I knew nothing about. He was a mystery that I didn’t get. In my early preteens and late adolescents I felt generally in a sense of awkwardness and emptiness as I just didn’t know how to relate to my dad. When I looked at my dad all I saw was a nearly unapproachable man’s man type of guy. In my early preteen life my feelings of inadequacy and his rugged masculinity did not always go together well.

He was a sports type guy. I was a comic and sports card kid. I mostly collected them for investment except for my near obsession with Marvel Comics and Nolan Ryan.

He was country music. I was classical. He could sing Hank Williams A Tear in My Beer and I could hum Beethoven’s 5th.

He seemed to be a tough northerner at heart. I was more a laid back country kid from the South who for five years lived as a “exile” in northern New Hampshire.

My dad tried to bond with me in his way when my mother went away to college and then seminary. His attempt was through food, entertainment, and work.

We both enjoyed food but at that time I wanted to be a recycling loving vegetarian. He would cook steaks on the grill to try and bond. His steaks by the way won out over vegetarianism. I rationalized that the cow probably was a vegetarian. My eating the cow was just a logical progression of the recycling ethos.

Our entertainment choices where really different until we started watching the Simpsons together. The first thing that we really watched was the OJ Simpson trial together. My mother was not amused. Then we discovered the other Simpsons and watched them when my mother was not around who despised the show.

My dad believed in the value of work. When I was nine he encouraged me to get a paper route. I had a strong value to earn money. In the winter months he would help me deliver papers before his work day began. We also got coffee nearly every morning that he would help me. Nine years old on caffeine, what could possibly go wrong? He helped me more and more as my half mile route turned in to a five mile paper route and the coffee cups grew very very large by the time I was twelve. He always encouraged me to expand it. I think because he knew I was good at it.

Still we just didn’t know how to talk with each other. There were so many things that I just didn’t know about my dad. We at times had good times but what I wanated was to understood who he was. We didn’t talk much and there was a lot of yelling. Northern men just didn’t seem to talk about feelings. They did like to yell and cuss. My dad never made full sense. He drank beer, went to the VFW, and was a pretty involved deacon in the UCC church.

It took me years and figuring out to a degree who I was to fully get more than a glimpse of who my dad was and who he had become.

I knew my dad was a second generation Navy guy. He had went in at 17 like his father before him. He lied about his age and was in the Navy before it ever came to light. He in many ways was like his dad. His first job as pre-teen was working with his dad as a carpenter doing everything from framework to roofing. He later became a lumberjack with one of his great uncles after he and his father had a very large falling out.

My dad from my earliest memories was a truck guy. Not just any truck but Chevy trucks. Some of my best memories of my dad where sitting in his Custom 1977 Chevrolet Longbed Pickup. Windows down, him chewing tobacco, and flying around curvy roads. He generally always seemed lighter in that truck. When we moved up north finances were really tight. He ended up driving a late 80s Ford Ford Aerostar minivan when his Chevy pretty much died. I think his soul was like that Chevy. Finances were tight. His mother whom he loved had bad health. Dad had moved our family up north to be with her before she died. His father and he moved apart as his father mourned the lost of his wife. My dad was the only son of three. He and his dad just didn’t seem to know how to communicate their grief. My dad during that time was working for the post office. Though qualified he was passed up several times for promotion by younger guys. He had bought a house to renovate that took much more time, money, and energy then he had to give. I was the only one of his sons not in legal trouble. He really went through it hard in those years.

In 1994 I moved back to NC. My dad wouldn’t move back until the end of 1997. When he moved back to North Carolina in 1997, he seemed to have a new lease on life. He bought a green 1997 Chevy S 10. We road together on the back roads with the windows down even though the AC could freeze a polar bear if he ran it.

In my life that year was when Jesus became a real person to me and the year that I started believing in Jesus as God. I grew a lot as a person but still my relationship with my dad was just weird. I hadn’t lived with my parents for three years and I just didn’t know how to relate nor did they know how to relate to me especially my dad.

In the early part of the 2000s my dad had several health issues one after the other that should have killed him. Yet by the grace of God he came through all of them. My dad when he was approaching his mid 60s and when most people prepare to retire my dad did what I consider remarkable. They began to parent again. This time they started to care for all three of my brothers’ daughters.

I witnessed two changes occur in my dad through the dual events of several fights with cancers that should have killed him and his own unexpected role as a second time stay at home parenting dad. He grew in to a man who in many ways I want to be like.

I watched a man change into a comfortable father. Not a perfect father but a comfortable one. When they came down today my dad looked at some dead trees on my property and said we can cut those down. It probably helps that his second job was after all as a lumberjack. There was my dad as the man’s man willing to help his son. After looking at the trees, I asked him some advice on how to put up a swing on my porch. It turned in to a trip to Lowes (the closest thing I have to a “my Mecca”) for supplies. I have two cars and he had driven there minivan. He said hope in and let’s go.

He uses the minivan to sport three girls around to ballet, school, and a dozen other activities. He also uses it in place of a truck. He still has the 97 Chevy but he does most things in the van. My dad looked at me in the parking lot of Lowes as I loaded in to his minivan a 2 by 6, some 6 foot shelves, and a few other odds and end bags. He said “you know you really need a minivan. They are great for hauling stuff and kids.”

Some how my tough as nails dad has turned in to a guy that can tell you the wonders of the minivan. In his 60s he is comfortable with who he is. He feels he is right with God. We enjoyed each others company aw we rode in his minivan. He talked to me as one dad to another and he encouraged me to get a minivan as he drove his with the windows down until he got to hot and put them up.

Still it was nice to just ride with my dad. Windows down, decades behind us, as we discussed lawn mowers, people from our past, automotive parts, and minivans.

If I can ever afford a minivan maybe it will be one like this. I wonder if Chevy makes one?