Tomorrow will be the 10 year anniversary of my father’s passing.  It occurs to me that so many people who are important to me never got to meet my dad and while there are far too many hilarious stories I could tell, one that I tell so very often I would share again.

My dad was a Lineman for Commonwealth Edison power company in Chicago.  His main dispatch location was out of the Skokie Road office in Northfield, Illinois;  not too awfully far from our house.  Some of the little things I remember from being a little girl include that he was never home at Christmas because working a holiday was triple-pay, but he always managed to make it home for us to open presents and would park his bucket truck in the driveway so he could see the flashing light in the dash indicating he had a dispatch call coming through.  He often slept on the floor in the living room right in front of the heater vent in the winter because he was always cold from working outside.  He had the roughest hands from the weather and used this horrible stuff called Corn Huskers Lotion to try to make them smoother – it didn’t work.  He had round scars on both his hands where he had been electrocuted as a young lineman and the scars were where the electricity escaped his body.

But one of my favorite memories came back to me not long before I moved from Chicago to Virginia.  In November 1996 I had a business friend visit (actually the person who introduced me to Michael) and I took the afternoon off to take him downtown to see the city.  He had been to our offices so many times before but had never seen the city as a tourist.   So we headed downtown and started with a drive down Lake Shore Drive and out to the Planetarium to take in the view of the city then made our way to the Sears Tower to the observation deck.  On the Sears Tower tour, the first thing you do is watch a video of the building of the tower.  As we sat there watching the video, I had a flashback………………….

When I was about 10 years old, the Sears Tower was under construction and was about the biggest thing to happen to Chicago and the United States since the 1920’s.  The new sky scraper was going to be the tallest building in the world, taking over the Empire State Building by at least 10 floors.  One afternoon in the summer while my dad was working he came home with his bucket truck.  A bucket truck is the kind used by a lineman from the telephone or electric company where the worker gets into the bucket and can operate it from inside the bucket or someone can operate it from the ground.  Raise the bucket high to get to the wires.  This replaced linemen from having to manually climb the poles as they had to in the 50’s and 60’s.

My dad came home knowing my brother Keith and I were home and it was a clear day.  Every once in awhile he would do this to give us and some of the neighbor kids a ride in the bucket.  On this day, he came home to give us a surprise.  I can remember like it was yesterday with my dad in the bucket with me, raising the bucket on its post as high as it could go and pointing to show me which way to look until I saw the shell of the Sears Tower in the distance.  It was just the steel girders, like a skeleton, but you could make it out. After I went, my brother went, then a few neighborhood kids, then I went again.

I had completely forgotten about that until sitting watching that movie and their was a shot of the skeleton as viewed from north of the city – just like my view was that beautiful day in 1972.   The tower was completed in 1973 and it would take another 23 years before I would cross the threshold for the first time and be reminded of my dad making a special trip home with his truck to show us from right in our driveway.

Michael and I were lucky enough to go to Bermuda a few months ago and in our trek to the Governor’s fort, I found this picture of a Bermuda Lineman, whom they call a “Kiteman”. Yup, put on some long underwear and a CarHart insulated jumper along with the rest of the equipment and that would be my dad. The green glass are insulators which can be found at the top of the   T-posts on a power line.  This insulates where the two lines meet and are tied off.  I don’t think we had a door in our entire house that wasn’t held open by one of these green glass insulators.

As an adult with kids now, I see the little things Dad’s do for their kids that go unnoticed or are so subtle the kids don’t get what’s happening at the time.  My hope would be that as they get older they find the same appreciation for those little things their dads did for them as I had and still have for my dad.

I have so many great stories about my dad I will have to share, but this one is definitely a favorite.

Miss you Dad