The Green Mustache
In 2016, the world lost David Bowie, Prince, Alan Rickman, Gene Wilder, George Michael, and Leonard Cohen. We lost the electoral college. We even lost Carrie Fisher, goddammit. It was a year of big losses.
And I lost my father. My brother and I found out early the day before his birthday. The day before we planned on calling him.
And while we were all sad about Carrie Fisher (I cried when I heard), I didn’t know if anyone ever ran an obituary for my father. I don’t know if they held a memorial service. I didn’t ask. My dad never was big on social rituals. He even asked his kids if he needed to dress up for our weddings.
And so he’s survived by his husband, his ex-wife, his three children, and his four grandchildren. His dog, his cat, his garden, the wild bears, and the cabin in the wilderness in Arkansas that he bought from some prepper.
I know that the facts may end up disagreeing with my memories here, but the memories are what I have.
I still remember my weird little childhood fondly, right down to my father’s green mustache. Other people may have thought it was salt and pepper, but it was clearly green, or at least it was back then. For a while he grew his mustache down to his shoulders and waxed it up in a fantastic handlebar. He was only about 30 years ahead of his time — or a century behind it, depending on who you asked.
My dad came from a long line of “makers” and was always into a lot of obscure hobbies. He built a greenhouse onto the back of the house and a darkroom in the basement. He taught himself macramé, taxidermy, and other eclectic crafts. We had the first computer in the neighborhood, and he learned how to program it by reading hobby magazines. He collected antiques — but often the more unusual items like patent medicine and quack medical kits. He traced our genealogy and kept track of heirlooms large and small, like the box that my great grandmother used to store food for the journey to America.
There was a certain pride in our eccentricity, in always being the neighborhood weirdos, in always having interesting priorities. The house was brimming with odd hobbies and collections. Replica weapons, antiques, macramé projects, old photos, taxidermy animals, and cleaned animal skulls all over the house. We watched TV on a 13 inch, black-and-white set with a rabbit-ear antenna while sitting on a pile of cushions covered with vinyl that served as a homemade couch. We didn’t have air conditioning in 100 degree Kansas summers until I was a teenager. And yet we still had the first computer in the neighborhood.
He loved the outdoors and encouraged us to love them, too. We harvested wild garlic and plantain weed from our lawn and picked paw-paws and persimmons from nearby trees. We temporarily homed snakes and turtles we caught in the back yard until we could release them in the country. One year he made all his kids bull whips, and we learned to crack them in the front yard, resulting in one of the many times the police were called to investigate by our neighbors. They also came to ask about the snakes.
My dad loved to tweak his thumb at legality as well as convention. He once knowingly bought a peyote cactus from a store that had inadvertently included one in a batch of succulents imported from Mexico. He had a giant taxidermy bald eagle in the basement until my mom persuaded him to get rid of it. He had a pressed-plant collection that included a sample of cannabis. He offered me a mounted and preserved slide of herpes virus from his lab to bring to my seventh grade biology class.
We used to have an actual human skull that he bought at auction when a local drugstore closed. We called it Yorick, of course. I put gum-ball eyeballs in the sockets to my dad’s delight. My mom insisted we keep it upstairs so that it wouldn’t result in yet another police visit. Alas, poor Yorick was sold when my dad ran low on money in Arkansas. He didn’t ask us for help. That would have been a hard conversation, and he wasn’t good at those. My brothers and I would have helped him out. Or we would have purchased Yorick if he didn’t want the charity. We all loved that thing. We could have shared custody. Transportation between houses would have been potentially exciting, especially if air travel were involved.
Both of my parents were up to their eyeballs in general nerdery but I remember so much of it coming from my dad. As a toddler, I learned to say the word “hematoma” instead of “boo-boo.” When I was a teenager, he gave me his grandfather’s copy of Brave New World. My dad taught me how to collect and preserve insects and the safest way to catch live rattlesnakes and how to find crinoids in road cuts. My dad built us a house out of sunchokes one year and sent it into Rodale’s Organic Gardening. He sent pictures of us holding rat snakes to the local newspaper (which alarmed the neighbors into thinking we were breeding snakes to release into the neighborhood and resulted in another police visit). When I was twelve and still short enough to fit them, he let me wear antique Victorian clothes (and my first corset) to the grand re-opening of our local museum.
The quirky exterior hid even more secrets.
In retrospect, the signs were there all along. He was pre-Stonewall gay. Too deep in the closet to admit it even when asked. He stayed in that closet until I was in college, but he still left us clues. There was the time he got into a letter to the editor war in the local paper with Fred Phelps. There was the time on a road trip through San Francisco when he told us he lived on Height Ashbury, but “it was a gay neighborhood at the time.” There was the time his Halloween costume was actual hanky code, and he snickered as he told us what it meant, knowing he was telling us a secret we didn’t yet understand.
He never actually came out to me properly. We never had that talk. He spontaneously got up to ask a question at an event focusing on gay rights and came out to both me and the whole crowd. I guess he assumed I’d figured it out by then. Luckily, I had.
I found out he married his husband on Facebook from a comment he was tagged in. It was a rush job once he got the diagnosis. I didn’t expect an invitation at such short notice, but it would have been nice to hear it from him first. He never was the best communicator. He always relied on my mom to have all the hard conversations with me. She’s also the one who had to tell me he died.
As an adult, we grew separate. It wasn’t that he abandoned us. We were adults, after all. More like we just lived parallel lives, like preschoolers have parallel play. We connected when we had common interests, but as a college student and recent grad, I wasn’t spending time on our common hobbies and the things that drew us together when I was a child. He and I lived in the same town for years. He would occasionally show up to take me out for dinner, drop off a gift, or show me something interesting. I’d occasionally call him to invite him over or share. I gave him the corpse of my pet hedgehog for his bone collection. He came to take pictures of my baby in the hospital. My mom would prompt him to check in with me, and often they’d visit together even though they were mostly living separately at that point.
When he moved to Arkansas, he’d still occasionally show up in town, unannounced, and I’d either be there to receive him or not. He’d casually mention that he was at a nearby camp and “just swinging into town for cake mix and eggs.” He later learned to call beforehand to arrange a visit, but I suspect my mom was still behind the idea. Even after the divorce, she ended up being his social norms translator.
My daughter only remembers one of his visits. She’s almost 16.
My husband is angry at him for ghosting on his grandchildren, but I don’t think he ever distanced himself on purpose. We were already adults by the time he drifted into recluse mode, and he was living in another state with flaky internet access. There was never any point in being hurt by it. I’m just sad he got sick too soon to find the common interests again. My daughter just started rescuing orchids from a grocery store that donated their unsold plants to her school. Her grandpa would have had so much advice. After he got sick, he told me he wished he’d been able to come visit us all in Oregon. I think it was the hardest conversation he ever had with me. He knew at the time that it may have been one of his last.
I expected my dad had a good shot to live to 100. That’s not just normal fantasies that kids have about their parents. It’s ancestry. He and I traced our DNA and shared the results, and I knew he had several “Methuselah” genes. He was active and fit until he got sick, and he was active and fit again after he started treatment. But those genes didn’t prevent lung cancer. Neither did a lifetime of not smoking.
He lived longer than his initial prognosis. But he still didn’t live long enough, and now all we have are the memories of the old man with the green mustache and the orchids and wild bears near that cabin on the side of a cliff in Arkansas.
