Danis Reeves, 1937-2008

My dad, Danis Reeves, died in November, 2008 of heart failure.

He had been seriously ill for the preceding two months, after falling and hitting his head on the last day of a cruise vacation with his wife Phyllis.

So I want to tell you a few things about my dad. He was a big dude. 6-foot-two, 250 pounds (or whatever). He had huge arms, a huge torso, huge legs. He retired from the Washington State Department of Transportation at the tender age of 55, where he was a supervisor of a bridge maintenance crew.

My dad liked sports. A lot. He would watch a game on TV and listen to another game on the radio at the same time, or watch two games on two TVs. He liked gambling. If there was a casino nearby he was there. He was a skilled carpenter. He built the house I was born and grew up in. He build the cabin (just a smaller house without a foundation, really) where he lived after he retired and until he died. He loved hunting and fishing. He hunted deer, elk and moose, but wasn't interested in bears because he didn't like the meat. When I was a kid we went fishing regularly and did a yearly trip to British Columbia to visit friends and fish.

Dad had the gift of gab. He liked to talk. He never missed an opportunity to strike up a conversation with anyone, whether they wanted to talk or not. Some examples: When I was a kid, he took me to Battle Ground High School basketball games. Nearly the only thing I remember about these games (aside from my boredom) was that he always introduced himself to the people sitting next to him and told them that he had played ball for Battle Ground, and that his two oldest kids had gone to Battle Ground, that I was his youngest and so forth. More recently: Dad, Phyllis, Cristy and I drove up around the north side of Mt. St. Helens (where all the volcanic destruction stuff is) and stopped in at all the museums there. If you left him alone for a minute (and I don't exaggerate) he would be talking to anyone who happend to be near him. If they were teenage girls, he was talking to them. If it was some old grutenheimer like him, he was talking to them. It really didn't matter. It was hard to shut him up.

Danis was one of those guys that everybody liked, mainly becuase he was easy to get along with. I'll use myself as an example, or rather my relationship with Danis. Dad and I had very little in common. All the things he enjoyed doing, I do not (with the possible exception of fishing). Through my adolescent years our differences became more obvious and I was probably as obnoxious about it as any teenager. I was interested in British pop music, drawing, playing guitar, science fiction, staying indoors, sleeping in, pegged jeans. We had many philosophical disagreements. I was in a constant state of wonderment at how he could be so closed-minded about this or that, about how someone could get to be his age and never read a book, about his general lack of interest in nearly everything I was interested in.

And yet he maintained the same basic, unconditional fondness for me that he had when I was little: The closest thing to an unkind word I can think of him saying to me about my long hair or weird clothes was that that they were "kind of different." Once he came home from work with a folder of all the birthday and Father's Day cards I'd made him over the last few years and told me that he had taken them to work to show his friends. I had no idea he had kept them, or even that he thought they were interesting. But maybe the best example is this one: during my senior year in high school I played (more or less successfully) the role of Nick Bottom in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." After the opening night performance Dad spent some time on the phone calling his friends and repeating, "I played baseball and basketball in high school, but I never could have done anything like that."

Anyway. That's the kind of guy he was.

I didn't see him before he died. I had work deadlines that seemed important at the time, so I waited a few weeks. I booked a flight to Washington to see him on November 30, but he died, somewhat suddenly, the day before, on the 29th. I had planned a week of sitting around with him, watching ESPN, maybe getting in a game of cards, that kind of thing. I assumed it would be the last time I would see him. I don't want to end on that note, but that's generally where my mind returns when I think about him. Would it have made things easier had I seen him? Harder? Phyllis showed me photos she took of him during his last month; he was shrunken and ashy. He didn't even look like himself anymore. Should I want that as my last memory of him? I don't know. Maybe it doesn't matter.

Here. I'll end on this note: