It turns out that the paternal death is as big a deal as one might think.

It turns out that to be in the house where one’s father has recently literally dropped dead, on his way to the kitchen with a pair of glasses of water in the grasp of two fingers, cane in the other hand, packs a certain emotional wallop. It turns out, working back in time, that to gather with family and family friends after the service and tell stories is packed with eddies of meaning. Who the hell knew that he got obsessed with the expression “She’s got Betty Davis eyes?” I knew he picked up on all sorts of stuff, the rain hurting the rhubarb, and politically incorrect bits of Lawrence Dunbar re: Sousa and ragtime, but Kim Carnes? Really? What up with dat, Dad? And even farther back in the endless 48 hours of a service and wake, it turns out that it’s damned hard to hear Lutkin’s “May The Lord Bless and Keep You,” that hoary favorite that ended so many trips to church in one congregation and sanctuary or other, and not be reduced to that old LSD familiar jello of emotion. Equally difficult and emotion evoking, it turns out, to try to sing the melody of “Amazing Grace” or the bass to “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” and “How Great Thou Art” or “It Is Well With My Soul” accurately and on pitch. For once, I tried to sing the actual listed verses and chorus without belting out the solfeggio pitch names. Add to the list of difficult things to bear, yet at the same time things that are good to hear, my brother’s practiced voice in the lead in the pew behind mine next to mom’s. It’s a bitch. One of life’s little major piles of crap is also to try to keep one’s voice in the baritone trying to say out loud from the lecturn “he didn’t have to explain what being a father meant.” Next to impossible, it turns out.

Like Billy Pilgrim in “Slaughter House Five,” we’ve become unstuck in time. We’re weaving all over the road of experience. Unless we get to cut loose outside the confines of Methodist propriety, we might explode in that shower of mental sparks.

So I checked twice down in my late father’s workshop/radio shack to make sure nothing was plugged in before I climbed a handy ladder into the necessary task of walking back my heritage as an electronics practitioner. I had to get dusty down there where the suicide string still dangles on the peg of wire. It turns out that Dad was a maniac when it came to high voltage. He might have had a lot of patience top side, and been a good shepherd to the flock and all of that. Perfectly true. He had a smile on his face, and sang in that choir to the bitter end. But down in that basement, he was a daredevil with high voltage. He wound his own filter coils out of 12 gauge and wasn’t shy about plugging that rig into the wall socket. He had power supplies that sported honking filter caps. His neat pen hand recorded schematics on the backs of IBM time cards. The voltage targets labeled in pencil next to bolts screwed into wood block bread boards make the eyes pop out. He did not write “danger, high voltage.” He died of natural causes, so it is assumed that if he got bit by the juice his heart was not in the path to ground for any significant length of time. He died topside, moments after reporting that he was awake and rounding a familiar corner. It had clearly been quite some time since he’d been down those stairs to the shop. Years of dust, dirt and animal fur accompanied me back to Illinois along with receivers, transmitters, power supplies, and other interesting concoctions. The once neat bench itself was in disarray and has been for all of my scattered recent visits home. Things got piled up; things that broke and never got fixed. Things that others who’d come to work on plumbing and mop up the flood water had moved around into my Dad’s typically neat and ordered former world of crazy lucid electron dreams obscured the way it once had been. But years of intimate familiarity with this world made it impossible to miss my targets and my tasks.

Here’s a concoction:

This thing always caught my eye, and I don’t remember when it first appeared in the shop. I’d guess somewhere around the time I was off in Boston learning the difference between art and Art. I asked about it a few times and Dad would say “it’s a counter.” I never saw it count. Now, if I had my father’s willingness to throw myself upon the stormy billows of electrons and, I’ll admit, a better idea about the expected result, I’d be tempted to replace the brittle power cord and plug it in. It is an array of 2D21 thyratron tubes. The filaments are in series, and there are two stray leads for input. Nearby in the shop there was a large geared motor mounted on a board that operated a switch.  It’s possible the switch contraption provided the input for the counter. Well, it’s a puzzle. Dad left me a puzzle. I might take him up on it. It turns out that the expression larger than life means something real.

I predict that soon the trial balloons of words I float here will return to the topic of someone else’s departed father. I’ve been thinking much about the mind of Salvatore Martirano and his instrument, the Sal-Mar construction. In the next few weeks, I’ll be in preparation for another telematic performance involving that machine. I’ve been captured by its orbit and am longing to write about the experience.

The Sal-Mar is a hugely realized collection of circuits, and its maker thought of himself as an artist. My dad did not. Perhaps it’s wrong to fetishize these gizmos. Dad made them for his own amusement and not for any other purpose. They will not be curated by anyone else but me, and I will do it for my own amusement. It turns out that while the music making still stings, and yet still must be done, and done well, the electronic puzzles provide an entertaining solace. It is one thing that brings me very close to transcendence when it comes to Dad.