I will have you all know that it's Monday night, and I am working late (again). This isn't an abnormal occurrence. Partly its that this job just sometimes takes all the extra hours I can afford to throw at it, and I like working after hours when there's no one here because it's super quiet. I also tend to be kind of a night owl and do my best work after what most people consider "regular working hours" (which are not always really a thing in this profession anyway). I'm not complaining.
I've long wondered whether I was just born with night owl tendencies, or if it's something that developed from keeping the schedule my father kept when I was growing up. As I've mentioned in other posts, I grew up on a farm in California, and farming meant late hours. We never had dinner until my father was home, and it was not unusual for him to show up at home well past 9:00. I grew up with the knowledge that in the hours that passed between sunset and his truck coming up the drive way, he'd likely been in his shop at the main section of the ranch. I'd look out the window waiting to see headlights, and by the time he backed up in front of our house I was ready to race outside to meet him. Dad had a habit, which he never abandoned, of always letting his vehicle idle for a few minutes before he shut the engine off. It did not matter if this was a tractor, his truck, or (later in life) a 2000 Ford Focus. When I was little, that meant I had a solid 3-5 minutes when he pulled up to go outside and sit on his lap waiting until it was acceptable to turn off the truck and go inside. I was really good at key turning, but only on his 1978 Ford. The tractors I never mastered, beyond the art of riding on them.
Dad only had one vice. This was a man who never (and I truly do mean never) had a drink, smoked a cigarette, tried gambling, or developed any real hobbies outside of tractor collecting. After he passed, as I struggled through writing his eulogy, it occurred to me that he might be the only person I've ever known who I don't think could be called out for telling a lie. He sometimes minimized his tractor buying habit, but in his mind I'm sure everything that came out of his mouth was legit. (I asked his younger brother about this, and he confirmed that even as kids my dad was honest to the point of annoyance. Little brother never got away with anything because of it). Dad's only weakness came with yellow paint and two tracks. Looking back, I think this probably stemmed to his childhood. My grandfather preferred working with horses, but his brother bought the first tractor they ever had on the ranch. The tractor, unlike the horses or my grandfather, never put up a fuss about things.
I recently came across a few old pictures, and I think these two basically capture dad's thoughts on the matter. He patiently tolerated most things, but he literally ran toward tractors for his entire life:
I've long wondered whether I was just born with night owl tendencies, or if it's something that developed from keeping the schedule my father kept when I was growing up. As I've mentioned in other posts, I grew up on a farm in California, and farming meant late hours. We never had dinner until my father was home, and it was not unusual for him to show up at home well past 9:00. I grew up with the knowledge that in the hours that passed between sunset and his truck coming up the drive way, he'd likely been in his shop at the main section of the ranch. I'd look out the window waiting to see headlights, and by the time he backed up in front of our house I was ready to race outside to meet him. Dad had a habit, which he never abandoned, of always letting his vehicle idle for a few minutes before he shut the engine off. It did not matter if this was a tractor, his truck, or (later in life) a 2000 Ford Focus. When I was little, that meant I had a solid 3-5 minutes when he pulled up to go outside and sit on his lap waiting until it was acceptable to turn off the truck and go inside. I was really good at key turning, but only on his 1978 Ford. The tractors I never mastered, beyond the art of riding on them.
Dad only had one vice. This was a man who never (and I truly do mean never) had a drink, smoked a cigarette, tried gambling, or developed any real hobbies outside of tractor collecting. After he passed, as I struggled through writing his eulogy, it occurred to me that he might be the only person I've ever known who I don't think could be called out for telling a lie. He sometimes minimized his tractor buying habit, but in his mind I'm sure everything that came out of his mouth was legit. (I asked his younger brother about this, and he confirmed that even as kids my dad was honest to the point of annoyance. Little brother never got away with anything because of it). Dad's only weakness came with yellow paint and two tracks. Looking back, I think this probably stemmed to his childhood. My grandfather preferred working with horses, but his brother bought the first tractor they ever had on the ranch. The tractor, unlike the horses or my grandfather, never put up a fuss about things.
I recently came across a few old pictures, and I think these two basically capture dad's thoughts on the matter. He patiently tolerated most things, but he literally ran toward tractors for his entire life:
Dad, about age 5, with his uncle, racing toward the first tractor ever put to use on the ranch
It wasn't until dad had died, and I was searching through old photos for his funeral services, that I realized how much even the visual record of my childhood was impacted by his habit. There were lots of photos of him with my brother and I, but nearly all of them included tractors in some form or other. When I was little, this involved being cute and riding on tractors. As I got older it just involved being slightly larger and riding on tractors. The tractors had always been an ever-present and unmistakable part of my life, and I resented them. Few things have indicated to me how profoundly or how much like one of the recent trips back to the ranch for a mediation meeting that required entering the shop where my dad spent most of my childhood. Most of the tractors have been moved to Washington, where he spent the last ten years of his life, but the shop was just how I remembered it. It still smelled like grease and diesel fuel, dust and old metal. A yellowed note on the door in dad's unmistakable cursive handwriting felt like it might have been there yesterday. It felt like walking into a time capsule, and a million scattered memories. Somehow, that wasn't even the painful part.
I had nailed "sit still and look cute" by age 4 The painful part was the implicit sense I carried growing up that despite his protestations otherwise, the tractors came first. I don't think he meant for it to be that way, but that was how his brain worked. Dad's collecting extended far beyond obsessive, to the point where I lost count altogether. It did not matter if the tractors ran (some did, some didn't), or if they would ever run (in truth, he had so many that he rarely finished a project), or if there was money for them (mostly there wasn't). It wasn't until I was an adult, long since on my own, that I started to wonder if there wasn't some sort of underlying mental health issue playing into the mix. Dad was very OCD, extremely anxious, and incredibly smart, but often stopped himself from starting projects for fear of how time consuming they would become. His hoarding impacted every aspect of my childhood, but his intentions - however misguided - were always in the right place. I never understood his obsession with tractors, and he never understood my disinterest or frustration. It wasn't until he died, when emails and letters started pouring in, that I learned he was internationally known as one of the foremost experts on Caterpillar tractors. I'm not sure it softened my opinions of them much, but it did help me appreciate the depths of his knowledge. The historian in me was somehow more impressed with the extensive knowledge he developed than with the actual collection itself. My brother and I took after him in different ways - him toward the tractors and the ability to fix just about anything, and me toward books and an education. Understanding for the first time that dad's tractor obsession also translated into expert-level knowledge was perhaps the first time I felt a connection with my own chosen profession of research and teaching. I'm certain dad loves this as much as the tractors.
By 20, I had also mastered "go stand on the tractor I just bought and look happy about it"
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