Lee was a great dad. He always seemed capable of balancing his love for his kids and family with the responsibilities of parenting and instilling his values in us.
From the moment we could eat solid food we had an opportunity to be members of the "Clean Plate Club". This was a very clever ruse to get us to eat our vegetables and other things we might not have liked. Membership was reset on each night's dinner and had only a single condition, to clean your plate. Sometimes we took it quite literally, and I remember on a few occasions trying to put a plate back into the cupboard that I had just finished licking. Dad was proud but mom vetoed the idea.
When being tucked into bed at night, he noticed that we might squirm a bit when he kissed us, and thus the "Ava" was born. For those not familiar an Ava is when you have a five-o-clock shadow, and when you're putting a little kid to bed, you go to kiss them on the crook of the neck but instead go "ava va vavava". It feels a bit like being lovingly tickled with 80 grit sandpaper, but it always made us laugh. We would angle for Avas, and I recall pitching them to friends and cousins as a potential perk of staying the night at our house. "You know, if you're really good you too might get an Ava."
He had a strong sense of what the right thing to do was. I remember once after the Rudells moved out, John and I made some trouble for the new neighbors. It was nothing against them personally, they just weren't the Rudells and we didn't like that. So with a little direction from John, I ripped up every single one of their marigolds lining the driveway and threw them over my head as I went, into their driveway. I was still ripping up flowers as their family car turned onto the street and pulled in, and I calmly waved hello at them and finished ripping up the last few flowers, then ran and hid in our shed behind the house.
I stood there for what seemed like an eternity, but which was probably more like 10 minutes, needing to pee and feeling some increasing level of guilt, until I heard his voice. I was hiding behind the lawn mower and he talked to me without really seeing me. He asked what I had done and I told him. I made a point of assuring him that I had finished the job I started. Despite every desire in my body at that moment, he somehow calmly coaxed me out of the shed and into owning up to my actions. I still don't know how he did it.
There was no yelling from him, but he explained that I would need to apologize and find a way to make it right to the neighbors, and that it wasn't going to be easy or feel good to do so. He also advised that I should give up the property damage game, which I retired from a couple short years later.
When I was in first grade one day I decided that I wanted to try out for the school play. I had no clue of the effort required or what the end result was, only that I had heard about it and thought it sounded fun. I must have told Dad or Mom because soon enough I had instructions to stay after school one day and to go to the auditorium; that I would have a ride waiting for me after the tryouts instead of the usual busride home.
When the day came I was terrified of this now-dawning commitment I had capriciously signed up for and all the unknowns that came with it. What would the process look like? How many other kids would be there? How long would it take? Would it be scary? Would finding my way home afterwards really be so simple? At the end of the school day, fearful of all those scary potentials, I ended up getting on the regular bus at the normal time.
Upon getting home, I found Dad was there. This wasn't typical, as he was normally at work after school, but by chance not for this stretch of time. He asked me why I was not at the school for the audition and I'm sure I tried to offer up some weak excuse. Dad, of course, saw right through it all and knew that I simply needed some coaxing in seeing-through what I had already declared I wanted to do. He immediately got us in the car and drove us up to the school, reassuring me the whole way that it would be alright.
Sure enough the process was far more uneventful than I had feared and I ended up getting cast in the chorusline along with all the other little kids. Had he not been there to show me the courage he already knew I had, I never would have ended up a singing, dancing, lovebug that year.
There are countless moments like these that all of us can recall of Dad leading the way. Even later on when he was not the one directly responsible, he was able to lend his wisdom to our lives. He loved cars, not just driving fast in some convertible but the appreciation of the machinery that made it work and a vivid exuberance whenever we described a need for his advice on one. This may be one of the reasons, among many, we ended up taking our vacations as roadtrips; whether to Canada, California, or Montana it could be assured we'd be loaded up with an overflowing roofrack and a car full of chaos endlessly looping the Star Wars ABC's.
Years later, as an adult, he would come with me when I had decided to buy my first car. He was so thrilled that his being there got me a much better deal than otherwise. Shortly thereafter Mom, Dad, and I decided to take a roadtrip down to see Uncle John and Aunt Lynn in Reno. Unlike all the ones from my childhood, however, this time we decided that we would take my new car and that I would drive.
I can still remember the smile on his face as we went way way too fast through the emptiness of north-eastern California, his singing along both to songs he knew well and songs he had never heard before, with results about the same in both cases. His calm as we drove (yet again too fast) on dirt roads near some lava park, hitting some potholes that seemingly jumped out of nowhere, and his reassurance as we then later found a tire repair place on-the-fly in the middle of Oregon. He may have just been in the passenger seat that time, but he had surely seen all these things from my perspective before himself; he always knew exactly the right way to both exude joy and tackle adversity.
Dad would always go the extra mile or ten to make something as good as it could be, especially when others might benefit from it. When my parents chose to downsize out of their longtime Redmond house a few years ago, there were lots of things to do, clean, get rid of or tidy up and so on. That will happen after you live somewhere for 30 years and raise a family there. This cleanup process went on for many months until the house was finally ready to list, but he never quite felt like it was good enough.
The house eventually sold to a nice family who at the time were living in Korea and readying to move to Redmond, but there was a gap of a couple months between the close of the house and them arriving to live in it. So what did he do? He would casually drive over there every day or two and keep the place up. Things like mowing the lawn, checking the mailbox, cleaning the gutters, cleaning off the driveway and picking up sticks and branches, organizing the shed and garden areas. He would even sometimes make trips to the hardware store and get little supplies for his exploits, just as he did when we lived there.
I actually chided him for this. I told him on numerous occasions that once the terms were finalized and the house had closed, that he was no longer a caretaker, but a trespasser. I still believe that I'm correct on this count, but for him it wasn't about being right. He cared about the house and the family who would come to live there and he wanted everything to be the best it could be for them, all technicalities aside and with nothing to gain. And out of those efforts my parents forged a friendship with the people who bought their home, people they didn't know at all beforehand, bonded only by random chance and the shared history of a house. A house that he worked tirelessly on to make it into a home - once our home, and now the home of another family.
It's hard to look back on a lifetime of hugs squeezed, laughs shared, and cinnamon rolled and think that it has all of a sudden come to an end, but I don't believe that Dad would have seen it that way and nor should we. A lesson does not end the moment it is first grasped with some clarity, instead that has only marked its true beginning. It must be demonstrated indefinitely going forward and I believe the same is true here.
Dad provided us with a lifetime of these moments. A crystal-clear blueprint of what it means to be a good person, told not so much in words but in action; given to us not via recitation but rather via experience. It is up to us now to carry his warmth forward into this world. So every time you do something nice for no reason other than it is right, every time you share some kindness for no reason other than it makes you feel good, and every time you share some freshly-baked bread for no reason other than it is delicious, you can know there just passed one of the countless echoes of the wisest man I'll ever know, our dad Lee Haycox.