It was a Day

It was a day.

One where the sun decided there was no point in showing itself, so the clouds were sent in to provide the grey so appropriate.
With the clouds came the snow. Not a blizzard of epic proportions, just snow. Slow snow, spitting, spotty, light, inconsistent in its consistency. Cold enough the snow stuck, piled up to nothing material – 5, maybe 6 inches lying flat in the open spaces where the bare tree limbs stretched out but failed to catch the snow, so it reached the ground.

There was nothingness. Wasn’t cold enough people would look back and say what they did during the Great Freeze of January 2025; not wet nor warm enough to remark how the streets ran with sluggish snowmelt; not deep enough to talk about the battle between shovelfuls; not windy enough for any shoveled snow to angrily return to the driveway.

It was a day.

There wasn’t anything to say about the day. Melancholic, flat, one where staying inside listening to the plows come by louder than a jet flying overhead was just Colorado winter normal.

There was a Deep Freeze the prior week – a nasty one reaching its icy grip deep enough into the southern states us in the wintery climates could watch as they struggled to walk let alone drive.

I wondered what it was like in Tennessee, if this grip had reached deep enough toward the Alabama border. Wondered. If it was truly awful he’d call. He nearly always did if there was some sort of weather calamity in his neck of the woods. The weather was one topic we could converse about. Sports was another – the three majors so to speak – football, basketball and baseball.

Football was not really in our wheelhouse as he didn’t play much as a kid, but we could talk about it. Like most fathers, he went with what he knew. He taught me how to play baseball as well as basketball. Those were his go-to sports. Basketball, probably due to limited amount of players, was an easy one. He could shoot as well as nearly any farm boy in Colorado. I once saw a newspaper clipping of him in high school where in one game his team – the Kiowa Indians – had won something like 48 to 32 and he had scored 36. The details failed to stick all I remember is he outscored the entire opposing team. The Nuggets finally won their long sought-after championship in 2023, so we had that to fall back on for a bit. When I was a kid he bought the family ticket packages to the Rockets first, then the Nuggets. First it was the Rockets at the Coliseum where on some January nights you could still smell the remnants from the National Western Stock Show. After that came McNichols where the Nuggets hit their stride – not enough to embrace a championship to their bosom, but enough to compete. They made it to the final ABA finals, losing to Dr. J and the Nets. He was heartbroken but couldn’t show it as his son produced enough angry tears for both.

As much as basketball was easy to talk about, it was baseball I remember most. He’d stand there a few feet away from me, cigarette dangling in his lips, showing me proper form. A smoking righty teaching an asthmatic lefty. It was a mirror for me which made it easier. He was my coach for a few Little League seasons, teaching me how to hit, how to field, how to throw… and perhaps how not to get angry enough when you strike out that you throw the bat and nearly take the legs out from under your coach.

We’d carry baseball to the farm close to Kiowa in Elbert County where he was raised. His brothers and I – I was the only male of the next generation living in Colorado – would go out and play pickle or 500 in the front acre battling one another and thistles for the ball – Uncle Sam, Uncle Lloyd, Uncle Don, dad and I. My imagination, as much as any imagination, can fall to distortion but I recall Uncle Tony playing too. He passed away when I was 9, when he was 21.

A draftsman, that’s a profession. Essentially an architect without the degree. There wasn’t a house he ever lived in as an adult where he didn’t create something special in the basement. In the house my sister and I grew up in, he created the basement. It was a tri-level. He had a caterpillar go under the house and dig out a fourth level large enough to have a storage room, a bar, a dart board area and room for a pool table. As he went about finishing the basement our mother filled the hole in the front yard with a Colorado-style garden complete with petrified wood from the farm as well as a short pine and a yucca bush.

There has always been an overabundance of talent in his hands but a reticence to take it further. Building was at once a gift and a curse. He could create anything out of wood – a bird carving, a rocking horse, a parquet style bar top or one framed in wood and made with stone inlayed into epoxy – but never advertised what he could do.

I wasn’t averse to picking up my iPhone and hitting the ‘dad’ button on my favorites list. We probably split calling 50/50 over the years regarding who would dial the other. Birthdays, holidays, bad weather days, days I’d be able to tell him I was traveling for work reasonably close to him so I could come visit for a day, maybe two. This time I waited. I got the call. Phone lit up ‘dad’ but I was downstairs working on an iced coffee maker trying to get it to function. I saw the missed call announcement less than 10 minutes later and returned the call. No answer. Not that unusual since he and his wife Emily had a landline and their answering machine – had that too – was not entirely functional. Thought nothing of it. I’ll try and call back later.

Emily is a wonder. She’s the one who nudged us toward being more affectionate. We never were before her. Once she and dad became a couple, she recognized it immediately. She’d stand there and make sure we hugged and made sure we told each other we loved one another. There was never any obligation to do it, not on my end I can’t speak for him. But Emily, she did it, got us closer together and for that I can never thank her enough.

By the time I put my fingers on this keyboard, the snow, as snow is wont to do, had turned on the streets, a mishmash of white overtaken by grease, dirt, exhaust until the white ceded to ash, then brown. The charcoal coloring will come later, snow blackened until ugly.

It was a day… and the day turned ugly. I waited until later to try and call again. Only waited for Emily. My sister called. I knew what it was before answering. There will be a talk after tomorrow’s championship games, but I’ll have to absorb our collective loathing of the Chiefs alone.

Love you dad, I’ll miss you.