Written by Betsy Vick and spoken at memorial service 2/28/20
It was a
dark and stormy night. Ten of us were
seated around the campfire when the captain said, “Vick, tell us a story!” and
this is the story I told…
That was the
start of a story my Dad would tell many times on stormy nights or long car
rides and it’s a story I would later tell to my own son on many occasions. My
dad would like to be remembered as a Soldier, Poet, Scholar, Teacher, but to me
he was (Dad, Poppy, Richardo, miles g. coverdale, Poor Richard), a supreme storyteller
and, of course, father. His chosen
epithets Soldier, Poet, Scholar, Teacher,
are his own, but he lived them out in my recollection as a teller of tales
and a role model for his children.
My father
loved to sing and through his singing would tell us stories but also singing
would figure in the important stories of his life, most significantly and oft
told, meeting my mother in Madrigals in college, singing in theater productions
(anyone remember Linus or Dusty Biffle?), harmonizing in the church choir
(though he wasn’t that crazy about church, he went for the choir), playing his
ukulele with us kids gathered to sing from the Burl Ives Songbook, Froggy Went
a Courtin’ or Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night, singing Christmas carols and
rounds (Man’s Life’s a Vapor) with his grown children and grandkids.
My Dad
wasn’t the typical father of the 70s I’ve learned in talking to friends and
acquaintances from the same era. Because
he taught at the university, he was often there in the mornings as we got ready
for school, he could often be at home when we came home, he was ever present
and ready to travel on holidays and breaks that were the same as ours (and,
boy, did we travel;, he cooked many weekly meals and I learned as much about
cooking from him as my mother (and both are fine cooks in their own right). On occasion when I wasn’t feeling good enough
to go to school but not contagious, I could go with him out to Western (and
this was long before take your daughter to work day) and hang around the office
with him and Dr. Logsdon or outside the classroom for his 50 minute class,
sitting there quietly on a bench, swinging my legs, listening to his voice booming
through the door, speaking in a language I couldn’t always understand. Yes, he was a scholar of old and middle
English and spoke old English with a beautiful lilt and quoting Beowulf (and
others) until nearly the day he died. I
know we heard Grendl approaching over this past Christmas season. At my wedding, he read the poem Alysoun, and
while I can’t say I understood the words, through my life, I heard always from
my father the story of love.
Back in the
day, on Saturday mornings he would bake whole wheat bread (and if we were lucky
cinnamon rolls) and listen to the Metropolitan opera on the radio as he worked
the dough. He tended the garden
alongside my mother, stooping his 6 foot five frame to plant seeds and later pull
the weeds and then harvest. He and my
mother were true partners in most everything they did.
He had a
library in our house, where he smoked his cigars and his pipe, while preparing
for class, grading papers, reading or holding me in his lap to play our
favorite game, Baby and Great Eagle. The
hours I sat curled in a chair in that library with my father and sometimes without,
(we were always welcome there) reading books I discovered on his shelves,
including the entire Lord of the Rings series, Slaughterhouse 5, the poems of
Emily Dickinson, listening to records of musicals (Man of La Mancha) and comedy
albums (Stan Freeburg), are the stories of my youth, etched by my father’s love
of literature, music and art. These are
the stories to tell our children.
My father
taught us through stories how to be kind, how to do good in this world, how to
be frugal and thoughtful, and he exemplified those stories through his actions.
But he also loved to argue (he would call it debate) and his opinions were
strong and not to be trifled with—you should come prepared. But he was also a teller of jokes (some more
raunchy than his daughters liked) and puns, and many were heard often to the
point of annoyance (got any grapes?) but he could also surprise us with new
ones we’d never heard before, just spontaneously erupting from him, like the one
he told to my sister and me one of the last times I spoke with him over at
Wesley Nursing, a rat walks into a bar and says “is the bar tender here?” That’s it—if you don’t get it—ask me later.
In eulogies,
we commemorate the good in people, but my dad did not believe in fairytales and he
rarely told those kinds of stories. There were meager times, there were many
“nos”, there were plenty of slammed doors and I hate yous (shouted mostly by
me, I think), bickering over things large and small, but looking back and
reflecting on our lives, it seems to me best that we do recall those we loved
in a cherished halo of goodness and allow the raw feelings and bruised egos to
fall away, to let go the chaff and understand the true kernel of a person, and to
me, that kernel of my father’s being was his family.
Because my
dad taught tales of heroes, like King Arthur and the Knights of the Round
Table, and because he knew many true heroes while fighting in Korea, men who
gave their lives, he didn’t like the overuse of the word hero in the everyday;
in fact, he objected strenuously to it, so forgive my indulgence here, Poppy,
as I speak about someone I believe was your hero. My dad would always give credit to his father
for how he learned to be a father and while I didn’t really get to know my
Grandpa Vick, not the man my father so admired at any rate, I understood that
the story my grandfather told my father through his life was that if you lead
your life with love, compassion and kindness, that will be returned to you, and
so that’s what my dad did, he led his life with love, and the tales he told
were heroic and inspiring, just like my father, even in the most mundane
moments of life.
