Up, Down and Around Our Town

This week's installment was written by John's older daughter, Sara Tripp Betz.

The day my father died, I didn’t cry much. The initial shock, contacting loved ones, and other tasks got in the way. I didn’t cry much at the visitation. I didn’t cry much at the funeral.

The stories poured in. First came Steve Looten’s addition to this blog. Then Bob Gough’s column in quincynews.org and Rodney Hart’s column in the Herald-Whig. Culver put up a tribute page on its website. I read eagerly with the rest of you, enjoying the reminiscing, the inside jokes, the suggestions of naughtiness, and the appreciation of my father’s amazing ability to communicate though speech or written word.

I rewrote his obituary after the “fill in the blank” version just wasn’t saying what it needed to. I didn’t cry then, either. Mostly, I was annoyed of all the noise and the looming deadline. It was completed nonetheless and ran far and wide.

My Facebook account overflowed with daily condolences. Messages and cards poured in. Daily chats with devoted friends helped soften the rough edges. Mountains of foliage arrived. One day, a tree arrived for us to plant, which still blows me away. I have the most amazing friends, who came from far and wide physically and virtually to help me say goodbye to Dad.

Our relationship was complicated, like all father-daughter relationships are. Too much alike to get along too well until I was a “certain age”…we’ll say 17. Despite the usual frustration, his opinion meant everything to me. Sometimes too much…

When I was younger, he tried to interest me in sports. After all, nobody loved baseball like my dad. Do you remember the scene in “City Slickers” when Billy Crystal and company are sitting around the fire? That was my dad. Alas, after several attempts at batting practice in the backyard and sweating our asses off at Cardinal games, I never caught the fever. My first love was dancing…always in search of a spotlight. My father endured 20 years of dance recitals between his two daughters…a fact that is well-known in our circle.

During college we discovered a common language and often chatted or emailed. When I started writing for Illinois State University’s newspaper, he got a subscription. When I started loving classic rock and all things vintage, we would compare notes. I became a history teacher much because of my encyclopedic memory for minutia, much like my dad.

He gave me away on my wedding day and we danced to Queen’s “These Are The Days Of Our Lives,” in the usual fashion. He found most of the wedding preparations ridiculous, but ran out not too long before the big day to find the best videographer in town to record the blessed event. That was always his contribution…never one for details or spectacle. He wanted to capture the day to remember it forever, not be part of the planning.

When my son, Wilson, was born, Dad was slow to warm to the concept. Babies in general weren’t his thing…he was a large man and babies are, well, small. Not until I made my first photo collage of Wilson with all of the family did he notice that he was conspicuously absent. He hadn’t ever been photographed with Wilson, an oversight that was quickly remedied. Over the years he and Wilson became good friends, usually bonding over a shared affection for pancakes.

When Dad’s “hero”, Sasha, arrived, Wilson moved in with Mom and Dad for nearly a month. Now having an unplanned, 6-year-old houseguest, Dad was the obvious caregiver since Mom was still teaching and he was done with his obligations at Culver. Wilson still needed to finish the school year and Dad was just the man for the job.

The whole time we were in St. Louis with Sasha, I felt like we had abandoned him. Choosing between one’s children is horrible, but one HAD to have us there and one HAD to be in school. Every morning Dad cued up with the Madison school mamas, having walked with Wilson the 4 blocks from their house to school. On the way home they would do the same thing in reverse, often stopping off at Madison Park before heading home. Food was cooked to order and excessive amounts of “Finding Nemo”, “Cars”, and “The Incredibles” were viewed.

By the time we got home, Wilson and Papa had their own language and were thick as thieves. At the time I didn’t think much of it, but now I’m so grateful that they had that time together. Wilson misses Dad terribly…always reminding himself aloud that “Papa’s in Heaven and he can’t ever come back”. He says it and asks me if I’m SURE Papa can’t come back. I always have the same sad answer and we hug and talk about how much we miss Papa. We tell Papa stories and laugh…there were lots of good times.

Sasha was his hero. Having just gotten past her own small and fragile stage, they were just starting to groove on each other. My Aunt Sue told me something after Dad’s funeral. “John was right about her…she does not disappoint”. And, she doesn’t.

I finally really cried about Dad Sunday morning. It was a combination of odd things…a Hallmark movie and a stack of DVDs. “Riding The Bus With My Sister” is a Rosie O’Donnell (whom my father loathed with a fiery, somewhat irrational passion) and Andie McDowell (whom Dad generally thought was a babe) movie. I’d seen it years before when it was on CBS and settled in with it this morning amidst piles of laundry and diapers to fold and put away.

I forgot that the father dies in that movie. Rosie’s raw emotion as a mentally challenged woman acting like a child about losing her “daddy” hit me like a ton of bricks. Adults don’t usually act like children, but Rosie’s character’s mental capacity gave her the freedom to act like many of us would if it wasn’t considered improper.

But it was my husband bringing in stacks of DVDs I'd inherited the night before that sent me over the edge. You see, the shared language of John Tripp and his daughters was media. TV and movies…if it came through a television screen, we would discuss it.

He loved “M*A*S*H“, which has been well-documented. My dad bought his first VCR in grand anticipation of the last episode of “M*A*S*H”. He unfortunately bought a Beta, feeling in the early days of VCRs, that he had chosen the better horse. He was wrong…and we spent the next 5 years fighting the uphill battle against VHS. We finally succumbed to the latter in 1987, but had every episode of “M*A*S*H” on Beta via KHQA’s nightly broadcast following the evening news.

He and I loved hour-long dramas. “L.A. Law”, “St. Elsewhere”, and “ER” were always discussed at Friday Night Dinner, the two-decades long tradition of our family to do something “special“ on Friday night. In later years it became discussions about “Grey’s Anatomy” mostly, prompting my mother to buy the show’s trivia game to keep us around a table longer. “Friends” was always a favorite, and we often relished in quoting the episode where it’s revealed, among other things, that Joey’s imaginary childhood friend’s name was Maurice (occupation: Space Cowboy) or in reliving Rachael’s failed Thanksgiving trifle with a layer of beef and peas mistakenly added. We held a shared passion for “How I Met Your Mother” and “The Big Bang Theory” as of late. Anything Aaron Sorkin wrote was fair game, even loving “The West Wing” (gratefully in solid reruns on Bravo) as much as I did, despite being a lifelong conservative.

So now all the seasons of “Seinfeld” that I gifted him over the years, along with “Sports Night” (one of Aaron Sorkin’s little-appreciated gems), "Cheers", and his third incarnation of “M*A*S*H” (all VHS tapes were donated to the Senior Center last year) on DVD have come to live at my house.

And then it hit me…he’s really gone and he’s never coming back, just like I had taught my son. The floodgates opened and I wept. Finally.

Dad died the day we were set to celebrate Sasha’s first birthday. The night before he died my husband, Mark, Sasha, the much beloved furry white dog and I stayed home from Friday Night Dinner to clean the house for the incoming deluge of family. So, Dad and I never discussed the season finale of “Grey’s Anatomy” where George and Izzy possibly died. And that really pisses me off.

Everything else I can live with.