Father

14 entries

1960

Friday, January 1, 1960 · Don Krumpos

Before He Was My Father

His history was very hidden. Maybe that was trauma. Maybe it was temperament. Maybe those are not as separate as we pretend. His father died when he was thirteen. His sister Catherine died not long after. Houses burned. More than…

Tuesday, January 1, 1980 · Don Krumpos

Work Clothes

My father was always steady and sturdy to me. Physically, first. That was how a child knew him. He had huge biceps and forearms, the kind made not in a gym but by work repeated over years. Lifting, hauling, carrying,…

Friday, January 1, 1982 · Don Krumpos

The Keeping of Things

We had horses my whole childhood. That was one of the facts of the farmstead, as natural to me then as the barn, the garden, the chickens, the machine shed, the old trees. Horses were not decoration. They were part…

Sunday, January 1, 1984 · Don Krumpos

Not Made for the Fair

Every year of grade school I built something. Second grade was a papier-mâché earth, cut open to show the layers. Crust, mantle, core — the planet sliced like fruit so you could see what it was made of. I did…
Sunday, January 1, 1984 · Don Krumpos

The Books in His Bedroom

My father had a massive collection of books from college. At least it felt massive to me then. They lived in his bedroom, which made them different from ordinary household books. They were not simply around, not part of the…
Wednesday, August 1, 1984 · Don Krumpos

The Cook

Once a year, my father had a reason for me to skip church. On the morning of the Grace Lutheran summer picnic, we did not put on church clothes. We did not sit in the pews. We got up early,…

Tuesday, January 1, 1985 · Don Krumpos

The Silent Curriculum

There were things the farm taught without explanation. No one sat you down and said, this is what country life requires. The lessons arrived through chores, accidents, deaths, and the strange adult certainty that some hard thing had to be…

Wednesday, January 1, 1986 · Don Krumpos

That's How I Learned

My father was involved in so many building projects that I sometimes have trouble separating them. They blur together now into one continuous image of him: work clothes, tools out, some old building opened up around him, a problem waiting…

Wednesday, July 1, 1987 · Don Krumpos

The Tape and the Tower

The summer between sixth and seventh grade, my father drove me to Chicago. It was a father-son trip, and it had an official purpose, though no one named it out loud. That was how my parents handled preparing us for…

Friday, January 1, 1988 · Don Krumpos

Something Good to Reach For

One of my special memories is movie night. Usually it was Sunday, and usually it was the Disney family movie hour. That phrase alone carries a whole atmosphere for me now — the television glowing in the living room, the…
Friday, January 1, 1988 · Don Krumpos

What Others Threw Away

The first time I understood my father was a kind of lumberjack, I was carrying his supper out to a stand of trees at the edge of a Royal Scot subdivision. He was up in one of the trees with…

Sunday, January 1, 1989 · Don Krumpos

The Beast

Cars were one of the ways my father measured time. Not deliberately. He was not sentimental about them in any obvious way. A vehicle was a tool first: something to get to work, haul lumber, carry children, survive winter, and…

Friday, January 1, 1993 · Don Krumpos

What He Couldn't Give

The question is harder to answer than it looks. If you ask me what my father could not give, I have to pause. Because in the obvious ways, he gave plenty. He gave hugs. He said, "I love you." Not…

Friday, January 1, 1999 · Don Krumpos

The House That Held Him

My father, with my grandfather's help, put a full new central chimney into our farmhouse. That sentence seems almost unbelievable to me now. A chimney is not a shelf or a bench or a toy barn. It is not a…