I was in my late forties when my father belatedly and somewhat sheepishly acknowledged that when he required some youthful backup, the second of his children was the one he could count on. Nevertheless, this unexpected note of appreciation was completely out of character, and was repeated only once more before he took leave of us.

    I offer this background information in order to win neither sympathy nor praise, only a measure of credibility as the teller of this tale.  My parent's marriage endured for over seventy years, but I have every reason to suspect both my mother’s memory and her objectivity. Over time, she became the classic co-dependent, so tightly tethered to her peculiar husband that she lost the capacity to think or act independently.  She admired her partner for his wit and his intellect (he was also a very convincing bullshitter), felt reliant on him in spite of a rewarding career as an occupation therapist, excused his less-than-conscientious parenting, and humbly acquiesced to his sometimes-outrageous proposals. 

    Although I cannot pretend to have “understood” my father as thoroughly as his wife, I did observe this guarded man closely enough to develop some insight into his behavior. At the same time, as an adult I tried to maintain a self-protective distance in order to forestall further abuse and exploitation.  Although my father’s inconsistent approach to child-rearing left much to be desired, and his narcissistic lifestyle choices troubled me, at this point in my life I really don’t have any axes to grind. I decided to write about him because, when all is said and done, he was a strange and puzzling figure who makes for an engaging story. Or, as my mother would declare with a sigh from time to time, “Your father is complicated.”

******

    Unlike Charles W. Schuler, who could be quite voluble and engaging under certain conditions but otherwise showed little interest in other human beings (he was fond of quoting a cynical line from Jean Paul Sartre’s play No Exit: “Hell is other people”), I have spent over forty years in the quintessentially social role of parish minister.  As a result, I’ve invested a great deal of time and energy in building and deepening relationships.  Over the course of my career, I conducted over a thousand weddings and funerals, taught innumerable classes, presided over countless meetings, and chewed the fat with parishioners over too many cups of coffee. 

    For three-quarters of that time I labored in the vineyard of the First Unitarian Society of Madison, Wisconsin, a substantial congregation of over sixteen-hundred adults and children.  Populated by humanistic free-thinkers similar to my parents, it was an easy place to establish a comfortable rapport.  Countless times I sat and patiently listened as families rehearsed their histories; most often when we were planning to memorialize a lost loved one. I also had the opportunity to peruse several memoirs authored by parishioners, and those experiences convinced me that my father’s checkered history might also be worth sharing. Perhaps in the process the jagged contours of his life will become clearer to me as well.

    Let’s begin, then, by creating a portrait.  Like his own father, Harry Augustus Schuler, Charles William was small of stature, with a body structure that some would approvingly describe as “wiry” and others, more critically, as “scrawny.”  He stood five feet nine and a half inches, with narrow, almost feminine, hands and feet, an aquiline nose and pale skin that turned ruddy from even moderate sun exposure. 

    In posing for photos, my father rarely smiled and never with lips parted to reveal his teeth. I suspect he was self-conscious about the prominent gap between the upper incisors, a sex-linked trait that both my brother and I possess. He was always clean shaven and kept his wispy light brown hair carefully coiffed.  Curiously, the color of his eyes escapes me because Dad was never without his aviator-style prescription glasses. I do vividly recall, though, how the eyes behind those frames narrowed when he was riled.

    As a young adult Dad was lithe and muscular, thanks to twenty years of toil on the two farms his father owned.  Although he did wrestle and play ice hockey competitively in high school, in later years he proclaimed that the only kind of “exercise” he respected consisted of productive physical labor. During my formative years I never saw him “work out.”  However, he did hit the three of us fungoes in the back yard now and then.  Except for a few years in which he occupied a manager’s desk he never tipped the scales at more than 140 pounds.

    Physically, then, Dad was a small fry, as most of the men in our family have been. At five feet ten and a half, I’m probably the tallest in three generations and inherited my mother’s thicker torso. But as I consider his story I think, first, not of my father’s slight build, but of the outsized ambitions that were often thwarted by his fear of failure. That is not to say that he was a failure; many people would have envied his privileges and admired his accomplishments.  Still, he suffered from self-imposed limitations that robbed him of any possibility of personal fulfillment. The truly regrettable thing is, he could have done, and been, so much more.

The Past As Prologue

It was with reluctance, and more than a twinge of skepticism, that I retrieved my parents at their well-appointed independent living apartment to transport them (together with a staggering amount of baggage) to the Dane County airport. It was early November, 2016 and the cold was beginning to tighten its grip on Wisconsin.

    Bill and Nancy had grudgingly moved to the Madison area after forty-four years in subtropical Florida.  Starting out on the southern Gulf Coast, they had migrated steadily northward; first to the interior town of Lake Placid and then to a posh retirement community in Jacksonville. But Naples-on-the-Gulf remained their first, and most cherished, place of residence in the Sunshine State. 

    My folks relocated to Jacksonville for only one reason: the presence of a new Mayo Clinic and Hospital just blocks from their front door. They were both in their mid-eighties and my father had developed some concerning health issues.  Nancy had no say in the matter; her husband wanted easy access to a premier medical facility and that was the end of the story.  Although he had previously spoken disparagingly of Jacksonville (a redneck city), the arrangement worked for a while.  But Dad was already abusing prescription drugs, Serax and Oxycodone in particular, which wreaked havoc on his digestive system and adversely affected his temperament. In time, life in my parent’s home became intolerable.

    At age ninety-two, Bill had become too much for Nancy to handle alone: verbally abusive, incontinent and impulsive, he resembled an overgrown toddler. His behavior was so egregious that placement in an assisted living facility was out of the question.  When his normally accommodating and long-suffering wife finally reached the end of her tether, she took the completely uncharacteristic step of appealing to my siblings and me for help.  We quickly came to a consensus that Madison made the most sense for a rapid resettlement, and with dispatch I set the wheels in motion.  Within a month the transition had been accomplished. 

    The process took a toll on all of us. Although my parents were both natives of the upper Midwest – Nancy from St. Paul and Bill from northern Illinois - he simply dreaded the idea of returning to a cold climate.  The prospect of torturing others with his misanthropy in the sweat-soaked tropics was preferable to the prospect of pulling a hat down over his ears and bundling up in a down jacket. 

    In the end, he didn’t have much choice in the matter.  Nancy finally threatened to leave him alone in a half-furnished house where he would have to cope with his multiple infirmities on his own. And so, under firm, relentless pressure his family, Dad finally capitulated.  Trina and I hurriedly boxed up the essentials they would need in Wisconsin, a crack team of movers from Tampa quickly and efficiently emptied the house, and a grandson volunteered to serve as their escort on the flight north.  I lagged behind, cramming house plants, fragile valuables and their elderly cat into my parent’s vintage Camry before pulling onto the Interstate.

     During that fitful first year in their new digs – a serviceable two-bedroom apartment (Dad had always insisted he would never submit to communal living) - the old man showed few signs of improvement. He stumbled and fell on several occasions, suffered from irritable bowel syndrome, dental and gum disease, advanced kyphosis, and cognitive impairment. His compulsive behavior worsened as well, which eventually required further intervention. 

    One morning, in a fit of pique triggered by an offhand remark from his wife, Dad swallowed half a bottle of a prescribed pain reliever and, after a few moments, collapsed onto the bedroom floor. His objective, it seems, was to “punish” Nancy for her impertinence, and his clumsy attempt at suicide certainly shook her up. But she had the presence of mind to dial 911 and a team of EMTs was dispatched to the apartment.  After assessing his condition, they bundled him into an ambulance and it was off to the hospital.   

    It turned out that, his advanced age notwithstanding, my father’s life was never in jeopardy. He was allowed to sleep off the effects of the drug and then subjected to a psychiatric evaluation. The attending physician recommended that he voluntarily commit himself to the mental health ward for a more thorough neurological workup and follow-up treatment. 

    Dad, always the control freak, stubbornly refused.  What he didn’t realize is that his suicide attempt – legitimate or not – gave County authorities grounds for an involuntary commitment. My mother wasn’t altogether comfortable with this measure, but there wasn’t much she could do about it.  My brother, sister and I thought it was a fine idea.

    Within twenty-four hours Dad had been transferred to a lock-down psychiatric unit at the adjacent VA hospital. He was ordered to spend a minimum of sixteen days there, during which he would undergo detoxification, counseling, and assessment for a new drug regimen. Mother and I visited as permitted, only to listen quietly as Dad groused about his “imprisonment.”

    In the weeks following his discharge it became evident that this enforced “time out” had produced some positive results. Dad’s physical and cognitive abilities had both improved and he was now functioning at a higher level than most men his age.  What hadn’t changed, however, was his disposition.  He was steaming, resentful and angry at every member of his immediate family for meddling in his affairs.  During his time at the VA he had formed a resolution: to leave Wisconsin, the scene of his humiliating incarceration, and never come back.

    Dad didn’t reveal his intentions at the time, holding the cards close to his vest.  But throughout the ensuing year he badgered Nancy relentlessly until she agreed to a sojourn in Naples for the upcoming winter.  Initially, Dad argued for a six-month stay. Nancy countered with a limit of two, but they finally “compromised” at four.  Between mid-November and mid-March, they would treat themselves to a suite overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. 

    Of course, the informal contract they agreed upon was bogus and I knew it.  “If Dad gets down to Naples, he’s not coming back,” I warned.  Mother frowned, shrugged her shoulders, but offered no rejoinder. Truth be told, she too liked the idea of an extended hiatus from Wisconsin’s cold, inclement weather.

    The expectant couple departed Madison with first-class round-trip tickets. Once settled, they passed the time pleasantly enough, fishing from charter boats, visiting with old friends, exploring the many new shops and restaurants on historic Fifth Avenue.  Time passed quickly, and when Nancy began making noises about the trip home Bill firmly declared his intention to remain at the hotel indefinitely.  She knew better than to pursue the matter because to do so would only alienate him further.  Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Nancy resigned herself to sacrificing her marriage of seventy years and flying back to Madison alone.

    Dad’s airline ticket expired, unused, and he showed no inclination to re-book.  His resolve had hardened; he would continue to enjoy the comforts of a sixth-floor suite high above the beachcombers and margarita sipping sunbathers toward whom he was largely indifferent.  It was enough to be back in an environment that evoked positive memories and reinforced his closely kept fantasies.

    I resisted the temptation to say, “I told you so,” and for her part Mom didn’t seem torn up over the separation - a first for the two of them.  Charles Schuler had not been an easy man to live with for at least a decade, so the prospect of entering a less fraught single life had its attractions. Moreover, she had a son and daughter-in-law within hailing distance, so she was hardly on her own.  Nancy could also look forward to annual reunions with her husband, which I helped arrange for the two winters that followed.

****** 

    Why Naples?  Although it had experienced phenomenal growth in the thirty years since my parents left and was now barely recognizable, that Gulf community was, for my father, a singular place.  It was here that he had enjoyed crowning success in the hospitality industry and where he seamlessly transitioned into the fulfilling roles of sport fisherman and photographer.  That our family ended up in this enclave between the Big Cypress and the white sand beaches back in 1967 smacks of serendipity. In the meantime, there’s a bit more history that needs to be unpacked.   

    C.W. Schuler’s forebears drifted west from Pennsylvania not long after the rail barons had laid track between Chicago and Galena. The first members of our clan stepped off in Dixon, a small but prosperous Rock River town with few remarkable features until, three-quarters of a century later, a B-movie actor named Ronald Reagan claimed it as his hometown. 

   An enterprising lot, the first generations of Schuler men established flourishing businesses, bought up farmland, and rose to become solid upper-middle class citizens. The family was not without adventurers; one or two eventually followed their inner compass further west until they ran out of running room at California Highway 1 and the city of Los Angeles. But caution was the byword for most of my ancestors, and they never ventured far in the search for greener pastures and sunnier skies.

    For my own father, stayed, conventional Dixon proved an awkward fit and entering adolescence he was more than ready to make a break.  No one in the family ever explained to me how and why he ended up there, but at sixteen Dad matriculated at the St. John’s (now Northwestern) Military Academy in Delafield, Wisconsin.  He once told me he was drawn to the Academy’s sports program, most notably the ice hockey team. He was an excellent skater, and I would guess he gravitated toward a more rough-and-tumble sport like hocky over baseball and tennis because it projected an aura of toughness - an image he craved.  Dad sought out the company of brawnier athletes and liked to think of himself as something of a scrapper. 

    Manliness is a trait military schools are eager to instill in their charges, and they appear to have succeeded with my father.  The only photo of his St. John’s days I remember seeing showed him posing proudly in his dress uniform, a rifle balanced jauntily on his shoulder (in the school’s yearbook he also appears in a group photo of the varsity hockey team).

    Following his stint at St. John’s, Dad spent an unremarkable year at Beloit College before transferring to Kansas University, a school recommended to him by Joe Crawford, an old Dixon High School buddy who was recruited to play football for the Jayhawks (Crawford would later play in the Rose Bowl).  It was here that he would meet Zona, an art major from a small town in western Kansas, who became his first wife.

    But then World War II erupted.  Rather than wait for the inevitable call from Selective Service, Dad enlisted, hoping to ride out the conflict in a non-combat position.  That was not to be, and along with ninety-eight percent of enlistees, he ended up in the Army infantry. 

    But now his tutelage at St. John’s proved to be a godsend; he was the rare raw recruit who had mastered close-order drill.  Within a few weeks he was made an instructor and elevated to the rank of corporal. To buy more time, he submitted his application for Officer Training School, was accepted, and only saw action overseas as the war was winding down.   

    D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge had already taken place, and only pockets of resistance remained, by the time Second Lieutenant Schuler and his platoon joined Patton’s Third Army.  He survived a couple of skirmishes with demoralized Wehrmacht soldiers, put in a few months with the military police, then spent the remainder of his tour in charge of an all-black quartermaster unit. The latter’s primary responsibility was operating a captured coffee roasting plant. Coffee was a sought-after commodity among troops and civilians alike, and Dad found ample opportunity for self-serving barter.  As I was growing up, he regaled us with racially-tinged stories about his black subordinates.

    Years later, he would reminisce about that year and a half he spent in Europe.  If the young lieutenant was to any degree traumatized by the experience, it wasn’t at all obvious. He talked, rather, about a live-in Czech-German girlfriend and the time he spent with fellow officers on the French Riviera.  These, he wistfully recalled, were some of the best months of his life.

    His service wasn’t entirely a bed of roses, however; the relationship with his commanding officer was troubled and he was passed over for promotion to Captain. In the end, he mustered out with the single bar of a First Lieutenant.

    Returning to Kansas, Dad pursued and earned a degree in business and was sued for divorce by Zona. The reasons for the break are a little fuzzy, but his European dalliances may have had something to do with it.  Like those of many other returning soldiers, their marriage didn’t survive the war. But in this instance, their falling-out may have had a peculiar twist to it, as we will shortly see. 

    Dad wasn’t really all that interested in the kind of career that his business degree had prepared him for, so he decided to stay on at KU for their Master’s program in creative writing.  He now hoped to become a celebrated writer of wartime fiction, joining the ranks of James Jones, Joseph Heller and even Ernest Hemingway.  He intended to draw on his experience during the Occupation to construct a semi-autobiographical narrative with the protagonist – an officer in the U.S. Military Police - modeled after himself. 

    Still in the process of finalizing his divorce, Dad was already seeking a new female companion.  Before long, Joe Crawford, his old football-playing buddy, invited him on a double blind date (this same gentleman had also played matchmaker with Bill and Zona). Nancy Balster, a St. Paul native, had recently completed her training in Occupational Therapy at Milwaukee’s Downer College and was now treating wounded veterans in Topeka.  

    The courtship was brief, and my parents exchanged vows on the same day Dad’s divorce was finalized. The ceremony took place in a Lutheran minister’s parlor, with only the obligatory two witnesses in attendance.  The hurried nuptials didn’t sit well with Nancy’s father, a respected figure in the St. Paul business community.  He had planned to gift each of his daughters with big, formal weddings and Nancy’s willingness to agree to Dad’s terms and disappoint her father got them off on the wrong foot. It didn’t help that his middle daughter had committed herself to a newly divorced suitor with fanciful ambitions.

    Dad soon completed his course work and began work on his thesis/novel. He had plenty of time to complete this final requirement for his MFA, but two barriers stood in his way. First, he was a slow, meticulous writer with a tendency to procrastinate and, second, he and Nancy produced three children in quick succession (all of us were born in the space of less than four years). Obviously, Dad would need to find some means of providing sustenance and shelter for his helpless brood and their stay-at-home mom. 

    His own father had little confidence in his son, financially or otherwise.  Harry Schuler cleaved to a small-town, middle-America ethos of practical investment and productive physical labor. With his brother, Dement, he owned a lumberyard, a down-at-the-heels hotel that functioned primarily as an SRO for impoverished men, and three mid-sized tenant farms.  Nancy once told me that Dad asked his father for a stipend to tide him over until the book was finished, but Harry demurred. Not that my grandfather lacked the means to help out; he was just convinced he’d be throwing good money after bad. 

   So, the young couple decided to explore another, somewhat farfetched possibility.  Following in the footsteps of one of his uncles, Bill left my infant brother in the care of his mother and, bride in hand, took the train to Southern California.  He had been hooked by the emerging high fidelity movement and believed a good living could be had selling HiFi components in or around Los Angeles.

    Lacking start-up capital this dream died aborning, and Dad was forced to return to Dixon with his tail between his legs and a second child (yours truly) now in the oven.  But Bill Schuler was still young and strong, and Harry was in need of someone to run one of his farms.  The son wanted nothing less than to be his father’s lacky, but it was that or starve.

    Of course, Dad was a city boy and knew next to nothing about agriculture and farming.  And, while his father profited from farming, he had never put his own hand to a plough.  But Harry had always fancied the idea of working the land, so in the end father and son entered into an awkward partnership of sorts.

    The two of them studied up on agronomy and picked the brains of those with more experience in animal husbandry and cultivating row crops. Still, their mistakes were legion.  They purchased heifers, but the bull they brought in to impregnate these damsels was a monster.  When calving time arrived, the poor creatures were too large to pass through the birth canal and the younger partner was reducing to pulling them free with a rope attached to a tractor.  Regrettably, this crude technique often cost both the mother and her offspring their lives.

    Then there were the state-of-the-art blue glass silos Harry bought to store silage for the cattle. These they filled with corn cuttings that contained excessive moisture. The contents compacted, fermented, and couldn’t be emptied with the auger.  Ultimately, the forty-foot towers had to be cleaned out by hand.

    Nor did the corn and soybeans fare much better.  The property itself was beautiful, with a forested back forty and a spring-fed stream filled with flashing minnows and banks of crisp watercress. But the soil was sandy and nutrient poor, vulnerable to drought and capable of modest yields, at best.  Harry lost money and, through it all, kept his frustrated son on a subsistence-level salary.

   There was little opportunity to plug away at the unfinished novel, and after four years of servitude, Dad decided to call it quits with farming. He was able to convince his father to provide him with a rent free, century-old house in town that was unoccupied at the time. The plan was for Nancy to find an OT position while he buckled down and completed the graduate school project.  My siblings and I were all of school age by now, which afforded mother the freedom to leave home during the day. She was quickly hired to work at an industrial-scale residential facility for developmentally disabled adults just outside of Dixon.  Before too much time had passed, she was promoted to supervisor with an appreciable bump in pay.

    We lived uneventfully in that drafty house for two years, during which Dad did cross the finish line with his writing project.  Unfortunately, the seven-year window he had been granted to complete his thesis had now closed and he never received his MFA.  But publication had always been his primary goal anyway, so he submitted “The Little Men” to several major firms, one of whose editors wrote approvingly of the novel and sent a $100.00 advance while they pondered the matter further.

    But in the end, no one followed through.  It seems that enough time had elapsed since World War II that the market for this genre had pretty much collapsed. Dad filed away his rejection letters, perhaps as a reminder of the publishing world’s folly.

   With his authorial ambitions thwarted, Dad accepted his father’s offer of a second farm, which proved more productive than the first and didn’t involve raising livestock. He would now place his emphasis on grain crops - corn, soybeans, oats - the sale of which, supplemented by Nancy’s OT income, provided a modicum of financial security.  Cash flow was now healthy enough for him to purchase better equipment and make much needed repairs to the sheds and barn.  And then, liberation day arrived. 

    This is how it happened.  Shortly after we’d settled into the new farm, Harry decided that a vintage concrete silo attached to the barn had to be emptied of old grain so that it was again serviceable.  The structure hadn’t been used for quite some time, and what remained of its contents was infested with mold.  Harry’s plan was for he and Bill to shovel it all out, but the younger man refused, feeling the task would be too hazardous. Harry dismissed his son’s concerns and proceeded to tackle the job himself. 

    The outcome was predictable but still tragic. Prolonged inhalation of toxic mold resulted in emphysema, to which Harry succumbed at age sixty-two. Dad inherited the farm, together with the decrepit Dixon hotel, which was soon sold and torn down. Now he could invest the fruits of his labor without fear of his penurious father’s disapproval.

    Soon there was a Glastron power boat for recreation on the muddy Rock River that lapped against our property. New cars were purchased, and expensive SLR cameras.  Dad converted a basement cubby to a combination office and darkroom, where he developed and printed the photos he’d begun taking in earnest.  We never felt impoverished, and with no cattle to feed, cows to milk, or lambs to sheer my father could enjoy a long hiatus from farm work throughout the winter months. 

    But there was still the novel nagging at him.  At the urging of his former classmate who had landed a teaching position at Carlton College, Dad signed up for a professional writer’s clinic in Breadloaf, Vermont. He hoped to receive some feedback from successful authors about how to make the book more appealing to prospective publishers.  As Nancy glumly reported in one of her journals, he returned from that trip crushed.  One writer he held in high esteem pretty much panned “The Little Men,” extending little hope that it would ever find its way into bookstores. After that, my father seldom sat down at his typewriter to compose anything longer than a letter.

    Dad never really took to life on the farm and I suspect he regarded the work as beneath him. Nevertheless, he did acquire some new skills: the ability to plow a straight furrow (which made him proud, according to Nancy), use an acetylene torch to repair a piece of equipment, and how to analyze the commodity market well enough to make a profit. Still, it distressed him that this low-status occupation might be something he was stuck with.  

    Several years passed, during which Dad - now on the far side of forty - contemplated his future.  But then, a miracle of sorts occurred (at least in my father’s eyes).  It seems that a consortium of civic leaders and investors was intent on establishing a community college somewhere between the small cities of Dixon and Sterling/Rock Falls, from which they hoped to draw the greater part of the enrollment. Lo and Behold, our farm’s level fields and riverfront location made it ideally suited for this purpose.  After some dickering, my parents sold three-quarters of their acreage at something above fair market value.  Charles Schuler now had the capital he needed to make a new beginning, but how and where?

    At first, he and his sister and brother-in-law, whose farm adjoined our own, explored the possibility of opening a motel and restaurant on the outskirts of Sterling, based on the assumption that the city was still growing and in an underserved area.  But to make the business viable they would need to procure a liquor license in what was, at the time, a dry township.

Dad circulated a survey, hoping residents would support a ballot initiative ending the prohibition. Not surprisingly, the conservative, God-fearing folks of Palmyra Township signaled overwhelming disapproval, so that ambition was now off the table.

    There was also a country club featuring an eighteen-hole golf course, bowling ally, and banquet hall nearby that had recently come on the market. Dad’s sister thought this would be a solid investment, and also an interesting enterprise to run. Dad wasn’t convinced, and much to his sister’s dismay, opted out of their partnership.

   My father proved to be prescient. The club was labor intensive and never generated enough revenue to support two families.  When my aunt and uncle tried to sell the deteriorating property some twenty years later, the only bid came from the City of Sterling, and it was hardly generous. Once they’d paid off their mortgage, my aunt and uncle had little to show for their two decades of hard work. 

    Aware of their dilemma, one of the college’s founding benefactors introduced Bill and Nancy to a friend - an investment broker named Jim Swanson. The two men quickly hit it off with the handsome and engaging Swanson agreeing to begin a nationwide search for a lucrative property in the hospitality sector.  If successful, he would receive a ten-percent stake in whatever business my parents ended up purchasing.

    Swanson felt that an independently-owned franchise – like a Ramada or Holiday Inn - was their best bet.  At the time, the Tennessee-based Holiday Inn corporation was at the peak of its popularity, drawing middle-class travelers with its full-service promise and high cleanliness standards. Several Inns were on the market in Texas, New Mexico, and Florida.  In the end, my parents closed on a deal that would change their fortunes forever.

    Six months after the contracts were signed, sealed and delivered, the four of us (my brother stayed behind in Illinois to begin college) caravanned from our Rock River homestead to a place that was beautiful beyond my wildest dreams.  Equipped with a decades-old business degree and a newly-minted certificate from the company’s Innkeeper Training School Dad - who knew as little about hotel management as he once did did about farming – assumed control of the Naples Holiday Inn.

    Nancy, ever the compliant wife, had sacrificed the job and the colleagues she loved but discovered rewarding work and new friends in the family business.  My sister and I had mixed feelings about the transition, since both of us had been thriving at Dixon High School.  As for our two forlorn mongrel dogs, Dad declined to bring them with us.  I was assigned the thankless task of delivering them to the local shelter, but it wasn’t until years later that I grasped the full implications of that callous abandonment.

     Dad’s first year of proprietorship featured a good deal of anxiety. Unexpected expenses cropped up, and a hotel manager he’d hired was caught dipping into the cash drawer. My parents feared they had bitten off more than they could chew and would run out of capital. Chastened by these setbacks, Dad decided he needed to step up to the plate and take on the responsibilities of management himself (after all, wasn’t that what he had been trained to do?) while placing the food and beverage end of the business in the hands of an experienced restauranter. I had barely dipped a toe in the warm water of the Gulf before being pressed into service as, successively, a dishwasher, busboy, handyman, houseboy and front desk clerk. 

    Fortunately, Naples was just beginning its ascent into the tropical resort stratosphere, and our Holiday Inn was one of only a handful of full-service providers in a rapidly expanding market.  The work was demanding and, like dairy farming, never-ending: our doors were open three-hundred and sixty-five days a year and every hour of the twenty-four. 

    But there was also no shortage of advantages.  Under “Mr. D”, our resourceful food and beverage manager, the Holiday Inn became popular with the local clientele.  The business reliably earned high marks from corporate inspectors, and photos from that era reveal a self-satisfied and impeccably groomed middle-aged man sitting behind a desk with a plaque before him reading “Mr. Big.”  A promotional poster that my father cherished shows him leaning against a colorful Holiday Inn float that had been created for Collier county’s annual Swamp Buggy Parade. Surrounding him are three lithesome blondes in scanty attire.

    Nancy was convinced that in the irrelevancy of old age Bill answered the Sirens’ call to Naples because it was the scene of his greatest success.  In the late 1960’s Naples was still a small coastal community, free from the traffic and shapeless high rises of a Miami Beach or even a Sarasota. Here a businessman like my father could be feted by the Jaycees, saluted by his peers, and acquire a reputation as an enterprising entrepreneur.  Still, all the approbation did little to satisfy his primary ambition in life.  He longed for something more artistic - and immortalizing - than was reachable for any mere businessman.

A Passion for Wheels

    Once my ninety-four-year-old father - frail, wobbly and hunched over with kyphosis - had taken up residence at the Naples Edgewater Beach Hotel, I didn’t hear much from him. We had talked on the phone on a near-weekly basis when my parents lived in Jacksonville, and he was always chatty and happy for the chance to pontificate even to an audience of one.  But now our conversations were sporadic at best, and even then, he had little to say.  Charles Schuler had apparently reached the stage where relationships simply didn’t matter.

    Although Nancy made it clear that she would appreciate her husband’s company during Wisconsin’s temperate summers, he stubbornly refused to revisit the scene of his previous humiliation. Mother reconciled herself to living alone in their Madison apartment for nine months of the year, looking forward as conditions worsened to a warm winter with Bill at the Edgewater.

  I kept tabs on the apartment while she was gone, paid the bills, and drove her car enough to keep the battery charged. The two of us kept in touch by phone, and because she had rented her own suite across the hall from his, Dad was rarely a party to our perfunctory chit-chats.  If he did happen to be in her room, she would always ask whether he wanted to say “hello” to his son.  On most occasions he responded with a mumbled “No.” 

    Nancy suffered from COPD, chronic asthma and a heart condition which, in combination, dramatically reduced her stamina.  Those trips to and from Naples took their toll, what with the TSA gauntlet to pass through and layovers in either Detroit or Atlanta.  Even traveling first class, and with assistance at the boarding gate, she would have been hard pressed to reach her destination in one piece.  She was also burdened with two sizable suitcases crammed with clothing and toiletries, as well as two over-stuffed carry-ons. Naturally, it fell to me to book the travel, serve as her personal sherpa, rent an appropriate car, and lead her by the hand through the airport maze.

   For these transitions I would only linger in Naples for a day or two, which did provide me with an opportunity to connect, however briefly, with my father and take his measure.  After a year on his own, I found him to be so absorbed in his own private, inner musings that pulling any information out of him was practically impossible. He didn’t have much to say to anyone, including his wife.  

    There was, however, one development he was eager to share with me as Nancy unpacked for her second winter at the Edgewater. At his insistence, I followed him down to the street-level parking garage where he introduced me to “The Red Baron” - a gleaming, fire engine red battery-powered tandem tricycle.  Larger than a Harley-Davidson, fully charged it had a range of about eight miles and a top speed approaching twenty miles per hour.  Best of all, an operator’ license wasn’t required.

   Now, most men his age would have been satisfied with one of those electric scooters you often see poking along the sidewalk in places like Naples.  But for Dad that was simply out of the question. He needed a vehicle that didn’t automatically shout “old” to passersby. This sharp little machine was, in his imagination, age-defying, and (if you can picture this) he even procured a black leather jacket to complete the package.

    I wasn’t really shocked by this new toy, because another of the reasons Dad had been adamant about leaving Wisconsin was loss of his cherished driver's license. Some months after his discharge from the VA his doctors brought him back for a battery of physical and cognitive tests.  The results were concerning, so they sent a report to the Wisconsin Department of Motor Vehicles, and they in turn notified my father that the license he’d been issued the previous year would be revoked. Dad appealed this judgment, to no effect.

    The truth of it is, Charles Schuler shouldn’t have been able to obtain a Wisconsin operator’s license in the first place.  After his Florida permit expired, he made three attempts at our state’s simple written exam before achieving a passing score.  Moreover, with his advanced kyphosis, neck vertebra so frozen he could barely turn his head, deafness, and significant loss of motor control, he was an accident waiting to happen.  

   But Dad was, if nothing else, a master manipulator.  Having finally passed the written portion of the driver’s test, he was now put on the schedule for a behind-the-wheel exam.  For that appointment he showed up wearing a fatigue jacket and a military-style cap bearing the legend, “World War II Combat Veteran.”  Naturally, the middle-aged male examiner coached him through the test and then rewarded the old soldier with an acceptable score.  The state approved him to drive up until his 102nd birthday.

     The subsequent revocation struck Dad as patently unjust, and it reenforced his determination to leave Madison. Aside from its other advantages, he believed that, having resumed his residency, he would be able to play on the sympathies of the local DMV examiners and obtain a new Florida license.  To insure that his troubles in Wisconsin wouldn’t follow him, he planned to submit his old, expired Florida license to the DMV and withhold the fact that he’d ever held an operator’s permit in Wisconsin.  What he didn’t count on was a nationwide database containing records of revocations and suspensions, which most states rely on when performing background checks. 

   Stymied in his quest for a new license, Dad availed himself of the next best option: procuring a vehicle that could be driven without the DMV’s sanction. A reasonable facsimile of a motorcycle, The Red Baron fit the bill.   

    It is well established that for many men loss of the freedom, flexibility, and power that driving a motor vehicle affords lowers their self-esteem.  This was true for my father in spades. Cars (and boats) figured significantly in his life story and those last years in Naples represented the culmination of a passion that blossomed in his early 20s.

    The first family car I remember riding in was a boxy but practical mustard yellow Mercury station wagon - a vehicle roomy enough to provide three contentious pre-adolescents with a little elbow room.  However, Dad’s “personal” car in the mid-1950’s was a 1948 Willy’s Overland Jeep that he had acquired shortly after he married my mother. That vehicle, with its canvass top and 4-wheel drive, reminded him of his Army days.  Numerous grainy photos from Europe show him standing front-and-center leaning on the fender of his beloved Jeep, with the name of his first wife – Zona – painted on the hood.

   In time, the Willy’s was turned out to pasture, so to speak, to be used for spraying weeds along the fence rows of our farm and running small equipment with its power takeoff.  Dad’s next personal vehicle – purchased only after his father was out of the picture and with a portion of his inheritance – was a classic, low-slung British sports car: the Austin-Healy 3000.  Such an impractical extravagance would have left the older man clutching his head in disbelief.  And it was, in fact, an extremely self-indulgent choice for a man with three growing children. 

    Moreover, with only six inches of clearance the Healy, like many cars in its class, was hardly suited for winter driving in Northern climes.  It’s powerful but finicky six-cylinder engine required constant maintenance, and tuning the three carburetors often tested its owner’s patience and left him sputtering in frustration. Nevertheless, for several years this crimson cruiser was the apple of his eye. I have no doubt he was the only dirt farmer in the upper Midwest with so striking a set of wheels.

     I suspect that one of the reasons he chose this particular model - apart from its classic lines and solid reputation among sports car aficionados - was the fact that it was technically a four-seater. Never mind that the hard bench behind the front buckets was no more comfortable to ride in than a buckboard.  All five of us piled in and cruised to town a few times for rootbeer floats at the Dog-&-Suds or a quick trip down the hairpin turns of nearby Lowell Park.  But then, one sunny Sunday morning, Dad decided we’d take the Healy into Chicago to watch a White Sox game at old Comiskey Park on the Southside.

   Imagine, if you will, three kids, ages ten to twelve, crammed in the backseat of the Healey for that ninety-mile open-air ramble down U.S. 30 to the Congress Expressway and along the lakefront to the stadium. From my vantage point, this felt like something of an adventure, since none of us had spent much time in Dad’s flashy car.  Excitement turned to anxiety when we headed home, as it began to rain. 

    Unlike some high-end sports cars, the 1962 Austin Healey 3000 didn’t come with a roof that could be deployed with the touch of a button. Instead, the canvass and frame assembly was stowed behind the seats and, along with the detachable side windows, took time to unpack and install. So, there we were…stopped on the shoulder of a Chicago expressway, hazard lights flashing, as Dad defied the elements and wrestled with the equipment (thankfully, traffic was light on a late Sunday afternoon). After ten long minutes we were on our way again, damp but not soaked through.

    With the top up and the windows in place, the interior had become more than a little claustrophobic, but after a few miles the rain stopped, the clouds parted, and the top came back off just as we were all feeling like we were trapped in a sauna.

   Within three years the Austin Healey was gone, traded for another rather unusual, but decidedly more sensible vehicle: a Studebaker Gran Turismo Golden Hawk sedan. Jet black, with red leather-clad upholstery, this struck us as a luxury car, and it was, in fact, one of the most attractive models the flagging Studebaker concern ever produced. As it turned out, my father didn’t drive the Hawk nearly as much as Nancy, who used it to commute to work for several years. Until, that is, my bleary brother drove it through a T-intersection and into a ditch while returning from a late-night date. 

    Dad’s penchant for sporty vehicles was hardly sated, and before long he trained his sites on another red convertible that would also turn heads: a customized Ford Mustang.  A few years later, both the Hawk and the Mustang accompanied the family to Florida, and I was occasionally permitted to borrow the latter for dating purposes (otherwise, I made do with the old ’48 Willy’s Jeep, which now sported surfboard racks).  On one occasion I made the mistake of turning off a country road onto what I thought was a gravel lane only to find the Mustang bogged down in the soft and yielding Florida sand. I managed to flag down a passing car whose driver obligingly called a tow truck, but my date was not amused.

    Other cars followed: a nicely appointed Ford Thunderbird, a succession of SUV’s and RV’s with enough torque to tow Dad’s several boats, a Toyota Camry “Gold” edition and, last but not least, a red (what else?) Toyota Prius C. He leased the hybrid at age ninety-three to celebrate his recently acquired but soon-to-be-revoked Wisconsin driver’s license.  That Dad chose a hybrid surprised me, but Trina and I had already owned three such vehicles, so this was almost certainly in keeping with Dad’s perennial game of oneupmanship.   

   Even after the revocation, Dad was undeterred, and continued to commute to and from Starbucks with his compliant spouse in tow.  Fearing that he would have an accident that insurance wouldn’t cover, I took matters into my own hands and contacted the local police, requesting an intervention.  A courteous young officer soon appeared at the apartment and apprised Dad of the legal jeopardy he’d be in if he insisted on driving the Prius.

     Despite the controlled pleasantness of the visit, Dad was steaming, and now more determined than ever to put Wisconsin behind him.  He grudgingly surrendered its keys and the Prius remained securely locked in the garage.  But the matter was hardly settled.  A few months later its counterpart - that bright scarlet trike - would become a familiar sight on Naples’ Gulfshore Blvd.

   During her winter residencies Nancy rode in the jump-seat while her wizened husband set the course, causing more than a little rubber-necking as they puttered along. On my rare visits, the hotel’s concierges would laughingly tell me how “cute” my parents looked when they departed for their daily outing: Bill decked out in his black jacket and aviator glasses, mother swallowed up by her billowing silk scarf and safety helmet. 

    Far from being “cute” this was a source of considerable worry for us children.  Dad couldn’t turn his head to see traffic or pedestrians approaching from the side, his hearing was shot, and his reflexes unreliable.  He was clearly a danger both to himself and others.  Mother, ever faithful ever loyal, minimized our concerns, saying, “Your father is alert to his surroundings and relies on his side mirrors.”  She was also sympathetic to her husband’s plight.  “It’s very important that he retain some measure of independence and agency,” she argued, personal safety and potential liability notwithstanding.

    One might think that at age ninety-five, the Red Baron would have satisfied Charles W. Schuler’s need for autonomy, but this was not to be the case.  Soon he was complaining about the limitations of his shiny toy and began searching for something with more get-up-and-go and an extended range. At the time, that necessitated a transition back to gasoline power.

   Soon he had put in an order for a streamlined jet-black trike with a top speed of well over twenty miles per hour. It was actually advertised as a “motorcycle,” but one for which an operator’s permit was not required. I found that claim rather dubious, but apparently the local constabulary had never checked it out.  It was also a single seater, with no accommodation for a second rider.  When Nancy returned for her third Naples winter, she’d be on her own. Dad’s choice was probably by design, since he was now beyond wanting a companion, including his wife of seventy years, on his daily outings.  The Red Baron wasn’t going anywhere but, for the most part, it sat tethered to its charging cable in the garage. In both appearance and deportment, my old man had created a new persona: the “Wild One.”

Clothes Make the (Wo)man

Dad’s new wardrobe and accessories were meant to complement his sporty little cycle.  Although most of his thin, lank hair had disappeared, he let the few gray strands that remained grow out so that it could be gathered into an absurd looking ponytail.  When I asked mother how her fumbling husband managed to create this faux-sixties look she chuckled. “One of his admirers on the hotel staff helps with his hair.” For a generous gratuity, I’d wager. 

    Although my father had never worn jewelry, not even a wedding ring, he was now heavy into bling. Two imposing shark’s teeth mounted in gold hung from a double chain around his neck, set off by the leather jacket mentioned earlier.  He’d also acquired another piece of outerwear - a distressed leather bomber jacket with its trademark fleece collar.  He only wore this costly garment once or twice before declaring it uncomfortably heavy. No joke: the jacket literally swallowed up his gaunt frame.  But rather than return this luxury item for a refund, he sloughed it off on a portly member of the hotel’s maintenance staff. Easy come, easy go. 

    At this point, Dad’s parchment-like skin had become so sensitive that he spent most of the day in gray cotton sweats, saving his stud apparel for afternoon jaunts on his precious trike. 

     Although sensible Nancy faithfully wore a helmet when Dad squired her around on the Red Baron, he threw safety to the winds, choosing to venture out instead with a simple black bill cap adorned with a white skull-and-crossbones. Aside from the U.S. Army rifleman’s pin that he still affixed to the breast pocket of all his jackets, he had now pretty much given up on the military look.  These days his aim was hipness, and the only visible concession to old age that he made were on his feet: sneakers secured with Velcro.

    While I was mildly amused when I first beheld his new getup, Nancy was nonchalant - perhaps because the hotel staff signaled their appreciation for this “cute,” but rather peculiar, permanent fixture.  And, while one could not help but notice the incongruity of it all - a bent-over, beady-eyed nonagenarian shuffling behind his walker and tricked out like the Fonz — those of us who had lived with Charles Schuler appreciated that this most recent incarnation wasn’t out of character.  Bill Schuler was, and always had been vain, fixated on his appearance even at a very young age.

    One photo from the early 1930’s depicts a boy, perhaps ten years old, posing beside his bicycle. He wears a neutral expression and looks like a character out of “The Little Rascals in his button-down shirt, knickers and knee socks. A beret is perched jauntily over his narrow eyes.  It is one of the few likenesses from his childhood that my father kept in a portfolio of family pictures, indicating that he thought quite highly of the image.

    Black-and-whites from his teenage years again depict a blossoming youth striving to look mature. His dress was always impeccable, and with his lean frame he wore clothes well. I have never seen a truly candid picture of my father; he was always posing, regarding the camera with a serious, sidelong glance. 

    It was a matter of some dispute among family members whether it was Bill’s decision to attend St. John’s Military School or his father’s, perhaps with the hope of instilling discipline in an unruly lad.  As indicated earlier, Dad always insisted that he wanted to play ice hockey, a sport the local public high school didn’t offer.  Whatever his motivation (and despite a lifelong uneasiness with authority) he was clearly attracted by the smart St. John’s dress uniforms.  He even flashed a rare smile when the camera captured him on parade.  

    Family albums contain a substantial collection of photos taken while Dad was stationed in Europe.  I presume he asked his colleagues to snap these pictures using the German-made Leica he had picked up in a trade for coffee.  In most of these shots he occupies the center of the frame: standing amidst the rubble of bombed-out buildings, sharing a smoke with members of his platoon, leaning against “Zona” the jeep. Whether in war or peace, his expression was the same: no-nonsense and tight-lipped.

    The assortment also contained two handsome studio portraits in which he poses in formal officer’s apparel.  These he was particularly proud of, and he did cut a handsome figure.  In his early nineties Dad joined Facebook, and in the process of setting up a personal account he chose for his homepage one of these now-ancient studio productions from his days serving in Patton’s Third Army. That photo has achieved a measure of immortality on the Web since his demise.

    The pictorial record of Dad’s post-war University days at Kansas is negligible.  There are several snapshots – nothing remotely formal - of him and Nancy in the aftermath of their wedding.  One highlights the newlyweds standing outside the minister’s study where the brief ceremony took place. Several more were taken at Rainy Lake in northern Minnesota, the setting Dad chose for their honeymoon. In one of these, Nancy stands beside their pup tent looking rather disconsolate, an empty canoe sitting forlornly behind her on the shoreline,

    More notable was another studio portrait of Dad decked out in a fashionable tweed jacket, starched shirt, and expertly knotted tie.  A cigarette dangles tantalizingly from his lips. Nancy lovingly referred to this as his “Robert Mitchum” look, but its intent was to project the image of a winsome, up-and-coming young author.  Mother wasn’t half wrong: Dad cut an impressive figure in these touched-up studio portraits, and one could certainly imagine one of them gracing the flyleaf of a best-selling novel. (If there were any comparable photographs of Nancy, they didn’t find their way into the albums).     

    Even as a dissatisfied farmer, Dad cared about his appearance. No bib overalls or plaid work shirts for him. He always dressed in tan khaki chinos and matching mail-order shirts with military-style epaulets on the shoulders. Long sleeves were a must, to protect his fair skin. And again, the same aviator-style glasses from his time in the service and that he preferred throughout his long life.  Perhaps his objective was to stand out from the rural hoy-polloi and show the world he was a proud and talented man stuck in a necessary, but thankless role.  

    Later, as a hotelier in Naples, Dad needed a new look. In keeping with his elevated status and the garish mid-century fashions of south Florida, Dad abandoned the staid khakis for pastel sports jackets and patterned neckties.  Once a year, a salesperson rented one of our rooms for a week and measured men and women for hand-tailored Hong Kong silk suits and dresses.  I’m guessing these gentlemen settled their bill, at least in part, with merchandise given to the management. Whatever arrangement they made, several of Hong Kong Tailor’s colorful, fitted sports jackets ended up in Dad’s wardrobe. 

    Once he’d abandoned the business and taken up sport fishing, the khakis made a comeback. Only on rare occasions - delivering a talk at the Unitarian Universalist fellowship or celebrating his and Nancy’s anniversary - did he pull a coat and tie from his closet.

    But then there were the dresses and lingerie - Bill’s, not Nancy’s - that our father fancied.  He was a crossdresser (or transvestite, to use an out-of-fashion term) and from what I can gather it’s a fetish that took hold while he was still a young adult.  According to his sister, this little quirk in his personality more than likely contributed to the dissolution of his marriage to his first wife.  My aunt Bonnie was friendly with Zona, and at some point she may have revealed his secret, or perhaps Zona discovered it on her own. In any case, it was the sort of “hobby” a small-town Kansas girl could never have come to terms with.

   Dad never lost his taste for women’s apparel.  After he fell and was hospitalized in Naples, Trina and I took on the task of emptying his hotel suite.  In addition to the leather jackets and sweatpants, we discovered pantyhose and other pieces of feminine apparel in his bureau drawers.

    I’d became aware of my father’s kinkiness years before.  He wasn’t always that discreet and as a nosy teenager I ran across a photo someone (probably Nancy) snapped of him decked out in a convincing wig, knee-length dress, and heels.  I had wandered into his basement study to poke around, and while Dad normally kept his personal effects under lock-and-key, on this occasion he carelessly left the picture on top of his desk. The Kinsey Report, which occupied a conspicuous niche on the brick & board bookshelf in our living room, was a volume I’d already dipped into surreptitiously.  So I knew what I was looking at.

     I was startled, but not particularly scandalized by the discovery.  Neither of my parents presented as sexual prudes, and there were any number of sexually-oriented books lined up on that same bookcase, works by Henry Miller, Frank Harris, D.H. Lawrence, among others.  Still, a half-century would pass before I divulged this family secret to my siblings, only to find out that years earlier my sister had also been made aware of her father’s crossdressing (my evangelical older brother, not so much). 

   Bill and Nancy had kept their boys in the dark, fearing we would think less of our father if we knew the truth.  My sister, on the other hand, was an unashamed lesbian, and the folks presumed she would be more tolerant of her father’s gender “confusion.”  The revelation probably didn’t do much to alter her estimation of the poor man, since she had long ago written him off as a misogynist.

    Once the cat was out of the bag, Nancy became more forthcoming about how uncomfortable her husband’s “hobby” made her feel. It seems Bill had never been content to play dress-up in private; on the contrary, he was determined to prove that he could “pass” as an attractive female in public spaces. As “Charlene” he insisted that Nancy accompany him on weekend trips, first to Madison and Chicago and, after moving to Florida, to Fort Myers and Miami.

    Dad retired from Innkeeping at the still-youthful age of fifty-one, and immediately purchased an RV in which he and Nancy crisscrossed the country. Dad, in his khakis, photographed the countryside by day and waltzed into cocktail lounges and restaurants in drag at day’s end. Nancy accompanied him despite a constant dread of exposure, which could have meant ridicule at best and jail time at worst.  “My husband took a kind of perverse pride in cutting a more attractive figure than me,” she ruefully confessed.

     In the journals where she recorded her private thoughts and concerns, mother also expressed frustration with her husband for making clothing purchases which, in the years before the Holiday Inn began to pay healthy dividends, they could hardly afford.  Another entry described a series of pricy defoliation treatments he endured hoping that his worries about five o’clock shadow would be over.

    Whether dressed as a man or a woman, until the end of his life Charles Schuler never could transcend his own vanity.   

The Old Man and the Sea

  Those first two winters back in Naples, Dad was eager to venture into the Gulf of Mexico where he had spent so much of his leisure time during his sixtieth decade.  Ever-indulgent but practical-minded Nancy suggested that they hire a charter boat if he wanted to fish. Initially, Dad seemed open to letting someone else do the heavy lifting while he dropped his line at the artificial reefs whose locations were familiar to the charter captains.  But after one or two such outings, he announced that this sort of angling was a poor substitute for the pleasure one experiences captaining one’s own personal watercraft.

    When I learned of Dad’s intention to purchase a boat, my reaction was swift and uncompromising.  It was, in short, a crazy idea.  The man was ninety-four and so unsteady on his feet that he couldn’t take ten steps without the aid of a walker.  He’d already lost his driving privileges because of physical and cognitive insufficiency.  Did Nancy really imagine he was capable of climbing into and clambering about in a rocking vessel, maneuvering it into and out of a tight marina berth, keeping the craft within the channel markers, and managing the swells in the open Gulf?

    Mother heard me out, but was noncommittal. Shortly thereafter she drove their rental car to a Naples dealer who, despite the prospective purchaser’s appearance, was more than willing to sell my father a sea-worthy vessel. Dad put down a deposit but, a few days later, asked for it back. I never discovered the reason for this reversal, but it’s likely mother had taken my objections seriously and conveyed them to her husband.  In any case, that marked the end of his Captain Courageous fantasy.    

    The subject never arose again.  There were one or two more charter excursions, then Dad called it quits.  On one of these trips, he returned quite irritated because Nancy had reeled in a good-sized specimen while he was skunked. On their last outing the Gulf was so stirred up that they were forced to spend much of the time below deck waiting for conditions to improve, which they never did.  As it was, even on a relatively placid sea Dad had difficulty maintaining his balance and struggled with the heavy fishing tackle.  In the end, none of that really mattered: if he couldn’t fish from his own boat, the activity held little appeal. 

    As was his wont, Dad prepared for his return to fishing by investing in high-end gear: rods, reels, tackle, foul weather outerwear. During our “excavation” of his hotel suite while he was hospitalized, we discovered in a closet several unblemished heavy-duty rods and at least four expensive casting and spinning reels, two of which were still in their original boxes.  A foot-locker contained a scramble of jigs, hooks and weights, packages of live bait preserved in brine, as well as an assortment of storm jackets and nautical caps. He clearly envisioned a heroic return to the angler’s life.  Instead, this sad collection merely attested to his stubborn unwillingness to face the facts. 

    Growing up on the banks of the Rock River I spent many sultry summer days fishing for catfish and bullheads, which Dad taught me to clean, then grill over an open wood fire.  He also schooled me in the use of a spinning reel while I stood on the wooden dock he had built.  In those days he rarely dipped a hook in the water himself, although it was something he recalled doing with pleasure during his own boyhood.  We later acquired an aluminum rowboat that allowed me to venture into the current in search of more productive fishing holes.  Eventually, Dad purchased the second-hand Glastron power boat already mentioned.  It was powered by a 35HP Evinrude outboard that elicited fits of cursing as Dad repeatedly yanked on the starter cord until it sputtered to life.  We didn’t often fish from that craft; its primary function was to provide a modicum of relief from the summer heat and to pull us kids out of the murky river and onto the surface with our water skis. 

    That modest craft accompanied us to Florida, but its hull never touched saltwater. For a few years it sat neglected on its trailer behind the Holiday Inn and eventually was either sold, stolen, or given away.  Those first years in Naples, Dad and Mom were too preoccupied with managing the business to even think about recreational boating. 

    Even after leaving the Inn and becoming a man of leisure, Dad seemed disinclined to spend much time in or around the water.  He wasn’t a beach-goer (to much sun for his fragile skin) and joining the leathery hangers-on at the Naples fishing pier was too blue-collar for his taste. Instead, he and Nancy became road warriors, driving a succession of RV’s up and down the East Coast and into the desert Southwest.  But there were mishaps, breakdowns, and medical emergencies that tainted these adventures and after a few years they settled back into their Naples cocoon.

    Perhaps out of sheer boredom, Dad finally decided to take advantage of his proximity to the bountiful Gulf of Mexico.  Over the next decade or so he bought three boats, trading up each time. At first there was the eighteen-foot Boston Whaler designed for exploring the coastal bays and inlets and the open water close to shore.  When fish nearby became scarce, Dad made the jump to a boat three times as large and outfitted with a cabin.  This made excursions to reefs further offshore, with their abundant schools of grouper and snapper, feasible.  Dad also envisioned overnight trips, which would allow him to begin pursuing his quarry at daybreak.  But this particular craft was a tub, pitching and rolling when the seas got a little rough. So, Dad went for broke and put his money down on a sleek, thirty-two-foot Bertrand, a vessel highly regarded by the sport fishing crowd.  With its superior seaworthiness and speed, this boat gave him the confidence to venture out of sight of land, using GPS and Loran equipment to find the reefs and wrecks that guaranteed a good haul.

     Charles Schuler was not after big game - the magnificent marlin, swordfish, and tarpon that figure prominently in promotional materials touting Florida’s salt water bounty.  Early in his fishing career he did land an impressive tarpon, had it mounted, and gave it a permanent home in the living room.  But after that he concentrated on protein he and Nancy could eat. It’s not that he had any ethical qualms about trophy fishing, but he was too impatient to spend hours and days trolling for the kind of prey Hemingway stalked.  And, he had developed a real fondness for seafood.  He and Nancy bought a substantial chest freezer, they learned how to prepare the fillets for prolonged cold-storage, and then dined on the fruits of their labor two or three times each week.

    Neither of my siblings cared a whit for fishing, so during sporadic visits to Naples it became my assigned role to play first mate on what had become near-daily outings. I wasn’t overly enthusiastic about spending my short vacations from parish ministry bouncing on the waves with my indefatigable father.  However, my participation did grant mother a much-deserved respite from her husband's obsessive-compulsive need to put out to sea. Dad was an anxious person, and I now believe this constituted for him a form of self-care. 

    Unfortunately, this wasn’t simply a matter of spending a few hours kicked back on the Gulf’s azure surface, waiting for the familiar tug of a grouper grabbing a piece of cut mullet. Fishing far out in the Gulf was of necessity a day-long affair.  Dad checked the off-shore weather forecasts and the tide reports, often leaving for the marina before sunrise.  Nancy packed sandwiches, cookies, and iced tea for their late-morning repast. 

    By the time the coconut palms along the shoreline were visible in the early light the bow rope had been coiled on the foredeck, and the bleary twosome was idling down Naples Bay toward Gordon Pass.  After negotiating the tricky chop at the mouth of the Pass, Dad set his GPS and headed for the spots where grouper were known to frequent. The trip took an hour or more each way, with three to four hours dedicated to the endeavor itself.  Then, back at the marina, the catch had to be eviscerated and the boat scrubbed down.  This was a pattern Dad followed with little deviation week after week, month after month, through his sixties.

    Although intensely private, Charles Schuler seldom ventured out by himself.  However, he was only really comfortable with his wife or, when convenient, his middle child.  On rare occasions he would invite one of his few friends to share the experience.  Why not more often?  Was he afraid of being shown-up by another party?  Did he worry about the distraction of having to engage in small-talk with a guest, or perhaps feel obliged “show them a good time?”  Was he self-conscious about his own noticeable quirks?  

    In his own home, or at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship they frequented, Dad was something of a raconteur who enjoyed regaling a captive audience with his existentialist talking points and cynical analysis of the human condition. He kept up with current events, but this was not something he wanted to dwell on while fishing. On the boat he was a study in concentration, a state of mind Nancy and I had learned to respect.  I actually appreciated Dad’s reticence because on most other occasions I’d feel obliged to listen respectfully to his monologues.    

    By the time he turned seventy, Dad’s enthusiasm for saltwater fishing, and for Naples itself, was waning. The city’s population had exploded and the once-charming coastal backwater had become a developer’s paradise.  As far as the fishing was concerned, an influx of commercial boats had put people like my father at a disadvantage.  At this point, Dad began thinking about a fresh water lake as a viable alternative.  A roomy contemporary home on the south shore of Lake June in Highland County caught his eye, and reports of an abundance of small mouth bass cinched the deal.     

     Nancy was fain to leave Naples since she had developed social connections in the community and enjoyed her role as pianist for the Unitarian Universalist fellowship.  But, ever the good sport, she acceded to her husband’s desire. Unfortunately, Dad’s impatience to leave Naples proved improvident; real estate values had declined and my parents sold their home of nineteen years for a bargain basement price (a decade later it had appreciated by nearly 200%).  Thanks to the Holiday Inn, money wasn’t really an issue: their assets would allow them to purchase just about any property they wanted.

    Alas, Lake June proved less productive in the fish department than Dad had anticipated.  Although their wooded one-acre lot featured a sturdy dock where he parked his new speedboat, too many other lakeshore residents had the same idea. Excessive traffic kept the lake too agitated for fish to thrive, never mind the steady whine of jet skis and other high-powered pleasure craft.  Moreover, the sweltering central Florida summers were an unwelcome change; there were no onshore breezes to help dissipate the heat.

    But Dad had yet another solution: they would seek out a more agreeable climate to which they could escape during the months when they would otherwise be trapped in their air-conditioned home.  Their first stop was Rainy Lake, where they had honeymooned years earlier.  The following summer they crossed the border into western Ontario, booking a week’s stay at one of the many fishing camps on Lake of the Woods.  Here he snagged enough walleye (or, more accurately, they hooked him) to convince Dad that he had found his summer paradise. 

     After a search of the area’s real estate listings, Dad purchased a snug cottage on Coney Island, a short trip by boat from the city of Kenora.  The site was relatively private, with dense vegetation and deep inlets separating their property from that of their nearest neighbors.  But it wasn’t remote, which suited my father just fine.  He liked to feel isolated, but he also appreciated the convenience of a nearby grocery store and bait-and-tackle shop. Thoreau’s paean to wilderness – “In wildness is the preservation of the world” would have been lost on my father. 

     My parents would spend the next fifteen or so summers at their cabin, arriving around Memorial Day and returning after Labor Day, at which point temperatures on the Canadian Shield were dipping into the low fifties.  As was their wont, when the weather was decent, the couple spent several hours fishing out of a generic bass boat, typically catching more than enough walleye, and an occasional northern pike, for their evening meal.  The whole process was far less time consuming than it had been in Naples, as most of the known fishing grounds were within a half-hour of their cottage.  Maintaining a boat in fresh water was also a lot easier than when it was exposed to salt water.

    Thankfully, my parent’s life in Canada consisted of more than fishing.  The Lake of the Woods proved to be the perfect outlet for an amateur photographer (more on this topic later), and Dad took scores of pictures of the native wildlife, including black bear, beaver, fox, loons and other waterfowl. Nancy studied up on the local flora, made pies from wild blueberries, and wrote dispatches from Coney Island that found their way (accompanied by her husband’s photos), into Kenora’s weekly tourist news.

     But then Dad stopped fishing almost as abruptly as he had started.  Now in their early eighties, Nancy and Bill were finding the five-day pilgrimages from Florida to Canada too physically and emotionally demanding. They would spend a good month preparing for these seasonal transitions, and another two weeks repacking and buttoning down the cabin for their return. 

    Dad did little to make these long drives more tolerable. In keeping with his obsessive nature, year after year he and Nancy followed the same well-beaten path up the Interstate, stayed in the same motels, ate at the same chain restaurants, and declined any and all opportunities to experience something new.  Any departure from routine interfered with his goal, which was to reach Coney Island as quickly as his tightly packed Toyota 4-Runner would take him.    

    I wasn’t fully aware of how rigid and inflexible he’d become until we prepared to celebrate his ninetieth birthday in Madison.  A few years had passed since the Canadian cottage had become a thing of memory, and he and Nancy were now living in Jacksonville.  For purposes of this party, I had flown to Florida to retrieve my parents and chauffeur them to Wisconsin. 

    The first two days in the car went smoothly enough, with Dad calmly accepting my refusal to let him drive part of the time.   He still seemed at ease until we reached southern Illinois, at which point I left the Interstate in favor of U.S. Route 51 – a scenic red road that cut forty miles off the journey and provided a welcome respite from dueling with those panic-inducing eighteen-wheelers.  

    But Dad was quick to call me out.  I assured him that I knew what I was doing, and that I’d taken this same detour on previous occasions.  Well, he was having none of it, and did his best to make the next hour and a half as uncomfortable as possible.  He only cooled back down when we again merged onto the Interstate east of Bloomington.

     For much of the second half of his life fishing was an exceptionally important pastime for my father, but it had all the hallmarks of a process addiction. I’m not sure whether it was the activity itself – the satisfaction that came with honing one’s skill and catching one’s own dinner – that held him in thrall, or simply the calming effects of being out on the water, free of any sense of obligation to others and at a safe distance from society’s constraints. It was probably some of both. 

     In the end, Dad showed his hand while an inpatient at the VA hospital.  The rest of the family had gathered in the visitation room to review his aborted attempt at self-harm.  As we queried him, he sat across from us in a hospital gown, legs and arms crossed in a defiant posture. He listened quietly as we each spoke in turn.  Having had our say, we asked him to share his own thoughts.  He glared at the four of us and declared, “You know, the happiest moments in my life were spent out on my boat, sixteen miles removed from the rest of the human race.” 

    None of us were shocked by this admission, but I was surprised that he said out loud what he’d always felt: that “Hell is other people.”

Guns R Us

   I flew down to Naples on March 18, 2019 to retrieve Nancy and bring her and her hernia-inducing load of luggage back to the Madison apartment.  We left the Edgewater on the 20th, booked on a Delta flight out of Fort Myers.  We would be changing planes in Detroit, which I wasn’t looking forward to since getting a 95-year-old from one gate to another was something of an ordeal.    

    My sister had also come to Naples, mostly for the purpose of taking a personal vacation on my parent’s tab.  She rode to the airport in our rental, rather than board a shuttle later on for her flight to Washington D.C. six hours later.  She assured us that passing the time in an airport was never a problem as she had plenty to read.  But the truth of the matter is, she didn’t want to spend any more time with her father than absolutely necessary. Indeed, as we had headed out of his suite and Nancy and I were saying our good-bye’s, Catherine turned her back on us and pointedly refused to wish her father well.  “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth,” I thought to myself.

    Dad took a bad fall the very next morning while preparing pancakes on his hotplate.  As he went down, his head struck either the protruding handle of the refrigerator or the sharp corner of the kitchen counter; he ended up with a nasty gash just above his hairline.  He didn’t lose consciousness, and used his cell phone to call the front desk for help. His scalp was bleeding profusely so the concierge decided to summon an ambulance. Dad was still in the emergency room receiving treatment when I received a call alerting me to the situation.

    As it turned out, the head wound - though rather grisly looking – was superficial; there was no evidence of skull fracture, concussion or any other deeper trauma.  But owing to Dad’s advanced age, the attending doctors decided to hospitalize him in order to ascertain whether some other health related issues might need attention.  Tests confirmed a urinary tract infection, and there was also a weeping pressure ulcer on his lower back attributable to prolonged sitting and poor hygiene. Dad also underwent a CT scan which revealed marked deterioration in the prefrontal cortex, probably stemming from a series of TIA’s, or small strokes. This piece of information was passed on to a neuropsychologist, who administered a battery of competency tests.

    The results were predictable.  Dad had undergone a similar assessment three years before at the VA hospital in Madison.  A number of deficiencies related to impulse control, executive function, and problem solving were documented and the new tests reaffirmed those findings and then some.  “Your father lacks capacity,” the Naples psychologist confided to me. “You really ought to begin thinking seriously about guardianship.”

    Nancy was her husband’s POA for both health care and finance, but she didn’t know which way to turn and was afraid of her husband’s reaction if she questioned his competency. On the advice of her attorney, she surrendered her authority for his welfare to me.  Still exhausted from the recent return to Madison, she conceded that she simply wasn’t strong enough to go back down.  Since Dad would remain hospitalized for an indeterminate period, Trina and I (recently retired) flew to Florida on our own in order to sort things out.  As we readied ourselves for the trip, I sought out a competent elder law attorney in Naples who could walk us through the guardianship process. 

    But before we touched down in Fort Myers my addled father did something quite foolish.  Unbeknownst to me (but not to Nancy) he had somehow procured a 9mm pistol, most likely through the good offices of a hotel employee.  Now, in a state less permissive than Florida, his documented history of mental illness would have disqualified him from owning a firearm. In Naples, however, he was even able to obtain a concealed carry permit. Dad kept his gun in a drawer next to his bed. But once in the hospital, and knowing that I would soon be back in the picture and have full access to his suite, he worried that I would discover the gun and confiscate it.  In a panic, he called one of the more obliging concierges at the hotel, asking her to retrieve the item and bring it to his room in the hospital.

     This badly thought-out plan went south when either a nurse or an orderly overheard him making the request (hard of hearing, Dad tended to raise his voice when on his cell phone).  Hospital security was alerted, and Dad placed under a secure twenty-four-hour watch.  Under Florida law, a hospitalized person who is deemed to be a threat to themselves or others is “Baker-Acted.”  Visitation is restricted to immediate family members, and then only under close supervision.

    When Trina and I arrived in Naples we immediately drove to the hospital and duly identified ourselves to the receptionist. When we asked for Charles Schuler’s room number she gave us a suspicious look, and asked that we step away from the counter and over to the waiting area.  A few minutes later, three rather formidable looking young men in security uniforms accosted us, demanding identification.  Satisfied with our documentation, they then proceeded to empty Trina’s purse and my briefcase, frisk the two of us, before escorting us to my father’s 9th floor room. 

    We were still clueless as to the reason for all this attention, but as we walked to the elevator the head of security explained why we had been detained.  The story, so typical of my father, almost made me laugh. 

    Before checking in with the patient, I called the Edgewater and instructed the manager to secure Dad’s suite. Later that same day I located the pistol and a box of ammunition where we had expected.  I have never owned a handgun and wasn’t comfortable leaving it in the room, so we immediately drove to the Naples police station, explained the situation to the desk officer, and turned the gun in.  The only question we were asked was, “Do you think you’ll want it back?”  We assured him that it was the Department’s to dispose of.

     After that initial challenge by security, we were able to come and go from the hospital without restriction. Dad, however, was under constant surveillance.  A plain-clothes observer sat impassively near the door to ensure that his hapless charge didn’t take flight, or interact with any unauthorized visitors.  Dad didn’t seem overly distressed by this stranger’s presence, although once or twice he asked me why he was sitting there. When I tried to explain how the Baker Act worked, he shook his head in confusion.  I’d guess that he had completely forgotten the episode with the gun.  In a few days, he stopped bringing up the subject, while lamenting that none of his “friends” from the hotel had paid him a visit.

     Dad loved his shooting irons and had collected quite an assortment over the years.  Growing up, I only recall four guns being in the house: a pump-action 22 calibre rifle (a birthday gift from his father when he turned thirteen); two hand-me-down shotguns (a 12-gauge pump and a single shot 410) and finally, Dad’s pride and joy - a long-barrel German Luger with a swastika on the grip that he brought home from Europe. 

    As kids, we all had BB and pellet guns, and at times (under adult supervision) we were permitted to plunk cans with the .22.  In the fall and winter, I hunted rabbits and squirrels in the wooded section of our farm – an activity toward which my brother and sister were indifferent. Although he was an accomplished marksman (I once saw him bring down a raccoon perched high in a tree with a single shot from the luger after the critter had been caught molesting our flock of ducks), Dad seldom hunted, and over the years his long guns acquired a rusty patina from sitting unused in our damp farmhouse.

    Years later, he would decide that these neglected heirlooms deserved some refurbishing, so he had a gunsmith re-blue the barrels and refinish the stocks of the shotguns.  He then put them on display in a less-than-secure glass-fronted gun cabinet, objects to be admired rather than used.  After Dad died, I took the shotguns and rifle to an appraiser who said that their age made them quite attractive to the right collector. Unfortunately, the restoration work decreased their value significantly (clearly, Dad hadn’t been watching “Antique Road Show”).

    After we left Dixon for Naples, Dad turned his attention to handguns.  Part of this had to do with a newfound sense of vulnerability, since an establishment like the Holiday Inn invited thieves, armed or not. He took to keeping a pistol in his office, and at some point strapped another under the front seat of his car.  During their RV and fishing trips he and Nancy always included a firearm or two among their travel necessities.

     Nostalgic for his days in the infantry, he eventually acquired a working replica of the M-1 carbine he had carried in Europe.  That purchase was followed by a short-barrel shotgun similar to the model one sees racked in the rear window of police cruisers.  I doubt that any of these guns was ever fired, although he had boxes of ammunition for all of them.  By the time Nancy decided their situation in Jacksonville had become untenable, Bill had added six pistols of various calibers to his arsenal. When we informed him of our intention to move the two of them to Madison, Dad refused to cooperate and became so angry that my siblings and I feared that he might resort to armed resistance.

    To avert a potential showdown, the three of us scoured the property in an effort to locate and confiscate all of his weaponry (he had even hidden a rifle behind the upright freezer in the garage). Before Dad realized his guns were missing, he had threatened to shoot the crew from North American Van Lines if they attempted to enter the house.  When they did arrive and began removing boxes, he just sat helpless and seething in his favorite chair. 

    Once the movers had completed their work and Bill and Nancy were winging their way north, I loaded up all the guns, wrestled “Mouse,” their gray cat, into a kennel, and began the twelve-hundred-mile trek to Madison.  Shortly after arriving, I turned all of the pistols – except for the Luger – over to our local police for disposal. The long guns remained in our basement for a while, but eventually three were placed on consignment with a reputable dealer, while my gun-fancying brother took possession of the other two. 

    Dad was distraught over this development, but the retirement complex where they now lived prohibited firearms anyway. Although I assured my father that the guns were safely stowed away (a bit of a white lie) their forfeiture added to his bitterness about the move.

    As with so many men in America, Dad felt emasculated when denied a vehicle to drive or a firearm to fondle. “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” as the Beatles famously put it.  Nancy sympathized with her husband and attributed his bad behavior to the fact that he had suffered so many painful losses.  But after his attempted suicide and abysmal performance on the cognitive exams that followed, there was no going back.  It wasn’t until he landed in the Naples hospital that I understood the lengths he would go to maintain what he considered to be his inalienable Second Amendment rights.

A Law Unto Himself

      The patterns of Dad’s behavior when it came to clothes, cars, and guns indicate a man who always needed, as Frank Sinatra so aptly put it, to “Do it my way.”  Indeed, Charles Schuler had a long history of taking umbrage at anyone who tried to tell him what to do. He was a born rebel, a non-conformist in the tradition of Emersonian or Sartre.  And he did chafe at authority.

    I don’t remember that he ever willfully broke the law or initiated a confrontation.  But if an individual (typically another male) tried to take his measure, he got his back up.  Doubtless, he regarded any exercise of authority as an attempt to dominate, and Dad wasn’t going to knuckle under to anyone. Whether this sensitivity was a function of his small size, memories of reprimand by senior military officers, resentment toward an overbearing father, or a combination of all three, is anybody’s guess.

    When we learned that, once back in Naples, he had acquired a motorized trike, my siblings and I agreed that he constituted a danger to himself and others.  Dad had neither a driver’s license nor liability insurance, and his physical limitations made a serious accident practically inevitable.  It is indeed fortunate that fate intervened before that happened. 

   After purchase of the first of his two trikes, I called the Naples police department to inquire about the legality of their use by someone in my father’s condition.  The officer who took my call agreed that someone like him shouldn’t be driving a rig like that on city streets…but he was within his rights in Florida.  Mother, as usual, shrugged her shoulders and said that driving boosted Bill’s self-esteem.  

    I had already raised the issue several times before.  In Madison, I reminding mother of the dire consequences should he speed through the school zone near their apartment and strike a child.  She stuck her head in the sand, unwilling to deal with her husband’s recalcitrance and wishing to spare him the heartbreak termination of his driving would cause.  Dad was the sort of person who always needed to be in control, which is one reason he disdained commercial air travel and other modes of public transportation, even taxicabs. 

     I tried to assure Mother than I understood her concerns, and agreed that it would be a major adjustment for Dad to become dependent on others for his transportation needs. But, I warned, he was selfishly putting others - including her – at risk.  After the revocation of his license he would lack liability insurance, and a run-in could result in the two of them being sued by the aggrieved party.  “You and Dad could be financially ruined,” I warned.  Following the home visit from the Madison police that I had arranged, Dad did finally hand over his keys.  But he never gave his wife a moment’s peace when they were together in the car, criticizing her driving, barking directions, and vowing he would find some way to regain his privileges.

    Charles Schuler’s authority issues may have begun with, or were exacerbated by, his military service.  In his novel “The Little Men” a junior officer patterned after himself endures a conflicted relationship with one or more of his superiors. After the war, Bill chafed under his father’s supervision as they tried to make money on an unproductive farm.

    Dad’s reactivity revealed itself to me when I was about thirteen years old.  Members of our family were standing next to the chain link fence that cordoned off the Dixon High School football field from the parking lot.  We were there to watch the band’s halftime show, principally because my brother was on the field hammering away on his snare drum.  Although we could have watched the proceedings from a seat in the stands, Dad didn’t want to sacrifice an entire evening; the game itself held little interest for him.

    Several other gawkers were also milling around, perhaps for reasons similar to our own.  We were on the point of leaving when an officious security guard bulled his way forward and ordered all of us to back away from the fence.  When he placed a hand on Dad’s shoulder to ensure compliance, something snapped.  We all retreated, but not until my red-faced father had given that presumptuous official an impressive piece of his mind. A verbal command would have been one thing, but accompanied by physical contact it sparked outrage. At the time, I was afraid Dad might throw a punch and be hauled off to jail. Fortunately, we were able to retreat to our car without further incident.

     My father did have a hair-trigger temper.  He could be verbally abusive toward us children when we tested his patience, but he always stopped short of violence – until old age, that is, when impulse control became a major issue.  Nevertheless, for his entire adult life he was determined to be his own boss, his own source of authority.  Charles W. Schuler would make his way through the world on terms he set, and in his own peculiar fashion.  In the 1971 film, “When Eight Bells Toll,” Philip Calvert, played by the inimitable Anthony Hopkins, is reprimanded by a superior who tells him: “You have a rather questionable attitude toward authority.”  That would be my father,  

    After his graduate school classmate at KU ended up as a tenure-track English instructor at Carlton College, he urged my father to consider an academic career as well.  But Dad demurred, even though Wayne was enjoying considerable success and the career as a novelist Dad envisioned was filled with roadblocks.

     I don’t think it was so much a fear of failure in academia that deterred him as an inability to see himself as part of a tight-knit community of higher learning.  Dad was scholarly, a decent public speaker who could think on his feet, and would probably have been a credit to a college like Carlton or Beloit. But he was also a Lone Ranger for whom collegiality was a stretch, and that would have proved a significant liability.

    After he completed his master’s coursework Dad never really looked for a “job.” His overarching ambition was to write and, to meet his financial requirements, to run his own business (the Hi-Fi store he hoped to establish in Southern California, for example).  Unhappily, he ended up as his father’s farmhand in order to keep a roof over his family’s heads. 

     With his father’s demise, Dad regained his independence, and that allowed him to run his farm in a manner that didn’t require too much effort and left him with abundant free time. There would be no livestock (the ducks and hogs were the children’s responsibility) and a significant portion of the arable acreage was placed in the federal land bank program, which paid farmers to not grow cash crops.  The hundred or so acres of corn and soybeans that he did cultivate were easily managed, which suited Dad just fine.  Now in his forties, he was in a kind of holding pattern that wouldn’t end until opportunity again knocked. That came in the shape of a tropical resort, at which point Charles Schuler had finally “made it:” he was the proprietor of a thriving business set in a little piece of paradise. Now he didn’t have to bend the knee to anyone.

    “Be careful what you wish for,” they say. With authority comes responsibility, and it wasn’t long before Dad discovered that a full-service hotel makes the same sort of demands as a sizable Midwest dairy herd: downtime is a luxury you can’t afford.  However much he might have enjoyed his elevated status, the long hours and stress of managing an often-discontented blue-collar workforce soon began to take its toll.  Dad wouldn’t work for someone else, but it was no picnic working for him either. So, as soon as an off-ramp appeared, he gladly turned onto it.  

    Fifty years old, his finances in good order, Dad was now pretty much free of all external constraints.  Nancy, who admitted on more than one occasion that she was content to follow her husband’s lead, was just along for the ride.  Goldie, Dad’s aging mother back in Dixon, wasn’t an obstacle either, since his sister lived close by and attended to her needs. If he saw Goldie once or twice a year his obligations were fulfilled.  For the next forty-six years, Bill Schuler lived entirely by his own design.

    As a somewhat rowdy teenager, I did benefit personally from my father’s resistance to authority on two occasions.

     Having been reared in a conservative Midwestern community, Naples felt a little like the Land of Oz. Its beauty was unsurpassed, and I was eager to make the necessary adjustment to the new environment and a new set of peers. Those first exciting months in our new home, I was befriended by another youth with whom I shared some classes. His father was an MD and his mother a tanned socialite with a local radio program.  Greg was, naturally, something of a wild child.  Upon learning that we owned a couple of shotguns that I was allowed to use, he suggested taking off to shoot some game birds out amidst the palmetto.  I’d hunted rabbits and pheasant back on our farm plenty of times, so together we took the old jeep –now my primary means of transportation – and headed down a back road.  After a short distance I parked, and the two of us set off on foot through the lightly shaded woods.  

    Unfortunately, I wasn’t familiar with Florida’s hunting regulations and didn’t know one native bird from another. No doubt Greg didn’t either, since for him the whole point of our outing was to mess around with the guns.  We did bag a few small birds, which turned out to be protected ground doves rather than legal turtle doves.  Being fairly close to town, some unknown party heard the reports from the shotguns and alerted a game warden. 

    We were ticketed, the birds and guns confiscated, and the two of us ordered to appear in court several weeks hence.  Back home, I shamefacedly informed my father of our misadventure. He frowned, shook his head, and contacted his attorney.  On Judgement Day the three of us stood before the county magistrate while my lawyer pleaded “no contest” on my behalf.  Dad paid the fifty-dollar fine and that was the end of the matter.

    Growing up, I was scolded numerous times, and my father was not above using harsh and intemperate language. For some unknown reason, all I received on this occasion was a mild reprimand. Perhaps at the time he was too consumed with his new role at the hotel to make too much of my caprice. It’s also possible he thought the whole affair was overblown, and that the police and courts had better things to do than lean on a couple of dumb teenagers. In later years, though, the episode became a joke he would delight in telling at my expense. 

     Be that as it may, this brush with the law did make an impression on me.  On the one hand, I was grateful to my father for remaining reasonably calm and standing up for me.  Moreover, unnerved by the experience, from that day on I swore off hunting. I’ve never picked up a gun to shoot another living being since.

    A second example.  Four years had now passed and I was enrolled in college in St. Petersburg.  Traffic was light on U.S 41 on a quiet Sunday morning as I drove north after spending the weekend with Trina in Naples.  I slowed down at the Punta Gorda city limits and another car pulled up beside me at one of that small town’s two traffic lights. When the light turned green, the other driver accelerated quickly, and not to be outgunned, I pressed the accelerator and tried to keep pace in my underpowered Ford Falcon. 

    Upon reaching the outskirts of town we were both cruising along at about ten miles per hour over the posted speed limit. I was several lengths behind, which was why the hidden patrolman pulled me over (I later learned that Punta Gorda was notorious for its speed traps). I didn’t even bother to explain that the driver ahead of me was going just as fast, knowing that it wouldn’t do any good.  Meekly accepting the citation, I put the car in gear and proceeded cautiously on my way. 

     This was the first time I’d ever been apprehended for a moving violation, so I didn’t realize I could simply send in a money order and avoid a court appearance. Instead, at the appointed time I drove back to Punta Gorda with my college roommate to pay the piper.  

    “Settle the fine at the clerk’s desk,” a bored magistrate instructed me. Following his instructions, I pulled out my checkbook and began to fill out a black check.  But now I was told that a personal check would not be accepted; cash or a money order were the only options.  Neither my roommate nor I had the sixty-seven dollars that were due, so the clerk called over another officer who took my wallet, my belt and shoes and proceeded to escort me to the cell block.  Before being led away, I stammered to my roommate to call my parents ASAP and let them know what had happened. 

    My jailers were anything but courteous, sniggering at the “hippie” in their custody and suggesting how satisfying it would be to shave off his long hair so that “he’d look like a normal human being.” I won’t say that I wasn’t a little freaked out; in 1972 you had to take such threats seriously in a provincial southern town. 

    My three hours in that barren cell felt like ten, but then a ring of keys rattled, the door creaked open and I was ushered into the station’s lobby. There, in the flesh, was my red-faced father in the process of berating the desk officer. Less than satisfied with the man’s explanation and still seething, Dad pulled out his wallet, forked over the sixty-seven dollars, and informed the constabulary that he was a businessman of some consequence down in Naples.

    I thought the gendarmes who were a party to this farce looked a little intimidated, but that may have been wishful thinking on my part.  A bigger relief was that Dad didn’t make a federal case over the issue, which created the inconvenience of driving fifty minutes to spring his son from this Mayberry-style jail.  What really stuck in his craw was his conviction that, once again, authority was being abused.  

   For me, on the other hand, that brief experience behind bars was transformative. Several years later, and now studying for the ministry, I chose for my three-month Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) unit a chaplaincy program at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville.  This was a medium security state prison with a cell block dedicated to inmates who’d been diagnosed with physical or mental illnesses.  The time I spent working as a spiritual counselor with a variety of offenders was both revealing and sobering, making me a lifelong advocate for prison reform.

    But I digress. Many years later, and after my parents had forsaken Naples for Lake Placid, my mother was also pulled over for some sort of minor infraction.  Past eighty at the time, she had never had reason to deal with law enforcement.  The ticketing officer treated her rather brusquely, which shook her up badly.  Mother was still completely rattled when she got home and, true to his nature, Dad sprang into action.  He got in his car, sped to the police station and burst into the lobby. Calling out the offending party, he accused him of using “gestapo” tactics on a fragile elderly woman. Only after a captain apologized profusely did Dad regain his composure.

    It wasn’t the legal issues that rankled my father. After all, both my mother and I had violated the traffic laws.  He just had a low opinion of people who, in their official capacity, liked to throw their weight around.  And, he was convinced that too many people who work in law enforcement are less committed to public service than to occupying a position in which they could exert power with impunity.   

    As the years went by, Dad’s own sense of entitlement began to assume troubling proportions. Once they had left their lakefront home in favor of a featureless tract house in a Jacksonville retirement complex, he fell into the daily habit of driving a few miles for refreshments at Starbucks, in this case one located inside a Target department store.  Dad demanded that Nancy accompany him, even though he paid scant attention to her once they’d found a table and settled in.  He spent most of their time at the cafe poring over the New York Times and surreptitiously snapping pictures of other patrons (later collected, edited, and self-published under the eponymous title, “The Starbucks Diaries”). 

    On my periodic visits, I rode shotgun with Dad while mother gratefully accepted a day or two of relief from the tedium. Dad’s compulsiveness was on full display during these trips. He had decided that he had a proprietary claim on a specific table in the coffee shop. If that table happened to be occupied when we arrived, his mood would turn sour and every so often he’d look up from his paper to glare at the intruding party. There was no convincing him that one table was as good as another; as a loyal patron he thought he deserved special consideration, which included his choice of seating in the café and an extra dollop of chocolate in his Frappuccino.

    Once my folks were in Madison, the Starbucks ritual continued unabated. For my father, it was now an exercise to be performed as unvaryingly as a monastic prayer.  He made the three-mile trip to our own Target store in fair weather and foul, and suffered painful withdrawal when the establishment closed its doors on Christmas and Easter. 

    One thing that did change in Madison was Dad’s wardrobe. He’d taken to wearing military-style fatigues, embellished with faux ribbons and patches from World War II. He also ordered that bill cap mentioned earlier announcing in bold letters, “World War II Combat Veteran.”  This get-up, combined with his wizened appearance, made him something of a celebrity at Starbucks. It wasn’t unusual for other patrons to shyly approach his table and thank him for his past service.  Often these admirers would insist on paying his bill, a magnanimous gesture that embarrassed Nancy; she knew all-too-well that the two of them were financially far better off than their well-meaning benefactors.

    Between Dad’s reliable patronage and his shameless exploitation of his military background, he was able to convince the Starbuck’s manager to set aside a table next to a large picture window for their exclusive use. Every day, a sign would appear on that tabletop reading: “Reserved for a World War II veteran.” On his birthday, the baristas feted Charles W. Schuler with pastries, congratulatory cards and helium balloons. In a rare moment of candor, Dad once admitted to being a master manipulator, and so he was. 

     The Starbucks personnel didn’t seem to mind when their guest took liberties with them (if they did, they didn’t let on), or occasionally showed disrespect.  When he dumped melted ice water from his cup onto the floor, or blocked the aisle next to his table with a shopping cart full of personal items he’d brought with him (seat cushions, cameras, I-Pads, newspapers, magazines, and even a thermos he’d topped off at home with twelve ounces of cold beer), staff looked the other way.   And…he didn’t hesitate to badger the baristas if they didn’t prepare his beverage exactly to his specifications.   

     No matter how much my father pressed against reasonable limits or violated accepted rules of decorum, the Starbucks staff gamely tried to accommodate him. After all, this doddering old warrior had selflessly (!) served his God and country in the Last Good War.  What they couldn’t have known is that my father was a shameless con, making of his short and rather unremarkable, military service something it was not. I’ll give him this: he faked it pretty well and was thus allowed to bypass the communal standards that lesser mortals are expected to observe. The long and short of it is that Charles Schuler wasn’t about to meet anyone else’s expectations, just as he thumbed his nose at the formal authority of law enforcement officials. And the older he got, the more outrageous he became.

The Next Great American Writer

As my wife and I sifted through the detritus in Dad’s hotel suite - bagging up spoiled produce, lugging boxes of products he’d stockpiled to the local food pantry, putting aside small appliances, deck chairs and the like for Goodwill - we paused at the jumble of laptops and printers on the dining room table. Amidst a tangle of cords, headphones, and toner cartridges a dozen or so thumb-drives lay scattered.  Curious about what they might contain, I deposited them in an envelope, intending to open the files when we returned to Madison.

    I later discovered that on a couple of those drives my father had deposited photos downloaded from commercial websites (for which, according to his credit card receipts, he’d paid a pretty penny).  Others were blank, but several contained a single Word document entitled “The Businessman.”  It was a short story he’d been working on, and the drafts were in various stages of completion.  These memory sticks featured storage capacities of 32, 64 or even 128 GB, but this single story was the only piece of data he’d saved in each of them.

    Why so many duplicate or near-duplicate copies?  Perhaps Dad was afraid he would lose track of his material, so he saved this work-in-progress in multiple locations.  Or, it could have simply been another manifestation of the hoarding behavior that had become a familiar pattern.

    I identified what I took to be the most complete draft, which ran to about 13,000 words. Dad’s protagonist (who speaks in the first person) is a veteran of the Iraq War. In civilian, life, he makes his living as a paid assassin.  The narrative is a little short on action – no descriptions of an actual killing – and focuses mostly on “Jack’s” rather humdrum daily routine: the food he consumes, the beer he drinks (basically, the same fare as the author), small-talk with his unsuspecting wife, and matter-of-fact negotiations with clients bargaining for his services.

    The premise of the story is similar to that of “The Godfather.”  For Jack, a quintessential every-man, there’s nothing personal in the elimination of a stranger, and there’s nothing to be gained by moralizing or second-guessing. Contract killing is just a business like any other. My cynical father chose as the subtitle for his tale a quote often attributed to Calvin Coolidge: “The Business of America is Business.”  A dedication on the second page reads, “To my wife, Nancy, who has been supportive in all my projects.”  Though belated, it was an acknowledgement she richly deserved.

    This appears to have been Charles Schuler’s last experiment in writing fiction.  Indeed, once the rejections for his novel “The Little Men” had piled up he pretty much put his Smith-Corona out to pasture.  Oh, there was the occasional “sermon” prepared for the good liberals at the Unitarian Universalist fellowships he and Nancy frequented, and once in a while a parable of sorts.  He rarely wrote letters (I only received two as an adult, one of which rebuked me for my un-brotherly conduct toward my sister).  Instead, Dad transitioned to photography – the subject of the next chapter.  After all, isn’t a picture worth a thousand words? 

    In pursuing this hobby, he tended to concentrate on non-human subjects: landscapes, animal life, tumble-down barns, covered bridges, and quirky roadside signs.  Toward the end there was the “Starbuck’s Diary,” in which my father seemed intent on poking fun at the unsuspecting coffee house crowd.  

    For years, my father had been in a lover’s quarrel with his craft. By the time 1965 rolled around he seemed reconciled to the fact that the book he’d sweated blood over had no future. So, what else to do but burn it all!  I well remember the day Dad carried a hefty pile of cheap yellow manuscript paper and carbon-copies to the trash-burning barrel in the back of our farmhouse. Having cremated his creation, he hoped to have freed himself from the literary albatross that had tormented him for more than a decade.  As far as the rest of us knew, nothing of “The Little Men” now remained.

    Strangely enough, although the book had now been reduced to ashes, Dad kept a small file folder containing his correspondence with three of the publishers - Vanguard, Putnam, and MacMillan - who had considered, then politely declined to put the book in print. Shortly before its immolation, Dad had made one last attempt to convince a New York City editor of the book’s merits.  Rejected once again, he vowed to give up writing and sealed the deal by reducing his creation to smoke and ashes.

    Before embarking on the novel, at Kansas University Dad had composed a few pieces of poetry (mostly derivative) and several short stories, one or two of which found their way into The New Mexico Review.  As mentioned earlier, when he and Nancy became active in Unitarian Universalist congregations, he and a few others, in the absence of paid clergy, composed pulpit essays for Sunday services.  The range of his interests was rather narrow and his oeuvre consisted of variations on a common theme: French existentialism. He didn’t have a lot of other material to draw from and eventually lost interest in drafting compositions of this sort.

    He did, however, save these modest pieces of occasional writing and eventually pulled them back out, added the old poetry and short stories, and created a spiral-bound book.  He didn’t try to have the collection published, but did give copies as gifts to family members and a few uncritical friends.  With this mission accomplished, Dad may have believed he could put his authorial ambitions to rest.  But then something totally unexpected occurred, which is a story in itself.  I’ll get back to that momentarily, but first I need to bring Nancy back into the picture. 

    Ironically, when my father laid down his pen mother became the writer in the family. It was she who kept a journal, corresponded with old acquaintances, composed cheery notes to her children, and signed holiday and birthday cards in both their names.

     Mother was an indefatigable correspondent and composed her newsy letters in precise cursive - usually on nice stationery - despite the fact that she was also a skilled typist.  And, her efforts bore fruit, as she received many letters and cards in return.  No one wrote to my father, except on business.  Then there were her journals, in which she meticulously described her daily routines, and expressed her unvarnished, often critical feelings about family members, old friends, and random people she dealt with in her comings and goings. 

    Journaling also served a cathartic purpose for my mother, since she was typically very guarded and unforthcoming in conversation.  Indeed, she was something of a sphinx, smiling and laughing while carefully concealing her true opinions (“Your mother is such a delightful person,” was a comment I heard all too often).  She was quick to defend her husband when others - especially us children - complained about his behavior, but in the privacy of her journals her frustration with him poured out. Even into old age, Mother continued to write. When she died just months past her one-hundredth birthday, Trina and I removed more than forty closely-worded notebooks dating back to the early 1970’s.

    But a few years before that Dad, now in his mid-eighties, decided to take another stab at “The Little Men”.

    A discovery my older brother made led to this turn-around.   He’d been living with grandmother Goldie in Dixon the summer after graduating from high school, while the rest of the family migrated to Florida’s Gulf Coast.  It appears that at some earlier time son Bill had expressed a desire to read his father’s magnum opus and, flattered by this show of interest, Dad handed him a box containing one of several loose-leaf copies of “The Little Men.”  It was the one copy he then forgot about, and that was not consigned to the trash barrel.  For his part, my brother was soon immersed in his studies at Northern Illinois University and never took the time to read his father’s work. So, for the next forty years the book remained unread and undisturbed in a dark corner of Goldie’s upstairs garage apartment. 

     Eventually my nostalgic brother wandered back into his former living quarters and came upon the dusty box containing the story of a GI stationed in post-World War II Europe.  When he told our father what he had found, Dad was initially rather indifferent. “So what?” He probably asked himself.  But Nancy was of another mind, believing that all her husband’s hard work shouldn’t go for naught; the manuscript should be retrieved and reworked, she argued.   

    It took some cajoling, but in the end the author grudgingly agreed to take another look at the failed enterprise.  To get things going, Nancy applied her superior typing skills to create a Word file on her husband’s desktop.  In the process, she also corrected the grammar and spelling and suggested some minor changes to the tone and content.  Dad then added some new material and tried to inject more drama into some of the scenes.  The re-write consumed a full two years, but in the end, Dad expressed satisfaction with the result.  He would not repeat the painful process of seeking out a commercial publisher and elected instead to self-publish with Ex Libris, a fairly respectable vanity press. The finished product did him credit, if I do say so.

   Of course, in the absence of a marketing campaign or endorsements by reviewers (not an option with self-published books), ”The Little Men” sold few copies.  Most of the small first run was handed out to friends and family.  When my own publisher, Berrett-Koehler, set up a promotional tour in 2009, I brought along a box of my father’s books, hoping to make a few sales while in the process of hawking my own.  Happy with the chance for additional exposure, Dad thoughtfully allowed me to keep the modest proceeds.  After that, the book again fell into oblivion,

    I regretted the poor reception because “The Little Men” did treat an aspect of the Second World War that fiction and non-fiction authors alike typically pass over.  My father had, in fact, created an interesting story line, the dialogues were smartly composed, the characterizations convincing, and some comic elements also kept things lively.  Again, “The Little Men” wasn’t an action-packed thriller (the setting was, after all, the occupation and not The Battle of the Bulge) and Dad was appealing to a more philosophically minded reader. However, this may have also been its greatest liability in the estimation of trade publishers.

    Once the re-write was complete, Dad’s compositional skills went into sharp decline, due in part to excessive use of sedatives and opioids.  Nancy did what she could to put some lipstick on his last two short stories, composed when he was well past ninety, but at that point it was a task beyond her own diminishing capabilities. The premise of both these abbreviated tales was juvenile, and the prose on a par with a Donald Trump social media post.  But the fact that he had the presence of mind to write them at all was a little surprising.              

    I believe two factors played into my father’s decision to resume writing fiction. First, he dreaded the thought of dying unheralded and without a literary legacy that would outlive him.  He wanted to prove that he had more than one story to tell; that he was a “real writer” and not a “one-and-done” hack.  After he’d dashed off “The Businessman,” Dad remarked to me that his authorial career was now complete; his five books (which included two volumes of photographs) represented a respectable output.

    Apart from this, Charles W. Schuler wasn’t leaving much else to be remembered by - no good friends, few material assets (since he’d already frittered away most of the money in his trust) no charitable endowments of any consequence. Regrettably, C.W. Schuler was no Joseph Heller, but if he’d chosen to address some other aspect of his odd life, he might have given Helen Boyd (“My Husband Betty”) some real competition.  

    The fact that two of his children had produced publishable books also provided my father with the impetus to resume writing.  He was not the sort of man who could bask in the reflected glory of his kids, and our own achievements rankled.  Like any confirmed narcissist, he even tried to take credit for our success, boasting that my sister and I were the products of a “literary household.”  That he never once helped with our schoolwork, or showed the least bit of interest in our childish compositions, was immaterial.  It was as if we’d made our modest mark as writers by occupying the same space and breathing the same air as him. 

   He really was jealous, a feeling he tried to hide by pronouncing our own books inferior because they weren’t fiction.  Real writers, he insisted, commit themselves to the creative, imaginative realm of story-telling.  Nevertheless, my sister and I both presented our parents with copies of our work. I believe mother did give them her attention, but I doubt he ever did.

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

 As far back as I can remember Dad was a shutter-bug.  He brought that vintage Leica back from the War, and it was the first of many SLR’s he used to capture scenes from family celebrations, vacations, and local sporting events (a few of the latter ending up in the Dixon Evening Telegraph). It was a hobby he pursued at times fanatically for three-quarters of a century.  The passion only petered out after a year’s residence at the Edgewater Hotel; after all, how many pictures can one person take of Gulf sunsets from a hotel window?  At that point he was also losing the ability to use his sophisticated equipment and took to downloading pictures from the Internet.

   Still, Dad remained proud of his former prowess with a camera and decorated the walls of his suite with matted prints of his work.  The Edgewater management looked the other way as he pounded nails into their walls, or used double-sided tape to clumsily display the prints.  The old man was, after all, a twelve-month-a-year paying guest to the tune of $500 per night.  

     As we burrowed into disorganized cabinets, desk drawers, and storage chests, along with a number of other electronic devices I retrieved Dad’s cameras, which included four SLR’s of various vintages and a spy-size Minolta that he had used to capture human subjects without fear of detection.  Peripherals of all sorts were scattered about his suite: lenses, filters, flash attachments, cases, memory cards, and charging cables.  There were also reams of photo quality paper and boxes of toner for use in the large format color printer that dominated the top of a side table.   He could have opened a small camera store with what his inventory included.     

    What was the meaning of all this expenditure, I wondered? The Nikons were pretty much interchangeable, differing only in the degree of digital complexity.  But none of them had seen much use in recent years.  And why go whole hog on a professional grade printer?  Dad had taken to downloading other artists’ work from sites such as Tumblr (where he had posted some older photos of his own) either just to amuse himself, or to add to the display on the walls of his suite. He had, as already mentioned, paid handsomely for these commercial images, which is not something he would ever have done as a younger man. At one point Nancy asked her husband why he didn’t print more of his own archived work, some of it quite good.  “I just like these better,” he replied.

    In the end, my father’s creative interests gave way to acquisitiveness, and a compulsive need to collect photographic equipment even though it no longer had any practical value.  For much of his life Charles Schuler had been a serious, if somewhat extravagant, hobbyist. Even as a boy, I remember him retreating to darkrooms with their infra-red lights, enlargers, and bottles of fixing and developing chemicals.  His cameras were his pride and joy: Leicas, Exactas, Mamiya-Sekors, Nikons, Polaroids, Sonys, and, at one point, even a Hasselblad.  

    Fancying himself a purist in the mold of Ansel Adams or Edward Weston, in his early years he processed only black & white. The chemistry of color prints was less stable, but eventually he made the transition and kept at it until he’d filled dozens of albums with proof sheets, 3X5 prints and Kodachrome slides.  Dad avidly devoured books and manuals, determined to master the arcana of his craft.  He arrived somewhat belatedly for the digital revolution, but once he’d procured a computer he discovered the magic of Photoshop – a program he picked up quickly, achieving remarkable proficiency.  In his final years he was simply repeating a life-long pattern, adding to and upgrading his equipment even though he no longer had the chops to use it.

    Although his passion for photography wavered at times, and especially when the fishing was good, Dad would rarely climb into his car or the cockpit of his boat without at least one camera and, of course, a gun.  Whenever they’d had a productive day on the water, he’d hand the camera to Nancy so that she could capture him proudly displaying a stringer full of fish (from the quantity of such photos I uncovered one might think he’d single-handedly emptied the Gulf of Mexico). 

    Most of the time, however, Charles was the person behind the viewfinder. As previously mentioned, in his prime he pretty much ignored human subjects – except for the obligatory family portraits – and trained his camera on landscapes, wildlife and tropical flora.  His accessories included telescopic lenses of varying power which gave him access to ospreys nesting on channel markers, wood storks perched on cypress trees deep in the everglades, and scrub jays eating peanuts out of Nancy’s hand.  Whatever the context, his camera was always close at hand. When a black bear swam across a channel in the Lake of the Woods, and an arctic fox appeared in their yard, looking forlorn in its dull summer coat, dad captured the image.  Loons were a favorite subject and his collection included mothers with chicks riding on their broad backs, and pairs huddled on their floating nests. 

    We were quite taken with some of his work and urged Dad to enter competitions sponsored by Audubon or the Sierra Club.  But if he ever did act on these suggestions, I never knew about it.  He strove for perfection in his craft and often seemed pleased with the result.  But he was also afraid his work wouldn’t measure up and was suspicious of being judged by professionals in the trade. I also have to believe that his failure as a novelist made him less than confident about his artistic endeavors more generally. Whatever was going on in his head, Dad declined to offer his photographs for either appraisal or commercial sale.  One crushing disappointment in a lifetime was enough, and Charles W. Schuler wasn’t going to put his fragile self-esteem on the line a second time.

    The photography bug followed Dad to Jacksonville and a new experience in retirement living.  Now there were no more big fish or swamp creatures to add to the digital record.  When he left the house, it was usually to escape from all those other distasteful old people and spend a couple of hours at Starbucks. Here he took notice of the wide assortment of characters that wandered in looking for bargains. For the first time, he saw something in his fellow human beings that was worth recording.

     Initially Dad was respectful and open about his intentions. He would politely ask passersby if he could take their picture, and a surprising number were receptive, if not flattered, by the invitation.  They might also have taken one look and decided that rather than disappoint the old coot with his Green Bay Packers jacket and bill cap they’d play along.  What harm could it do?

   And so, he began collecting material for what would eventually become “The Starbucks Diaries.”  There were plump moms pushing strollers, tanned and muscled-up laborers, preening women covered in tattoos, young baristas in their trademark green aprons.  Conspicuously absent were persons such as himself; no images of elders leaning on canes or shuffling behind their walkers made the cut. That would hit too close to home.  

    Dad continued this practice in Madison.  But the mood here was different, and most of his potential subjects expressed either reluctance or disapproval when he approached them. People in this community just didn’t want to be photographed by a stranger, no matter how old and inoffensive he appeared. But rather than give up, Dad simple stopped asking for permission.  This came back to bite him a couple of times, when a patron would notice that his camera was pointed in their direction and confront him.  In response, Dad played innocent, denying that the offended party was the subject he was aiming at.  But even these embarrassing encounters didn’t deter him.  Using his inconspicuous mini-Minolta he was better able to avoid detection, and as a result more than a few Madisonians found their way into “The Starbuck’s Diaries.”

    My father followed this unvarying daily routine for more than two years, as his wife sat passively across from him nodding off over her New York Times, barely revived by the small cup of black coffee she was nursing.  She had learned from long exposure to pretend that her husband was behaving normally. 

    A couple of times a week I’d leave work and make the short trip to Target to check in with the folks. My presence at the table did little to shift the dynamic.  Scarcely acknowledging my presence, Dad would look up from his I-pad from time to time to assess his surroundings.  If he happened to spy a new mark, he’d pull out the Minolta, snap a picture, and then proudly share the results projected on the camera’s small viewing screen. 

     I did urge mother to speak to her husband about these invasions of other people’s privacy, saying it was not only unethical, but potentially hazardous to his health. I worried that at some point one of his subjects would do more than issue a verbal warning.  Although she agreed with me in principle, she was reluctant to deprive him of an activity that made him feel like he was still exercising his creativity.  Eventually I approached the Starbuck’s manager, who agreed that my father was out of line.  But I never followed up, and even if she did put her stubborn customer on notice, I doubt it was with sufficient firmness to break the pattern.  In any case, Charles W. Schuler wasn’t going to accept a silly rule emanating from some junior “authority figure.”

     Any admonition may also have been beside the point, since by then he’d collected enough portraits to complete his “Diary.”  Dad affixed captions to the images, then sent in the collection for self-publication.  The permissions principled photographers routinely obtain from their subjects were conspicuously absent.  Fortunately, no one has sued us…yet.

Melancholia and Occasional Madness

   The foregoing speaks to a lifetime of mental and emotional struggles.  My father was, among other things, a narcissist, and his decision to return to Naples and spend his last years alone (mostly) in a pricy beachfront hotel was profoundly narcissistic.  All of my parents’ relocations, from the time they left Kansas as newlyweds to this last Naples gambit, were his idea. If Nancy had an opinion on such matters, it didn’t count for much.  She was expected to make the necessary adjustments and otherwise serve as a convenient sex partner, income provider, cook and cleaning service. I once asked Dad whether mother was comfortable with his choices.  He shrugged and replied, “She can live anywhere. But if it were up to her, we’d probably still be raising corn on the Rock River farm.”

    There was some truth in this casual dismissal of his wife’s feelings about their place of residence.  Our mother was, as the novelist Wallace Stegner put it, a “sticker.”  She was determined to make the best of her husband’s restlessness - planting gardens, seeking out new friends, plying her profession, volunteering, and uncomplainingly caring for kids, cats, and her quirky husband. Meanwhile, Dad did his own thing, eventually finding reasons to feel dissatisfied with any given place of residence and preparing for their next move. Fortunately (for him, at least), the two of them possessed the means to live securely just about anywhere, although toward the end Dad was drawing down his assets at a rate that would leave him penniless well before he turned one-hundred.

    Charles and Nancy had made a few friends during their first years in Naples, with Dad serving as treasurer for both the local Unitarian Universalist congregation and the co-op marina where they kept their boat.  But that was then.  Once he’d settled into the Edgewater, Dad made no attempt to renew old friendships or initiate new ones.  He would reach out when he needed something a former acquaintance could provide: a ride to the VA clinic, or perhaps to a store beyond the range of his electric trike.  One shy, never-married woman who had worked for him years earlier at the Holiday Inn was particularly willing and able.  But because she wasn’t Dad’s “type”, he eventually began to treat her with scorn.  She would ply him with homemade baked goods, but that generous gesture irritated rather than pleased him.  Fixated on his own needs, my father had no interest in, or ability to remain in a relationship in which some degree of reciprocity was expected.

    By the time he registered at the Edgewater, Dad belonged to the growing cohort of the “infirm elderly” and needed a dependable support system. Given the king’s ransom he was willing to pay for the privilege of living in a fancy resort hotel, it made sense that the staff would do whatever was required to keep him happy.  Although my father clung to the illusion that he was living “independently,” the reality is that he had transitioned to a costly assisted living facility.  Staff members did his laundry (except during the winter, when Nancy took over), ran errands, troubleshot his electronics, and provided maid service as requested.  He did prepare most of his own meals on a hotplate in order to “save money,” but also to avoid displaying his slovenly eating habits in the hotel’s public dining spaces.

     Dad did have enough on the ball to know that he’d need to provide some extra incentive if the staff were to remain faithful.  As we set about emptying the bureau drawers after he landed in the hospital, we discovered wads of ten- and twenty-dollar bills tucked between the socks and underwear.  He almost certainly kept this cash on hand for tips and under-the-table bribes.

    He always left a twenty-spot for the maid, who stopped by weekly to empty the trash, change the bed linens and wipe down the bathroom fixtures.  But Dad also rewarded her for what she agreed not to do.  He fiercely guarded his privacy and if the cleaning crew was too thorough, he worried about exposure or someone else rearranging his “stuff”.  So, the staff and management left him to his own devices for the most part, even if it meant relaxing their standards and ignoring the fire code which proscribed hot plates in the rental units. 

    The management’s level of tolerance of him was remarkable.  When Dad cooked (especially fish) the smell permeated the hallway outside his suite and must have been more than a little off-putting to nearby guests. 

      After two and a half years of uninterrupted occupancy, suite 604 looked like something out of that schlocky reality show “The Hoarders.”  Hardly a surface remained for anyone other than him to sit.  Dad had also acquired quite an assortment of small appliances: a deep fryer, popcorn maker, food chopper, coffee brewer, hot plate, several of which existed in duplicate.  The drawers and cupboards in both the kitchen and bedroom were crammed with every conceivable utensil and tool, including at least a half-dozen Swiss Army knives of assorted sizes.

    Mortally afraid that the stores he frequented would stop carrying products he favored, Dad stock-piled.  We counted over fifty unopened boxes of Kodiak Cakes flapjack mix, dozens of untouched bags of Pirate’s Booty popcorn, cases of cream soda and a premium Belgian beer he’d begun drinking.  Eight loaves of brioche bread took up most of the freezer space, and a half-dozen bottles of pure maple syrup were lined up under the counter. 

    Because Dad would not allow the maid to invade his kitchen and dining/living room spaces (she was only permitted to change his linens and make a pass at the bathroom), all the counters and tabletops were sticky from spills and slick with bacon grease and vegetable oil.  His suite was located on the sixth floor, yet ants were everywhere.  The hotel’s maintenance chief had recently hooked up a new printer because ants had infested its predecessor, rendering it inoperable. He paid this obliging gentleman $100 for a half-hour’s labor.  

    When all was said and done, I calculated that Dad had run through nearly five-hundred-thousand dollars during his stay at the Edgewater – receipts for a third of which I was never able to track down.  Each week he had been withdrawing large sums of cash from his bank account, but where it all went nobody knows.  Nancy received copies of his monthly credit card statements, informing her that his online purchasing was out of control; packages from Amazon and other merchandizers arrived at the front desk almost daily.  Some of what he bought was handed out to hotel staff as “tokens of appreciation.”  Most of it, though, simply added to the general clutter in his suite.

    What we do know is that despite the deplorable condition of his residence, the egregious violations of safety codes, and the demands he placed on staff, Dad was pretty much left to do as he pleased.  To my knowledge, he was never cautioned about his unsurpassed sense of entitlement. 

    My siblings and I were of no interest to him, and when Nancy joined him for one last winter his treatment of her was so disrespectful that some of the staff took notice. Yet she endured his scolding for four months, washing his briefs, watching videos he selected during the long evenings, eating food from their laps amidst the clutter.  Only once did he agree to dine with her at a casual restaurant close by.

     My father’s self-absorption and disregard of other people’s needs, interests or feelings was unusual only in its extremity He was not, however, a malignant narcissist in the mold of a Donald Trump.  As a younger man, Dad found ways to compensate for this personality disorder, but as he became less inhibited in his later years it was on full display. 

    Dad had always been self-absorbed and didn’t find other people very appealing.  He once laughingly told Nancy that manipulating others wasn’t all that difficult - especially if they didn’t know him well. Whether or not he took pleasure in these games, they did mark him as a classic sociopath. When he was no longer able to control people through subterfuge, he softened them up with money - another means to the same end.

    Whenever one of us brought Dad’s selfishness and lack of empathy to her attention, rather than defend his misanthropy mother would retreat to safer ground: “Your father is complicated,” was the go-to excuse she clung to as he became more and more outrageous. 

     And in certain respects, Charles W. Schuler was complicated. I can only speculate about the genesis of his cross-dressing, but Nancy claimed that his upbringing had a lot to do with it.  Goldie was a spoiled only child who was both something of a prima Dona and an unhappy wife and mother. Harry, her husband, suffered from bipolar disorder, and he was also a cold figure incapable of showing affection.  It’s likely that their fragile son grew up insecure and uncertain about his masculinity. 

   Dad was seven when his sister, Bonnie, entered the picture and she became the apple of her parents’ eyes.  In photos from those early years, Bonnie has a doll-like appearance, all laces and frills.  At this critical juncture in his maturation, older brother was assigned a new bedroom, upstairs and far removed from the hub of family life.  If he became convinced in his heart of hearts that his parents preferred females, well…he would become a female, if only in fantasy. 

    It’s hard to know how defining these formative experiences were for my father.  When in his early thirties he commuted by train from Dixon to Chicago to work with a Freudian psychoanalyst he may well have been looking for clues to his gender confusion. Years later, mother shared one observation the therapist made about his patient: “His is an iron fist wearing a velvet glove.”  The fact that psychoanalysis had become something of a status marker among the literati of the time may have given him the courage to go this route, but in the end, he couldn’t afford the high cost of these sessions.  Despite a lengthy history of depression, this was Dad’s only encounter with a mental health professional until his VA hospitalization some six decades later.

    If genetics had anything to do with Dad’s personality disorders, there is evidence that he stood in a long line of troubled Schuler’s.  His tyrannical grandfather, also named William, treated his depressive wife so badly that eventually she took her own life.  Harry - one of four children - was, as I mentioned, bipolar.  When Bill was a teenager, his father had to be institutionalized and was away from his family for six months.  Harry had entered a severe manic state, become delusional, and began insisting that Satan wanted to take possession of him and his family.  He begged his wife and children to repent of their “sins” and seek God’s grace. When those appeals fell on deaf ears, he climbed into his rowboat, intending to float down the Rock River to its confluence with the Mississippi and from there to points unknown.  His behavior so appalled his son that it – along with ice hockey - may have sealed his decision to leave Dixon for St. John’s Military Academy.   

    Both depression and anxiety were undoubtedly realities for Charles, and he was also tightly wound.  It wasn’t just authority figures who set him off.  When one of us irritated him, Dad would clench his jaw, narrow his eyes, and ball up his fists. The phrase “if looks could kill” described him perfectly. 

    Patience – an invaluable attribute for anyone sharing their home with three quarrelsome kids - was hardly Dad’s strong suite.  He was often frustrated with the – to his mind – “thankless task” of parenting, and the fact that his hoped-for career as a writer had died aborning didn’t help.  The stress of dealing with his own father, reluctantly playing the roles of farmer and parent, exacted a toll on his physical health.  By his early thirties Dad had developed a peptic ulcer, which he attacked with handfuls of Gelusil tablets, soda crackers, and Puffed Wheat swimming in whole milk.  Not a diet gastroenterologists would approve today.

    He wasn’t shy about shaming the three of us by blaming the ulcer on his insubordinate brood. It may not have been a coincidence that Goldie was also plagued with lower GI problems, often retreating to her bed for long periods of time.  Miraculously, her maladies disappeared after Harry passed away.  Goldie had just turned sixty, and she spent the next forty years as a remarkably healthy globe-trotting widow.

    Dad’s illness might have been even more serious had farm life been more demanding.  He really didn’t have much to worry about, and once we had reached school age he had plenty of time to pursue other interests.  But, as they say, be careful what you wish for. When he opted to run a resort facility the challenges were greater than any he’d ever faced.  After several years in this pressure cooker Dad’s anxiety was so acute that he practically ceased to function. 

     As his relationship with the Holiday Inn staff soured, Nancy stepped in as personnel manager and coordinator of day-to-day operations.  As a former OT supervisor in a large institution, she possessed considerable skills in this department. Dad’s mental and physical disabilities – like his mother’s – faded in significance once the Inn was disposed of and the children sent off to college.  

     That doesn't exactly mean he became a happy camper.  My father’s outlook was always bleak, and his glass half-empty.  His upbringing in a cold home combined with the embrace of a hard-edged philosophy that provided little in the way of comfort had a lot to do with this. 

    As a post-war graduate student at KU, Dad made an intellectual pact with the European Existentialists who were in vogue at the time. He quickly consumed just about everything available in English translation by Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett.  The writings of these men exerted an outsize influence on him for his entire adult life, and he invoked their authority early and often.  Even into his nineties, and after he’d discarded the better part of his personal library, he couldn’t let go of his heroes. 

    Dad clearly saw himself as part of the avant-garde movement.  He identified with the “Anguish, Forlornness and Despair” Sartre described as humankind’s inescapable fate.  This conviction may have helped him accept as inevitable his chronic depression, but it certainly didn’t put a bounce in his step or bring a smile to his face.  In fact, he seemed to feel that, alone among his peers, he was the only realist, a man who could unflinchingly face the absurdity of the human condition.

    As they aged, Nancy would sometimes complain to me that Bill never wanted to watch a light-hearted movie or one that ended on a positive note. “No Country for Old Men” was more to his taste and, as always, Nancy sat beside him uncomplainingly and endured the bleak fare he selected.

    When we had to arrange for a speedy transfer to Wisconsin, I asked my father which of his books I ought to pack.  Although reluctant to do anything to facilitate the process, he waved to the space occupied by the Existentialists and thick volumes focused on World War II, the Nazis, and military armaments.  Cartons of other books on economics, politics and current events were set aside so that at a later date I could haul them to a cavernous used bookstore on the outskirts of Jacksonville.  A year or so later, Dad made the switch to e-books, complaining about the weight and small print of their physical counterparts. The remnants of his library now sat gathering dust in their new apartment.

    Back in Naples, Dad’s powers of concentration and cognition had declined to the point that longer articles in magazines like Harper’s and The New Yorker - much less books – were incomprehensible.  Now he spent hours every day surfing the Internet, clicking on condensed news feeds and other superficial fare. He also streamed movies, television shows and documentaries (usually war-related) for evening viewing.  Even during the last weeks of his life at Naples hospital, he ignored the room’s television and, for diversion, relied exclusively on his I-Pad.

    One might wonder how a person could live so many years in a cloud of cynicism and negativity without, as Camus observed, seriously considering suicide.  Mood-altering chemicals can help.   

    I’m not exactly sure when Dad first began using psychoactive drugs to get through the day and then fall asleep at night.  Nancy pointed to a time in the late 1970’s when he “borrowed” a tab or two of my sisters’ Oxazepam, a drug she was taking for acute anxiety.  Amazed at how mellow the medication made him feel, he soon managed to wrangle a prescription of his own.   Despite warnings that Oxazepam’s effectiveness decreases over time, and that uninterrupted, long-term use can lead to paranoia and other mental disturbances, he steadily increased the dosage. Dad’s dependency became so acute that he didn’t acknowledge side effects that were obvious to others in the family.  For almost forty years he pressured a series of pliable physicians to keep his prescription open. 

    At some point, he also obtained a scrip for the opiate oxycontin, which was readily available for many years as drug manufacturers sought to maximize their profits. Nancy used the medication as well to ease the pain of her spinal stenosis.  When Bill felt he needed an extra boost, he simply pilfered tabs from her bottle.

    After doctors began tightening up on the distribution of opioids, Nancy worried about how an interruption in his supply would affect her husband.  “Your father is hard to live with when he doesn’t have his meds,” she complained.  I knew from my own observations that she was right about Dad, so I mentioned that Trina had hydrocodone tabs left over from her hip replacement surgeries.  Mother brightened at this news, and begged me to “donate” them to Dad.  I made the mistake of giving in to her desperate appeal, and Trina was livid when she found out.  I offered my wife profuse apologies and told mother that the medication had to be returned.  This did not please her in the least.     

    That episode took place shortly after the two of them had landed in Madison, but Dad had already been abusing drugs for decades.  The last year they lived in Jacksonville, Trina and I had made arrangements for a ninetieth birthday bash at one of The First Unitarian Society’s beautiful gathering spaces (this was the same trip on which he had complained about my deviation from his familiar route).  Dad was so unnerved by the prospect of being in the same room with his children, grandchildren, and other close relatives that he fortified himself in advance with a triple dose of Oxazepam.

    Noticeably unsteady when he walked into the room, after he sat down, he became the life of the party.  For the next hour or so he was in full command of his audience: smiling, cracking jokes, and basking in all the attention. Ironically, he showed little interest in the gift my siblings and I had pooled our money to give him: an Apple I-Pad (his first).  At that point the device hadn’t been around very long and Dad couldn’t fathom how it might serve as a useful adjunct to his beloved Macbook laptop.  Consequently, the I-pad sat untouched in its handsome Apple box for a few months, until the old man convinced himself that this was now a “hot thing” in digital technology.  Once he became familiar with it, the I-pad accompanied him everywhere and he purchased several upgrades in the years that followed.

    That 90th birthday bash was an exception. In daily life the drugs were having a profoundly negative effect on Dad’s well-being (he had also begun smoking cigarettes again after having conquered the habit forty years earlier).  His paranoia - directed most often toward his immediate family and his physicians - became more pronounced, and his opioid consumption led to alternating bouts of painful constipation and explosive diarrhea.  He was also becoming more impulsive, verbally lashing out at His wife over petty differences. 

    By now, Dad’s motor skills were also showing marked deterioration.  Standing for short periods, taking a brief walk, getting back on his feet after toileting or sitting in his easy chair – all of this was a struggle. During their last two years in Jacksonville Dad simply toppled over several times, suffering painful injuries on two occasions.  Bodily infirmities such as these are probably to be expected for someone entering their ninetieth decade, but in Dad’s case the problems were magnified by his initial refusal to use a walker, insert his hearing aids properly, or curtail his drug use.

    He didn’t do much better in Madison, but at least Nancy now had Trina and me for support.  Impulse control continued to be a major issue.  His use of profanity increased and, at times, he became physically confrontational.  Then, one late summer morning in a spontaneous “I’ll show you” fit of pique he swallowed that half-bottle of sedatives.  It was meant to be a performance of sorts, designed to capture Nancy’s attention as much as anything else. He undoubtedly didn’t count on being carted off to the hospital to have his stomach pumped. 

    To this day I don’t think Dad was serious about killing himself.  As mentioned earlier, even without medical intervention he would likely have slept off the effects of the drug.  But the presumed gravity of the act was enough to qualify him for an involuntary commitment.

    At the VA, Dad was weaned off the opiates and sedatives and assigned more appropriate medications. He was not permitted to administer them himself; Nancy was instructed to procure a lock-box and dole out the proper dosages, morning and night.  This forfeiture of his freedom made Dad livid, so after several weeks of compliance he told his wife that he would accept the meds from her but wash them down in the privacy of his bathroom. Nancy was all-too-aware that he might well be flushing away at least some of the pills, but she relented rather than deal with his anger.

     The terms of his release from the VA facility also included abstinence from alcohol, but before long Dad was self-medicating with copious amounts of beer.  During his time in Naples, he began imbibing wine and hard liquor as well.

    Approaching his ninety-sixth year, Dad took one more step into the world of drugs.  With assistance from an unidentified hotel staffer, he was put in touch with a Naples doctor who wrote him a scrip for medical marijuana.  He then began vaping, and from what I can gather subsequently entered into a relationship with a private dispenser of medical marijuana who was willing (for a price) to provide him with more THC than his prescription authorized.  Well provisioned, Dad came out of his shell and began holding get-togethers for his favored hotel employees in his suite, plying them with booze and pot.  During her last winter at The Edgewater Nancy became aware of this new pattern of behavior, and although she refused to participate, also chose to overlook it.  Reviewing Dad’s receipts after he passed away, I estimated that he was laying out upwards of $1000 a month for marijuana.

    As I prepared to bring Nancy back to Madison that year, my siblings and I made yet another attempt to convince Dad to come with her and stay at least through the warmer months in Wisconsin.  We pointed out his disabilities and how they elevated the risk of living by himself. He brushed us off and, after ten minutes, shuffled into his bedroom, thus signaling an end to the conversation.  When I subsequently learned of Dad’s new marijuana habit, I realized that it had been useless to press the point – Wisconsin hadn’t passed medical marijuana legislation so returning was, for this reason alone, out of the question. 

    While emptying his suite, Trina and I discovered numerous vials, mostly empty, of THC for vaping, as well as copious quantities of CBD oil.  We bagged everything up and dropped it off at the local police station.  The amount of alcohol he had stockpiled was also breathtaking.  At age ninety-six, my fashion-conscious father had suddenly become a party animal. 

     Did drug use help my father transcend his chronic depression and anxiety?  It’s hard to say, but in my opinion, he just traded one devil for another.  He was a man who insisted on doing things his own way, and who was convinced he knew better than anyone else what was best for him.  He used a permissive medical system the way he used everyone else: to get what he wanted. 

    Dad would never admit that any of his lifestyle choices were harmful, or that his mental and physical deterioration was in any way connected to his drug use.  He always had an alternative explanation at the ready (“It’s that damned blood pressure medication, not the sedative, that caused me to fall”). 

    During their months of separation, Dad maintained his connection with Nancy by phone.  But as time when on, their weekly chats became briefer and more perfunctory, their most consistant feature being his complaints of boredom and unhappiness.  He was now free, unencumbered, and living high, but most days he really wasn’t experiencing much pleasure.  Like the obsessive-compulsive person he’d always been, Dad clung fiercely to his routines.  In the end, those were only interrupted by his death. 

Pater Familias

    My father died alone. There was no one to hold his hand or utter words of comfort. He’d been transferred from the Naples Hospital to an in-patient hospice facility two days before and, when he called me from his new room, he seemed relieved: the space was better appointed and there was no sentry sitting a few feet from his bed. 

    When we spoke again by phone the day after his admission, Dad’s speech was slurred and his thought processes muddled.  He had a hard time grasping the information I was attempting to convey.  I assured him that Nancy and I would see him in a few days, and that we had already purchased plane tickets.  He was clearly looking forward to seeing her. 

    Dad reconnected the following morning with a request: could I deliver a message to his favorite concierge at the Edgewater, asking that she come visit him.  This was the same woman with whom he had conspired earlier regarding his gun.  Even if hospice would allow it, I didn’t want her or any of the other hotel workers around Dad.  There was no telling what an interaction would lead to.  I told my father (somewhat disingenuously) that only family members were permitted to see him; friends didn’t count.  Distressed by this news, he abruptly hung up on me.

    That was the last time I, or anyone apart from the hospice crew, spoke with Charles W. Schuler.  That organization had been reluctant to take on my father in the first place, since there was no indication that his passing was imminent.  They said he could stay for no more than fourteen days, after which he would be referred to a skilled nursing facility.  Mother and I were convinced that this would mean bringing him back to Wisconsin, with all the complications this entailed.

    But Dad pulled a fast one for the last time.  Less than twenty-four hours after our final abbreviated conversation, the noon meal having been served and the dishes cleared, Dad settled in for a nap.  He had shown little interest in food throughout his hospitalization and, as a result, was quite depleted. When an attendant stopped by two hours later to check his vitals, he had expired without a whimper.

    Given his recent history of TIA’s, a severe stroke might have done him in, or heart failure - although there were no prior indications of coronary disease.  Mother declined to have an autopsy performed; what was the point with a man just two months shy of his ninety-seventh birthday?  For lack of a more definitive explanation, the hospice physician simply listed “failure to thrive” as the proximate cause of death.

    Nancy broke down when I appeared unannounced at her apartment to deliver the news, berating herself for not being present for her husband when he passed.  I reminded her that we had all tried our best to convince Dad to take that March 20 flight to Madison, but he wouldn’t hear of it.  He had made what was, to his mind, an irrevocable decision two and a half years earlier: he would live and die in Naples, and the rest of the family could go about their own business.

    It was just not in Dad’s nature to prioritize his relatives. The walls and tabletops of his suite were covered with photos, but conspicuously absent were images of his wife and children.  There were many such pictures in the Middleton apartment, but that was Mother’s doing, not his.  Yes, Dad had taken most of those pictures, but she was the one who insisted that they be displayed.  For their seventieth wedding anniversary, Nancy had framed a nice portrait of the two of them, smiling at each other, in happier times.  Dad glanced at it, then laid it aside with hardly a second thought.  We found it lying unheralded amidst a litter of papers and magazines on an end table in his suite. 

    As we were growing up Dad was a rather indifferent father who, as previously noted, considered his children a bother rather than a blessing.  Without question, the three of us bickered at times, as is probably par for the course with siblings as close in age as we were.  And, living in relative isolation on our farm, we got on each other’s nerves at times.  But Dad had a low threshold for annoyance.  He could be very intimidating, and he didn’t have to harm any of us physically in order to put us in our place.

     We were always aware of the possibility of being slapped around a little though.  In my parent’s bedroom, propped against a window, there was a flat wooden paddle.  The business end was decorated with a cartoon of a bare-bottomed child bending over and waiting for a well-deserved paddling. Etched beneath the picture were the words “Board of Education.”  I don’t recall ever being smacked with that device, so its ostensible purpose was deterrence rather than the administration of pain.  Paradoxically, mother was the one who occasionally swatted us with her open hand to drive home a point.  Perhaps this was a bargain she had negotiated with her husband, to ensure that he wouldn’t do something he’d later regret.

    But Dad was the one I was wary of, because when he became upset, he didn’t keep it bottled up. Yes, he resisted the impulse to strike, but he was far less careful about his speech.  Dad’s approach to punishment was shaming; he lashed out at us with ugly epithets - “stupid,” “lazy,” “infuriating,” and “You kids are what gave me this ulcer.”  On occasion he would lob these verbal grenades in the presence of other adults.

     He also threatened my brother and me with torturous tasks if we “didn’t shape up.”  He’d once read a short story about a stern father who, in an effort to instill a solid work ethic, put his son to work on his summer vacation cutting their large front lawn with a straight razor. It was, needless to say, a Sisyphean task beyond any child’s capacity.  But this, our father suggested, may be your fate if you don’t behave yourselves.    

    Years later, I read the great naturalist John Muir’s account of his own youth, and how his God-fearing Scotch father ordered John to dig a well through sixty feet of soil and bedrock to supply the family with water. John did as his father demanded and, despite this brutal assignment, found it in his heart years later to forgive the old man.  For my part, I was grateful that my own father never handed me a straight razor.

    That said, he did lean on me at a rather tender age.  Equipped with wire cutters, crowbars, shovels and rugged leather gloves, he and I dismantled many of the barbwire fences that previous farm hands had erected to contain their livestock.  Since Dad had put aside any and all thoughts of raising cattle, we removed the fences in order to open up the fields for row crops.  I was only seven or eight years old, but pulling staples out of the fence posts and cutting the jagged wire into small sections were tasks I could easily manage.  It wasn’t physically demanding work, and because it made me feel grown-up and trustworthy, it became an early source of pride.  Moreover, Dad seemed satisfied with my efforts – although he never said as much.

    On other occasions, the jobs he assigned felt punitive, although I don’t think this was the overseer’s intention.  Acting as a servant-in-waiting as he struggled to remove the corn picker assembly from our big, all-purpose Allis Chalmers tractor was especially torturous.  This annual ritual took place once the grain had been harvested and siloed.  Some years the weather cooperated, the crop matured early, and the mechanical part of the process could be completed by early November.  Other years, it was after Thanksgiving before Dad had made the last pass over the frosty ground and it was achingly cold.  This meant that the knuckle-busting work of disassembly would be undertaken in a heatless barn as curious pigeons roosting snuggly in the rafters looked on.

   I was pressed into service not to do anything technical or remotely interesting but, like a dental assistant, to retrieve from the toolbox the specific wrench or screwdriver Dad called out for.  As he strained over and swore at the stubborn bolts he was trying to loosen, I’d stamp my feet and rub my hands to keep them from going numb.  Standing around in those bitter conditions, waiting for my father to bark his next command, was incredibly uncomfortable.  He wasn’t being cruel, and he needed a helper.  But it did — and still does — seem insensitive.  

    It has been said that anger in its various manifestation is the only emotion the typical American male is programmed to express.  Whether or not this is true more generally, it was certainly the case with my father.  Otherwise, he was not a demonstrative person.  He projected little warmth and certainly didn’t have a knack for nurturing. I never remember him tucking me in, comforting me when I was ill, or commiserating when I suffered a disappointment.  He did give my brother and me haircuts, although it wasn’t exactly the sort of attention we craved.  Dad went about this task like a surgeon, so it took forever – at least in the eyes of an impatient eight-year-old.  More than once, he addressed the challenge each of us presented: my brother’s hair, he said, was “like a Brillo Pad,” thick and course.  My locks were precisely the opposite, fine and downy.  Making his sons presentable was a necessary but thankless task yet he stuck with it.  I was high school age when Dad finally surrendered me to a professional barber. 

     Tonsuring apart, even when we were infants Dad imposed rules designed to keep us in a sphere of our own.  Although she didn’t feel it was appropriate, he forbade Nancy from going to our bedrooms to comfort us when we cried at night.  We had to learn to “comfort ourselves”, he insisted. “I’ve always regretted that I bowed to his demands when you were so little,” she later admitted.

    Whether he just didn’t believe in positive reinforcement or was temperamentally incapable of bestowing praise or encouragement, Dad rarely made us feel good about ourselves. If he was proud of us for our academic achievements, theatrical accomplishments (I won the lead in two school plays, and a supporting role in a third), or athleticism he kept it to himself – as, for the most part, did mother.  The same code extended to our home life; we were criticized for our derelictions and given to understand that a neutral silence signaled that we had met their expectations. 

    I have to believe that my father’s reticence reflected his own upbringing; if he hadn’t been affirmed as a youngster he may not have been able to satisfy any child’s hunger for approval. But again, Dad was a narcissist, so for him the giving and receiving of praise was a zero-sum game. In other words, to affirm someone else feels to the narcissist like an act of self-diminishment. I think it really was a blow to his ego when his children excelled, and in time this curdled into resentment.  In the end, it became hard to feel much affection, or gratitude, for such an indifferent parent.  

    For much of my adult life I wanted to give my father the benefit of the doubt, excusing his behavior toward us as a regrettable fixture of his personality.  But then, in his last years, he unambiguously stated that his hopes in life had been dashed because of his children. 

    As his demeanor hardened and his behavior became more unstable, the rest of the family orchestrated “interventions” on two separate occasions to air our concerns and apprise Dad of actions we were prepared to take. The second of these – as described earlier -  took place at the VA hospital. But the first was held in his and Nancy’s Madison apartment.  In the middle of that somber discussion, he grew agitated and rose to leave only to end up in my sister’s grasp.  She took hold of his forearm and demanded that he sit back down. Surprisingly, he didn’t fight back and meekly complied.

    But then, a bit later, he exacted his revenge. Glaring, and pointing his finger, he informed the three of us that our births had undermined his ambition to become a writer.  “Then why didn’t you just use a condom?” My sister spat back.

    It is true that Dad had endured his share of disappointment.  He had never planned to be a farmer and, had it not been for Nancy, who wanted some stability in her own and the children’s lives, he would have sought an escape route much earlier than he did.  I will give him minimal credit for staying in the marriage even as he may have silently wished to be elsewhere.

    So, yes, child rearing was not Charles Schuler’s cup of tea and, yes, he could be cold and condescending at times.  But he did have his better moments.  There were sunny summer days when he would emerge from his study to play catch or participate in a game of croquet.  When he purchased the powerboat, water skis for us were part of the deal.  In colder months, stuck indoors we occasionally played board games together - Monopoly, The Game of Life, and Camelot - a two-person strategy game resembling chess that he and I both enjoyed. 

    Perhaps our most memorable father-son collaboration was in the building of a slot-car racing track in the basement of our farmhouse. Several of my seventh-grade peers had introduced me to this activity, which was more exciting than running pokey model trains.  I procured a car of my own, but there was no place to run it except on a friend’s track on the rare occasions I was allowed to go straight from school to his house.  We lived too far out of town for me to do this this very often, so I began hinting at getting a track of my own. 

    The kind that hobby shops sold, with sections that snapped together, was prohibitively expensive.  So, Dad did some calculating and came home with several large sheets of particle board and enough copper conductive tape to create a homemade version.  He showed me how to use a router to cut the “slots” on which the cars traveled, and a soldering iron for connecting the segments of tape and the tape to a transformer.  It’s the only childhood project I remember him helping me with, and he was uncommonly patient with my mistakes.  And, when the novelty wore off and the track sat largely unused, he didn’t say “I told you so.”

    It was fortuitous that my grandmother, Inga, spent the summers with us during our years on the Rock River farm. She had sold her own home in St. Paul after her husband died of a heart attack (his third) at age sixty.  After that, Inga spent a portion of the year with each of her far-flung daughters.  In our case, she helped out with childcare, managed the garden, and did the lion’s share of the housework.  Since mother worked long hours during the week, grandma Inga also did much of the cooking.  She didn’t live in our farmhouse, which only had a single upstairs bath and three small bedrooms.  Instead, she and my parents agreed on the fully-equipped house trailer that found a permanent home across from our front door. 

    Despite the indispensable domestic aid she provided, there was no love lost between Inga and my father. As I described earlier, the relationship began on a sour note when Bill convinced Nancy to elope, thus depriving her parents of the prideful pleasure of arranging a formal wedding for the couple.  As the years passed, Dad and his mother-in-law tried not to get under each other’s skin, but there were a few times when harsh words were exchanged.

    For the intervening months when Inga was supporting her other two daughters, Dad did pitch in a bit more, generally taking the path of least resistance.  When mother worked late there were frozen Swanson pot pies and Banquet TV dinners that needed no more preparation than a half-hour in a pre-heated oven.  Those meals were typically served on trays in front of the television, which helped keep the amount of childish squabbling to a minimum. 

    Dad was also more easy-going about housework than our grandmother, which meant fewer chores and more time for Looney Tunes in the afternoon and pulp science fiction novels before bed.  Dad was happy as long as we were distracted and out of his hair.

    When all five of us did sit down for a family meal in the dining room, the conversation tended to be muted. Particularly when we were younger, admonitions about table manners and reprimands for unruly behavior were commonplace.  In between our childish spats, Dad and mother would carry on conversations from which we were excluded.  Years later I asked my father why he didn’t engage with us very often.  “Because children don’t have anything meaningful to contribute,” he replied.  He almost never expressed curiosity about the activities that filled our days - school, friendships, books, games.  Because we had yet to “put aside childish things” we might as well have been chattering chimpanzees. 

      When we were old enough to grasp an abstract concept or an adult joke, Dad did deign to include us in discussions of his favorite topics.  Of course, these weren’t really “discussions” so much as soliloquies similar to the ones he delivered at the Unitarian Fellowship.  Dad could be quite entertaining when he was on a roll. He liked to play for laughs and clearly enjoyed being the center of attention.  He had a sharp wit and made a point of being provocative and irreverent.  As teenagers sitting around that dining room table, we learned a great deal about existentialism, religious hypocrisy, and the sad, historic record of human folly.  Dad did a commendable job of indoctrinating us, and for years afterward my own outlook closely resembled his.  Brother Bill, on the other hand, came to resent Dad’s pontificating and eventually beat a retreat from his secularistic cynicism, putting his soul in the hands of the Assemblies of God.

    To make sure we got the message, Dad took a couple of steps highly unusual for a father of his, or any, generation. On one occasion, he volunteered to fill in for mother as the reader of our bedtime story.  This was an enjoyable responsibility for her, and she instilled in all of us a love of literature as we listened raptly to works by those quintessentially British children’s authors A.A. Milne, Kenneth Graham, and Beatrix Potter.  But when we’d reached the age of ten or so, Dad decided we were mature enough to be exposed to something more pointedly political.  Thus, George Orwell and his anti-fascist novel Animal Farm entered our lives. 

    Obviously, at the time none of us were worldly enough to appreciate the more serious point Orwell was trying to make.  We absorbed it as an amusing, if somewhat disconcerting fable about oppressed livestock who orchestrate a coup and, over the course of several days, gain control over a modest farm.  Dad shared the entire book with us and seemed to relish the experience.  But I don’t recall him trying to explain Orwell’s design in creating this fable; maybe he thought we’d catch on when we were older.  Not long after, Dad bought home two young Hampshire sows for me to raise.  I promptly christened them “Napoleon” and “Snowball,” after the porcine protagonists in Orwell’s novel.

    Being a big fan of Samuel Beckett, Dad opened the second chapter in our exposure to “adult” literature with an audiotape of that playwright’s most noteworthy creation: “Waiting for Godot.”  Dad had managed to make a recording of a stage production starring E.G. Marshall and Bert Lahr that found its way into our farmhouse via a Chicago FM station.

    Dad now owned a high-end open reel tape deck, so the results – given their distant origin – allowed for decent listening.  The dialogue was crisp and Lahr and Marshall’s performances were memorable.  In keeping with his religious skepticism, Dad chose Christmas Eve for our introduction to Beckett.  Perhaps he was hoping we’d connect the dots between Godot, who never shows up, and the fantasy figures of Santa Claus and Jesus, in whom we’d already lost faith.  We all thought the play was a hoot, despite the pathos of the two hobos, Vladimir and Estragon and the decidedly unlucky character named “Lucky” (apparently Beckett himself was less than pleased with this production, feeling it had descended into slapstick).

    Dad threaded that same tape through the recorder each Christmas for several years, usually as the “second feature” after we had all watched Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol” on TV.  The tradition died when the family relocated to Naples, because now our Christmases were spent working at the Holiday Inn, filling hungry vacationers’ gullets with slabs of turkey and prime rib off the buffet.

    Decades later, and after my hapless parents had relocated to Madison, I tried to return the favor of those early Christmases spent with Samuel Beckett. Trina and I were regular patrons of the American Players Theater, an outstanding repertory company that staged their shows some forty miles from our home.  Checking to see what new productions the company had on tap, I was delighted to see that “Endgame” would soon open. I immediately ordered four tickets, convinced that my father, in particular, would be thrilled to attend a live performance of a Beckett play that was one of his all-time favorites.

     After a serene drive to the scenic country theater we settled into our seats, just a few yards from the stage.  The acting was exceptional and the staging drab and destitute of color, as Beckett would have intended.  As the action unfolded, I watched Dad out of the corner of my eye and was disappointed to see that he spent most of the performance fiddling with his I-phone before eventually nodding off.  When we were all back in the car I asked him what he thought of the play and he just shrugged. 

    While in college I continued to work for my father when classes were out, usually filling in for full-time employees on vacation. In the process, I did learn a few things: how to maintain a large swimming pool; hanging black-out curtains in guest rooms; stocking vending machine; and handling drunks as a night clerk.  It was cheap, indentured servanthood, and I earned the same hourly wage no matter how much responsibility the job entailed.   

    I was also expected to be “on call” when an unforeseen absence occurred.  Being “Mr. Big’s” son certainly didn’t make me eligible for preferential treatment. Just the opposite: Dad simply expected me to make a sacrificial effort on behalf of the family business – a role that neither my sister nor brother were asked to play.

    Nevertheless, his demands weren’t so draconian that I was required to suspend my budding relationship with Trina, who lived with her parents less than a mile from the Inn.  Over my high school and college years I dined with her family more than often than in my own, typically empty, house.

     Although he never issued an explicit invitation, it was my distinct impression that Dad hoped that following graduation I would return to Naples as manager-apprentice at the Holiday Inn. It was not a role I would have accepted without serious reservations, since I knew from personal observation that the work was consuming and had taken a considerable toll on both my parents. Trina also weighed in, questioning whether she was cut out to be an Innkeeper’s wife.  And, we both agreed that, like his father, Charles W. Schuler’s controlling personality would leave me little latitude in running the business according to “best practices.” 

    Dad undoubtedly sensed my reluctance, so he ended up leasing the business to a slick fellow who already operated several other Holiday Inn franchises in Florida. Shortly thereafter, Trina and I shook the sand from our sneakers and pointed her Oldsmobile Cutlass west, to Berkeley, California and graduate school.

    We received a modest cash wedding present from my parents, but other than that we were on our own for the next three years (I later found out that the folks paid for my brother’s medical school and both my sister’s MFA and Ph.D. programs).  The wedding gift, plus my own meager savings, got us through that first year – thanks in part to the $125.00/mo. apartment we lucked into after a previous student-tenant vacated.  From there, Trina supported us with her job at a sheltered workshop in nearby Richmond, while I brought in a few dollars from a work-study gig at a migrant farmworker advocacy organization.  Dad and Mother may well have assumed we were being subsidized by Trina’s moderately wealthy parents, but that wasn’t the case. In any event, they never asked if we needed help, and neither of us felt like begging. 

     The old man’s penuriousness was due in part to my problematic choice or vocations.  The fact that I was preparing for the ministry – albeit in our own family’s faith tradition – didn’t sit well with him.  Yes, we had attended the small lay-led Unitarian Fellowship in Dixon on a regular basis where he served as a faux minister. But he also possessed a strong anticlerical streak, and if it wasn’t in the cards for me to succeed him as manager of the Holiday Inn, he hoped I’d become an attorney or choose some other equally respectable (and well compensated) secular line of work.  Dad had every reason to think this way. I’d earned an undergraduate degree in political science and had applied to and been accepted by two fine law schools. But in my heart-of-hearts I just didn’t feel called to that over-subscribed profession. 

     Trina and I took the red-eye from San Francisco to Florida a couple of times while I was in seminary, but my parents visited the Bay Area only once: for my ordination.  I’m sure that trip made Dad more than a little anxious, since he was deathly afraid of flying.  But even if Mother had to badger him into coming, it did signal at least grudging support for my ambitions.

    Naturally, he brought along one of his cameras and took a few shots of me in the tailored Saint-Laurens ordination suit I had splurged on. I selected one of the prints and attached it to the cover of the application packets Unitarian Universalist ministers prepare for congregations looking to settle a new minister.  The pickings were pretty slim, and few pulpit committees showed interest in a twenty-five-year-old with few qualifications aside from a newly minted divinity degree.  But after that early gesture of acceptance, Dad showed little interest in my professional development.

    Over the first fifteen years of our marriage, my parents visited Trina and me in our home exactly twice.  They clearly felt it was up to us to take time out from work and make the long, costly journey to see them in South Florida. Although they both were in excellent health and financially well off, this pattern of avoidance persisted even after we’d finally produced a grandchild in 1986.  When Kyle and his mom came home from the hospital, Nancy came up to “help” with his care for a week or so.  Dad, on the other hand, pointedly chose to remain in Naples. 

    By contrast, Trina’s folks were thrilled about Kyle’s arrival and flew to Binghamton for the infant dedication ceremony that was held at the church I was serving at the time.  My own father wasn’t going to let anything impinge on his precious leisure activities - traveling cross-country in a succession of motor homes, photographing Everglades wildlife, indulging his cross-dressing fetish and, in time, reeling in grouper as if his life depended on it. 

    He always made time for reading, though, and on the rare occasions we did get together he would talk animatedly about his latest discovery.  By this point he’d pretty much exhausted that coveted vein of existentialist ore, but he wasn’t much interested in anybody else’s works of fiction.  That always seemed a bit odd to me; a novelist who eschewed other novels (Cormac McCarthy was the exception, as his dark, pessimistic outlook reflected my father’s). Perhaps he just didn’t want to read anything that might highlight the deficiencies of his own prose. 

    The non-fiction he favored was dense, topical and often as not had received favorable notice in the New York Times or The New York Review of Books.  For the most part, these works reinforced his own left-of-center opinions and prejudices, which meant that our occasional conversations moved along predictable, well-worn pathways. He did not cast his net very widely, and the older he got the narrower his interests became.  By his ninth decade, his commentaries had become infuriatingly repetitious.  He found alternate points of view irritating rather than engaging.   

    Once my folks had set up shop in Jacksonville, I made it a point to call almost weekly, even though our talks were predictably one-sided.  Mother was a silent party, listening in but otherwise relieved that her husband could regale a third party with his well-worn arguments.  My brother and sister both avoided dialoging with Dad because he had a habit of making off-hand comments that rankled them - anti-Christian rhetoric in my evangelical brother’s case, and misogynist jibes where my sister was concerned. Consistent with their refusal to be a physical part of our lives, Dad and mother hardly ever initiated a phone call (for years, they reached out only on my birthday) believing, again, that keeping the connection alive was the child’s responsibility. 

    Dad and I enjoyed a rapport of sorts so long as I didn’t contradict him, or move the conversation in another direction. For his past, elder brother Bill, had little tolerance for his father’s unfiltered ramblings.  Bill had come to conservative Christianity through marriage, moving from Anglicanism through Roman Catholicism to Pentecostalism. He and his wife, Flo, homeschooled their four boys and became pillars of their local Assembly of God church.  Prior to marriage, my brother had been the drummer for a couple of rock groups, and now he assumed the same role in his congregation’s Praise Band (my parents believed that drumming was how their oldest son released his frustrations).  Flo, for her part, led a women’s bible study group. 

    Dad was both mystified and distressed by my brother and sister-in-law's fervent evangelicism.  How could his well-educated physician son be sucked in by such an anti-intellectual and moralistic faith tradition?  He undoubtedly took his offspring’s betrayal of his own values personally, but placed most of the blame on Flo, the headstrong spouse who led her smart but emotionally immature husband into the arms of Jesus.

    For my sister, it was Dad’s lack of regard for women’s intelligence that compromised their relationship.  A hard-core feminist, Cathy also bristled at the erotica (Henry Miller, Frank Harris) she found on her father’s bookshelf.  His high-handed treatment of Nancy didn’t do much to improve their rapport either.

    Whether he meant to or not, on more than one occasion Dad also made demeaning comments about my sister’s appearance, comparing her plain looks to those of her more fetching (in his opinion) female partners.  What both of my siblings seemed incapable of accepting is that our father lacked an empathy gene; he spoke and acted like the full-blown narcissist he was. 

    Nor did he have a very high opinion of my own choice in women.  Despite her attractiveness, Trina had grown up in southern Arkansas and my father dismissed all white Southerners as bourbon-chugging rednecks.  My father-in-law was a bourbon drinker, but he was also a self-made man who had, over time, acquired a big chunk of fertile delta farmland on which he grew bumper crops of rice and soybeans.  By the time we met, he had a lot of dough.

    Victor Songer was six feet tall, with rugged, Hollywood looks reminiscent of Dean Martin.  An accomplished athlete, he had survived the Bataan Death March and spent three-plus years in a Japanese prison camp.  He was outgoing, made friends easily, and valued practical intelligence over academic learning (his formal education ended after a semester in college). In short, he was just the sort of person in whose presence Charles Schuler would feel inadequate. During the early years of our marriage, the two sets of parents met socially exactly once, even though they lived just six blocks apart.  Trina never had a chance.

    Both daughters-in-law didn’t hesitate to call dad out when he acted disrespectfully. My parents undoubtedly faulted the two younger women for not being sufficiently deferential. Or, as mother might have put it, “Why can’t you just let Charles be Charles?”

    Deference and appeasement were my mother’s default positions.  She was the middle of three sisters, and the other two were prettier and more extroverted than stout, bespectacled Nancy.  If she had a serious romantic encounter with anyone, male or female, before meeting this slender, recently discharged Army lieutenant, none of us were aware of it.  Did she feel grateful to Dad for marrying her?  I suspect she did.

    In any event, she spent the rest of her life accommodating his choices and fancies: his unremunerative pursuit of a literary career; the cross-dressing; a succession of relocations which forced her to abandon careers and friendships; the need to keep control of their leisure activities and financial resources; dismissal of her own family of origin.  Although there was no physical abuse, Dad did play on mother’s insecurities.  He questioned her intelligence and scoffed at her slow grasp of computers and cameras.  Dad commonly referred to her as “my peasant wife,” a dig meant to remind her of her humble, working-class origins (blithely ignoring the fact that Herman, her father, was an accomplished manager, 42nd degree Mason and commander of his local VFW post) and her swarthy complexion.

    More than once I asked mother why she put up with Dad’s antics and she’d sheepishly argue that he’d done some nice things for her over the years.  He’d bought her a few expensive trinkets, although not ones she would ever have chosen.  There was, for example, the gold South African Krugerrand coin repurposed as a pendant. A small purse-size pistol whose purpose none of us could divine. On their anniversary, they dined at a fancy restaurant of his choosing, but otherwise he refused to eat out.  But most important to me, Nancy said, is that “my husband makes me laugh.” 

    This was true.  Mother would explode in honest laughter when dad was regaling her with his droll humor.  “When the laughter stops,” she mused late in life, “I don’t know what I’ll do.”  But in fact, that happened years before they separated.  Mother stuck with him to the bitter end anyway.

    Nancy Schuler was fiercely loyal, not just to dad but to the concept of loyalty itself. “When I vowed to remain with your father ‘for as long as we both shall live,’ I meant it,” she declared with complete conviction.  Mother didn’t oppose divorce as a necessary recourse for unhappy couples; she just refused to consider it for herself.  Her attitude toward abortion was similar - she was pro-choice, but would never have terminated one of her own pregnancies, even if the fetus was non-viable.

    So, no matter how controlling dad was, or how much his behavior troubled her, she was determined to stay the course as a matter of principle, if not of affection.

    During the two and a half years Trina and I spent in Tallahassee pursuing advanced degrees we visited our Naples families more frequently and Dad and I, as mentioned, would often fish together in the Gulf.  But my parents never explicitly invited us to stay with them (Trina’s parents provided hospitality).  Years would pass before the entire family spent time together, and rarely at my parent’s initiative.  

     Too many relatives invading his turf upset my father.  Once, when my brother’s brood all descended on his island hideaway in the Lake of the Woods, Dad could barely contain his agitation.  Once they had departed, he informed Nancy that no more than two of his grandchildren could stay with them at any one time. That pretty much put a stop to my brother’s visits.

    For much of our courtship and married life, Trina and I spent the better part of our free time with Vic and Louise Songer, as they were always welcoming.  I’m sure my parents felt we were playing favorites, but they made little, if any, effort to cultivate us.  After Trina’s folks passed away, and as Dad and mother’s health worsened, we felt obliged to visit more often, whether invited or not.  We made the long road trip to Jacksonville at least annually, and more often while our son was working on an advanced degree up the road at the Savannah College of Art and Design.  We were present often enough to witness a rapid deterioration in Dad’s physical and mental wellbeing, and a concurrent increase in his volatility.

    Their last two years in Florida were tough. One fall that he took left the side of his face bloodied, bruised, and swollen.  His driving made me so nervous – tailgating, speeding - that I had to tell him flat out that I would no longer accompany him for coffee unless he handed me the keys.  Starbucks won the day, if only because Dad had become so compulsive that any interruption in the daily pattern made him miserable.    

    During one of our visits, he had me drive him and mother to a nearby shopping mall so that he could pick up a water purification filter at Sears.  The timing of this errand was critical because it had to fall within the time parameters of his daily coffee run.  We were halfway to our destination when mother remembered that the two homemade cookies she always packed to complement his Frappuccino had been left on the kitchen counter.  Sitting beside me, Dad cursed and berated Nancy for this innocent oversight.  Seeking to dispel the tension, I volunteered to find an acceptable cookie substitute at the mall. Dad was mollified, but I also took note of the mildness of mother’s reaction to her husband’s outburst. What this suggested to me was that she had made her peace with his frequent tantrums.

    In the months that followed, the old man became increasingly unruly, and his irritable bowel syndrome so severe that his long-suffering wife spent a lot of time cleaning up after him.  He had also begun recalling out loud his “beautiful and artistic” first wife, Zona, whom he hadn’t seen or heard from in almost seventy years (she had died while still in her sixties). He pulled out old photos of the young Zona, completely ignoring the impact this might have on his present partner of sixty-five years. 

    The isolation from friends and family was taking a real toll on mother, and she had decided that the only way to preserve her sanity was for the two of them to leave Jacksonville for a community where one of the children could lend support.  That meant Madison, since neither of my siblings were eager to deal with dad.  In any event, the bustling Washington D.C. area where my sister lived would have overwhelmed the old couple while my brother’s small town in northern Indiana lacked the medical resources my father now needed. 

    As reported earlier, Dad initially refused to budge, and I didn’t argue with him.  “You can rattle around in this house by yourself if you like,” I told him, “but mother is moving to Madison with us. You can come or stay. Your choice.”  Threats, bluster, and imprecations followed, including a promise to shoot any outsider who tried to empty the house.  Dad eventually caved because he still had the presence of mind to realize that he couldn’t survive on his own.

    Their single-story ranch wasn’t large but it was crammed with a seven decades accumulation of dishes, knickknacks, linens, pictures, books, electronic equipment, shelves overflowing with VCR tapes and DVD’s and just plain detritus.  A child of the Great Depression, mother refused to discard anything that might have some life left in it, including a recycling facility’s worth of plastic food containers.  Consequently, the process of sifting and winnowing - which fell to Trina and me - took considerable time. 

    Then the movers - a top-notch North American Van Lines duo from the Tampa area – arrived.  For three days we worked with the crew bubble-wrapping and boxing up my parents’ belongings while Dad, immobile in his recliner, sat glaring at the invaders.  His only contribution to the entire process was to gloomily point to that portion of his library he wanted shipped to Madison.  

    Amidst the flurry of activity, mother acted like a woman in shock, confused and uncertain about what to take and what to sacrifice.  We ended up packing more than would fit into their new apartment, presuming that culling would continue in Madison.  As it was, we still had to leave the house in a state of disarray, which meant returning to Jacksonville a month later to finish the job and place the house on the market.

    While their belongings were in transit, my parents settled into our guest bedroom.  We placed a desk in the living room for dad to work on his laptop, but he deemed the arrangement unsatisfactory.  He wanted to be in the den where the flat screen TV was located and where Trina and I spent most of our own leisure time.  Rather than create another opportunity for rancor we acceded to his wishes.  He promptly took possession of the TV remote and set about re-programming our satellite system – changing the default settings, deleting the programs we’d saved, cancelling series we’d set up to record.

     Dad was intent upon dominating our space, partly as punishment for uprooting him, but also because he simply had to have everything his way.  By the time the movers arrived with their belongings, we had a much clearer picture of what mother had been dealing with.  But everything still had to be unpacked and set up the new apartment before the two of them were out of our hair.

     We also had to find new doctors, dentists, a local bank, and a nearby Starbucks where Dad would feel “at home.” Throughout this drawn-out process he remained belligerent and uncooperative.  Once the transition had been completed, neither he nor my stressed-out mother offered a single word of gratitude for all our efforts.  We really didn’t expect as much; this sense of entitlement was completely in character for the two of them.

    Instead, on at least two occasions dad accused me of neglect.  “You promised that if I came to Madison I’d be your first priority,” he complained. 

    “No,” I said firmly, “I never made a commitment like that. I still have a demanding, full-time job.  Trina and I will always respond to legitimate needs, but I cannot guarantee I’ll be able to jump when you say jump.”

    “Doesn’t the Bible tell you to ‘honor your father,’” he rejoined.  “What about that?”

    I had to suppress a laugh at that remark. Charles W. Schuler - the man who had never invoked the Bible except to criticize it, and who had sneered at its injunctions, was now quoting scripture to his minister son.  That’s when I knew my father had lost all perspective and was grasping at straws. In the months that followed, and until he overdosed on sedatives, Dad continued to decline while his agitation increased.  Things leveled out a bit after his “incarceration” at the VA hospital but ironically, this new lease on life’s allowed him to survive long enough to effect his escape to Naples.

    While in the care of the VA’s psychiatric team, Dad was asked to compose a brief autobiography.  Apparently, this was a task old warriors like him were routinely asked to complete, and it was the only aspect of his treatment former Lieutenant Schuler submitted to willingly.  He carried the twelve-page transcript of “My Life, My Story,” back to the apartment, and although he had been encouraged to write about his life as a whole, fully half of the narrative focused on his brief service in the Army. He summed up his childhood in three paragraphs, and his seventy-years with Nancy in a few sentences. Dad was even less interested in his offspring.  I suspect he would have ignored us entirely if he hadn’t been coached.  Except for the times he was fighting us, we just weren’t on his radar.

What Are Friends For (Not Much, Apparently)?

    People who reach the ripe old age of ninety-seven have already lost most of their friends, and this should have been true for my father as well.  But the fact is, he never had many buddies to begin with and he didn’t put much effort into seeking friendships in either the short- or the long-term.  In other words, his aloofness from his children repeated itself in his broader relational life.  For most of their married life Nancy satisfied his need for an obliging all-purpose companion: household manager, caregiver, sexual partner, income producer, editor, consoler, apologist, all on terms he dictated.

    In the months before he passed away, Charles Schuler’s only “friends” were the hotel personnel who, as already mentioned, benefitted financially from looking after him. Some may have genuinely cared for and about him, and several did show up at the funeral home for the post-mortem visitation.  After consoling his widow, this small party of hangers-on stood off to one side reminiscing among themselves about the pot and liquor fueled soirées their benefactor had hosted in his suite.  These were people who had tended to Dad for over two years, and he seemed to have become the grandfatherly figure in their corporate family. 

    But while their sense of loss seemed genuine, I worried they were also expecting something would come their way from his estate.  Would Nancy, at some point, be served papers in which one or more of the Edgewater employees staked a claim to all or a portion of his diminished trust?  The Naples elder law lawyer we’d engaged recommended that we probate the estate, which would provide a brief window of opportunity for potential claimants to come forward.  After a few months the matter would be settled, and we could breathe a sigh of relief.

    Perhaps we were being overly cautious, but Dad wouldn’t have attracted many friends on account of his personality alone: he was impulsive and often snapped at members of the staff when their service fell short of his expectations.  Moreover, with his cognitive impairment and reckless spending he’d have been an easy mark for con artists and grifters in a place like Naples.  Thankfully, his Edgewater “pals” never gave us any trouble.

    The visitation brought out only a few who were not relatives.  There were several long-time Neapolitans who had made an effort over the years to stay in touch.  It was more for Nancy’s sake that they came, and not because they felt any real grief over Dad’s passing.  Still, their presence was welcome, and did take some of the sting out of Nancy’s very real sorrow.

    From what family records indicate, it’s doubtful Charles W. Schuler had many friends as a child.  In the oral history he dictated at the VA hospital he mentions only one – the football player and match-maker Joe Crawford.  Year’s earlier, Nancy purchased a little “Grandpa’s Memory Book” in which she recorded episodes Dad dictated to her. Two other buddies are identified here, and Dad recalled that they teased each other a good deal.  Apparently, this is the context in which he acquired the knick-name “Chisel” as a reflection of his prominent nose.  Reading between the lines, I would hazard that young Charles William received more than his share of good-natured(?) ribbing. 

     I could find no pictorial evidence of him playing with neighborhood kids.  Grandma Goldie could recall only one: “Eddie,” a small, bookish lad who lived across the street and eventually became a medical doctor.  Nancy affirmed that after he entered high school, ”Chisel” sought out the bigger athletic boys for companionship. Although he was gifted athletically in his own right, Bill would have given anything to look more like Bronko Nagurski than Willie Schumacher.  

    After the war, Dad reconnected with Joe Crawford.  As classmates and the product of the same small Midwestern town, the two men stayed close.  But once he and Nancy left Kansas, Dad didn’t give much thought to his old running mate. I only remember meeting him once, when he showed up, hat in hand, at our doorstep on the Rock River. 

     “I just stopped by to say hello,” Joe explained.  He didn’t linger long, and I don’t recall him joining us for so much as a meal.  But during a private conversation with my father, he admitted to financial difficulties and said he was in desperate need of a “loan.”  At that point our family didn’t have much money to spare, but Dad wrote Joe a check – as a gift, not a loan - perhaps in consideration of past favors.  As far as I know, that was the last time he and Joe ever spoke.

    During his farming and writing years, and before he became active in Dixon’s Unitarian fellowship, Dad had very few social outlets (although it appears that he and Nancy spent some weekends with a closeted cross-dressing group in Wisconsin).  He did enjoy the semblance of a relationship with another former college classmate, Wayne Carver, whom we’ve met before.  We drove as a family to Northfield for a visit at least once, and on another occasion, Dad made the trip alone. 

    His motivation for the latter was a faculty party Wayne was hosting, and to which he’d been invited.  But Dad felt so out-matched in the company of these academics that he stopped communicating.  He never knew quite how to comport himself in the company of people who were better informed or more articulate than him, so he simply opted out.  Ironically, years later and after he’d settled in Madison, he criticized me for not introducing him to parishioners who served on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin.  The problem is that Dad just wasn’t an attentive listener; if he couldn’t be at the center of the conversation, he felt superfluous.

    Dixon’s small Unitarian Fellowship was tailor-made for someone like him. Although surveys of Unitarian Universalists indicate that (apart from Jews) they are generally better educated than subscribers to other faith traditions, Dad stood tall in provincial Dixon. The small congregation met in an old white-frame church surrounded on three sides by corn fields with a century-old cemetery on the fourth. 

    Sunday meetings were informal, light on liturgy with the emphasis on conversation. Dad soon realized he was one of the better read and well-informed members, which led to increased volubility.  He was also more willing than others to prepare and deliver “talks,” which tended to be either philosophical or a commentary on some social issue.  

    But Dad didn’t brook dissent, and after being challenged a few times, he decided that the “malcontents” were too “religious” for a community purporting to be humanistic.  One congregant, the editor of the local Dixon Evening Telegraph newspaper and a lapsed evangelical minister did, however, take a fancy to my father.  The two enjoyed a meeting of the minds and he and his family were among the very few with whom we socialized.  

    Once in Florida, Dad and mother had little time for friends because work at the resort was all-consuming.  He and Nancy socialized occasionally with his gregarious food service manager, Rod, and his wife.  But that was about it. 

     Two years into Dad’s tenure at the Holiday Inn, The Naples Star - a local weekly - featured a “Who’s Who in Naples” which included C.W. Shuler (sic). The writer described the Inn’s new proprietor as a “natural…who truly likes and enjoys meeting people…. Mr. Shuler (sic) has combined amiability and know-how in the operation of his business.”  On reading this tribute years later I thought maybe it was a case of mistaken identify. It was certainly the only time anyone ever characterized my father as “amiable.”  

     Following retirement, Dad interacted on a limited basis with men who shared his interest in boats, fishing, or cameras.  The one exception was Carl, manager of a camera shop in downtown Naples and a master of his craft. He sold Dad an assortment of high-end equipment, but also offered him useful tips on the composition and processing of photographs.  Carl was an alcoholic, unreliable and often in need of money. Nevertheless, Dad admired him and always ponied up when he claimed to be in a pinch. 

    Carl’s younger wife, Marlee, worked as a beautician and tended to Nancy’s hair. The couple had a daughter, Wendi, for whom my parents frequently provided gratuitous childcare.  I got the impression they were more enamored of this cute child than any of us when we were young.

    These were the closest friends I can remember my parents having in Naples, which is somewhat surprising since neither Carl nor Marlee had much on the ball intellectually. The relationship worked because Carl possessed a specialized skill that Dad could draw upon, and in whose presence he didn’t feel like a second-rate thinker. 

    As they moved through their sixties, Bill and Nancy spent time with one or two couples in the Naples Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, and after that with several Canadians who had seasonal cabins near theirs on the Lake of the Woods. But these were transient friendships Dad could take or leave. 

    After a relocation, Dad might stay in touch for a brief time while Nancy kept the lines of communication open for years with letters, birthday greetings and holiday cards. She loved being part of a social network consisting of old classmates, distant relatives and former co-workers and tucked away every card and missive she received from members of her distant connections.  Storage boxes containing this yellowing material crowded the floor of her large walk-in closet in Madison.  For Dad, on the other hand, it was pretty much “out of sight, out of mind.”  Once he’d turned the page, the people he’d known, with rare exceptions, ceased to interest him.

     Dad was around 80, and he and Mother were still living in Lake Placid when his prostate began acting up.  Worried, rather than seek treatment locally he made an appointment at the Jacksonville Mayo Clinic five hours away.  An examination revealed suspicious cells, for which the Mayo oncologist recommended a series of radiation treatments.  He and Nancy then spent two months in a nearby motel shuttling back and forth to the clinic several days each week. 

    At the end of the therapy, they returned home, but that summer three hurricanes tore through South Florida downing trees and power lines, sweeping away docks, swamping boats and tearing tiles off rooftops.  Their house escaped serious damage but the one-acre grounds took a beating.  Trina and I happened to be visiting and helped with repairs and cleanup, but between the storms and the cancer scare, Dad resolved to sell the property. 

    Fearful of a recurrence, and impressed with the quality of care at the Mayo Clinic, he proceeded to purchase a house less than a mile away.  Dad had never before expressed the slightest interest in Jacksonville as a place to live, a featureless metropolis with little to recommend it.  However. the prospect of becoming a regular patient at Mayo’s was incentive enough.     

    The single-family house was one of several dozen in a sprawling retirement complex called Cypress Village, which also contained an assortment of duplexes and fourplexes, as well as a high-rise described by residents as “The Big House.”  During the nine years they spent there, Dad did not make a single friend.  Despite a plethora of programs and interest groups that anyone interested in photography, writing, or computers could have joined, he demurred.

    The multi-story “Big House” at the center of the complex was the hub of resident activity.  It featured an attractive restaurant, coffee shop, craft studios, a fitness center and meeting rooms, as well as floors dedicated to skilled nursing and memory care.  Dad declined to take advantage of any of the facility’s amenities because, as he put it, “I don’t want to hang out with a bunch of old people.”  Since her husband wouldn’t pass through the portals of the Big House Nancy, wary of his disapproval, kept her distance as well. 

    During their years at the Village their sole form of recreation was a daily walk around the well-manicured neighborhood.  Nancy cheerily greeted the residents they passed, but it irritated her husband when she would pause to chat.  He did little to hide his displeasure, and soon began referring to the elderly women with their canes and walkers as “the witches.”  He refused to speak either with them, or the occasional male passerby.

    Dad sought escape from the distasteful Village on almost a daily basis and Nancy was, of course, expected to tag along.  His destination of choice was a large strip mall a few blocks from the ocean where practically all of his consumer needs could be met.  There was a Publix grocery, an Ace hardware, a chain bookstore, barbershop and, most important, that Target department store with its in-house Starbucks cafe.  

    At first, Dad liked to browse in the Books-A-Million, which also served coffee.  Before long he decided that Starbucks served a drink more suitable to his palate, and it also provided a greater opportunity for people-watching.  The repetitious quality of these outings attested to a growing obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it also spoke to his need to share space with people younger than himself.  Apart from the baristas and Nancy, he didn’t engage anyone in conversation; but the flow of thirty- and forty-somethings into the store fed into his own illusion of eternal youthfulness. 

    During those years he also made a point of wearing some article of clothing - a green and gold jacket or bill cap - indicating his devotion to the Green Bay Packers.  He did this, as much as anything, to draw attention to himself, and he was clearly pleased when someone complimented him on his choice of attire.  But that’s as far as it went.  A brief encounter or cursory exchange was about all he could handle.    

    Dad did make one meaningful connection during this time. Jim Lynch was about my age and worked as an independent artist designing large-scale murals and architectural sculptures for commercial clients.  With his shoulder-length hair, salt-and-pepper beard, and casual wardrobe Jim presented as a cross between a bohemian and a beach bum.  He lived in a trailer some hundred yards from the Atlantic Ocean and was also a recovering drug addict – a lifestyle that had led to a life-threatening case of Hepatitis C.

    Dad first ran into Jim at Books-a-Million, where he introduced himself as a novelist.  The younger man seemed impressed, and the prospect of having an artist for a friend hooked Dad.   Jim soon introduced my father to another artist, Jim McNallis, who had worked for Walt Disney Studios.  In retirement, McNallis created clay likenesses of famous individuals, and split his time between a Fort Lauderdale workspace and Southeast Asia.  Both of the Jims thought of themselves as unconventional “free spirits,” as did my father. 

    Dad came to value these relationships more than any he’d had since leaving Carl and Naples behind, wining and dining the perennially short of cash Lynch and cultivating McNallis via Facebook and Instagram.  The two artists stroked the older man’s ego, but as far as I know never tried to exploit the friendship.  After the move to Madison, Nancy encouraged both Lynch and McNallis to come north for a visit, but that never happened.  Lynch died from hepatitis within the year, and McNallis lost interest in Dad once Lynch was out of the picture. 

    When Dad died, Nancy re-contacted McNallis and invited him to the visitation in Naples.  He never responded.  But then, Dad wouldn’t have come to his visitation either.

A Death Denying Act

  I don’t know whether my father even figured out he was at death’s door.  Once he’d been admitted to, and assessed at the hospital, it became clear there were more issues to deal with than a mere head wound.  Still, there was no indication of a life-threatening condition.  He had a low-grade urinary tract infection that stubbornly resisted the antibiotics being administered.  His sedentary lifestyle, inadequate diet, and frequent use of drugs and intoxicants had also taken a toll on his mental and physical wellness.  Living quasi-independently, even in a full-service hotel, was no longer feasible.  That much was clear. 

    Dad would never have agreed to a move to a nursing facility, which was why a court-ordered guardianship was set in motion.  The attending doctors didn’t think he was in bad enough shape to qualify for hospice and recommended he be transferred to rehab.  We tried that route, but because of the episode with the pistol, no clinic would take him in.

    As we looked for alternatives Dad began refusing food, partly because the hospital fare was unappealing, but also because he imagined that a hunger strike might prompt a discharge. He ate very little while hospitalized, which dramatically lowered his hemoglobin level, caused his muscles to atrophy, and produced even greater mental confusion.  If an elderly patient becomes stubborn about not eating, over time they will lose interest in food completely, we were told.  This proved to be the cast with Dad.  He had few reserves to begin with, so his decline now accelerated.

    To repeat, Dad’s sudden and unexpected departure came as a relief to his children (although not to Nancy) and was actually fortuitous for him.  My father had always insisted - somewhat disingenuously, perhaps – that it wasn’t death that terrified him but the preliminaries: the pain, disorientation, and emotional upheaval that he believed marked the final stage of life.   Nevertheless, the prospect of oblivion was the worm in the apple. Mother knew very well that, despite his existentialist professions, her husband found the idea of extinction intolerable. He had always gone to considerable lengths to distract himself from that unacceptable outcome. 

     John Donne famously wrote that “any man’s death diminishes me,” but I doubt that was true for Charles W. Schuler. I don’t recall him ever lamenting the loss of relatives and friends when he learned of their passing.  His fascination with war, and his fondness for morbid literature suggested a certain callousness toward other people’s fate.  But like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, he was incapable of imagining that what was in store for him was the same as everybody else. 

    The only funerals I recall him attending were for his parents and in-laws.  Mother made it a priority to visit the cemeteries where her forebears rested, and in later years I escorted her.  While she reminisced about past relationships, I trimmed the grass that had crept over the flush bronze markers.  

     Mother also firmly believed in putting one’s affairs in order.  It was she who insisted that I drive the two of them to Dixon for a planning session with the director of the Jones Funeral Home.  The Joneses had served several generations of Schuler’s, and their mortuary occupied a gloomy Victorian mansion straight out of the Addams Family.  The place freaked Dad out, and it didn’t help that the undertakers were busy preparing for an open casket viewing in a room adjacent to the front entrance as we arrived.  Dad caught a quick glimpse of the rigid corpse as we stepped into the lobby and visibly shuddered. I thought he might bolt, but he pulled himself together and we found our way into the office where a youngish member of the Jones clan laid out our options.  It was one of the rare times Nancy had her way.

    Dad had always bragged that he intended to make his final exit cleanly and quickly.  In other words, he was determined to maintain control to the bitter end.  In his seventies he’d read Derrick Humphries’ book on “self-deliverance” and subsequently joined the Hemlock Society.  Since he was in excellent health at the time, it was undoubtedly more of an intellectual than an emotional commitment. 

    As his health declined, he decided that it would take more will power than he possessed to swallow the prescribed sedatives and lie down with a plastic bag secured around his head.  Assisted suicide, he now believed, was a more feasible solution. Investigating further, he discovered Dignitas, a Swiss organization dedicated to ending life under expert medical supervision.  Their well-appointed facility was located in the Swiss Alps, and the literature promised a painless denouement in a resort-like atmosphere.

    Dad was so sure that this was his ticket that he copied all of us on the enrollment papers he’d signed and returned to Dignitas, along with a modest membership fee.  He obtained his first passport in decades and insisted that I renew mine as well.  When the time came, I was to shepherd him to the scene of his final adventure. 

     Nancy wasn’t on board with this plan, and had informed her husband that she would not sit by and watch him die in a foreign country. My physician brother, a right-to-life evangelical, also made it clear that he didn’t favor this “un-Christian” alternative to a natural death.  My sister, for reasons of her own, wasn’t about to do her father any favors.   For me, on the other hand, assisted suicide made sense in certain circumstances (Unitarian Universalists had been in the forefront of efforts to codify a universal “right to die”).  Although skeptical about his resolve, I did agree to help my father fulfill his mission, if and when Dignitas accepted him.  Frankly, I made this promise to humor him as much as anything else.    

    I’ve already highlighted my father’s heavy reliance on a variety of drugs and intoxicating substances over the last twenty years of his life.  The daily use of sedatives and opioids was driven, I would guess, by existential anxiety, as was his almost continuous need too distract himself with computers, cameras, and frenetic activity.   

    Apart from Nancy, he really had no one who could help assuage his fears, and even then, he would not allow himself to betray any sign of weakness.  Talk therapy was available through the VA, but what he chose to share with the counselors during and after his hospitalization was inconsequential.  He delighted in rehearsing his past - pretty much the same heavily redacted story - over and over.  About his inner life he had little to say, because exposing his feelings would have made him feel vulnerable.  Those sessions with the Freudian analyst were now far behind him.

    Religion wasn’t of any help here.  Dad didn’t really consider himself a Unitarian Universalist which, as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once jokingly remarked, “is the least religion a person can have.”  Yes, he and Nancy were active in two liberal congregations, but for Dad those years of involvement served primarily to feed his ego; he loved to show off his erudition, limited though it was.  Moreover, Unitarian Universalism lacks any comforting doctrine of the afterlife. 

     My brother and sister-in-law tried, on occasion, to “witness” to Dad, testifying to the hope and consolation Christianity had provided them.  Perhaps they were setting the stage for a death-bed conversion, but the old existentialist had spent almost three-quarters of a century quoting from the austere gospel of Sartre and Beckett while scoffing at the credulous promoters of pie-in-the-sky.  Anxious or not, he was never going to admit that his secular heroes were false prophets.  With Freud (The Future of an Illusion) and others, he was convinced that humans invented religion to keep the terror of death at bay.  

    As death loomed larger, Dad made another stab at writing fiction.  Despite the uncounted hours he had spent taking and processing photographs, he didn’t trust that they constituted a noteworthy legacy; he still clung to a vision of himself as a writer, a teller of well-told tales.  But now his ability to create a coherent storyline, paint a word picture, or coin an original phrase had long since deserted him.  Paradoxically, in his last scribblings he did reflect on death and the very real prospect of post-mortem obscurity. In one short story a character - again patterned after the author - consoles himself with the thought, “Maybe survival is the best that most of us can do.”

    If this is the conclusion he reached in his dotage, I shouldn’t have been surprised that, once back in Naples, Charles Schuler adopted the lifestyle of a full-blown hedonist. Since he had nothing important to live for and no worthy cause to die for, why not indulge in pleasures of the flesh he had denied himself as a younger man and that he now believed were his due?

    Dad had never given Nancy much credit for her contributions to their marriage and their success in business, so he persuaded himself that he had a proprietary claim to their financial resources.  He was, after all, the one who had invested their capital wisely, while she took on tasks that required only middling intelligence and a high threshold for tedium. 

    As for his children, my father felt no obligation to pass a portion of his wealth on to the next generation, belying the fact that he owed his own initial investment capital to a generous bequest from his father. If Dad had his way, every last farthing in his accounts would have been spent before the last ship sailed.  He was well on his way to insolvency by the time the hospital, legal, and funeral bills were all settled, so only a fraction of his once considerable wealth passed on to Nancy and the three of us. 

    To ensure that at least a few people would have reason to salute his passing, Dad had ordered a bronze grave marker from the Veteran’s Administration.  Etched on its surface is a detail that is almost certainly false: in addition to his rank and status as a Purple Heart recipient (an award World War II soldiers earned even for non-combat injuries) there is mention of a Bronze Star. 

     This medal, given for valor under fire, I never saw among his service ribbons and U.S. Army patches.  He had always kept these items, together with other wartime memorabilia, in a display case.  It’s hard to fathom why he wouldn’t have put something as noteworthy as a Bronze Star in a prominent place, and it never came up in any conversation about his European deployment.  Was Nancy aware of this apparent deception?  If so, she never let on.

    Well, in that collection of his short stories, poetry and essays that he put together and self-published prior to coming to Madison, he included a brief, undated poem that spoke to his utter lack of self-awareness.  Based on the title he gave it, I have to believe it was written late in life.  Here the poet claims that he’d always tried to do what was right by other people.  To be sure, Charles Schuler wasn’t a bad man, or a scoundrel.  But my father was almost certainly a narcissist with a less than generous spirit.  What, then, was he trying to prove with this disingenuous scrap of free verse? 

    Perhaps he just needed to reassure himself that, despite appearances, his heart had always been in the right place. Whatever. In “Leaves of Grass” Walt Whitman declared, “I am large; I contain multitudes.”  My father, on the other hand, left very little room in his soul for others.  Like the characters portrayed in his novel, he was a curious, but little man.

 Memoir: An Abridgment

 This is the way I have chosen

For your edification; so no thought

Shall remain unarticulated,

No motive not explained

In light of the circumstances.

And upon my demise you can thus be

Assured that my intentions were always

The best.

Afterward

    My wife and I have been blessed to have had five dogs in our lives these past forty-three years.  Two of them were quite old when they died, sixteen and nineteen respectively.  We hung on to Jhana and Sasha longer than we should have, as both had deteriorated badly: blind, deaf, unsteady on their feet, confused.  A third dog, Kala, was barely more than a puppy when she was over-sedated by a veterinarian preparing her for routine elective surgery.

    Each one of these losses shook me up emotionally.  I rarely cry, but the tears flowed freely when we lost these precious creatures.  “Only a dog,” some people might protest, but it’s pretty amazing how devoted we become to each other.  They burrow deep under one’s skin and remain there, even in death.  Nowadays, whenever one of our present dogs has to undergo a procedure requiring sedation - even as simple as teeth cleaning –Trina and I are reduced to nervous wrecks.

    My parents didn’t particularly like dogs, preferring cats who tend to keep their distance.  Dogs give a lot, but they also expect a lot from their humans, and for Dad that was a non-starter.  He undoubtedly thought we were far too solicitous toward our regal Lhasa Apso and four spritely Papillions.   

    I bring the dogs into this story by way of comparison.  They are precious to me, and losing any of them has been, and still is, painful.  In a way I feel guilty saying this, and perhaps I shouldn’t.  At Dad’s funeral, and in the years that have passed since then, I’ve never shed a tear for the man. 

    When my mother died four years later at age one-hundred, we were out of town celebrating Thanksgiving with our son.  The funeral home stepped up in our absence and began preparing her for cremation.  Again, any sense of loss was muted and, as with my father, I spent the next year doing what needs to be done when a parent passes.  Grieving?  Mother was gone, but she didn’t leave a hole in my heart.

    I often wonder whether my reaction to these two deaths is unusually cold, and whether at some point it will sink in and I’ll feel bereft.  I kind of doubt it.  As I’ve tried to illuminate in this memoir, my father – and mother as well, since she allowed him to control her access to us – never tried to draw us close.  They expected me to be there for them when I was young, and again when they were old, which meant that I felt (and was treated) more like an employee than a son.  How many employees weep for their employers? 

    I cannot even say that I “loved” my parents, and certainly not anywhere near the way I have loved my wife and our dogs.  Instead, I respected them – hard as even that was at times – and harbored a strong sense of filial obligation.  Our relationship was founded on an unspoken, unwritten ethical mandate, rather than an emotional bond.  Once I came into their life they felt obligated to raise me, which they did in a formal sort of way.  After that, there was no basis on which on ongoing relationship could be maintained; we pretty much went our separate ways.

   The story does not end tragically, nor as a farce.  I kind of suspect that it’s more common than one might suspect.