Taunya Brandon
Growing up with my dad was a series of adventures. Intensely talking about serious things one minute, and an impish grin with a twinkle in his eye the next. Drove like a racecar driver, but couldn't change the oil. A flirt that never tired of teasing. Neverendingly curious about the world and its denizens, he exposed me to things most of my classmates had never heard of. When I said he was from Austria, they would ask "has he seen a kangaroo?" And my answer was "Well, yes, but not in Austria." For years I was the only kid in my class who knew those were two different countries. Meeting my mom in New Zealand, hunting mushrooms, playing a zither? Who else did that? Once he came to school to bring me something i forgot, and after hearing his accent, my classmates said my dad was cool. Apparently they never saw him wearing socks with his sandals or blaming his farts on barking spiders.
He was a skilled chef, and my mom made sure at a young age i knew how to handle his big chef knife, so I wouldn't hurt myself. I watched him toss his knife into the air spinning and catch it again and again without hurting himself. Mom says when I was young, I about gave grandma a heart attack as I calmly cut up an apple with a 12" blade. He also taught us that less is more when it comes to seasoning. He once helped a guy clear some bluegill out of his pond, and he cooked them up in a Japanese way with green onion and ginger, that was the most delicious thing I ever tasted in my life. We once roasted trout over our burning slash pile, just salt and pepper, and a fish on a stick, it was so good.
Almost every day, I got to hear him play his zither. Such a complicated instrument, like playing a guitar with your left hand and a harp with your right. The fact that he could make it sound so beautiful was just so impossible and wonderful. Not content to just play music, he studied musical theory and converted piano music. He somehow found a group of people that also played this instrument, who met from time to time to swap music and stories. He also played the guitar when I was younger, belting out songs that were popular when he was young, like "Lonely Boy", "Cool Water", "Tom Dooley", and my favorite "Catch a Falling Star". One time, when visiting Grandma and Grandpa, we started watching My Fair Lady on TV, and I had no idea he knew all those songs, and we had a lot of fun singing along with the movie.
And we followed him on his mushroom hunts, a skill he learned from his father. My mom always asked, "how can you find your way around in the forest without getting lost, but get turned around in a mall?" He demanded that we follow behind him, so as not to step on the mushrooms, which his eagle eye could pick out before us. A rule the dogs never followed, much to his frustration, and yet, we hardly ever left them home. He showed me how to tell if the mushroom was a good one, by gills, frills, and what they did when you cut them. When he came to visit my husband and I while we were stationed in Germany, he made his way to a near by forest and found an abundance of meadow mushrooms. He asked some other explorers why they didn't pick these mushrooms, and everyone thought they were death angels. He brought them back and spread them all over our apartment to dry, while my husband pleaded "please, no more mushrooms!".
Everyone already knows his passion for fish and fishing, but do they know how he examined the stomach contents of all his fish he brought home, showing me the different food they ate, taking note to better trick fish in the future? Or the art of fly-tying, turning the musky scented fur and feathers, and glittery thread into a fake bug that would twitch just the right way when pulled through the water? I remember when i was about 6, he had a fly-tying station in my bedroom closet. He could spot a fish before anyone else, and catch fish when no one else could. He once tried to teach me how to cast and draw the lure so a fish would find it irresistible, and had to keep shaking a fish off the hook with frustration because he wasn't trying to catch fish, he was trying to teach me. I never caught a thing. Although later I went on a fishing trip with him to Alaska, and caught a halibut, but that was bait fishing, which in my dad's opinion, it just wasn't the same as wooing a trout with fly. Once, in Yellowstone, he showed me how if I stood in the cold mountain stream and wiggled my toes in the gravel, the fish would come and nibble at them, which worked much better than my casting skills. But I did enjoy following him along the river, amusing myself in my own way.
He was already a pretty talented artist, but when he started carving, a whole new chapter began, with noisy tools and sawdust and paints and varathane. Piles of wood aging in our basement rec room. Searching along reservoirs for bits of driftwood to mount his creations on, leaping from rock to rock like mountain goats. Driving for what seemed hours over washboard roads or hiking into places we couldn't drive to, just to catch and take pictures of the fish there. Trips to art shows, where I saw so much talent in one place, and when I was bored with it, hiding under our cloth covered display table. Visiting a well to do artist and getting to hold a baby bobcat he was fostering. The occasional detour from fish carving to make something different, like a bird or a box, or a little gift for my mom or I.
An avid skier, he never had the patience to teach me how to ski, leaving that chore to my mom, while he skied down face slopes at Mach speed all day. That was his approach to life, full speed ahead. But he still stopped to smell the roses, pick up a bug, point out an animaI. He's the guy that taught me my first word, "ishy". Apparently I had a whole warf laughing at me when I was a toddler as I tried to pick up and/or stomp a fish. He was the guy with a front tooth bridge that I thought was magic when he flossed through his gum line. He brought a bullfrog home for me as a pet that didn't last one night of croaking. He was the only one that brought a fishing pole to a family reunion on a farm, and amused all the kids by catching bullfrogs in a farm pond. He's the guy who got bit by a seal and the guy that got bit by a parrot that had a sign on its cage that said "I bite." He was the guy that made me an igloo when we had an unusual snow fall in Springfield. The guy that read signs aloud with me when I was learning to read and never stopped, and neither have i. The guy who made trumpet and turkey noises when we were at a campground and someone would loudly ask "who's playing a trumpet?" or "was that a turkey?" Once he took me up into the hills to pick huckleberries, and we spotted a lizard. He decided to catch it, and chased it up my pant leg. He brought home rattlesnakes he caught while wearing shorts and sandals, which alarmed my mom, and cooked them up to eat, which disgusted my grandma. He was the guy that offered to kill a rooster for a friend that couldn't bring themselves to do it, and found his cleaver was no match for its old stringy neck, what an unholy racket that was. He collected stamps since he was a boy, and drew pictures from them. And he played solitaire every day.
After I left home, he and mom built a house on a little stream. They put a high fence around their yard to protect it from the deer, put net over their berries to unsuccessfully defend item from the birds and squirrels, and put a smaller fence around the garden to protect it from the dog. He shot porcupines to protect the dog. Shot ferrel cats to protect the quail. They loved it there.
After i left home, he and mom became born again Christians, and he embraced that calling with his usual enthusiasm. He studied the Bible, read books about the Bible, and shared his love of it with anyone that would listen. After they moved to Ogden to be closer to me and a hospital, in a house right on Ogden River, he soon knew every inch of his stretch of river. He gathered friends during his near daily walks, and even brought one home for Bible study. He would tell me the critters he had seen, feed grasshoppers to his watery pals, and curse the ducks that ate their eggs. He would pick up treasures along the river and give them to me, rocks, toys, jewelry. He would pick ripe berries in the morning to share with his wife, no matter how few there were.
These last few months of his life were rough, but also a gift, as we told old stories and shared our love for each other. After he passed, the mortuary representative helped us fill out a form, and one of the questions was what level of schooling did he have. My mom said, he went to public school and metals fabricating trade school in Austria, was taught how to play the zither by his dad and went on to study further on his own, learned how to be a chef on the job which was his career for many years, and after a crash course in wood working from Floyd Broadbent, went on to pioneer the field of fish carved from wood and painting them, studying and reproducing them down to the finest detail. The mortuary person said, "Umm, well, I just need to check a box, how about graduated with some college and no degree?" No, that's not good enough. He was very educated.
He once said to someone who asked "when are you going to grow up?", and he responded that he would grow up when he was dead, and he managed to stay young at heart longer than many people his age. I like to think he will never grow up, because he will always be a part of who I am.
