{"id":35527,"date":"2026-10-05T18:40:20","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T23:40:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=35527"},"modified":"2026-10-07T09:30:55","modified_gmt":"2026-10-07T14:30:55","slug":"daddy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=35527","title":{"rendered":"Daddy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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“There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell!”
— JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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My dad, Edward Gibson, passed away Friday morning. He was three weeks shy of his eighty-fifth birthday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was a lot of things, and were I to distill it down to two, he was a scholar and a soldier. He was a quiet man who loved the outdoors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He had a touch of the farmer in him; there were always issues of Mother Earth News<\/i> and Organic Gardening<\/i> in the house when I was growing up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was an historian; when it came time for gift giving, when in doubt, give him a book on early American history or the World Wars or Scotland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He had a bit of the Jesuit in him, too; even into his eighties he would quote the Jesuit priests he knew at Loyola in the early seventies, where he met my mom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He could name-drop at times, people he had met in his career like Bill Cosby (not impressed), Tom Clancy (also not impressed), and Karol Wojty\u0142a (ie., John Paul II, impressed).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was a Cub Scout leader when I was that age. He enjoyed it, and after he retired I suggested that he find a local Cub Scout pack and become something like an emeritus leader. I don’t know if there is such a thing, but I had (and still have) the dim recollection of grandfatherly types in uniforms who didn’t do anything but were there at Pack meetings, and I thought he could do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was never a phone person; “you two have such great conversations in person,” my mom would say, “but you don’t talk on the phone.” It wasn’t him, and when he became hard of hearing, the last few years of conversation, especially COVID and beyond, were, sadly, perfunctory and short.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He loved to cook. He loved to bake cookies. He loved to grill and would do so in almost any weather.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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He smoked a corncob pipe as far back as I can remember, up until his heart attack in 1996. I have many memories of him taking a pipe cleaner and cleaning out the pipe and stem, slowly and methodically, eyeing it before reassembling it. He stopped smoking after the heart attack, but surreptitiously took up cigarettes again around the time of 9-11. A few years after that, for Christmas I gifted him a corncob pipe and a canister of Carter Hall and said, “Look, we all know you smoke. If you’re going to smoke, use a pipe. A pipe is you. Cigarettes are not you.” And he did for a few years, and then finally stopped at some point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He told me in the spring, I think it was March, he was proud of me for being a writer and that if he had a regret it’s that he didn’t write more. When I was in elementary school I remember him reading galleys of military-themed books and writing reviews of them, and in high school I remember finding a notepad with a story he had begun in his meticulous handwriting that trailed off after a few pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He tried his best. We moved around a lot when I was a kid because academia can be like that. We never had a lot of money, but what we had we made work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last two years–the last year especially, after my mom died in December<\/a>–were rough years, and neither of my parents left this world in any way they would have liked, and their health was not what they would have wanted, either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He would say, in his quiet, philosophical way, that it’s okay. Death was a kindness. They lived and they loved and they had a lot of years. But quantity of life is not quality, and you can only prolong life so long before it becomes cruel, and we had conversations about this over the years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wish he could have sat in his garden and felt the sun on his face one more time. Held up a zucchini he’d grown himself and marveled at it. That’s the ending he would have wanted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am proud of you, and I love you, and I miss you now and always. And I know you’ve been worried about me the last year–I worry, too–and I will be okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Summer 1976. I am the weirdo with the kite. My dad, holding my one year-old brother, is completely unbothered.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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When I was very young, about two or three, my dad had a book on the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad, George Hilton<\/a>‘s The Ma & Pa<\/i>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The railroad ran from Baltimore to York, and it followed, shall we say, a scenic route. It went northeast from Baltimore through Towson, and then toward the Susquehanna River, the 19th-century intent being to cross the difficult-to-bridge river and then go on to Philadelphia. Instead, the railroad reached Delta and turned northwest, toward York, resulting in a long and not at all direct route between the two cities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I destroyed this book. My mom says I loved looking at the trains, and I have no doubt that I loved looking at the trains. I read it sometime later, probably when I was about ten or twelve. It still exists, I have it to this day, but the cover is gone, the pages are all dog-eared, there might be some crayon drawings, yet the binding is intact, and it has held together for many years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought, on occasion, about replacing the book for my dad, and never did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the book there is a picture of the town I live in. There was a station, at the bottom of the hill. You can still see where the train tracks ran through town; there’s flat, grassy, and open ground along the creek between the hills. A little bit of the station still remains, part of the ramp that led into the station, in a parking lot between some vintage buildings that still stand. The photograph is of the station; this is not that photograph<\/a>, but it is the station.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every time I walk to the grocery store–it’s not far, about a mile, down a steep hill and up a steep hill in both directions–I walk past or even through where this station stood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was three, I loved my dad’s book so much that I destroyed it, and somehow this book had a photograph of the obscure small town where I would one day live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The world is weird like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"My
Easter 2005–Cutting the ham he cooked on the charcoal grill<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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My memory is famously terrible, not just of childhood but ten years ago or even yesterday, and personal memories are more like impressions or dream-like fragments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I watched Cosmos<\/i> with my dad, and The Martian Chronicles<\/i>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We went to see 2010<\/i> when I was in junior high school. It was December, we went to the Virginia Theater downtown, and I remember the lampposts in Harrisonburg being all decorated for Christmas. He had taken me and my brother there to see Star Trek II<\/i> two years earlier, and we saw The Black Cauldron<\/i> there, too, with my younger sister.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We didn’t go to movies often, it was always a special treat, and though I know there were earlier movies, because my mom told me so, the earliest I can remember is going to see Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown<\/i> with my dad after church. I feel like my brother was there, too, though he had just turned two. It may actually have been a year later, though, as my mom said the sign at the movie theater said “Heaven Can Wait” and on the next line “Charlie Brown”–“Heaven Can Wait, Charlie Brown”–and Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait<\/i> didn’t come out until 1978, so Race for Your Life<\/i> must have been a local or limited re-release a year after its debut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He took me to bowling when I was five or six. I wasn’t good, and he would sit and read. I remember a philosophy book where he wrote my scores on the inside of the cover, and I remember Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers<\/i>, which is on the bookshelf here in my apartment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember him writing his master’s thesis on a manual typewriter in the kitchen. He fashioned a makeshift desk in the washer alcove by the kitchen, and he would type away in the evenings. I remember his graduation ceremony, and he donned a fancy robe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember my dad taking me to work when I was small, like six or seven, to get me out of the house, to give my mom a break. He was always so proud to introduce little me to his coworkers: “That’s my number one son.” He kept two photographs of my siblings on his work desk into his sixties, but only one frame; the main photograph was a formal photograph of myself, my brother, and my younger sister, taken before my youngest sister was born, and he inserted a photograph of my youngest sister by herself when she was one or two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember people at church calling him “Dr. Gibson,” though he only had two Master’s degrees, and I remember my mom saying, “That’s with his next<\/i> wife.” (They were married fifty-three years. At this point, they were in about ten.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"My
My parents’ 45th wedding anniversary, December 2017
My dad would have baked all the cookies here. My mom thought this would be their last major anniversary milestone. They had eight more years (minus less than a week) to go.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I remember Thanksgiving dinners at the National Guard armory. I remember him in his dress uniform and how impressive he looked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember the sounds of the machines he was hooked up to in the hospital after his bypass surgery, how they sounded like air bubbles blowing through water, and how strange and unnatural he looked, unconscious but not sleeping. My mom would later say I disappeared, but I wasn’t lost; I walked around the hospital, stumbled upon the chapel, and sat in one of the pews by myself for a time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My dad asked me what happened to Guinevere after she died, and I was too devastated to answer. He told me he would take care of it once I finally could say she was in the attic steps, and I said, no, I had to do it, and I wrapped her in t-shirts, placed her in a shoebox, and placed a bag of cat toys I bought that day, after she was gone, between her fore paws, then went out with a shovel in the dark and dug a hole through my tears and laid her to rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I took my dad to see Fellowship of the Ring<\/i> in early 2002. He and I hadn’t been to a movie together in many years, and he enjoyed it. We didn’t see the next two together in the theater, but we watched them together on cable a few times. I think he really liked The Two Towers<\/i>. He did not like The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey<\/i>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was profiled in the Philadelphia Inquirer<\/i><\/a> in 2001 about his work at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. I was proud of him, and I shared the article with my friends. He received death threats after the article, threats so serious the FBI investigated. His office at Lincoln was more of a storage room with a desk worked in somehow, and he had a strange collection of books on the shelves, including The Illuminatus Trilogy<\/i>. He could have had a different office, but this one was quiet and out of the way; no one bothered him here, he said. He introduced me to the library director, Emery Wimbish, at Lincoln in my twenties with every bit of pride as he had when I was six or seven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We took an Amtrak from Baltimore to Raleigh a few years later. He suggested we have dinner in the dining car, and we did. We had to go forward two or three cars, and we sat in the dining room. The tables had tablecloths, and we had menus, and there was something quintessentially delightful about the whole experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He drove up to Pennsylvania on the day I moved there in 2013. It was rainy and cold, and he called me to ask where he was. I couldn’t even begin to tell him, because I didn’t know where he was, either. He somehow found his way–he found the post office and asked for directions–and he was my first visitor. He only came up to Pennsylvania three more times that I can recall, the last in 2016. It was a long trip from Virginia, and it was a hard trip for a man in his seventies. In the last few years he said he wanted to visit, and my sister asked me why. “He wants to see it one more time. He wants to say goodbye.” But we could never figure out a way to get him from Virginia to Lancaster; I thought we could finally do it this spring, but time and health disagreed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We went to a hardware store to buy a drill bit for cutting glass. It was a locally owned store, with a wooden floor and racks. It was dark and dusty, and we found the drill bits. He looked at the selection, he looked at the prices, they were more expensive than he thought, and then he decided to buy the one he could afford. “No,” I said, “get the one you really want. I’ll take care of it.” I did, and he showed my mother when we got home, and he was happy like a little kid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We went to the planetarium about once a month when we lived in Harrisonburg. So many programs we saw on what was in the skies that month, or the Triple Conjunction of 6 BCE, or the planets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember, I was probably three, getting out of bed in the middle of the night. I might have heard something. I went downstairs, and my dad was in the kitchen making himself a bowl of cereal. I watched as he poured the milk, and it hit the spoon because the milk shot out of the bowl and onto the counter or the floor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We would go to A&P and buy new volumes of The Sesame Street Library<\/em>, and there was a story in one of the volumes he liked to read at bedtime. We also bought the New Illustrated Columbia Encyclopedia<\/em>, and though we got a World Book<\/em> a few years later, I liked and used the Columbia<\/em> a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He hated the word “humongous.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are two photos of my dad hanging in my parents’ house that I think of fondly, and both are of him with my sister. One is Easter 1977. Easter was always a big production with my mom, and my dad is dressed up for church, holding my sister, in a white outfit, only five months old, with such evident joy. The other is of her college graduation twenty-one years later. He’s just so extraordinarily proud of her in both pictures, and the love is so visible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember our trip to Arlington when he had an interview at Marymount University. It came less than two months after his heart attack, and he needed someone to drive him, though it was perhaps too early for him to travel and interview like this. He suggested I take the Metro into Washington that day, but he seemed weak and frail and I didn’t want to be completely out of touch, so I spent the day in the library, where there was a copy of Ellery Queen’s The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes<\/em><\/a> on the shelves, and I spent the day reading that. It was a good trip, he was good company, and we ate dinner at the Subway in Warrenton on our way home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last gift I gave him was a baseball hat. It was in April, I had received my last unemployment check, I shouldn’t have spent the money, but it was a day filled with grief<\/a>, I saw a cap in the Lancaster Stormers team store that I thought he’d like, and I wanted him to have it. (He went to Franklin & Marshall in Lancaster in the late 50s and early 60s.) I saw him a few days later–I drove to Virginia to take him to an appointment with his neurologist, as I recall–and he smiled broadly when I gave it to him. He never wore that I know of–it is white, and he had an open sore on his head that never healed and only would have made it bloody–but I know he appreciated it, and it was, last I saw, hanging on a peg in the television room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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At the Lynchburg Hillcats<\/a>, August 2019. I saw my mom next in October, after my hospitalization and vision loss; she drove up and stayed for a few days. I would not see my dad and siblings again until July 2021.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I think of playing wiffleball with him in the front yard, where we wore the yard down to dirt. I think of going to baseball games–the Harrisonburg Turks in elementary school, the Lynchburg Red Sox and Hillcats in later years. He told me he listened to the Philadelphia Athletics on the radio when he was a boy–the Orioles didn’t move to Baltimore until he was twelve–and he would talk about the 1966 World Series. (I drove to Bel Air to buy him a book from the author about that World Series.) I can remember him and my mom listening to the Chicago White Sox on the radio when we lived in Chicago, but only when they were playing the Orioles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember the Chicago Zoo and the car breaking down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember going to a barbecue in Manassas at Bill and Christine’s–Christine was my grandmother’s niece–and he spilled gasoline all over his shoes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember going with him to Singer’s Glen to get our first cat, a yellow tabby kitten we named McTavish, and McTavish got under the pedals in the car while my dad tried to drive home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think of him cutting firewood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think of him in his garden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think of him sitting quietly, smoking his pipe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"My<\/a>
October 2013, outside the Capitol in Colonial Williamsburg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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“The sails were drawn up, and the wind blew, and slowly the ship slipped away down the long grey firth; and the light of the glass of Galadriel that Frodo bore glimmered and was lost. And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.”
— JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My father, Edward Gibson, passed away on October 2nd, aged almost eighty-five. Some scattered thoughts and memories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35531,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[4081,4720,716,5492,4641,5354,5494,4507,4816,5493],"class_list":["post-35527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","tag-baseball","tag-carl-sagan-2","tag-cosmos","tag-edward-gibson","tag-featured","tag-harrisonburg","tag-harrisonburg-turks","tag-lancaster","tag-lancaster-barnstormers","tag-marymount-university","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35527\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/35531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}