my father's obituary

My father passed away last April.  This is something I am still processing, and I felt writing a more thorough obituary than the brief online version in the Albuquerque Journal would help me a bit.  That and writing more and more.  

at TCU 1963

Obituary for Fred Allison ‘Buzz’ Rowell

Fred Allison ‘Buzz’ Rowell, age 73, of Albuquerque, New Mexico, passed away April 25, 2016. Born September 11, 1942 in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, he was the only child of Brigadier General Fred Gallagher Rowell and Elizabeth Lucille ‘Bette Lou’ Allison Rowell. General Rowell was stationed in Washington DC after WWII as one of Eisenhower’s aides and later commander of the 111^th Anti-Aircraft Brigade of the New Mexico National Guard.

Buzz was a New Mexico resident for 42 years. He attended New Mexico Military Institute and Texas Christian University (‘63), where he earned a business marketing degree and was a member of and pledge trainer for Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. He was on the ski patrol in Ruidoso at Sierra Blanca Ski area in spring of ‘62.

Buzz was a founding member and officer of the Maverick Region of the Porsche Club of America. In 1964 he joined the SCCA, Sports Car Club of America. After college he bought Pit Stop, a car dealership in Roswell NM selling BMW, MGB and Jaguars.

He owned a Porsche SC 1600 which he later traded for a Gemini Mk2 Formula Junior racecar, one of several rear engine FJs he raced for a racing team he formed for Pit Stop. He also raced an orange Lotus Super 7 and an Elva. President Johnson’s closure of Walker AFB in 1967 spelled the end for the sportscar dealership and he worked for a short time for Bondurant Insurance Agency.

In 1969 he moved his family to El Paso to join the sales force for Xerox, and was chosen as one of their top salesmen earning a trip to Acapulco.  At Xerox he met Ben Miller Jr, and they joined with his close school friend from NMMI, (former judge) Pat O’Rourke to start the Ben Miller Boot Company.  As Sales Manager he traveled a great deal in the Southwest. In 1972 the boot company was sold and he moved his family to Phoenix to sales rep for Pioneer Western Wear.

Buzz moved to Santa Fe a short time later where he continued to be a successful sales person and was very prominent in the western and boot industries. He was also a real estate agent in Santa Fe and owned a landscaping company, Edenscape Landscaping. 

           

An avid nature lover, he often skied, sailed, backpacked, hiked and ran the trails and backcountry of New Mexico.

He is survived by four children: Daughters Mary Allison Tierney and Kirsten Rowell, their mother Janel Gary Larson; Sons Christian Rowell and William Rowell, their mother Rosemary Rowell. Also survived by six Grandchildren: Jack, Mark, Amelia, Oliver, Simone and Daisy; and cousins, Seth Orell and Pat Orell.

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I'm an Expert

I need to speak to an expert.

The man on the phone was concerned about bees taking over his hummingbird feeder. 

I think the bees are keeping the hummingbirds away. It’s swarming with bees.

I reassure him that in nature birds and bees are on the same team. Flowers that attract pollinators don’t cause turf wars. I ask if he’s allergic to bees or has children who are.

No, but the feeder is right by the front door and there are lots of bees now.

I suggest that he move the feeder.

Oh, good idea.

I’m an expert.

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managed expectations

The sound of his truck coming up the driveway woke me, and then his dog was in my room, all whipping tail and twirling with muscular excitement. I’d left the door to the front garden open and had fallen asleep reading.

My son was in a dark mood and unusually humorless. The hood of his truck was open, the battery wasn’t holding a charge, the alternator perhaps, he was meant to meet friends in Oregon and go backpacking.  He usually lets me know when he is going to stop by and I was surprised he was taking time off work, having only started his job two months prior.

There was more to this story.  I asked about the house I’d recently leased for him and his brother, who was in summer school.  I asked about work, and the progress I hoped he’d made with registering for classes at the community college.  He said he was on a wait list for the intro welding class. This was the condition for which I would pay for his rent, if he were in school full time.  He’d given his brother his word that he was committed.

The next morning over coffee I pulled the more truthful threads out of him: He’d quit his job. He hated Santa Cruz.  Boring, doesn’t make enough money at the berry farm to fix what needs fixing on his truck, commuting is ruining his truck, needs to fix the headlight and the suspension.  After he left I found a discarded pot dispensary receipt for two quarter ounces equaling $100 on the floor with a cliff bar wrapper.  The college campus felt like an institution, he didn’t like being there. He wants to be in nature. He’s going back to Humbolt to work on another farm with a friend.

I learn in this same conversation that his brother got 100% on his midterms.  I should have been leaning into this great news, celebrating the focus and dedication of his accomplishments and not dwelling on my disappointment and concern for his older brother.  But I am so very disappointed; I could barely sleep the night before and I remembered him at preschool drop off, hurling himself against the closed door, screaming for me. I sat on a bench outside the classroom and cried.  A year later his younger brother barely looked over his shoulder when I left, totally engrossed in the Brio track he was assembling.  They could not be more different.

I always feel an empty hole in my chest when I think of my son, an equal mixture of love and concern.  I asked him if he wanted to see a therapist, as he seemed so depressed.  He scoffed, mocking me, insulted.  I reprimanded him for being rude.  I want to help, but he wanted only for this conversation to end and his truck to start. He hugged me and he left.

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Suitable Programming

 July 1972

Three girls in a row, exposed bellies down on the cool wood floor, tanned legs bent, chins elbow propped in hands, absorbed in the destruction of a small town by a giant scorpion. The afternoon creature feature on the black and white TV that my aunt has rolled out on the brass colored metal trolley is our after lunch pre nap indulgence. We have already watched several episodes of Popeye and even though the reception is grainy with the occasional scroll up of the picture and the curved screen gives a fisheye perspective, the Texas summer heat keeps us glued to the spot in the air-conditioned family room.

The kitchen wall phone with it’s grimy ten foot intestinal cord is ringing; the loud bell can be heard all over the sprawling ranch house. This is an adult sound, so we all ignore the bell. Finally the older cousin nudged her sister to get the phone.  Groaning and stomping up the steps to the kitchen and a forced polite southern phone voice answer, then a yell Aunt Janel had the baby! I pushed back to a sit. I don’t remember knowing that my mother was pregnant, or anticipating becoming a sister, just that my mother was in New Mexico and I was in Texas, like most summers.

My mother taught first grade in El Paso and I was in the other first grade class.  I drove to work every morning with her in the red Corvair convertible with the white leather seats that were always cold.  She tied a triangular scarf on my head when we put the top down.

One morning when we were walking from the car my Scooby Doo thermos slipped from under my elbow onto the new asphalt, and when I picked it up it made a slushing sound. My mother told me that was the glass inside and took it from me angrily and said we’d have to throw it away.  I was allowed in the teachers lounge before school started and the air was thick with cigarette smoke. When we had fire drills and lined up on the blacktop against the fence, I was responsible for going through the pass through door that joined the two first grade class rooms and opening my mother’s classroom door for her class to come in.

At some point that spring I changed schools to one that was closer to our house, because my mother was let go.  She dressed in Villager pencil skirts and low flats, but her condition betrayed her and in 1971 a woman was not allowed teach elementary school if she were visibly pregnant.  I didn’t know any of this at the time of course, I just liked the new school because an ice cream truck stopped outside after school and the neighbor kids I now walked home with always had change for candy.

But this summer visit with my cousins was different, because we were moving from El Paso to Phoenix. I walked to the kitchen and took the receiver from my cousin and learned that I had a sister. 

August 1972

We set out very early with pillows slipped in floral cotton covers lining the back seat of the blue Ford station wagon. There was a cooler with pimento cheese sandwiches and cold bottles of Dr. Pepper. My aunt, her fifth and youngest child and I were driving from Texas to pick up my mother and newborn sister in New Mexico and then get settled in Arizona. I don’t know why my mother went to New Mexico, where my father’s mother lived, to have the baby. I don’t know why she didn’t stay in El Paso, where we lived, or come to her sister’s house where I was. There must have been a very practical reason. Roswell New Mexico isn’t where I’d want to go for medical care in 1972, or now.

My most vivid memory of arriving in Phoenix when I was 7 was of the palm trees.  Long rows of tall thin palm trees that stretched down the street creating a vanishing point. And there were mountains in the distance that sat like ships on the horizon. I don’t remember a baby, though we drove for hundreds of miles with her in the car. I remember the rental house with the dark green painted windows that cranked open and the dark green bushes that surrounded the house, oleanders, had pink flowers and the neighbor warned me that they were poisonous, even if the leaf brushed my hand, which still freaks me out.

I waited for the bus to my new school at the end of the street, which had a grassy median with orange trees that had trunks painted white. Then just weeks later we moved to an apartment with a fountain in a courtyard and an accordion sliding door that separated one bedroom from the living room. My bedroom window was narrow but floor to ceiling, and I lay on my carousel printed bedspread and looked out through the decorative cinderblock patio wall to the apartment across the courtyard and tried to see the people in side. I learned that a bottlebrush tree shaded this window; the red delicate spiky flowers did resemble the brushes my mother used to wash my sister’s bottles.  In the mornings after watching the Flintstones I ducked through a hole in the chain link fence in the back of the covered carport that backed up to playground of my next new school. My aunt and cousin had driven back to Texas and now my Granny was staying with us help with the transition. My father had been traveling a lot and no one had used the word divorce yet.

Summer 1974

We were moving around the corner, to a cheaper apartment, so we filled my mother’s orange Datsun 510 station wagon over and over, loading then unloading. One of my cousins had come, I assume flown, from Texas to help. She was just sixteen and my mother taught her to drive a stick shift so she could help with our move.  On one of our last nights in the nicer apartment, she took my friend and I swimming in the apartment pool. Some tenants upstairs complained that we were being too loud, although I can’t imagine what we were doing that could have been so disruptive.  We were nine.  My cousin pantomimed taking her top off and twirling it in the air, whooping “woo hoo!” then we ran shrieking back through the manicured hedges to the boxed up apartment.

The Monkees on Wallace & Ladmo!

The new apartment was smaller; the carpet was thin and rough. The laundry room had older machines and the door wouldn’t shut properly. We kept laundry quarters in a ceramic pinch pot I’d made at summer rec camp. The trash dumpster in the car port was the first thing you saw when you pulled up.  My mother had taken a new teaching position but the school was on the other side of town so she left for work earlier than I could leave for school. I had to manage that hour before third grade on my own.  This meant the Jetsons and Wallace & Ladmo. 

My sister now went to daycare and I had a house key on a hair yarn that I wore around my neck.  I didn’t know it then but I was part of a new demographic: The original latchkey kid.  When I got home from school in the afternoon the apartment was stuffy with Arizona heat but I kept the curtains drawn and the door locked, just like I was told.  I watched Bewitched, I Dream of Jeanie and the Beverly Hill Billies. If the phone rang I was not allowed to say that my parents weren’t home but, ‘they can’t come to the phone right now, can I take a message?’

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Dog Towels

The Canada geese glide down and ski to a stop on the brown water below us as we walk over the wooden bridge towards the dog park. It is a misty grey morning and it has been raining, so the bridge is slick. The geese have joined ducks and the invitation propels the puppy to the side, pushing her black snout through the slats, all her birding instincts commanding her to crouch, bark and attempt to simultaneously remove my arm at the shoulder and knock me off my feet by yanking forward on the leash. 

I am pulled along, the puppy zigzagging from one side of the path to the other, sniffing grass, peeing on a fence, greeting another dog until I can unhook her and toss the kong. This early the dog park is nearly deserted and the rain has left small lakes clustered all through the throwing area. I am not a dog park person, as our old Aussie mix preferred sitting on the bench with the people and we can do that at home. After a few tosses, I give the kong a throw with a bit more muscle and the puppy plows through a puddle sending up a huge spray. This puppy is drawn to the water like a toddler and this could go on for hours I soon realize.  The game winds down when the puppy starts to drop the kong further and further from me so I clip on her leash and am dragged back over the bridge to the parking lot.

On cue the puppy sails up into the back of the Jeep, sleek and black as a seal pup, her tail threatening to pull her spine out of alignment she wags so furiously.  I remind her, again, to sit and push her back, distracting her by tossing the slimy pink kong in the corner as I close the tailgate. By the time I open the driver’s door she’s in the passenger seat, beyond excited to see me again.  I get out and put her in the back, this time looping her leash over the roll bar. This is my son’s puppy, in essence my beta grandchild, so it’s the best kind of puppy.

I had lined the back of the Jeep with junky blue towels – the dog towels - and used an extra one to rub her muddy haunches as she wiggled all over me.  This towel wrestle is a familiar one. Her muscular enthusiasm echoes that of her owner’s when I used the same towels to dry his 30-pound puppy body.

These faded cobalt blue towels were once the perfect match for the blue tile that lined the shower and bathtub in my kids bathroom, though they were rarely displayed on the towel rack.  They have toweled off three slippery baby bodies. Pulled hot from the dryer they have burritoed toddlers who did not want to get out of the bath that they did not want to take 20 minutes earlier.  I’ve used them to cover a pee soaked bed I was too exhausted to change at three in the morning. They have dried dripping curls of many lengths, and been left where they drop, on the floor of the teen post apocalyptic bedroom, after lacrosse practice showers.

There was the time, not too long ago, I found a blue towel staple gunned to the polished blonde maple dining table leaf, because my eldest said he was ‘making something’.  One was discovered in my middle son’s bass drum along with some couch pillows when the drum kit was being unloaded from my car after a gig.

I washed, dried and folded the vibrant cobalt hue and fluffy texture right out of these towels. After twenty years of service, they are no longer presentable, now frayed, with holes and inexplicable stains, they reside folded in the laundry room pantry next to the leash, dog and cat food and box of poop bags.

Once we are back home I let the puppy out of the back as she was eager to get reacquainted with our cats and I gather all the wet muddy towels out of the Jeep and bring them in the laundry room.

The puppy flops down at my feet while I start the towel load, and gnaws her kong with a squeaking of puppy teeth on wet rubber. The emergency towels, the junker towels, the dog towels. They are faithful and ever ready.

I don’t know who’s more exhausted.

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