Today is my dad’s birthday. Still. I will always remember him on this day. The first year after his death I wandered into a United Methodist Church I’d never been in before to attend Sunday service while being given the side-eye by the regular parishioners and hearing a loud ringing in my ears. It’s gotten easier with the still-small number of years as they’ve passed, but I will always remember him on this day. Happy birthday, Daddy!
What follows is the eulogy that I wrote for his memorial service. I was in a total fog when I wrote it and likely incomprehensible when I attempted to read it. It’s probable that people who heard me deliver it that day didn’t actually receive the information that follows. Therefore, I decided it is about time to publish it in this form. To those who remember him, I hope you enjoy. To those who don’t, I hope you at least see the shadow here of someone you have loved.
August 13, 2017
Lyle Dean Linder – June 9, 1940-August 3, 2017
My dad was a great minister. I think this became his calling because he wanted to keep learning all his life, and he wanted to learn what life is all about. For a boy growing up in the farm country of Nebraska in the 1950s, reading books and collecting knowledge was a highly suspect ambition. Unless you were going to become a minister. Such a noble calling was unassailable. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Dad and at least two of his close cousins became clergy. But, though he got to it in mid-life and may have picked it for convenience, as is so often the way, he still managed to find a true calling. One of the big truths that my dad seemed to discover was that a life of service to others also makes your own life much happier. He engaged in this service tirelessly. Only days before his death he was talking about volunteering at the nursing home, or in chaplaincy. So, he was a great pastor. But, he was also much more.
My Aunt Nancy (Linder Boucher) remembers him as her big brother. He always protected his little sister and looked out for her best interests. As a boy, Lyle was insightful and intellectually curious. The extent of his curiosity and his impatience to get into the world was rather torturous for him at times. It made him restless—impatient with others, but mostly impatient with himself. One example of this might be a few entries in a diary called a “scribble-in book,” which he used at age fourteen, in 1955. I think he must have given me this journal when I was younger, perhaps in high school. In it, he offers a dire assessment of his own school work by saying: “My essay and my criticism upon my essay on Voltaire. The hideous part of it was, that this essay wasn’t hopeless—just undeveloped, raw like uncarded wool. Childish and puerile.”
Geesh, Dad. Daughterly eye roll. Actually adore it, though.
I found the scribble book on a shelf last year and I gave it back to him for his 76th birthday. He and Mary Ann and I had all met for a week in Cape Cod right in between his birthday (June 9) and Father’s Day. I gave the book back to him with the suggestion that he fill in the many blank pages. He never got around to it. Dad was interested in taking up writing—maybe a memoir or blogging, but he just didn’t get any traction on it in that final year. Perhaps, as he noted in the scribble book as a teen, he just didn’t feel like he’d landed on the proper subject matter. As he noted in ’55, “This journal is dull and lifeless, I wish I could somehow add some life to it.” Really, he wanted to add some more colorful and fulfilling experiences to his own life.
In his entire life he remained ravenous for experience. He took many certificates and degrees in graduate school and on his various sabbatical leaves. He enjoyed unusual vacations, cultural exchanges by hosting exchange students (especially from Japan), and pulpit exchanges to places like England and Northern Ireland. He toured his ancestor’s’ native land of Sweden late in life and met some of our distant relatives. Remaining somewhat fluent in Swedish from his childhood as a first-generation American, he loved for his whole life to attend Swedish heritage picnics and get fawned over by the little old ladies who loved to hear anyone speak their native tongue. This was the oldest trick in his book since he bragged to me that he’d learned young he’d always get top rung treatment if he asked the ladies for a cookie in Swedish rather than English back in his hometown region of Uehling (pronounced like eee-you-ling) and Oakland Nebraska.
Actually, this teen journal of his is pretty funny. Fourteen-year-old Lyle is preparing for a school field trip to Omaha and Fremont. The itinerary includes a viewing of a live television recording, a tour of a coffee factory, and trips to a Natural History Museum and a zoo. Lyle prepares for the trip as follows:
NECESSITES FOR THE TRIP SHALL BE:
A. Scribble-in book to record events of the trip.
B. 1 well-filled ball point pen.
C. 1 “brownie holiday” camera, loaded with the new kodak panchromatic film.
D. 1 billfold containing roughly one dollar (and I mean roughly).
E. 1 lunch box chock-full of delectable goodies (peanut butter sandwiches, Ugh).
F. My wristwatch (the better to make correctly timed entries in the scribble book).
In this journal, he does clearly walk around the museum, the coffee factory, the television studio, and the zoo (maybe the same zoo that deer pic was taken at when I was a kid…though in Lyle’s day he recorded the place as “a total flop”), his whole day he was clearly absorbed with taking meticulous real-time notes.
The trip was an important foray into the world, and young Lyle wanted to remember every moment. To me, the journal and it’s literally minute-by minute entries offers an exquisitely painful look at his intellectual impatience. He was in such a hurry to live and to learn. The entry concluding his field trip record reads, “Due to the soothing effects of a warm bath, I must succumb to a necessary evil which takes up too much of our short lives—sleep.” This zest for life was with him the whole time, as those who have known him can attest.
My dad loved to collect mementos of his daily experiences. Some he shared as gifts and many (many, many) he kept. He curated books, antiques, hats, cowboy boots, belt buckles, and bobbles of all kinds. He loved the little sayings that come on plaques for your desk or your wall. Two of the favorites that remained prominently displayed over the years were these:
YOU CAN ALWAYS TELL A SWEDE, BUT YOU CAN’T TELL HIM MUCH
BE PATIENT, GOD ISN’T FINISHED WITH ME YET.
I suppose these were insightful selections.
Lyle’s independence, intelligence, and love of life were always on display. They were traits he remained true to for his entire life. My cousins, Nancy’s daughters, offered some examples. Janet writes that she always knew him for his joyful nature, passion for knowledge and love for people. Joy remembered the time when we all went to visit their ranch in Idaho. Janet, Joy and I were just little girls. She recalls how, when they showed my dad the cabin where we’d be staying, he ran and leapt onto the bed like a kid. A grown man behaving like we would was pretty impressive to my cousins. I was used to it, and totally took it for granted.
I’ve said as an adult that my dad encouraged me to become a critical thinker and a creative communicator. He always made a point as a parent of speaking to me in vocabulary that he would use with adults. No baby talk or simplifications. Of course, that didn’t stop him from reading and re-reading my favorite picture books, like “Tubby and the Pooh-bah” and “How many kittens?” until I’m sure the mere sight of those books made him want to vomit. He’d try skipping dialogue sometimes but he was proud that I’d catch him.
Our free time together was always populated by fantasies. Especially time spent in the car. Our little orange car, which was called a Vega, became the “vamp vega” as my dad helped Daniel and I weave wild scenarios of a vampire family tooling around Atlanta, Georgia. “Vegetable soup” was a game in which the car was a pot for making soup, and huge pieces of sliced vegetables of all kinds were periodically tumbling down from the sky, threatening to crush us if we didn’t duck. We’d all take turns. “Oh, no! Here comes a carrot! A potato! Onion, my eyes!!!”
There were running games involving space aliens, trying to figure out these bizarre humans they had come upon. And there was something about a swarm of bees. I think we were bees in our car, traveling in a swarm. All these games were extended improv sessions. Endless, really. We would drop them when we needed to and then pick them up again.
I’m not going to wrap this remembrance up in some neat and tidy way. Life doesn’t get wrapped up that way. So, like one of our improv sessions, I guess we’re done playing for now. At least, we’re done playing in the way we once knew. But, I know we’ll pick it up again.
