Dad's Eulogy...

As many of you know, my father passed away on Wednesday, May 20th. It seems like yesterday that I was talking to him. Now he's gone, but his memory remains. I think about him all the time.

Here's the eulogy that I wrote. We gave copies to people when they came to his celebration of life.


MEMORIES OF A MAN, MY DAD

My Dad was born Richard Joseph Homan. He was the youngest of four siblings. He is survived by a wife, five children, 12 grandchildren and one great grand child. He is also survived by four refrigerators; one deep freezer; seven televisions; eight phones; an old ice maker; 4 rain gauges; hundreds of drill bits; 1 machete; 1 plastic Michelin man; 11 peanut jars of odds and ends; over 100 jars and cans of nuts, bolts, nails, screws, washers, hinges, latches, brackets, wires, and other metal pieces; 9 9/16 wrenches; 7 7/16 wrenches; 3 cowbells; 2 iron horses; over 50 bottle openers and 39 lag bolts.

My Dad was well-rounded man. He liked to bake cookies, to make salsa, to grow tomatoes, to watch birds and to watch football (especially Nebraska football).

There didn't seem to be a Sunday that would go by where my Dad wasn't baking his chocolate chip cookies. The best times to get them were before they were baked and right after they came out of the oven. He'd scowl if he'd see you sneak some of the cookie dough, but I don't think that he minded that much.

He started dabbling in salsa when I was in college. He'd make tons of batches of the stuff. He thought it was pretty good, and I knew that a lot of people liked it. He'd give away jars of the stuff whether you wanted it or not. He ran into some snags with it early one, like the batch that wasn't red enough for him, so he used red food coloring, which turned the salsa pink.

He started his bird watching later in life. He had several bird feeders and a bird bath. I gave him a couple of bird watching guides to help him out.

This leads into a short story of mine about Dad trying to protect his birds.

A year or two ago, my Dad had it up to here with the squirrels. Apparently, the squirrels in his backyard were eating the bird seed that he used in his bird feeders (naturally) and he was doing something about it.

A previous bird feeder problem occurred when black birds moved in and were eating all his food and scaring the smaller birds away. Undaunted and a little aggravated, my Dad did what any reasonable bird lover would do, he bought a pellet gun and started shooting them.

Now before you think my Dad was cruel to animals, you have to understand that he wasn't intending to kill these birds. He was merely trying to scare them off... and scare them off he did. He'd sit in the garage watching the bird bath. A black bird would fly down to the feeding area, my Dad would cock and pump the pellet gun, and he'd fire off a pellet. Usually, it'd whistle by the bird, who would then be so startled that it would fly away. A few times, I think it hit a small part of the wing, but then was still able to fully fly away.

My Mom kept telling my Dad that "one of these times, the animal control people are going to see you!", but he kept on at it. After a while, the black birds got the message and stopped coming.

The squirrels were another matter. We were over at my brother Bill's place for his daughter's birthday. My brothers and I started talking to my Mom. One of us asked, "How is Dad doing?" It was a common question because you never knew what was happening with my Dad. Seeing as how my Dad was retired, he had plenty of time to spend as he put it 'watching the world go by', which also meant that he had plenty of time coming up with new things to obsess about.

For example, my Mom told us that my Dad had jars upon jars of nuts and bolts that he took from my Grandpa's barn before it was torn down. My Dad had been sitting outside and sorting through the nuts and bolts. We guess that he was sifting out the 'good' from the 'bad.' To my Mom, they are all bad and she admitted that she'd been systematically throwing a jar away every now and then. "But he'll never notice," she had said.

Knowing my Dad like I did, I thought, "He probably does notice." Sure enough, barely a day after she told me that, my Dad suddenly complained, "Well, your mother keeps throwing away things I'm trying to save! She's throwing out my jars of bolts!"

I suppressed a smile and said nothing.

The squirrels had him at his wit's end, I guess. He'd seen the squirrels out there eating all the bird seed that he had left for the birds. At first, he had tried to hide the food from the squirrels. While that was semi-successful, they really ticked him off by biting through his sun room's screen door and pillaging the food from the bucket it was stored in.

Seeing what his options were, my Dad decided to do the most reasonably humane thing he could think of, which was to capture and relocate all the squirrels.

He set out to do this by getting an animal trap, one of those cages that allowed the animal to walk in, but closed before they could walk out. He finally got his first victim and instructed my Mom to dispose of the critter by the ball field by her work. She took it out there, opened the cage, and set it free. The squirrel shot out of the cage, turned around to look at her once as if to say 'thanks' and took off for the nearest tree.

Dad managed to trap yet another one, but my Mom started to put her foot down on this behavior.

"People are going to think that I'm weird!" she scolded.

The success of trapping tapered off rather quickly, though. When my Dad had still only caught only two squirrels several weeks later, he threatened to take even more drastic measures.

My Mom said, "You're going to be fined for cruelty to animals, you know!"

Dad snapped, "It's a small price to pay for my happiness!"

My Dad wasn't necessarily a cruel man. He just wanted the thoughtless animals from eating his food that he left for other animals.

Our Dad was also one of the toughest men that we knew. My brother, Joe, remembers being at the old family farm doing some work in the barn, when a large beam fell and hit Dad squarely in the chest. Joe said that he shrugged it off and continued working all day as if nothing happened.

I had heard stories about fights that Dad had gotten into. One that we talked about was when Dad went to the liquor store and encountered two guys giving a guy he knew a hard time. Dad took both of them on. His excuse to Mom was, "They were messing with my friend. I had two fists. What was I supposed to do?"

I can verify that Dad hit hard. As one of five kids that frequently got into trouble, Dad would have to spank us once to make his point every now and then. You did not want to be on the receiving end of one of those open-palmed spanks. If memory serves, it felt like his hands were made of solid rock. You still saw the brute force of those hands from time to time. One day when my brother, Bill and I were around 12, we heard some yelling upstairs, followed by a commotion of chairs, followed by a stomping of feet downstairs. My brother, Paul, zoomed past us with a whimper followed closely by Dad. Paul slammed the door to his room in time for my Dad to punch a hole through the first layer. Apparently, Paul was smarting off to Dad, which was not an uncommon occurrence in our house and Dad had had enough that day. I thought to myself, "There is no way I'm going to mess with Dad when I get as old as Paul."

I had no idea what set my Dad off that night, but my brother, Paul, and my Dad laughed about it years later like it was a planned prank.

Growing up with my Dad was like growing up with Tim Allen's character on Home Improvement if instead of rewiring things, he built things. My Dad always seemed to have some solution to a problem by merely using nails, wood (paneling, plywood or real wood) and some elbow grease. At our old house on First street, Dad built a bar with a sink, a kind of sitting booth, an insert into the wall for a TV and inserts for fish tanks. The summer when I was in kindergarten, we moved to the current house on Anna street. It's a three-bedroom house. When we moved in, Dad constructed walls downstairs to make three more bedrooms, a laundry room and a bathroom. When one of the rooms wasn't big enough, Dad moved two of the walls a few feet over to make more room.

He was always trying to improve his set up. He'd build a shelf within a desk and then he'd build mini shelves that would go on the bigger shelves. On his shelves were every type of container either store bought or re-used from its previous life as a cigar box or a wine container.

Dad was also a scavenger. If he saw something while driving that was being thrown out, he'd come back later to claim it. One of our mini-closets for our downstairs was a rolling rack that was being thrown out by a store. Dad saw it and came back for it later.

It was often that we'd be riding with our Dad on the highway when he'd spot something on the side of the road. He'd hit the brakes, pull over to the side and drive backwards all the way to the item he spotted, which might be something like a bungee that someone had dropped. If it still looked like it worked, he'd pick it up.

You could always count on my Dad to help out. He was always willing to help us move in and out of our homes and apartments.

When Bill and I moved into our first apartment off campus while we were in college, we opted for one that was a fairly large two bedroom apartment. My Dad showed up with our stuff that we had packed into a horse trailer. He showed up at the apartment in a fowl mood. For starters, it was far from campus. Then he had issues with the apartment itself in that it was on the second floor.

"Couldn't have gotten one on the ground floor?" Dad asked.

"We didn't really have a choice, Dad" one of us tried to explain.

Dad scowled. That was late summer of 1991. Even then, Dad was starting to show the signs of his years of smoking. He huffed and puffed up the stairs with our stuff. It was a hot August day and he was pouring with sweat.

When all the furniture was off loaded. Dad brought up a fan for us to use. It was a metal shop fan that was round like it was some sort of stool. He turned it on and showed us the various speeds that it had. It started to rattle a little.

Dad said, "Oh that's normal. If it starts to rattle like that you just give it a little kick like this."

Dad kicked the fan. The rattle stopped.

"See? Just kick it."

Sure enough, we started kicking it whenever it rattled.

As Dad was leaving, he turned to us and said, "You guys are never going to be able to afford this."

Thanks for the vote of confidence Dad!

Dad was a Nebraska Cornhusker fan. He didn't go to many games, but he'd gladly buy tickets for us kids. He was just glad to do it because we were fans.

He was a big optimist about the Huskers. The year that the Huskers went 7-7, he boldly proclaimed that they'd win the national championship. I don't think he ever missed a game that was on television.

My Dad was a Bud man through and through. That is, until he switched to Busch Light, but for decades, he could be counted on for being a loyal Budweiser customer. My Dad didn't drink pop, so it was only natural that we'd see him with a Bud in his hand. That is not to say that he had a problem though. If he was somewhere and was offered a beer and they didn't have Budweiser, he'd just go without. Now that's loyal!

He was also prepared. Whenever the weather report called for some severe weather, he'd go out and buy a few more cases.

One time, I was visiting from college. My Dad met me in the garage and asked me to take his beer out of the cooler and put them on the shelf in the garage. I complied, but noted that he had six cases in the trunk.

I mentioned this to my Mom, whose reply was, "Six? He usually buys nine!"

He drank out of a Bud koozy. Our various dwellings were scattered with various Budweiser coasters, commemorative bottles, clocks, beer signs, fridge magnets, and other Budweiser memorabilia.

His other drink of choice was coffee, which he drank a lot.

I'd see commercials for those Mister Coffee machines and think that Dad would enjoy that, but he was an old-style percolator man through and through. There wasn't a day that didn't start with coffee. Sometimes, he'd forget to buy coffee filters so he'd have to compromise by using toilet paper or Kleenex. He'd really let Mom hear it if the only thing available was colored, scented tissue paper.

He never took sugar or cream. Even with the popularity of gourmet flavored coffees, iced coffees and cappuccinos, he never once tried them. It was black or nothing.

For food, Dad was just as simple. He was a meat and potatoes man, that is until he discovered that he was allergic to starches, then it changed to just meat. He loved chicken, especially gizzards and livers. He enjoyed eating his home-caught catfish when we had a summer trailer.

Dad was a very well-liked man. He got that way by being himself. He was always generous to other people. Even in his last days, he would have us stock his snack stash with cookies and snack cakes, which he'd often give to the nurses.

Dad very rarely was out in public in a fowl mood. He'd always have a kind word to say to people when they walked in when he was at his usual place, at the end of the bar: behind it. He'd stand behind the bar so he could see who was coming in and to say 'Hi' to people. If the people working behind the bar minded, they didn't say so. That's just where he stood.

I guess you could say that he was an optimist... for the most part. He never talked about being 'Stressed”. Speaking of the word, 'Stress'. My Dad hated that word. One time, I made the mistake of saying to my Dad that I was 'stressed out' because of college. He immediately scoffed by saying, "I don't believe in stress. It's a made up word. What do you have to be stressed about anyway? I bid on multi-million contracts every day. If anyone can say that they're stressed, it's me!"

From then on, I made sure to use the word, "pressure". He didn't mind that one.

But as much as he was personable towards people he knew, he was very much against giving out your personal information.

For example, one day my Dad and I went to Radio Shack to get some batteries. Normally he didn't go to Radio Shack, but we were at the mall for some reason and he said he needed batteries, so I pointed to Radio Shack, which was the nearest store.

We walked in and sure enough, there were batteries. He grabbed a pack and set it on the counter. He pulled out his wallet.

The man behind the counter asked, "Can I get your name and address, sir?"

Dad asked, "Why do you need my name and address?"

"I just need it to complete the sale, sir."

"But I don't want to give you my name and address."

"I'm sorry, but I need it."

"But I just want to buy these batteries."

"Well I'm sorry sir," the man persisted. "But I can't open the register unless I have your name and address."

Dad eyed the kid a little.

"So you're telling me that you can't just let me pay cash for these batteries?"

"That's right."

"What do you need my name and address for anyway?" Dad asked.

"They use it to send out a mailer to you." the clerk explained.

"But what if I don't want a mailer?" Dad asked.

"I'm sorry. But like I said, I can't open the register without your name and address."

Without a word, Dad put his wallet back in his pocket and left the store without buying any batteries. For the rest of the day, everyone he talked to was treated to that story which ended with the phrase: "And I picked my money up and walked out the door!"

Being a teenager, I was like "You sure told them, Dad!" Well not to his face. I thought it. I may have been young, but I wasn't crazy.

Because he didn't like giving out any more personal information than he had to, he had a card by his phone that had written on it every magazine subscription he had with the expiration date and every donation that he gave and the day he gave it. That way, if he got a call from a telemarketer telling him that his magazine subscription was about to expire or he last gave a donation at a certain date, he'd whip out the card, check it and tell the telemarketer that his subscription still had so many months left or that he gave at a date different than they had told him.

I don't know what grand plans Dad had about how he'd live his life, but I know he probably didn't want to spend the last several months of it in hospitals or stuck at home. Even so, I'm so glad that he lived long enough to enjoy several years of retirement.

He said to me on several occasions that he was just sitting watching the world go by, which is what he was reduced to for the past year or so. He lamented about that once. He said, “We thought we were all invincible.”

If he were here today, well he'd probably be cursing us out for throwing away a lot of perfectly good tools, wire, bolts, nuts, nails, screws and various things he needed that were in his garage and study. But he wanted me to make sure and tell everyone, “Enjoy and have fun.”

So Dad, here's to you: “Enjoy and have fun.”