My Dad, who loved birds, Mom, science and Mother Nature

(NOTE June 19, 2021: This is yet another revision of a post originally titled, “My Father, The Sex Machine.” I changed the title, as it offended some my siblings — and probably many others too polite to tell me so.)

At the funeral of my father, his former secretary came up to me in tears, gave me a warm hug, and said, “Your father was the most wonderful person I knew.”  This kind of shocked me, because my memories of Dad were not, for the most part, wonderful.  Yet here was this obese middle-aged woman blithering about how many poor people my father — a surgeon in Lancaster, Pennsylvania — had helped, without any hope of being paid; how he had personally told her not to send medical bills to patients they knew to be penniless.

As I grew up, my impression of Dad was that he liked birds better than people — perhaps because his earliest experiences of the human race were rather negative.  He was an only child; his mother was a spoiled, peevish society girl from Mainline Philadelphia.  From what my mother told me about her mother-in-law: poor Dad.

Yet in many ways Dad had it good.  He was smart, athletic — and, as you can see from the above photo of him at Haverford College — very good-looking.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania medical school, where he met and married his favorite classmate (my mother), he went to Liberia as a missionary doctor for a few years.  Below we see Dad in Liberia, relaxing on a hammock in the jungle.  He would need all the rest he could get, because when he came back to the States, life got hectic.

During Dad’s career as a surgeon,  I remember the phone ringing after midnight, and minutes later, footsteps on the stairs, the back door slamming, the old VW starting and accelerating out the driveway.  Usually it was an emergency appendectomy, which requires slicing into the abdomen of a total stranger and delicately removing up to half a pound of stinky mess.  In my imagination, the human race must have looked to my father like armies of the walking dead — a bunch of rotting organs, walking on two legs, keeping him from sleep.

My mother, as luck would have it, was six inches taller than he, which I’m guessing was stressful for him.  Mom was a frustrated, emotionally unstable medical school graduate who bore him six frustrated, emotionally unstable children — each of which represented, to Dad, an endless river of frustration and emotional instability.

By now, I think you get the picture.  For my father, people were — in general — a drag.

Birds, on the other hand, were great. They didn’t complain — except for crows, whose raucous cacophony awakened us many mornings on our family farm.  Birds, unlike Mom, didn’t bitch and moan; they made songs delightful to the soul.  Birds, unlike my siblings and me, didn’t walk in my father’s newly-planted vegetable garden, then track mud on the carpet.

The very fact that I took this photo of a house finch means I’ve inherited at least some of my father’s obsession with birds.

No. Birds twittered in the trees, and flew over our heads in flocks and swoops and barrel rolls.  Birds were fun.  Especially barn swallows, which were precision-flying prodigies.  Crows were a pain in the ass, with their sneak attacks on the corn, so in their case my father made an exception to his Quaker pacifism and shot them with his .22 rifle.  He would then leave their bodies to rot next to the corn field, a warning to their fellows.

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My father never said “I love you” to me until the last time I saw him.  For my father, I think, love equaled sex, and was therefore inappropriate for children. According to my mother, who after my father’s death felt a need to share personal details with all who would listen, Dad was a sex machine.  Mom told us, “Your father’s hands were everwhere.”  Mom and Dad didn’t stop having weekly or biweekly sex until he had a disabling stroke.

Go, Dad.

So, to recap, here is Dad’s list so far:

People – a drag, with a few occasonal exceptions (my little brother Bill, his favorite, being one exception, and my mother being another, judging by their conjugal fervor.)

Birds – good, except for crows.

Sex – great!

Dad also loved gardening.  Coming home from a ten-or-twelve-or-fourteen-hour day at the hospital, he made a beeline straight to his vegetable garden, which was a meditation in chaos.  Rows of vegetable plants could best be found among the waist-high weeds by looking for little piles of stones that Dad put at the end of each row, the plan being that Dad would later cart the stones off to another location.  That rarely happened.

Dad also marked rows of vegetables with random sticks of scrap material: broken dowel rods; bent metal tubing from umbrellas; short PVC pipes; plastic forks; straws from McDonald’s milkshakes; remnants of smashed kite frames; and scraps of aluminum conduit.

On our gentleman’s farm, nothing went to waste. Actually we can add to the list of things Dad loved:  random stuff.  My father could throw, would throw, did throw nothing away.  He was a textbook example of a pack rat.  Dad was remarkable for his obdurate inability to part with any object in his possession, no matter how trivial or apparently worthless.  He filled every available space in every building of our farm with random stuff — initially organized in stacks, piles, cartons, or bins, but increasingly demonstrative of the second law of thermodynamics:  everything in the physical universe tends towards entropy.

Our basement ended up filled with plastic bottles and paper cups that could be used for gardening purposes; boxes of assorted plumbing parts; boxes of used medical supplies (rubber gloves, disposable scalpels, syringes, and medicine bottles); varieties of string and twine; varieties of plastic, paper, and burlap bags; and stacks of magazines, organized by date, and sometimes even tied together with strings: National Geographic, Scientific American, Time, Ramparts, the Nation, Atlantic Monthly, and the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Our attic was filled with dusty boxes and old furniture. Random broken pieces of farm equipmennt filled the hog pen that was attached to the back of our garage, and the pigeon roost above the hog pen.  Stacks and boxes of debris also filled a chicken house with an improvised greenhouse attached, made of scrap lumber and plastic sheeting.  Everything else with which my father could not part landed in our approximately 5,000-square-foot barn.

By the time Dad passed away, physical evidence of his unresolved psychological issues had choked every flat surface of more than 20,000 square feet of house, barn, and outbuildings.

After the funeral, my older brother Jim began the sad task of carting Dad’s
memorabilia by the truckload to a pit in a cornfield for cremation.  Columns of smoke rose above our farm for weeks.

At a memorial service for Dad, brother Jim produced an example of Dad’s obsession with stuff:  a small bottle, with a small note inside, in our father’s neat handwriting:  “Hole in bottom.”  Sure enough, the bottle had a tiny hole in its bottom.

Don’t we all.

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But I would be remiss were I to not mention a whole other side of Dad.

In my early forties and living in Mission Hills, California, I came down with a mysterious rash that started on my foot and spread quickly up my leg.  I also had a low fever and felt completely exhausted.  I went to a local doctor assigned to me by Blue Cross HMO.  The doctor ran tests and X-rays, diagnosed me with pneumonia, and prescribed a wide-spectrum antibiotic.  I called Dad to update him.  He asked about my symptoms.  I told him. He expressed doubt as to the diagnosis. He told me to check and write down my temperature every four to eight hours for the next twenty-four hours, which I did. When I reported back to him that my fever had gone from 100 to 101.5 in two shallow waves, he said, “God damn it, you don’t have pneumonia.  You have mononucleosis!  Go back and tell that doctor to run blood tests for mono.”  I did, and sure enough, I had the Epstein-Barr virus with infectious mononucleosis.

My father had correctly diagnosed me over the phone, sight unseen, from three thousand miles away.  He was a good doctor.  A very good doctor.

At Dad’s funeral, fellow physicians stood up at the eulogy (held in the chapel of St. Joseph’s Hospital in Lancaster, Pennsylvania) and sang his praises.  My father was a consummate professional, the most skilled surgeon they had ever known, even though he was “a pack-ratter,” one friend called him.

When I went shopping in a local supermarket and I showed my I.D., the cashier’s eyes got big: “Oh!  Are you Dr. Mears’s son?”  She explained that my father had saved her daughter’s life.  More visits to Lancaster County businesses throughout my life have yielded similar stories; Dad had saved their mother’s life, or their son’s or daughter’s life, or their friend’s or husband’s life.  Often at one, two, or three o’clock in the morning.  And often without being able to pay.  And as I was told by Connie, his medical secretary, that when it came time to collect from the poor, Dad told his office staff, “They don’t have insurance.  They can’t afford the bill. Let it go.”

Because Dad did not use draconian methods to collect medical fees, our family was always a little short of cash, and my father drove a used Volkswagon beetle with a broken heater and wore the same suit five or six days a week.  In spite of that, he put five of his six children through university.  In my case, I think it was especially difficult for him, because he thought my choice of university—Maharishi International University, a kind of experimental New Age college where the curriculum was all centered around the teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi—was a big mistake.  But he paid my tuition and never once complained.  (I only found out that he didn’t agree with my choice of schools after he passed away, when my little brother Bill told me.)

My father, an agnostic Quaker, was one of the only liberal doctors in the staunchly conservative Republican city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  He was among the first people I met who passionately opposed the Vietnam war, supported civil rights and environmental causes, practiced recycling, and criticized the military-industrial complex.  In 1965, our family donated the use of our station wagon to civil rights workers traveling to those famous marches in Selma, Alabama.  When I got stranded after an anti-Vietnam-War march in Washington, D.C., Dad drove through the night to give me a ride home, because he believed in the march and in peace, even though he had to see patients at 7:00 AM the next morning.

Dad was, by some measures, a terrible father.  He was cold, remote, impatient, scornful, and often violent.  I remember him whipping me with the thin branches of apple trees, and I remember him chasing my older brother Jim around the farm and hurling wedges of scrap lumber after Jim accidentally let the cows into the sweet corn patch.

But my father saved dozens, probably hundreds of lives — maybe more — and he was one of the most sincere believers in education, environmental preservation, organic gardening, and open-mindedness–and in every case he practiced his beliefs with firm resolve.  In spite of his violent temper and inherited peevishness, I saw him always trying to be gentle, kind, generous, understanding, and well-informed, never rushing to judgment, never forming opinions that were not merited by solid data.

This Father’s Day, I thank Dr. Frank Kennedy Mears, Jr. for giving me life; for supporting my education at an unconventional university, even though I could have gone to Haverford College; for serving as a positive role model in many ways; and for teaching me core values I now hold close to my heart, as I hold him in my memory and in my gratitude.

Dad talking to me behind the farmhouse, circa 1984. This was after I got married. I think he liked me better after I got married. For one thing, he really liked my wife.

P.S. July 1, 2011

It was around ten days ago that I first published this post.  Just now I got out of the Jacuzzi at around 1 AM and I–rooftops away–I heard a lone mockingbird singing to the night. Immediately I thought of my father, who of course loved birds, but at some point, gentle reader, I want to share with you a really weird story about birds and my father.  Until then, thanks for reading!

P.P.S. June 15, 2013

I just updated this piece with a few editing touches.  Tomorrow is Father’s Day.  Time to post this again on FaceBook.

P.P.P.S. August 21, 2014

Dad’s birthday.  More editing touches.  I love this piece, as I love Dad.

P.P.P.P.S June 21, 2015

Still another quick edit.  Thank you, Dad.