View from Porum Mountain

Breathe in the air and memories. We're on top of what we call a "mountain" in Oklahoma -- Porum Mountain, where my granddad, "PaPa," took me quail hunting, where my dad loved the wildflowers and gnarly wood used for fenceposts among the rusted barbed wire, where it seems like a world apart and you could see the hazy blue of the hills below through the trees.

I drove to Porum in southeastern Oklahoma for Memorial Day ... about three hours each way from Norman on SH 9, the best way ... to visit my dad's grave for the first Memorial Day since he died Jan. 24, 2010, and leave some fresh blue flowers (even if they were weird dyed things) to decorate his grave, because I know he hated silk. It's still so very fresh and my tears of loss continue to be close to the surface. And I visited Porum Mountain, one of his favorite places, just west up Ute Road from the home of my grandparents almost under the tiny town's water tower. Ironically where my dad is buried is east on Ute Road at Fields Cemetery, where you drive and drive until you find the faded rusted sign and think you've about run out of road when you get there.

It's a question of what is "home" for each individual? As my dad fought to breathe the air that keeps all of us alive, thanks to his uncomfortably painful and progressive pulmonary fibrosis, he would ask each of us as we entered his room at the nursing facility he hated, "Are you here to take me home?" And to him that meant Porum. Would we take him to his beloved Porum? It answered our unasked question about where to take him when he lost his biggest life battle.

Daddy and I had planned to go to his beloved Porum High School reunion about a year ago, but his lung disease had already robbed him of too much of his body. We'd gone twice in recent years. He'd lost too much of his vision as a result of macular degeneration to drive, but he loved me chauffeuring him there and his arriving like a rock star amongst his dwindling group of friends, most of whom would attend from his tiny class of loyal graduates. He had so many good friends from his class who would attend -- Leola Griffith, Eugene Cooper, Flora (Hilton) Tye, Cora Shipley, Margaret "Maggie" Hazelwood and more.

As a young man, my dad escaped Porum to go to college at Northeastern Oklahoma State University in Tahlequah and dental school at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. And I say escaped. Because he left for dreams of a good life that he didn't think he could have in Porum. But as we all want recognition in our home towns, so did my dad.

After he retired from dentistry in about 1990, he started modeling and acting, first in Oklahoma and Texas and later in New York City. He had some success, like his lovely little part as a classy security guard in Home Alone II that delighted his granddaughter, although it was not the wild success he dreamed of. Those kinds of parts went to veteran male actors like Kirk Douglas, Henry Fonda and Walter Matthau.

He had his happiest acting experiences with the interactive New York murder mystery troupe, Murder Mystery Inc. -- always as the guy who dies, some times as a corrupt New York councilman with women on each arm, something his kids found humorous. We joked that he was dying to meet you and he "died" thousands of times.

But I digress. All that time he spent in exotic places around the world and Daddy still wanted to come back to Porum. After living in the always bustling New York City for two decades -- which he reveled in -- he was always drawn back to Porum.

My Aunt Louise (his older sister) and Uncle Bill lovingly purchased my dad's head stone and traveled there when it was set quietly May 27. I love that they did that as their last gift to him -- and us. They are very special people.

Porum's a sweet spot where I spent parts of my youthful summers -- chasing chickens with their heads cut off, shooting bottles off a downed tree with my granddad over a creek near the house and nursing sick cows -- and now it's the place that my Daddy wanted to be and now it's the place where I'll visit when we want to be especially close.

Daddy ... I miss you and I'll be there again one of these days soon. But I know you're with me all the time anyway.

I can hear your voice as I greet you on the phone with, "What's cookin', good lookin'?" And your perennial answer -- "Chicken, wanna neck?" And you'd laugh and it was our silly Okie joke. I can hear it. And you're with me right now.