My Father the Furnace Fighter

CHAPTER 16

MY FATHER THE FURNACE FIGHTER

“I am an old man and have known many great troubles, but most of them never happened.”
Mark Twain

One of the happiest days of my life was a cold November evening in 1999 when the furnace in my father’s home sputtered a few times, then died a dignified death at a good old age. My poor father had worried over that thirty-year-old dinosaur for years and now, like him, it was gone. Dear Old Dad was not the fearless furnace fighter like Ralphie’s dad in the endearing movie, A Chrismas Carol. However, during the last few years of his life, he often worried that his “money would run out” and he would not be able to afford a new heater. The notion of a more modern heat pump with central air-conditioning was more than his pocket book could bear, he thought.
My father had made numerous repairs to the furnace over the years and undoubtedly prayed at the onset of every winter that it would be last just one more season. Indeed, his living expenses, which included his heart medications, stretched his fixed income, but Social Security, income from cattle sales and his most liquid asset, his faith, always converged along his life’s path. He always made it through his last years with a little money left over each month. “Don’t worry,” I often told him, “ the Lord has helped you through the past seventy years, so you know you’ll make it for the rest of your days.” For once, I made sense: the furnace, and practically everything else in the house that had a motor, fell apart after he died.

Despite my grief over his recent death, I could only smile and think that my father had made it out of this world just in the nick of time and did not need to worry about the furnace. Even in death, if you look hard enough, you can always find a few bright spots to help you through the mire of sorrow. When the furnace died three months after my father died, I knew that I was on the road to recovery.
Soon after the furnace shut down, the well water pump burned out and I noticed that the bathroom floor had a few rotten spots. Even the septic tank backed up! Here I am, I thought, preparing my father’s house, my boyhood home, for my maternal grandmother, and look at this mess! How can a house age so much overnight? Can a house die with it’s owner?
But the house did not die with its owner. The owner’s problems were left behind when he died.
My father, a world-class worrier all of his life who passed along his talent to me, wrestled to a draw with that “old clinker” of a furnace. He had struggled with his finances and he had maintained the upper hand. Dear Old Dad had gone the distance. Just like one of his boyhood idols, Joe Louis, he fought hard and well. This was a battle he did not lose. He had also been spared one of his worst fears: he had fought the furnace, and he had won.
Life began to look much brighter after that day.