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Montana Quarterly, Fall 2010
Delia ‘Dee’ Zarzyski eulogy
Delia ‘Dee’ Zarzyski obituary

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© Paul Zarzyski. All rights reserved. These words may not be reprinted or reposted without the author's written permission.

CHORDWOOD
pics 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |

Except for the time that my dad, Leonard Zarzyski, served during WWII aboard ship, he seldom ventured far during his 83 years from the hardwoods of northern Wisconsin—oaks, maples, ash, birch.  They towered over the house in which he was born, and continued to surround him while he pursued his life’s passions—hunting, fishing, wild berry and mushroom gathering, making wood (cutting firewood), and milling lumber from which he built cabinets, tables, boxes of every denomination—toy,  jewelry, shoe-shine, recipe-card, pen-and-pencil, fishing lure, you name it— ornate banks, picture frames, knife blocks, cutting boards, chests of drawers, shelves, anything and everything to challenge and occupy him in his wood-working shop, especially during the long winters.  Sometime in the ‘60s—likely while he was still working in the iron ore mine for 2-3 bucks an hour— he bought 20 acres of mostly virgin hardwoods a few miles from our house for $750, a decision he tormented over.  “The Twenty”—as he referred to this woodlot with so much pride in his voice—became his sanctuary.  He built a small “shack,” which he dubbed
S E R E N I T Y in oak letters arched over the door, and enjoyed thousands of hours there by himself (Mom preferring the comforts of their home in town) but never alone amidst his beloved trees.  Over the years, he cut the standing dead for firewood and culled others—mostly those jeopardized by disease—for lumber, lumber he stacked, stockpiled, everywhere, a Fort Knox of hardwood boards.  “Do you know what you’d shell out for this oak one-by-six at Menard’s!” he was prone to exclaim every time he’d pull the corrugated tin off the top off one of his troves, as if opening a vault, to show off his wealth.    

My dad died in October 2008.  I’d helped him cut and haul into town his last years’ supply of cordwood with which he heated our house, the same home at 505 Poplar Street where he and Mom lived their entire married life, since 1947. Little could I have known, as we worked side-by-side making wood, much the same as I did 50 years earlier—a five-year-old boy wielding a wooden ax Dad had carved—that I’d be soon spreading my father’s remains at the bases of the biggest trees on The Twenty, the very trees I vowed to him I would never allow anyone to cut.  In the sawdust to gray-ash interim, I wrote the poem, “How I Tell My Dad I Love Him”:

How I Tell My Dad I Love Him

Knocking down the standing dead
oak, maple, ash, yellow birch
in July humidity all day long, we
take a blow only to guzzle
spring water from moonshine jugs—
same jugs, same artesian seep, same
father and son who made wood
together one-half century ago, me at six
swinging a hickory double-bit
Dad carved as he whittled
into me the virtue of work, same pride
a blue-collar poet knows
sizing-up the ricks, the short cords of words,
split and fit into stacks
during another hard shift in the woods. Dad
gestures to me his slow-motion
coup de grâce—kill it, quitting time—
straight razor across the throat
Sicilian sign language with thick Polish finger
just as my chainsaw, racing
out of gas, bucks into two
matching sixteen-inch rounds
the butt-end of a fifty-footer
I was itching to finish. Flocked
with sawdust from my boot laces up
to the crown button of my Paul Bunyan ball cap,
I saunter to the stump
Dad sits on, The Lumberjack Thinker
pondering four score and two years of BTUs. He
does not see me peeling the heavy red
sweat-soaked t-shirt
inside-out up over my torso and face—
popping its collar, like a cork
out of a crock nozzle,
off my forehead. I toss it
splashing into his lap
with reptile heft. He jumps,
cusses me with a laugh, agrees
to replenish my Pabst Blue Ribbon reservoir,
replace my shredded gloves. Our deal
sealed with a handshake, ever so
less virile lately, tender as a hug,
we drive the same slow miles home—
dripping in the sweetest silence he knows.

A couple of months before Dad passed and while he was extremely ill, we sat together inside his shack and talked.  At one point, after a long, difficult lull in our conversation, he said joyously, as if offering a testimonial summary of his life, “well, I sure did build a lot of beautiful pieces out of these hardwoods.”   We were sitting at his kitchen table—oak and maple—the same table at which he wrote, by lantern light, hundreds of letters mailed to me in Stevens Point, where I went to college my first four years, and later to Montana, where I’ve lived the past 38 years.  Along with all the finished woodwork Dad left as legacy, he also left, among the thousands of board feet of rough-cut lumber, a small stash of his favorite bird’s-eye maple, which he’d high-graded and stored out of the weather. 

Unfortunately—or so it sometimes seems—the building materials of my craft, my passion, are merely musically grained words rather than woods.  I’ve paid tribute to my father often with poetry, including two pieces written after his death.  One, tilted “Rubato: Stolen Time,” is triggered by a birch burl clock Dad built for me.  It’s hung near my writing desks for 40 years. The other poem, “Good Friday,” offers the following as its second stanza:

                                                              Melding into the fog bank
                             horizon on the other side, my dad left
                             dovetailed in his wake
                             one bird’s-eye maple tackle box
                             half-filled with the cinder of a man
                             whose blue-collar hands loved
                             the smooth, slow-stroked
                             strumming of exotic grains he milled,
                             sanded, lacquered—enticed
                             into the light.

I spread half of Dad’s ashes at the trunks of 51 (the year I was born and the title to my recent book) of the oldest, most majestic trees on his Twenty.  The other half, in the most elaborate bird’s-eye maple fishing lure box Dad ever built, was placed in the coffin and buried with Mom on August 28, 2010, one year ago to this very hour, I just now serendipitously realized, glancing at the calendar and then to the birch-burl clock, in the midst of this writing. 

Timing, dear reader, seldom occurs more perfectly on this earth than it did in the following scenario.  Earlier this year, I contacted Wyatt Wilkie (www.wilkiestringedinstruments.com), master luthier and son of one of my grandest compadres and song-writing collaborators, David Wilkie.  While cleaning Dad’s shop in Hurley, Wisconsin, I had discovered a dozen or so bird’s-eye boards of various lengths and widths and thicknesses that he had obviously earmarked for special projects.  In the same breath (again, timing to the precisely crossed T), I found in a drawer a black and white photograph of my Mom holding a guitar and captioned “Tex, 10/3/1939.”  And, in the same drawer, a 1940’s photo of Dad and Mom (on the left) drinking with friends and listening to ”Don Pablo and His N.B.C. Orchestra at the Palm Beach Café in Detroit.” 

I take seriously my cues from the Musical Universe.  I learned early—thanks in part to cowboy and Indian coloring books of my ‘50s childhood—the critical significance of connecting the Cowpoke Cosmos dots.  Thus, Dad’s bird’s-eye stash—his enthusiasm for anything made artistically from hardwood—connected with a straight-edged line to Mom’s guitar picture and her life-long love of music, of singing (though she did not continue to play), which then evoked  the 1930s or ‘40s arch-top Gibson likely being picked, off camera, in Don Pablo’s orchestra performing that night at the Detroit club, which reflected my late-career discovery of common ground between the poem and the song lyric, the stanza and the verse, which in turn summoned fond recollections of David Wilkie’s and his wife Denise Withnell’s sojourns from Alberta across the Medicine Line into Great Falls for drinks and laughs and music with Liz and me (much akin to the spirit of the Palm Beach Café snapshot), most every visit including a tuning of my Ibanez, likely not extracted from its case since its last tuning by Dave and Denise, which then connected, ultimately and intimately full circle, to my vision of a guitar, dubbed Leonard, accompanied by a matching mandolin, Delia, both inlaid in abalone and/or mother-of-pearl (a la the sea, the navy) on the fret board or on the head—all (neck, sides, back, binding) save for the spruce top, made from wood cut and milled off Dad’s Twenty.  Yes, as a tribute to my enduring love for my parents.  Moreover, as a way to hold them in my arms for my remaining days.  To celebrate their memories, their life’s music and songs imbued, engrained, into these instruments by not just any luthier, but by the very son of musician extraordinaire, David Wilkie, who has graciously offered to teach me to bring the music of Leonard and Delia, of Dad and Mom, out of Wyatt’s bird’s-eye masterpieces and into the living room of our log home.  Not immortality, granted, but perhaps as close as we, in this dimension, can creatively come to it.

[click here to see photos of the guitar and mandolin in progress: pics 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |]