“And that’s when I discovered that
my father hadn’t been dying after all. He was just changing, transforming
himself into something new and different to carry his life forward
in.
All this time, my father was
becoming a fish.
I saw him dart this way and that, a
silvery, brilliant, shining life, and disappear into the darkness of the deep
water where the big fish go, and I haven’t seen him since-though others
have. Already I’ve heard stories, of lives saved and wishes granted, of
children carried for miles on his back, of anglers mischievously dumped from
their vessels and emptied into various oceans and streams from Beaufort to
Hyannis by the biggest fish they’ve ever seen, and they tell their stories to
anybody who will listen.
But no one believes them. No one believes a word."
Daniel Wallace, Big Fish
This time last year, dad passed
away. With characteristic hyperbole, I like to say that his soul took its
leave through the bedroom window that mom had left open (like any good wife of
a dying Irishman). And with additional hyperbole, on that day, to quote
Daniel Wallace, “my father became a myth.”
Writing an obituary for dad was not
easy. It was impossible to sum up in a handful of paragraphs
seventy-eight years of a life well-lived. So, with help from mom, Vicki
and even dad (don’t ask), I pieced together a modest, presentable obituary. But anyone who actually knew Ken Roark probably took one look
at that obit in the Gadsden Times and knew there were about 647 additional
pages of his story missing. So, on the first anniversary of his death,
for the sake of sharing a bit more about Dad, I’d like to add to his obituary. Not an additional 646 pages, but probably
another four pages.
“Kenneth Victor Roark, passed away
at his home on June 8, 2016. He was seventy-eight years old. A
long-time resident of Rainbow City, Mr. Roark was honored when he was named the
first king of the Alabama Chocolate Festival in 2006. No other king has
been named since.” This is all true. Ours is the royal house of
Roark. He is the one and only Alabama Chocolate Festival King.
Which makes mom a queen, Vicki and me princesses, and Eric and Tony
princes. With no sons, I believe the crown and scepter will one day go to
his grandson Alex.
“Born in 1938 in Cincinnati, Ohio,
Mr. Roark served in the United States Navy on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Lake
Champlain from 1955 to 1959.” Indeed, he was born in Cincinnati, which is
where both of his daughters were born. And yes, he served on the U.S.S.
Lake Champlain, which sailed many places, most notably, the Mediterranean
Sea. While in the Navy, dad was in two police actions: one in
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the other in Beirut, Lebanon. And while he didn’t
often talk about his time in the Navy, certain stories about dad were
common knowledge in our household. I certainly grew up knowing the name
Buford Greer, the man who kept a young and underweight Ken Roark from being
blown off the deck of the ship during flight take offs and landings. I
also knew about dad’s jail time in Lisbon, Portugal for throwing a man
through a plate-glass window while defending a woman’s honor. And I knewabout that one time his ship caught on fire. It’s hard to think about dad being
that young and tender, experiencing so much before he was even twenty.
“It was after his military service
that he began working for Proctor & Gamble in downtown Cincinnati, where he
met coworker Joan Smith, who would become his wife in 1962. In 1971, he
moved his wife and young daughters, Vicki and Carol, to Gadsden, Alabama to
work as terminal manager/owner operator with D.O.X. Trucking Company. He
served in various management and driving positions related to transportation and
distribution, including working for the Goodyear Wingfoot division for ten
years.” Yes, my sister and I have P&G to thank for our lives...it is
a long-running joke in our family. And yes,
we did move to a rental house on Noccalula Mountain in Gadsden (our backyard
was on the banks of Black Creek), and then further out to up-and-coming Rainbow
City when he purchased the old Hamilton Place. And much of the last part
of that paragraph was a fancy way of saying that dad was, simply put,
a trucker who also acted as a manager and owner/operator at times during his
career.
Now, it was during his tenure at
Goodyear that the myth of Ken Roark was further developed, like the time he was
driving his eighteen wheeler through downtown Demopolis, AL during the
Christmas season and, with holiday ornaments and trappings hanging too low from
the traffic lights, tore down ornaments, lights and all with his semi,
resulting in some jail time (probably more for what he might have said to the officer of the law who reported the accident). And the
time his truck was hijacked…dad, luckily, not being in it. The short
version of that particular story is that dad’s truck was stolen
while he slept in a hotel room. When the truck was found a few
days later, it had been stripped of its load and of all dad’s possessions.
When dad testified at the trial and was asked if he could pick out the
defendant in the courtroom, dad pointed at the man who stole his
truck and said, “That’s him.” “How do you know this is the man who took
your truck?” asked the defense attorney. “Because he’s wearing my boots,”
responded dad. Dad never got those boots back, saying, “He
must need ‘em more than I do.”
The stories continued to be told
about dad’s adventures when he began long haul, coast-to-coast trucking
for Tyson. He’d haul not just chicken, but Otis Spunkmeyer cookies, steak
and other things that sounded like delicacies to me. One especially
blizzardy haul through Colorado found him stranded just outside of Aspen/Snow
Mass with a number of other travelers in a rest area on I-70. The roads
were closed and the storm showed no signs of letting up. Folks were
hungry and there were no stores or restaurants near. So dad broke
the seal on his trailer, and pulled boxes of frozen chicken out from the back. Starting up his truck’s engine, he cooked that
chicken on his manifold that night and everyone ate. As a trucker, breaking the shipping seal on
your trailer is illegal, punishable by termination. Dad didn’t lose
his job.
And then there was that one
time dad was on the lam, having had a disagreement with the
California delivery warehouse that made him sit with his truck and wait until
they would accept his delivery of celery…a wait that lasted so long, the celery
went bad and they refused to accept his subpar produce. Dad had
some words with them that probably included something about their efficiency
and where they could stick it. When told to relinquish his truck and take
the Greyhound home, he responded with, “I came out in this truck, by God, I’m
returning in it.” At the time, he was supposed to meet up with me
somewhere in the Four Corners region of the Southwest on his return trip, as I
was on a two-week geography/archaeology camping excursion with JSU, but he
couldn’t risk the stop. Instead of telling me that dad was a wanted man, mom just told me he had a change of plans and was coming back to Alabama.
It was days after I returned from my trip that I found out what really
happened.
“He was a generous soul, exhibiting
his civic-mindedness by being active in numerous organizations: Rainbow City
Lions Club, Cedar Bend Masonic Lodge, local VFW Post 2760, Shriners
International, and Scottish Rite. For many years, he assisted with the
Rainbow City Public Library’s Summer Reading Program. And until illness
prevented further service, Mr. Roark volunteered as a van driver and
coordinator for the Veterans Administration.” Yes, dad was a member of
all of those civic organizations, and gave back to his community any chance he
could. Whether he delivered dozens of pizzas to children for their summer
reading program party, drove eighteen wheelers of supplies to communities in
need of disaster relief, or raised money by flipping pancakes and selling
brooms and mops, he could be counted on to help. And to say he was
generous doesn’t even come close to describing his soul. I don’t know how
many times he gave away or traded one of our family cars to someone who needed
it, or came up with odd jobs around the house (ones that were not necessarily
necessary) that “needed” to be done so he could hire friends who may have been
cash strapped. And I still on occasion have people who rode in dad’s van
to the VA hospital in Birmingham tell me how he not only drove them to their
different appointments, but that he personally pushed their wheel chair through
the hospital wings to get them where they needed to go, and often bought them
lunch and sat with them when the wait for treatment stretched too long.
This is where I leave his obituary
behind completely, because there was no room to talk about the times dad saved
people’s lives. The young woman who attempted suicide, only saved by my
dad and a priest who witnessed her jump into icy waters from a bridge and
dove in after her. The child at the YMCA who was choking on a piece of
candy, heimliched by dad into coughing the offending treat out of a blocked
airway…there were others. So many others.
And there was no room in his
obituary to tell the end of his story, an end that began the day before
Thanksgiving of 2015, when he became terribly ill. While Eric
and I were in Kansas visiting family, my mom tried to nurse him back to health
at home, because that’s what they had always done. When that failed, Vicki
took him to the doctor, and then on to Gadsden Regional. And having an
understanding that when dad was hospitalized, it was never for a short
period of time, Eric started the thirteen-hour drive home so that we could be
there to help circle the wagons. The next day, dad was
transported to UAB for a blocked bile duct and a mass on his pancreas.
There, dad and I were roommates for five days. We talked about
life. We talked about death. We waited for tests. We waited
for results. All of the nurses, interns, residents, orderlies and
surgeons liked dad. Of course they did. He was a funny and caring person who liked to
connect with everyone he met, even in the most difficult of circumstances. I’ll
never forget the day an orderly came with a gurney the day before surgery to
take dad to have an ultrasound on his kidneys. Once on
the gurney, Dad asked the orderly if he wouldn’t mind pulling the sheet up over
Dad’s eyes because of the brightness of the light. Dad then joked that maybe he
shouldn't pull the sheet up because it would look like the tech was pushing
around a dead body. The orderly laughed, pulled the sheet over dad's eyes
and told him that it would even more cool if, while wheeling dad down
the hallway, all of a sudden dad sat up like he was miraculously
alive. They rode off together, conspiring, leaving me to wonder where we would
go if dad was kicked out of UAB for bad behavior…
The day after dad’s surgery to
repair his blocked bile duct and the revelation that the mass on his pancreas
was most likely cancer, we were told he could leave. I was in total “handle
it” mode, completing the tasks I needed to do in order to make sure we had everything
before we left the hospital: both sets
of our possessions, medications from the pharmacy located in a totally separate
building (three buildings away, accessible via hobbit hallways that may or may
not have contained giant man-eating spiders), and instructions from the nurse as
to how to give said medications (one of which was an injection to be administered
twice a day by shooting it into the stomach meat). It was four o’clock, Birmingham rush-hour time
when I buckled dad into the passenger seat, and prayed silently that my Waze would
work us around the never ending downtown construction. Dad, looking remarkably energized despite the
day’s exertions and super interested in my iPhone doubling as our GPS, chuckled
and said, “We got this...you can do it.”
We exited the parking deck into a pouring rain and followed the back
alleys and rail yards upon which Waze sent us to avoid traffic. We arrived home safe and sound approximately one
hour later, just in time for me to beg his forgiveness as I gave him his first
injection (unfortunately for him, it was my first injection, too...to give one,
at least). Luckily, mom took over from that point forward...and she nursed him
at home for the next seven months, with some help from Vicki, Tony, Eric, me
and our hospice nurses.
So, I only want to tell one more
story about dad, and it’s not because there aren’t any more to share. There are quite a few. It’s just that most of dad’s stories beyond
this point are too personal, too private.
We cried with him. And we laughed
with him. Dad was courageous. And he was home with mom by his side when he
departed.
Even though dad passed on Wednesday,
June 8th, our final adventure together took place on Thursday, June
16, 2016. I received a call from Emily at Morgan Funeral Chapel while I
was at work, letting me know that dad was ready to go home. As I was signing
paperwork at the funeral home, the gentleman asked if I needed help
getting Dad to the car. My response was, “No, thank you.
I’ve got him.” I seat-belted his platinum-trimmed, navy urn into the
passenger seat and headed home. But along the way, I stopped for French
fries at the Arby’s on 77 because I was hungry. And because Dad would’ve totally loved
the story of me stopping to get French fries with his urn riding shotgun.
