Takeaways from the Memorial Service for my Father

Obviously as I have gotten older, I have forgotten more and more of my childhood. Since my dad died, I have looked at pictures and tried to recall things, but seeing the video yesterday, I realized that I have forgotten so much more than I thought I had. 

Seeing Steve Zammit again was a real treat. Of all my dad's students that became friends, Steve was always my favorite. I have always related to Steve really well. He got me my first restaurant job at Delphines in Ann Arbor at the Sheraton Hotel. Talking to him was really cool after all these years. He has an amazing sense of humor, and is such a genuinely good person. We found out that we had a mutual friend in Ken Shannon which I think I may have known before but forgotten. I was able to introduce him to Kat, and they connected really well over mechanical engineering. Seeing Gary Talbot, Uncle Dean, Mrs Dubin, and Mrs Hiss again was really nice. I had a sad feeling that it was nice to see these people, but I may never see any of them again.

Having Steve start the presentation was a perfect way to begin. Steve and Gary were two of my dads closest friends, and Steve has been around longer, so it fit that he went first. When Steve started talking about the SAAB that my dad had and how he had one sitting out front, a flood of memories came to me. My dad loved that car, and I can vaguely remember him giving me rides to nursery school in that car. I remember loving that car, but my mom hated it. I am not sure if she hated it just because it was a stick shift or if there was some other reason. The next two cars we had were sticks as well, so I would have thought if that were the only reason, they would have gotten cars with automatic transmissions. 

There were so many things that Steve mentioned about my dad and their relationship that made me smile. The story about bringing in a six pack of beer and my dad with a beer in one hand and a stick of chalk in the other while teaching the last day of spring class really made me happy to think of. It reminded me of a spring physics class I took at WCC where we had beer while taking our final. Steve made the comment that my dad was never Bruce to him, it was always professor Karnopp, and that he called him that out of extreme respect. It made me think of something that my dad once said about respect being something you earn, and my dad really did earn the title of professor.

When Steve talked about Carol's wedding where he and his wife did a dual service of renewing their vows with my mom and dad, it made me realize how long Steve had been in my dads and my life. The wedding seems like such a recent memory, but it was over 15 years ago. Steve said that he went to U of M between 1980-85 which means I met him when I was 13 or 14. Watching Steve tear up at the loss of such a long time friend made me realize there was so much more to my father as a professor than I realized. My dads job was so much more than just a job, he really connected with his students, and they really loved him for everything he did for them. 

When Dean got up to speak it was a little surreal. He made the comment that it was a little unnerving to have a memorial for professor Karnopp when he is also referred to as professor Karnopp, but the same could be said about watching him speak. Dean and my father look very similar, sound very similar, and also have a lot of the same mannerisms. I never knew Dean. He visited once or twice when I was young, and I have seen him a few times as an adult, but always very briefly. My dad would tell stories about him as a kid, but there was always kind of a separation in the description where they just weren't as close as you would expect. There was however, never a negative word about his brother or any of his family for that matter. 

I think Dean's talk about my dad really explained their relationship very well. Time and Space worked against them throughout their lives. At four years apart, they really weren't in the same place at the same time either physically or emotionally. His comments made me think about my relationship with Carol and how we were three years apart. We had some time together in Elementary school, but after that, were never in the same place at the same time. The interesting thing about my dad and deans life was that even though they were never in the same place at the same time, they both had the same trajectory for their education and career. Deans life was a little more exciting than my dads, but I think having a special needs child played into that a bit. 

There was a little confusion between Gary and Carol about who was to talk next, but Carol took over and did a nice remembrance of her father and family life. Her relationship was so much different than mine. She worked so hard to please my dad, and I worked so hard to show my independence. We both wanted him to be proud of us, and I am sure that Carol succeeded much better than I did. I know my dad was proud of me for who I became, but I caused him a lot more stress getting there than Carol did. Carol did a great job speaking, and I know my father would have been very proud of her for that. She isn't the shy little girl that she used to be. 

There was some jostling back and forth with the video, but they decided Gary should speak first. I have known Gary for a long time, but he came into the picture after I was out of the house, so I didn't have the same kind of relationship with him that I did with Steve, but I heard about him all the time from my dad. When my dad got sick, Gary and Forrest communicated a lot more than I did, and I think they created a special bond in the process. It was interesting hearing Gary describe his childhood in Ann Arbor and how he got to the U of M after being a mechanic. I knew a lot of this about him from my dad, and I had known him when he was a student, but hearing more details was really nice. 

When Gary described his first meeting of my dad, I really started to tear up. He had gone back to school at WCC and transferred to U of M, and my dad came up him and and asked him what he was doing there. He hassled him a little bit in a way that I could so easily imagine, then gave him his card and told him to come and see him. Gary waited a couple of hours feeling self conscious and out of place, but finally made his way to my dads office. He said my dad talked him about his history and really got to know him over several hours. Then he told him to go to his classes, do the best he can, and when he is struggling, which he would struggle, come back and see him. He did what my dad said, and my dad helped him get through. He said my dad wanted to see him make the effort, but once he did, he went out of his way to help him succeed. That was my dad in a nutshell.

One of Gary's comments that really hit home with me was when he was talking about my dad referring to him as a non traditional student. Gary had always thought that he was referring to him that way because he was in a wheelchair, but when he asked him about it once, my dad just looked at him and said, that has nothing to do with it, you're non traditional just because you are old. Gary talked about how much my dad did to encourage other non traditional students. Steve was another non traditional student who had worked in a steel mill then went to EMU to get his grades up and then went to U of M. I think my dad really liked teaching people who had real stories to tell before coming to the University. I think he had a lot of respect for them and knew how much work it really is to make changes like that in a persons life. 

The video Carol put together was really cool. There were so many pictures of things that I didn't remember. I had completely forgotten about the photography club my dad had done at St. Pauls Elementary School, and there were so many pictures that I didn't even know existed. I lost so many of my pictures from film when I moved into my house and the basement flooded, and I didn't get a digital camera until 1998, so there are so many years that I just didn't have much of. I'm sure there are some in the box that grandma sent over with Forrest, but I haven't had a chance to go through them at all. Unfortunately it was just a bin full of packets of pictures. There were no labels, no dates, and nothing to identify them. It was funny that Carol mentioned the Doors as that was one of my dad's favorite bands which seemed so out of character compared to everything else he liked. It was really a beautiful video and a wonderful tribute to our father. 

I didn't know the next speakers who went up and told stories of interactions with my dad. I did really enjoy the one where my dad joked with a colleague about putting a sensor on the toilets in the bathroom to measure who would be able to fill the chair of the department. I had to glance at Forrest because he has definitely inherited a lot of his Grandpa's toilet humor. Kat kept squeezing my hand nudging me to go up and talk. I was about to when Steve called on someone else. My heart was beating in my chest because I was loosing my nerve at this point. I hadn't prepared anything, and I am not good at speaking off the cuff. I thought I could pull some things from memory from my letter that I posted on my blog right after his death, but that was going to be a stretch. The next speaker mentioned a story where my dad had been working on his dishwasher, and rather than go to the basement to find the breaker, decided to short the circuit with a screwdriver to kill the power. The really funny part of the story was when my dad described the chunk of metal missing from the tip of the screwdriver as a result of the arc and how he decided to return it to Sears and get a replacement. My dad did love Craftsman tools, and although he may have returned that particular screwdriver, there were a number of them in his set with the tell tale chunk missing with the rough carbon pattern. 

After hearing about the dishwasher, I knew I had to be next. I walked to the podium, and I cant remember whether I used the mic or not. I am not much of a public speaker, and the adrenaline coursing through my veins made the entire event seem like a dream where I am trying to recall the memories. I remember introducing myself and telling everyone that I was the more challenging kid. I explained that I had to come up after the last speaker because I had just been doing wiring around my house the week before, and my girlfriend had insisted that I not work with live wires. I had used pliers and the ground wire to short the circuit, but the effect was the same. Hearing the story about my dad reminded me of all the things like that I had learned from him. I described how we did things like that together. Then I mentioned my paper route and how he had taken it over after Steve got me the job at the Sheraton because it was cash money. I told the story of how one time we were talking after delivering papers and he told me he didn't know what I was going to do with my life, and that I hadn't taken the path he would have liked, but he knew whatever I put my mind to, I would do it well and be successful. I mentioned how I have always remembered those words and I used them with my own son when he graduated high school. 

I also mentioned in there somewhere how Carol had done things the way he would have wanted and how well she had done. I think at that point I thanked everyone for coming and returned to my seat. I know my eyes were starting to tear up, and I don't think I could have said much more without losing my composure. When I sat down, Kat squeezed my hand and told me how proud of me she was. I sat there thinking of all the things I would have liked to have said, but I guess I said what was most important.

I was a little disappointed that my mom didn't say anything. It would have been nice if she could have mentioned something about the man that she was married to for over 50 years. I tried to sit next to her during the service, but she got up and went to sit next to her handyman. I can't even imagine how someone could have such hatred for their own son that they would avoid sitting next to their own son in favor of someone they paid to be their friend. I have a lot of resentment toward this man who got all of my dads tool, cameras, furniture and a significant amount of money. Of course he is nice to her and agrees with everything she says, he has taken over my spot in the family. It is actually her loss. After the server the entire family except for my mom were sitting outside because she had to spend time with Mark. My dad loved his family more than anything and he would never have allowed this. 

After the service a woman came over to me and told me she used to work with my dad when I had my restaurant. She said her husband had been trying to start a bakery at around the same time, and my dad used to share emails from me about the restaurant. She mentioned my last email where I had said goodbye to my customers and tried to analyze the mistakes that were made. She said my dad was always so proud of me and talked about me all the time. That really made me feel good. Mrs Hiss stopped by to tell me how sorry she was that my dad had passed, and she mentioned how when I was young my dad had made a ribbon board for her daughter Meredith just like the one he made for me. 

After hanging out with Carol, Holden, and John for a little while, we helped Carol carry stuff to her car. We waved them off, then Kat and I along with Forrest and Sarah walked over to Knights restaurant and had a wonderful meal together. It was kind of a somber time together, but we shared stories and commented on how our family might come back together now that Carol and Holden live nearby. I am sure that rebuilding our family would be the one thing my dad would want more than anything.

Photography

For as long as I can remember, I have had a camera of some sort. My dad had learned photography from his uncle Wayne, and he had a darkroom in the basement and several styles of cameras. Ironically, my dad didn't take that many pictures of my sister, brother, and me, and the ones he did take were probably more because my mom told him too. He always preferred black and white photography and landscapes. I have always enjoyed landscapes, but I love taking pictures of people too. I love scrolling through memories and having the faces of people you know and love adds context to a location. 

I got my first real camera as a Christmas present when I was probably 6 or 7. It had been my moms camera when she was in college, and for the time, it was a pretty nice 35 mm, especially for a child of my age. It had fixed lens that you had to focus by estimating the distance. It didn't have a through the lens viewfinder, so if you weren't taking pictures of landscapes at infinity, it was a real crap shoot as to whether the image would be in focus or not. I loved taking pictures with this camera and sitting with my dad in the dark room loading the film into canisters for developing, then going back in to make the prints. 

As I got older, I inherited several cameras from my dad. The first one I got was a Yashica twin lens reflex, and I finally was able to focus through a similar lens. This improved the pictures I took of people significantly. My dad upgraded to a Mamiya camera at that time. He also gave me a tripod to go with my camera, so I was starting to have a pretty nice kit especially since I was still in elementary school. 

The next camera I receive from my Dad was his Minolta SRT 101. My dad preferred larger format cameras, but he always had a couple of 35 mm cameras too. The SRT 101 was the last manual focus camera he had in the Minolta line. He eventually moved up to a 7000 and even got a digital Minolta right before they went out of business. My Dad didn't just give me this camera though. We were on vacation in Canada visiting some friends of his who were from Australia but living in Canada for a couple of years. They were a really nice couple named Eva and Momo, and they had a daughter, Tara. Eva was making dinner for us one night, and me being a really picky eater was nervous about what she was making. My dad bribed me with the camera telling me if I ate whatever she made without complaint, I could have the camera. I remember it was baked chicken, and I really liked it, so it turned out to be a really good deal for me. 

I really liked the SRT 101, and I preferred it to the twin lens reflex for a couple of reasons. The first was that the light meter worked in the SRT where the one in my Yashica had always been broken. The main reason I liked it was because I could load up a roll of film that held 36 pictures which was so much more convenient than the 12 exposures that the Yashica had. The main drawbacks to using 35 mm was that the negatives were smaller, so the images aren't as crisp and loading the developing cartridges could be really tough. I used my SRT 101 for many years, and I learned a lot with this camera.

In the late 80's, I got my first new camera for Christmas. My Dad gave me a brand new in the box Minolta Maxxum camera. The Maxxum's were the first auto focus cameras in the world. It had a lighter more plastic body, but it took amazing pictures. I took a lot of pictures with that camera, but the cost of film was always a limitation, and if I did color, it cost money to process too.

In my first apartment, I setup a darkroom in a closet right off the kitchen. I was hired by the dart league I was on to take the team photos, and I developed them and printed them in my little darkroom. My dad had given me his old enlarger, so I had everything I needed. The room would get really hot with me inside, and this made the prints develop really quickly, so it was difficult to do the printing without over developing the prints, but I got pretty good at it. 

When I moved into my house, I never setup a darkroom, and a flood in my basement destroyed most of my equipment and prints that I had in storage containers that weren't waterproof. From that point on, I only shot in color, and it was mostly family events and snapshots. I kind of lost interest in the technical side of photography until the digital age. 

In 1998 I bought my first digital camera. It was a little Ricoh RDC-2 camera that took images at a resolution of 768 x 576. The images were pretty grainy and not very high quality, but you could take as many as you wanted as long as you had memory to hold them. I loved this little camera, and I took tons of pictures of the kids with it. My next camera was a Kodak that was 1.2 megapixel, and the images were significantly better. A 5x7 print was looking very close to what you could get in film. I upgraded to another Kodak that was over 2 megapixel, and now I could print 8x10's that looked really nice. 

My next big jump was the Olympus E10 camera. It was a 4.3 megapixel camera with F2 zoom lens attached to it. The lens wasn't interchangeable, but there were lens attachments available for it. The images it produced were fantastic, and I loved having a real camera body in my hands again. I started getting back into the technical side of photography trying to learn all I had forgotten about f-stops, iso, and speed. I took thousands of pictures with that camera and became involved in several online users groups. At one point me and another guy developed a website and created an even called E-10 day where users in the group would take pictures on a specific date all around the world and upload them to our site. It was a huge success and we ended up with thousands of pictures from that day. We tried to do it again a year later, but as technology advanced, people weren't as excited about the camera the following year and the project kind of fizzled away. 

My next big jump was a Canon  EOS D60 digital camera. This was Canon's second entry into the prosumer digital camera, and it had a 6 megapixel sensor and interchangeable lenses. This was a real digital camera, and I was hooked. I took it with me everywhere. I had bought several zoom lenses in different ranges and different speeds. I started learning more and more about photography and being able to experiment without worrying about buying film made it so nice. I think Forrest was probably one of the most photographed kids on the planet. I always had my camera with me at every event he was involved in. 

My dad eventually bought a digital camera, but he was never a convert the way I was. He loved his darkroom and the smell of hypo when he was developing. Even though we were using different formats, having a real camera again made it so we would have long conversations about techniques and the more technical aspects of the hobby. Between 2002 and 2005 I think I talked to my dad more than any other time in our relationship. He always had questions for me about his computers, and I always had questions for him about photography. We would share our images with each other, and he always had really good constructive comments on mine.  

In 2005 we bought the restaurant, and that pretty much brought all my hobbies to an end. I did use my camera to take pictures of the food for the menus and the website, but I had very little opportunity to get away from the place just to take pictures. I did upgrade my camera to a Canon 50D for use at the restaurant, and even though it was a significant upgrade, it didn't have the excitement of my previous cameras. 

A couple of weeks ago Sarah asked me if I could help her get into photography. She said she had been looking to get into a new hobby and thought photography would be a good one. She got several of my dad's prints right before he died, and she really loves them. Even though I have been out of the cafe for 6 years, I hadn't gotten back into photography. I bought a really nice rugged camera, and I have taken a lot of pictures of my adventures, but I hadn't pulled out an SLR in quite a while. I dug through all my old stuff and found the D60 and the 50D. I put together a couple of lenses to go with the D60 and gave them to Sarah. 

The camera is 15 years old now, so it is on its last leg, but she was able to use it while we went to Northville to visit a historic village and take some pictures. I had a wonderful time with my 50D in hand, and I got some decent shots. More than anything I had a great time hanging out with Sarah and Kat enjoying a hobby together. Photography is about sharing memories, and building memories with family that you record and share for a lifetime is what really makes me happy.