The Last Word On Nothing

My father, Jim Fields, died unexpectedly in November at age 81, of a stroke. Last week I wrote a eulogy for his memorial service on Saturday. It was hard. I’m a writer, and goldarn it I wanted it to be the best eulogy ever written. (I’m confident that I did not achieve that, but it’s certainly the best eulogy I’ve ever written.) Here‘s a lightly edited version, if you’d like to learn a little about my father.

My dad loved being outside. Hiking was one of his favorite things and it’s actually how my parents met. It was the beginning of the summer of 1961, and it was going to be my mom’s second summer at the YMCA camp in Estes Park, Colorado. She was standing in the Boulder bus station talking to some of the other college kids about hiking—all the hiking she’d done the summer before, all the hiking she was going to do this summer. And there was this guy standing nearby, and listening, and getting closer and closer…

That was my dad. They hiked a lot that summer and then the next summer, and now here we are.

The last time he and I hiked in Rocky Mountain National Park together was in the summer of 2019. He and I walked up Flattop, one of the mountains that they climbed several times in those summers, and kept on going up the next mountain over, Hallett. The picture above is from the top of Hallett.

When we got to the top, he said, and I quote: “Ha-haaa!! Oh, man. Oh boy oh boy oh boy. This is where we get to eat our lunch.” I know that because I took a video. In the video, you can hear me breathing hard from the climb. He was 77 at the time and still in better shape than me. Obviously. My dad was always in better shape than me, until the day he died.

Once in the 1990s I came home with a group of 15 friends from college. We were on our way to Baltimore to help renovate houses with Habitat for Humanity, and my parents put us up for a night. My dad offered to take anyone who wanted out on his run in the morning, on a trail in a ravine nearby.

They thought, ok, easy run with an old man, why not. They were college kids and he was in his 50s. An hour or so later they got back. He looked pretty much normal. They were all bedraggled and gasping and talking about him leaping over boulders. That story still comes up at reunions.

At age 69 he took up scuba diving. He eventually found his way to the wonderful Olney dive club. [cheers from assembled dive club members] There’s a lot of technical information to learn for diving. You have to learn the ideal gas laws and understand how long your air lasts. But once you’re underwater, you enter an alien world. His favorite thing to do underwater was to look at the animals. He would always tell people that the great thing about diving was that the wildlife, for the most part, aren’t afraid of you. Birds fly away, the frogs and the turtles jump into the water, but most of the sea creatures just hang out and do their thing. He loved watching them.

By the end of our last dive trip, just before the pandemic in January 2020, he’d been on more than 200 dives.

My dad loved to help people.

After all that hiking my parents decided to get married, and then they volunteered two years of their lives in the Peace Corps, teaching English in a school in a remote village in Nepal. And walking a lot. That’s how you got around in Nepal those days. There’s harrowing tales of leeches, and of times when they walked, like, 30 miles in the hot sun with a gallon of water. Something like that.

In 2016 I got to go with him to visit the village where they lived and taught. You can get there by road now! You don’t have to walk a day from the nearest airfield. In the village, we’d walk along the paths and old men would stop him and tell him they’d been in his English class. For some of the men, that even helped launch them into international careers. When I was growing up, one of them would show up sometimes at home. One of them is here today, actually. [Chitra waves at everyone] Now I feel bad about calling them “old men.”

The thing everyone says about the Peace Corps is that you learn more than you teach. It was the beginning of a long career of traveling, to Asia, and also to Europe, Africa, and Australia. He loved learning about new places and seeing how other people do things.

After the Peace Corps, my parents came back to the U.S. and he got a Ph.D. in sociology. He was curious about people. He was respectful of other people’s ways of thinking and perceptive about imagining other people’s points of view – something I often found useful when I talked to him about problems I was having. And he always left room for the possibility that other people had a completely different view of a situation.

One way to find out what people are thinking is with social surveys. That was his area of expertise. While we were living in England, where I was born, he did research on how people feel about noise. He kept up with that research over the years, working as a consultant on noise studies. Once in about 2000 I went to a conference with him in Nice.

He was working on building a catalogue of all of the social surveys that had been done on noise annoyance. At different times, both Bruce and I helped out with organizing it. There was a grad student with a poster that he wanted to track down, to get some details to help fill out the catalogue. We got to her poster and she read his nametag and did a double take—Dr. Fields! She was impressed. I guess if you were in that very narrow field, you saw his name on a lot of scientific publications.

He also designed surveys in his work at the Government Accountability Office. He once even designed a survey for the Washington Revels, a performing arts group that I’m part of. You’ve been hearing some friends from Revels sing today.

He was very enthusiastic about problem solving.

Early in the pandemic my dad was at my apartment and he noticed the pile of tea on a corner of my kitchen counter. It’s a very small kitchen. So he came up with a plan to build some tea and spice shelves. When we measured we learned that the corner was not 90 degrees. Not even close. But he made them so that they fit perfectly in that weird angle.

When I was a kid he built me a loft bed. The bed is gone—he took over my bedroom and made it into his office. But the shelves that he built to go under the bed are now in the basement, holding jigsaw puzzles and my mom’s decades of journals. The office he created in my old bedroom is beautiful. I work there sometimes now. It’s filled with shelves that he made and the shelves are full of treasures from his travels—carvings from Nepal, spinning tops from Japan, embroidery by me. From the desk you have a beautiful view of the backyard, where he could watch the birds and his two backyard archenemies, the squirrels and the deer. Enemies who he loved to watch.

I asked Bruce about our dad and he said: “His helpfulness and nonstop energy showed up in a lot of ways. It didn’t matter whether I was visiting him or he was visiting me, I never seemed to find myself washing any dishes when he was in the same house. He was always up for reading to and walking with (and camping with) James when Sara and I were exhausted. And I know he did those same things with us when he was actually a parent—and I don’t remember him seeming exhausted.”

I mentioned the pandemic. Before the pandemic I was busy, and so were my parents. Even though I live five miles away, I could go months without seeing them. But once the lockdown started, we decided that we were in a bubble and I went over there every Sunday.

I didn’t have a car, so on Friday or so, my dad would drive over to my place with the bike on the top of the car, park the car behind my building, and bike back home. That’s not a long enough ride for Jim Fields! It’s only five miles. So he’d add on a few extra loops to get up to 20 miles or so. On Sunday, I’d drive the car to their house, have lunch, maybe play Scrabble with my mom. And on Monday he’d reverse the process to get the car back home.

Not every week, but a lot of weeks, on those Sunday afternoons, we’d go on a walk along the Northwest Branch of the Anacostia River, which runs near here. That’s the ravine where he went running with those kids in college. My parents used to take a ton of walks there before and I’d been many times, too. When you’re walking that much in the same place you get to see the seasons change. You see the woods turning green in spring, the red-shouldered hawks on their nest, the mountain laurel blooming. The frogs. The little tadpoles squirming around, the toads vibrating the water with their croaking. It was a difficult time for the world but a really special time for me, and I treasure all the time I got to spend with my parents.

It means a lot to all of us that my dad was able to be an organ donor. After he died, they were able to give his liver to someone else. I love that he’s still helping someone.

I’m thinking now about maybe moving myself and it makes me sad that I’ll have to figure out how to arrange my house without him. With no custom-built furniture.

I miss my dad a lot. He’s gone, and that’s unacceptable.

Photo: Helen Fields, obviously