With Love, from Grandpa Loren

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On the Vernal Equinox in 1905, thirty-two years after Jules Verne wrote Around the World in 80 Days, the 77-year-old French writer would die. He is revered even now as the Father of Science Fiction. On the Vernal Equinox in 1997, my own father Loren Dunton, known as the Father of Financial Planning, would die from a blood thinner expected to save him, but which caused a massive brain hemorrage that would kill him. Both men lived remarkable lives, and today I celebrate their memories.

When my father was 77, he sent my son a copy of Jules Verne’s Classic Science Fiction. “To Matt,” he inscribed, “with love from Grandpa Loren, San Francisco.” At the time, I wondered why my father would be sending our son, who was only nine, a 511-page book. At first the gift seemed thoughtless, but then, as I wrote an essay about it for my memoir In Search of Kinship, I grew to understand the reason. This story may already be familiar to some of you.

“Sixty-five years and a thousand miles separate my father from his grandson; only a few more years of gift-giving stretch before him. Time does not allow my father the luxury of sending only appropriate gifts. If in ten years Matt opens this book, ready to dive 20,000 leagues beneath the sea, it will be his grandfather’s words wishing him bon voyage.” 

As it turned out, our father only had two more years left. He departed this world on the Spring Equinox, when day and night are everywhere the same. We would scatter his ashes on the fairway of his favorite golf course in San Francisco, along the shores of the Pacific Ocean, and in the turquoise blue waters off the coast of Hawaii.

Loren Dunton's grandson Gabriel scattering his grandfather's ashes.

Today, on the anniversary of his death, I flip through the pages of one his books, Prime Time: How to Enjoy the Best Years of Your Life. Woven lovingly throughout are the threads of our family. Dad's language is conversational, as it is in the other nine business books he wrote. The energetic sound of his voice comes rushing back and I am transported to childhood. 

Dad also wrote a small book titled We Smiled First. More of a pamphlet, really, it’s a little booklet about our family’s 11-month trip around the world in 1964 and 1965. A remarkable adventure for a family of four, especially during the Cold War. Given the times in which we now live, the world of our travels seems relatively innocent. We literally traveled around the world like Jules Vernes’ characters Phileas Fogg and Passepartout, only we took nearly 365 days to do so.

I am grateful for the books our father wrote, though the novel he dreamed of someday writing never materialized. I wonder what kind of novel it would have been. Surely, not science fiction, though Jules Verne was one of his heroes and, no doubt, the inspiration for our own trip around the world.

Loren Dunton fishing a wild Montana river circa 1995.
More likely, Dad’s novel would have been set in the Canadian wilderness, where Dad was born, and there would be an untamed river in it, and a woman at least as intelligent and beautiful as our mother. There would have been trout darting through the fast waters, as wild as the river, and somewhere nearby a log cabin with a warm fire. Not a romance, but surely a love story.

Our mother and father were married for 25 years. And I remember enough to know that despite the challenges of any relationship, each of those years was laced with romance. As was his second marriage years later to Marta, a Hungarian woman who had escaped Budapest in 1956 when the city was surrounded by Soviet tanks and troops. She would lose her baby to starvation that year. I remember our father crying when he told me about going with her to Budapest to find the baby’s grave.

Yes, a love story. He would write a love story. Perhaps children would have been created on the shores of that imaginary river, and in the years to come, grandchildren would fish with homemade poles along its banks. Perhaps, years later, they would read an inscription in some long-forgotten book, like The Incredible Journey or Wind in the Willows. In their grandfather's handwriting, they would read, With love, from Grandpa Loren. 

The things we treasure often find their way into the pages of our books. Often they are stories from our lives - sometimes disguised, sometimes not. How different our world might be were it not for the novels of Jules Verne - Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, Around the World in 80 Days, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Mysterious Island, and more. 

How different might the lives of thousands be if it were not for our father's vision regarding the need for financial planning. How different my world and my sister's might be were it not for our parents' spirit of adventure. 

Recently, my daughter-in-law, Matt's wife Anna, sent me a photo of our granddaughter Carly reading my Wyoming memoir, In Search of Kinship. The memoir tells the story of Carly's grandfather Mark and me moving to Wyoming from Colorado when her dad was only three years old and his sister, her Aunt Sarah, only six weeks old. Carly's grandfather Mark had just passed away, and she was on her way to the Wyoming ranch with her parents and little sister. 

I cried, seeing the photo of Carly reading stories of her ancestors, reading the essay "Gifts" about her great-grandfather, reading of how her grandfather Mark and I built the log home where her father and Aunt Sarah grew up, reading about her dad's first calf, his first horse, about the wild turkeys and white tail deer. I am grateful to have kept these treasured memories safe between the pages of a book. 

***

Related reading: Keeping Your World Safe within the Pages of a Book: Learning from Kazuo Ishiguro. Keeping Your World Safe within the Pages of a Book: Learning from Kazuo Ishiguro

Related reading: blog post, "The Gifts My Father Has Given" https://pagelambert.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-gifts-my-father-has-given-looking.html  

Jules Verne, Father of Science Fiction, 1892
Loren Dunton, Father of Financial Planning, circa 1992 


 


An advisor for the Rocky Mountain Land Library and member of the International League of Conservation Writers, Page Lambert has been writing about the western landscape and leading nature retreats in the West for twenty years. Founding member of Women Writing the West, member of Wyoming Writers and Colorado Authors’ League, Lambert’s writing can be found inside monumental sculptures at the Denver Art Museum, online at Huffington Post, and inside the pages of dozens of anthologies. Page designs and teaches graduate writing courses for the University of Denver’s University College. Recent published works include “Not for Sale” (Langscape Magazine and “The Rural West,” included in Fulcrum’s new book, The Light Shines from the West. Forthcoming are 3 poems in DoveTails: Writing for Peace. Page writes All Things Literary/All Things Natural from her mountain home west of Denver.

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