Novv. 3 Mayflower

This is the third day of FlashNano2022 where we write under 1000 words from a prompt. The prompt contained the words Mayflowers and Father. I wouldn't know mayflower from a zebra, so I chose the ship.

 

“I don’t believe it,” my father was watching BBC, “They’re going to burn the Mayflower. He sat in his wheelchair, something he had fought needing, but the Parkinson’s was winning over his body.

He’d always been high energy, both at work and at home. Football games with my brothers, horseback riding with me. And golf, golf, golf.

His first reaction to the news that his illness would slowly take away all his life was depression. After six months he declared “Depression is boring.”

I don’t know what would have done had he not seen that BBC program about a group building a replica of the Mayflower just to burn it to raise money for charity.

He went on a Mayflower hunt. Thirty million people claim to be descended from the original 102 passengers. He was only slightly disappointed when he didn’t find his family’s name on the list of passengers, but then started to investigate his ancestors in case the family name had changed over the centuries. It hadn’t nor did his mother’s family name appear.

He had my mother bake his favorite chocolate cake on July 22, the anniversary of the ship’s sailing. She humoured him and gave him a sip of champagne despite it being a bad idea because of his disease and meds. “More likely they had beer,” she said having been a history teacher herself. The research became their raison d’etre in place of the golf that had taken over their lives after retirement.

My father texted me regularly about the progress of the rebuilding of another Mayflower, this one to be returned to Plimouth Plantation, a living museum. We joined him and mother for a tour after it arrived. If didn’t matter that it was a rainy day. My mother pushed his wheelchair through the dirt paths. I held the umbrella over them. Mother had her own.

My father had made email friends with those working on the rebuilding project as well as a woman who worked at the Plantation. She joined us for lunch.

When my father was bedridden, my mother bought him a copy of Caleb Johnson’s book. It contained every extent document of the Pilgrims. He had trouble with its weight on his lap as he read it page by page.

When my father died, the family agreed to have a carving of the Mayflower on his stone. Mother told us his greatest passion wasn’t the Mayflower nor golf but his kids. “I think I taught them how to live, and I hope I taught them how to die,” she said after the funeral.