Editor's note: Steve Jensen is the communications director for Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman, and brother of Enfield and Suffield Patch editor Tim Jensen. Their dad, Wayne Jensen, passed away Dec. 17, 2010, at age 76. This column originally ran on Enfield Patch on March 9, 2011, and is being re-published today on what would have been their dad's 79th birthday.
The dozen or so whippy pine saplings that I helped Dad plant as a kid were no taller than I was the weekend we put them in a long row along the curb of the side yard.
In typical frugal fashion, Dad had dug them up at a friend’s property and hauled them home in the back of the station wagon…the Ford Country Squire woody if I remember right.
Those first few years were rough on the skinny pines, having to endure the constant collateral grabbing and trampling of never-ending pickup baseball and football and Frisbee and whatever else we could think to do in the big sloping yard. Getting run into by the occasional Snurfer or Flexible Flyer in winter didn’t help much, either.
The row took pretty well, though, and I don’t think we lost more than one or two before it developed into a solid line of man-sized trees. By the time I left for college, they were as tall as the driveway basketball hoop.
“Trees are looking good, Dad - can’t believe how big they got,” I would invariably say each time I returned home.
When the row developed into a mature evergreen stand, Dad started trimming the bottom branches off the trunks. I objected, arguing that the lower limbs should be left as a buffer between the yard and road.
“Maybe,” he said with that tone that let you know he wasn’t quite finished. “But I want to be able to walk under them.”
I still didn’t get it, and started yapping again about how he should leave the branches alone. That was the opening Dad needed to deliver the line he notoriously deployed in that kind of situation.
“Hey - that’s why they make chocolate and vanilla.”
There it is. Chocolate or vanilla. You want to leave the branches, I want to cut them off. No offense, but you do it your way, I’ll do it mine. That was the essence of my Dad’s approach to life.
As one of my brothers said at the hospital soon after he had passed: “Dad really was about live and let live.”
My Dad had the understated but sure approach of a man with broad, competent experience – the approach of a gentleman with very little ego and definitely no enemies.
He was known for his dry, teasing sense of humor and for keeping everyone on their toes regarding pronunciation or spelling of words, or the validity of this alleged fact or that new theory.
Dad was a skilled lifetime golfer who loved exploring new courses. For decades on end he could shoot 90 with his eyes closed and on many, many days scored much better. He also loved to have a laugh and a beer with his golfing buddies, who after his retirement honored him by holding the annual Wayne Jensen Open.
I remember watching him play third base for the church softball team, and will never forget the time he had the patience to step over the bag and hand me a dollar out of his uniform pocket when I bugged him for candy money during the game.
Dad was a guy with a firm disinterest in fashion who still kept his hair neat and his shoes polished because he believed that is simply what a man does. He was a guy who took pride in knowing the rules and following them, and who day after day for 36 years drove pretty much the speed limit down I-91 to Hartford to earn a living that began in the prehistoric era of what is now called information technology.
And in the days when the kids were coming faster than the paychecks, he was the guy working a second job bagging groceries down at the Grand Union, without complaint. Unlike so many of us today, with my Dad it was never, ever all about him.
This was a guy who despite having barely picked up a hockey stick in his life helped launch his sons and the town of Enfield into a proud tradition of hockey – a tradition begun the night he and the other Dads shoveled falling snow off a natural-ice rink in West Suffield and sent us boys out to play the first organized youth game in town history.
As hockey became a way of life in our family, Dad came home from work on many nights and got to relax by jumping back in the car to bring us to rinks all over the state, including our “home” arena an hour away at Avon Old Farms in the days before the Twin Rinks were built. I can’t imagine he and Mom much miss the countless times they drove us on our morning paper routes so we could make pre-dawn ice time in the dead of winter.
But the efforts did bear fruit. What my Dad did in those years was nothing less than plant the seeds that helped define my life in both powerful and ordinary ways – like when I lace up my middle-aged skates with the excitement of a kid playing pond hockey, or when I’m home, tending to my own trees.
It’s probably no coincidence that even though my house is in the middle of a hemlock forest, I still felt compelled to plant a mini-tree farm of spruce and white pine. It’s amazing how much the seedlings have grown in just seven years, and I’m way behind on the transplanting.
Dad and Mom sold the family house and moved across town a few years ago, but if you go by the old place you’ll see that the pines my Dad and I planted are as high as the roof and still thriving - so much that the street-side has to be pruned to keep from being a hazard.
My Dad’s passing won’t mean a thing to those trees. Won’t matter to them that he was the one who nurtured them as saplings, and who finally got his reward by walking on the carpet of needles that fell from branches over his head. They’ll just keep growing, regardless.
Dad wouldn’t be offended by their indifference. Live and let live. In the 40-odd years since we planted them, I’m sure he’d gotten all he wanted from those trees. Maybe I should have asked him if it was chocolate, or vanilla, or both.
Either way, his work is done.
Rest easy Dad, way above the trees, knowing the work you did down here is keeping those pines, and all of us, reaching up to you in the sky.