Yesterday my mom gave me something she had found while sorting through photographs and keepsakes. It was a plaque from my dad’s belongings, a Ford certification recognizing Dick Neal as an active member of the Certified Training Program and a Registered Technician. I remember only two places where my dad worked during the seven short years I had with him before he died in 1977, Mathison Ford and later Story Farm and Home.
When I was a child, I would not have understood what a plaque like this meant. I would not have known what training he completed, what he had to learn, whether he was proud when he received it, or where he might have hung it. I only knew that my dad went to work, because that is the kind of thing children know without yet understanding the person behind it.
Across the plaque are the words “Be it Known That.” They were intended to announce a professional accomplishment, but nearly fifty years later they seem to say something much larger to me. Be it known that Dick Neal was here, that he learned things, that he worked, that he had skills and responsibilities and an ordinary life that existed long before his death became one of the defining facts of mine.
There is something about losing a parent when you are very young that leaves you knowing someone intimately and hardly knowing them at all. I knew him as Dad, but I never had the opportunity to know him as an adult knows another adult. I never got to ask him what he liked about his work, what frustrated him, what he was good at, or whether becoming a Registered Technician mattered to him.
That is why objects like this have become so important to me. They do not answer all of those questions, but they give me another piece of evidence. They let me meet another version of the man whose life I experienced almost entirely through the eyes of a little girl.
I am not entirely sure why Mom decided the plaque should come to me. Maybe she has realized how much I treasure these pieces of family history, maybe she knows I will give them a place where they can be seen, or maybe, no one else simply wanted it. Whatever the reason, the moment Mom handed it to me, I knew exactly where it belonged.
It will hang above “Dead Dick,” the skeleton who has become our slightly unconventional representation of my dad. He sits in the chair my dad once sat in at my grandmother’s house, underneath the crocheted blanket she made for him and that he used so often we still simply call it “Dad’s blanket.” Now another piece of his life will join them.
A chair, a blanket, and an old Ford certification plaque are not particularly remarkable things on their own. None of them were created to become memorial objects. They became important because someone lived with them, used them, earned them, and left traces of himself behind.
Maybe that is part of what it means to be the Keeper of the Dead. It is not only keeping photographs of birthdays, weddings, funerals, and other moments someone thought were important enough to document. Sometimes it is keeping the ordinary evidence that reminds us a person had an entire life happening between those photographs.
So the plaque will go on the wall above Dad’s chair and Dad’s blanket, right over Dead Dick. It will probably make me smile every time I look at the rather serious professional recognition hanging above a skeleton with my father’s nickname. Somehow, that mixture of reverence and humor feels much more like remembering a person than creating a shrine ever could.
And above all of it will remain those words that were stamped into the plaque decades ago.
Be it known that Dick Neal was here. And his daughter is still getting to know him.
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