My father, Myles N. Murray (1923 – 1995), left something of the best he had in this world. Among other things, he invented the Capacitor-with-at-Least-One-Electrode-in-a-Sealed-Container, patent number 3124727, which has served the automotive and aeronautic industries in this world since 1959, when he filed for the patent at the age of 36.
He excelled at inventing things. At the time of his death he owned more patents than I can keep track of, including patent number 4366015: the Rubber-Driving-Band-Artillery-Shell-Employing-the-Same-and-Method-of-Making-the-Band-and-Assembling-the Same-in-the-Shell patent; and, a few years before he died, patent number 4961393: the Anti-projectile-Protection-Fence-and-Method-for-Marine-Surface-Vessels patent.
He couldn’t help it. Brilliance and creativity were captive to his human imagination and come hell or high-water they had to assert themselves. He was not eccentric. Don’t picture a bug-eyed scientist in a white coat with excitable hair working obsessively in his basement. Though, I concede that the company he founded did begin in our family basement: The Industrial Electronic Rubber Company (IER), in 1958; it was sold and in 2006 became IER Fujikuora).
This Father’s Day I am remembering him, as I remember him every Father’s Day and countless days in between. I am his Patent Number 2: his second of four daughters (with a single son to punctuate the brood late-in-life). I continue to ask myself —even now in my old age—How could I not have appreciated all this? I see beautiful rocks on the shore near where I live and reproach myself for not caring more about his extravagant collection of amethysts and geodes (and other geological specimens whose names I’ll never know). He was ever collecting. He collected clocks. He collected Native-American pottery. He collected music boxes. One day, years ago, I was in a second-hand shop and saw a small wooden music box with little-CD-sized perforated disks: the exact model my father had purchased for me when I was a young girl, including the disk of “La Traviata.” I would have bought it on the spot, but the proprietor told me what it was worth; I walked away without it. (I have no idea what became of the one my father gave me.)
I am tempted to regret my casual dismissal of my father’s irrepressible need to create, explore, elevate, and give to others. (I did appreciate, however, when he pressed a few twenty-dollar bills into my hand.) But he would not want me to. Near the end of his life, his multiple patents were not on his mind. He was unconcerned that his offspring knew little of such things. His brilliance had carried its demons and we, as his family, had to confront that world too. Still, I know for a fact that it was his love for his children that ultimately enabled him to rebuke his demons and claw his way to wholeness. As I sat with him within days of his death, he was resolved, at peace, and satisfied. He talked about his childhood on the farm, his own father (who had died in his early 50s) and the hymns he wanted us to sing at his memorial service. He said, ‘I love you’ and, in those last days, there weren’t enough I love yous to say. I do believe that, in some quiet moments near his death he saw glimpses of heaven and relished the time he would have to create an ongoing, ever-expanding, ever-unfolding, immutable and unceasing, Patent Number Infinity.