Remembering Arthur Joseph Muir, for Father's Day
I celebrate his life
Arthur Joseph Muir was born in 1933. He was my dad. Before he was my dad, he was a kid growing up in Meriden, Connecticut. His family was not wealthy. He had an older sister. I don't know that I ever met her. His mother drank quite heavily. His father died at the end of a noose when he was five. It's not fair that my five-year-old dad had to help his mom deal with this, logistically. His father died in the basement. This event cast a shadow over his entire life. It would be forgivable if nobody who knew him understood this because he didn't talk about it much.
Arthur Joseph Muir was a decent student but not a great one. He didn't like fighting. He grew up in an era where physical fighting was more common among kids— fisticuffs. The lethality of those fights was significantly less than the school shootings of our day. To not get into fights, he started to work out. He got” ripped” in our modern parlance. He didn't want to be picked on. So he tried to get himself in a physical shape that would make that seem like a bad idea.
This was a successful strategy.
Given his family’s limited finances in what became a single-parent household, he had to work starting pretty early. His first job was on the milk delivery route. 5 AM, on a milk truck, delivering milk. He was nine years old. He was paid $0.50 daily and all the breakfast he could eat. Subsequent jobs included picking tobacco, driving a Mack truck for other deliveries, and cleaning toilets with muriatic acid. It was not a glamorous upbringing.
He became a state champion diver. He was as handsome as he was physically fit.
He eventually decided to attend the General Motors Institute for college on a scholarship. This exists today as Kettering University. He became an engineer. He chose it because he was pretty confident that he would never be a good engineer, but one of his friends had applied there. If he could succeed at something at which he had absolutely no aptitude, he could succeed at anything. And he did. He graduated. His first job was as a ball-bearing salesman.
He got married to someone who wasn't my mother. He had two daughters. Alison Muir, and Karen Muir. I don't even know the name of his first wife.
He lived in New Jersey. He was dreadfully insecure. Not that he let it show. My dad had a vasectomy after the girls.
Eventually, he went to work in management consulting and met my mother at a wine tasting.
Vita West, born Vita Roberta Bivona, was exciting. She was everything that his wife at the time was not. So either he was separated, or he wasn't, and I don't know the answer.
Either Vita was separated from her first husband, the grandson of HG Wells, or she wasn't. That doesn't seem to matter, either. They fell in love.
They wanted to have children.
They couldn't because he had that vasectomy. Those couldn't be reversed, the doctors told them. It turns out that the doctors were not correct. The vasectomy was reversed, and my sister and I were born.
I'll have more to say about my dad later because it's a good story, but he was born on May 8, 1933. So today is his birthday.
At his funeral, which was just a party where everyone shared stories about Art, my sister Alison shared her stories, also. Unfortunately, she would die two weeks later on the floor of her bathroom, gasping for breath with a massive amount of opiate in her body as well as benzodiazepines, olanzapine, and a number of other compounds.
What she said at the service, however, was beautiful.
“Everyone else always talked about their mom. For me, it was my dad. He was always there for me. At every event, he would be there. Every time I made something in class, it would be for my dad. He was at every school play. He was at every parent-teacher conference. I never had to worry if my dad would be there for me. He was always there. I always had my father. He always loved me. Other people had a mother for that, but I had the best dad.”
My father was officially racist in that he would make jokes that were “off-color.” This is a term we use to minimize racist language. He made “jokes” about Black People—but never about actual black humans. Everyone would pounce on him for statements like this—especially my maternal grandmother, who had no patience for casual racism. None of these were directed at individuals; it was things like racist mnemonics for remembering the color coding on resistors. Remember, he was an engineer. It seemed reflexive on his part. I’m proud we never gave this kind of statement a pass.
With actual people who are black, or anything else, he was endlessly gracious. We had friends staying in our home for a year or more when I grew up. It was just average. Yeah, Uncle Jay will be staying with us. How long? Well, as long as he needs. We went on vacation, and friends of the family were invited. Nobody had to worry if they would be taken care of when my dad was involved. He would do it. As one friend of Mom’s once called him, he was the “Caretaker General.”
My mother put up with a lot. He drank a lot. Every night. In the basement. He was on the road about five days a week. It was hard. He worked hard. He wanted to provide for his family. But he wasn't very good at talking about how he felt.
He was official, similar to his racism, homophobic, except when it came to actual people who are gay. Everyone was welcome. Everyone was loved. Family dinners included family, extended family, and friends, some of whom were black and gay and needed to be taken in. My mom had a lot to do with that, too.
My dad was never good at being an asshole to anyone but himself and his family. He was pretty good at being an asshole for the heads of major companies. This was performative. It was in his role as a salesman for management consulting, and that was his job. To tell them the truth. Senior executives found the truth so liberating that they immediately hired his company.
He had a hard time accepting the truth about his drinking. He had a stroke several days after I took the USMLE step one. He never drank again.
The nursing home said what he did in post-stroke rehab was an inspiration to everyone who had to recover from their strokes.
His dedication to getting well was an inspiration in other ways too. He went to AA regularly in the last eight years of his life. He inspired other people to get sober. He would do crazy stuff like try to go and clean the snow off the driveway in the middle of a horrible ice storm, fall, and get stuck for a couple of hours.
This seemed like a great way to die. But my father was a risk taker, and one of the risks he wanted to take was that he liked to pick up sticks. He liked to plow the driveway. He wanted to make sure other people didn't have to do work. So he liked to do the work. And one of the things that went along with that was that he might fall. And he accepted that risk.
As a theoretically bigoted man born in 1933, he never treated women poorly. On the contrary, he was a great father to his daughters, a great father to his son, and a shitty husband until he had a stroke. But after he had the stroke and stopped drinking, he tried his best.
He was grateful. He was proud of his wife. Vita did remarkable work, and he never did anything other than shine the spotlight on her greatness. He knew she was a superstar, and he supported her.
One of my favorite stories told at his funeral was the story of the purchase of the home in which I grew up.
My mom went and saw it while he was on the road working. It was in Litchfield, Connecticut. It was a big house. It was a mansion— for a kid who grew up picking tobacco. She went and made an offer that day. Vita did not discuss it with him. She just did it. She called him that night to tell Art they had—already—bought a house.
“I can't wait to see it.” This was Art Muir’s response.
My dad spent the last eight years of his life sober and grateful. He had some severe trauma, but love saved him in the end.
And he knew it. My dad’s last words were, “I have no regrets.”
—Owen Scott Muir, M.D.
he sounds like a pretty good man, tbh. we're all works in progress. <3