Thinking about my dad over the last week, it has occurred to me how impossible it is to neatly categorize his life, personality, or accomplishments. I think that unique complexity is part of what made him a man who so many people admired, and it’s one of the things that brought us closer together in the years following my mom’s death.

Some of my earliest memories of Dad involve sitting on our front steps looking up at the night sky. He explained the endlessness of the universe to me while pointing out the big dipper and teaching me how to locate the North Star. He shared my awe and incomprehension at the concept of infinity. There was something comforting, as a kid, in sharing that sense of amazement as we quietly gazed heavenward.

He taught me to carry that sense of wonder into my other experiences with the natural world. I’ll never forget the magic of catching tadpoles with him and early mornings fishing together, when I learned to appreciate the quiet and beauty of nature. Afternoons walking through the woods and splashing in the Moscow River.

But just as much as he taught me to love the natural world, he showed me the wonder of the man-made world, too: I remember my dapper dad leading me through international airports and hotel lobbies, visiting Shakespeare’s home and St. Peter’s in Rome; I remember being introduced to the food and thrilling urbanity of foreign places. No matter where we traveled, it was always clear to me that he loved learning how people around the world lived their lives and that he cared about what happened to them.

He was a boy of small-town America. And just as much, he was a cosmopolitan man of the world. He artfully balanced country and city, rusticity and elegance, for the rest of his life, and it has always been something I’ve admired about him.

During the last few years, he and I spoke regularly, even though we lived far apart. As his health declined, he wasn’t able to tend to his own garden, so I would take him on unsolicited tours of my own via FaceTime, hoping he’d share the excitement of the new blossom on my rose bush or the new shoots on a plant that had threatened to die on me. We would share stories of wildlife sightings, the weather, the magic of our yards as one season moved into the next. I think what we were saying to each other without ever saying it out loud was, “Can you believe how magical and beautiful and precious this world is?”

In spite of all Dad had experienced and learned over his long and illustrious career, I think I came to realize that he was as bewildered by the human experience as I am. As pained by human suffering, as saddened and confused by personal grief, as frightened by the unknown. And of course, as heartsick at the thought that anyone could mistreat an animal.

But he found solace in beauty and in his attempts to add a little softness to this hard world whenever he could: tending a garden, feeding the birds, rescuing a frightened dog from the pound, keeping childhood jokes alive with his grandchildren, treasuring keepsakes inherited from beloved relatives.

The world saw my dad as Steve Hurst the journalist. I just saw my dad, the man who taught me recognize the subtle beauty all around us and who encouraged me to find my own ways of bringing softness to this world.

I’ll close with a poem that captures–I think–the complexity of my dad’s life. You might call his a “dappled life.” He and my mom both had a habit of admiring the dappled light of a forest or tree-bordered meadow on a sunny day, when as if on cue, one or the other of them, would break out in a recitation of the first few lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty.”

It reads, in full:

Glory be to God for dappled things–

For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced — fold, fallow, and plough;

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change; Praise him.