We called him “Dirty Earl.” In the back room at York Cycle, where I worked when I was fresh out of college, my dad was our most colorful and our most frequent customer. His bicycle was to him what my guitar is to me. He rode it and rode it hard. Our job was to patch up the results. Once he’d picked the gravel out of his knee, he’d haul it in to replace a busted fork or true up a twisted wheel. We’d do the surgery, cross our fingers and send him out for his next encounter with the asphalt.

            Not every wreck can be fixed. On Wednesday, June 14, Earl Brooks went out like a cowboy, in the saddle. At age 75, training for his next race, he was charging along a familiar street. His face down on the tri-bars, I imagine he saw the blacktop blurring beneath him. He didn’t see the lawn truck parked against a curb that was usually clear. His head took the full force of the impact. The bike wasn’t even scratched.

            That was Earl for you, going full-speed ahead and not afraid to butt heads with any hard object that might fall in his path. Sometimes, that hard object was a boss, sometimes an enemy soldier. Sometimes, it was a loved one, or someone fool enough to cross a loved one. Sometimes, it was God Almighty.

            He had steel in his spine, like the stuff they cranked out of the mills in Birmingham, Alabama, where he spent his boyhood. It was forged by standing up to his alcoholic father. It was stiffened at age 12, when his dad expired from tuberculosis and he became the man of the family.

He never forgave his dad, and he never failed to worship his widowed mother.   Ever after, he would be long on grudges and longer on loyalty. He would stand by kinfolks when the rest had given up. For 16 years, he stuck by his failed marriage with my mom and his duty to his two boys. When he finally got marriage right, on the third try, he spent his last 19 years standing by his beloved Linda.

But his code of honor worked both ways. Once you crossed over to his bad side, it was tough to cross back. It took him two decades to reconcile with one of my half-sisters. With a bull-headed streak that runs in our family, neither one of them wanted to be the first to talk.

Above all, he was stubborn about working out his own beliefs. Raised in a Methodist household in the South, he came of age as a freethinker. Perhaps it was his early lesson that God did not always reward the virtuous. Perhaps he projected his own father upon the heavenly one. Whatever the reason, he rejected religion. He favored reason over revelation and believed science was the one sure path to human progress. He made fun of fundamentalism as fiercely as he’d attack a steep hill.

His sharpest weapon was his wit. His dad had detailed autos for a living, and Earl had a sure hand with a pen and ink. His collected cartoons, loosely titled, “The Gospel According to Brooks,” challenged the self-righteous to have a laugh at themselves. In one panel, Mary is talking to her insurance agent while the Mount of Calvary looms outside the window. He explains to her that the policy doesn’t cover acts of God.

In another, Jesus is dressing down the apostle Peter: “Peter, you are really a rock - solid stone from ear to ear, stubborn as a mule.” Sitting nearby is the evangelist Matthew. Like many who pretend to take scripture literally, he picks the words he wants to hear and leaves out the rest. He writes, “Peter is a rock.”

Debunking religion was just one of Earl’s wide-ranging interests. He worked as a commercial artist for twenty years, until he traded in his paintbrush for a briefcase. More loyal to his customers than to the insurance company he worked for, he pulled strings when the home office tried to weasel out of paying their claims. He composed photographs as finely as he painted portraits. He loved listening to classical music, and played me Bach and Beethoven before I ever heard The Beatles.

Another passion was astronomy. He kept his telescope with the 12-inch mirror in our landlord’s garage, and rolled it out for neighborhood star parties. When pointed straight at the zenith, I could peek though the eyepiece only by climbing a ladder twice as tall as I was. Later on, the county built an observatory to house his scope. It’s still there, inspiring kids to raise their eyes from the earthbound.

Earl shot for the stars, no matter what he was doing. York, Pennsylvania is famous for three products: air conditioners, Peppermint Patties and barbells. He started me pumping iron in Sixth Grade. That activity grew into weekly meets with neighborhood kids, and he ended up coaching one of those kids to a national championship. At 14, Donny Warner was the youngest champion ever.

My dad coached me in other endeavors, like winning the citywide Science Fair with a project about a total eclipse of the sun. But his greatest gift was teaching me to read, at the tender age of three. At the time, I did not consider it a gift. A few minutes with the flash cards, and I’d start to squirm. But once I got the hang of it, I fell into a lifelong love affair with language. While I was too young to know better, I even began to imitate his puns.

Just as Earl outgrew his hometown, books led me to worlds far away from York and to values far away from his own. He taught me to think for myself, and he lived to regret it. He was a Korean War vet and got personally offended when I went on peace marches. He almost disowned me when I fought to close down the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, fifteen miles from our door. He loved my music but had no use for my political songs. Once I found my own religion – being a born-again Pagan and a Unitarian – we spent hours debating God and godlessness.

How can two people be so different and yet so alike? That’s the mystery of family. I inherited my dad’s sense of humor, his artistic bent, his love of the outdoors, his unbending independence of thought and his restless hunger to know everything about everything. When I asked him if he was proud of anything I’d done, he had a hard time giving me an answer. Then he said he was proud that I thought for myself.

While I finished growing up, I kept a lot of distance between us – at any given time, about 1,500 miles. As I felt more secure in myself, I started to come back around.  Ironically, Dubya brought us a little closer together. Earl was alarmed enough by the rise of Robertsons and Falwells in the Republican Party that in 2004, for the first time ever, we both voted for the same presidential candidate.

My turning point came when I drove to Baton Rouge to cheer him on in the Senior Olympics. He had broken a collarbone a few weeks earlier, in another spill from his bike. But he came in fifth in the nation, and for the first time since my teens, I realized I was proud of my dad. I was proud of him at age 61, when he rode coast-to-coast in 30 days.

I joked that he would outlive the rest of us, if only he could keep from falling off his bike. But after years of broken bones and road pizzas, he suffered two concussions in six months. Following those injuries, he was never quite the same. He wrestled with depression, with a quicker temper and a shorter memory. Six months ago, he gave up his driver’s license. The last thing he would ever give up would be his bicycle.

I wish to hell he’d paid more attention to safety. But then, he always wished the same about me.