A Memory (so he won't ever be lost.....)
My father died when I was still just a kid. 10 years old. I am now 61. It amazes me that he has been gone for over 50 years.
He was an incredible Dad. Now, that I am older and I see life with a grown up's eyes, I know that he was imperfect. Yet, that just makes me love him even more. He tried, sometimes against high odds.
My favorite days with him were Thursdays. His day off and chore day. I would wait for him to get up. This was sometimes a long wait as he often slept until 10 a.m. I would hear his steps on the stairs and know that after he shaved, brushed his teeth, gave himself his insulin shot, and had breakfast....it would be time to do chores. He NEVER went without me.
He let me watch him shave and sometimes would put a dab of shaving cream on my nose. He liked his privacy when giving himself his insulin shot, so I would sit on a kitchen chair with my back to him. He always gave himself a shot in his thigh in our kitchen, where his insulin was stored. After that, he would eat a bowl of cold cereal in the Summer or oatmeal in the colder months. He especially loved something called corn meal mush.This came in a long log and he would slice a thick portion of it off and fry it in butter. I hated the smell of it, but would occasionally take a few bites of it to please him. It squeaked against my teeth as I chewed. I hated that. But my love for him ran so deep that I ate corn meal mush just because HE liked it and more than anything in the world, I wanted to be like him.
Then he would say my favorite words: "Are you ready to do some chores, kiddo?"
I was.
Usually, we went to the gas station first. He would fill the car up with gas while I stood next to him, inhaling the gas smell....a smell that I loved. Once, when a man was in the next place over putting gas in his car and had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, Dad made me sit in the car. Later, he explained that it was very dangerous to have fire anywhere near gasoline. I asked him why that guy was so stupid.
He said: "Maybe he doesn't have a little girl to love and protect. When we are young, we are sometimes foolish. When a man becomes a Dad, he becomes a protector."
That made sense to me. Because my Dad was the best protector in the world. I felt completely safe when I was with him. Nothing could hurt me.
After he gassed up the car, we would go inside to pay for the gas and I would sidle over to a little white case where candy bars were placed strategically at a child's eye level. The case had a glass front and I would look longingly at the candy bars until Dad nodded. Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn't. I would NEVER have asked for candy. In our family, you just never asked for things. If he nodded yes, I would pick out my favorite. I cannot remember the name of the candy now, except that it was some sort of white nougat. I would place it on the counter and Dad would say, "9 gallons and my little girl has candy."
If a man named Bill was running the cash register, he would say, "Candy is free to sweet little gals." If it was someone else, Dad would pay for it. A dime.
Back in the car, I would sit and carefully, s l o w l y.....unwrap the candy bar. Candy bars were a special treat. In my family, we didn't just have them laying around. I loved that first bite. Then, we would usually head to the hardware store. There was always something needed for our home, a bottle of air conditioner cleaner, screws, a new hammer, something. I was never much interested in the store, but I loved holding my Dad's hand and walking up the aisles. Once, I was fingering a rabbit's foot key chain and he told me that it was a cruel thing.
"Using an animal's foot for something decorative is cruel."
I told him that a girl in the neighborhood had one, said it was lucky.
"What is lucky about hurting a rabbit for no other reason than to put its foot on a silly chain?"
I thought about it and agreed. Instead, he bought me a set of colored pencils. I was thrilled. Dad seldom bought things for us. Presents were reserved for birthdays or Christmas.
After the hardware store, we would usually go to a store that was filled with baskets of small polished rocks, small hand tools, and polishing oils. I loved the smell of this place and it was downtown. I really loved to go downtown. We would park on the street and Dad would fish in his pockets for change and let me feed the parking meter. I felt important. I loved the rock store. I loved sliding my hands through the baskets of polished onyx, amethysts, and tiger eyes. Dad would give his cutting tools to the man behind the counter and he would take them in the back to sharpen them up. Sometimes Dad would buy a small pebble, he liked all kinds: agates, aquamarines, calcite, the beautiful blue iolites, the dark obsidians, the glittery sunstones, blood red garnets, green peridots, turquoise, and a stone called chicken blood stone that looked exactly like an ugly gray stone with blood red dots. I loved the pyrite the most because it sparkled like gold. Dad told me stories of men who mined for gold in the mountains and brought buckets of these stones down, hiding them in their hack sacks, sure that they were about to be millionaires.
"Pyrite is also called 'fool's gold'," he said. "Because it is basically worthless, but it is pretty, isn't it?"
I told him that I thought it was just as pretty as gold and he said that when I grew up, I'd be a very cheap date. I had no idea what that meant.
He sometimes bought a stone and taught me to hunt for the gemstones with cracks in them, because they would be sold for half or even a third of their price. He liked them the best. Said that a stone is made prettier by its flaws.
My Dad was pretty wise.
After our trip to the stone place, we got to go to the bookstore. I ADORED the bookstore even more than the library. Just the smell of the place made me happy. But, to get to the bookstore, we had to go past someone who scared me.
A man sitting on a rug on the pavement. He had no legs and a fan of newly sharpened pencils would be sitting in front of him. A small silver can was next to them. He was the pencil man and he frightened me. I have no idea why this was so as he was a sweet man. My Dad would hand me a dime and tell me to go put it in the man's can and chose a pencil. I would nervously argue that we had PLENTY of pencils at home, that we didn't NEED any more. Dad would gently bend over and make me look at him.
"In our house, we give to those in need," he would say. "This man has no other way to make a living and we must help him. Now, go give him this money and bring me back a pencil."
It was about as close as my Dad ever got to stern. I would snatch up the dime, run to the man and throw it in his can and grab a pencil on the end. The pencil man always graciously thanked me and I would say in my thin, scared voice, "You're welcome" and run back to Dad. Once that was over, it was on to the bookstore.
The bookstore was a wonderland. All bookstores are. I would immediately go to the children's department and immerse myself in everything. My Dad would go on his own to browse, sometimes not coming back for an hour or more. I think we were both in our own heavens. He never bought me a book, but would write down the titles of the ones I loved and when my Mother took us to the library on Saturday, I would look for them there or get on a waiting list. Except for one time. I was deep into the book The Wind in the Willows when he came to retrieve me one day and it nearly killed me to leave this book. I remember longing so hard to have this book, to take it home with me, but knowing that I must not ask. In our family, as I may have mentioned, we didn't ask for things. I had tears in my eyes, but put the book back on the shelf. It never once occurred to me to ask my Dad why he got to buy a book once a month, but I had to get mine at the library. It would never have crossed my mind to question an adult or say that it wasn't fair, etc. I see children today and am sometimes astonished at the way that they speak to their parents. I was raised in an extremely loving home, but we did not call our parents out....or ANY older relative. Ever. And if we did, our parents would have disciplined us harshly. My Mother and her sister did not get along well at all and once when I was a teenager, I remarked to my Mother that Aunt J was kind of sour. My Mother slapped me across my face. That kind of talk was considered incredibly disrespectful.
But, back to the bookstore. I walked out of the store without The Wind in the Willows. I went to the library and discovered that I could get on a waiting list for it. I was number 100 something. It would be a long wait but that was just life.
My birthday was the following week. There was a special gift from my Dad. You know what it was. Yes. It was The Wind in the Willows. I was astonished. I had asked for roller skates that fit like shoes and didn't need a key. I had also asked for this book. But, in our home, books were rarely given as gifts. We could read them from the library, so a waste of money. And roller skates were too dear, too expensive. I think I got a coloring book and some new crayons, a 64 pack, a real treat.
And that book. I still have it. I bawled over it. I could read, but not prolifically. I was just going into 1st grade. Dad read it to me over the next week, me cuddled up in his lap, he patiently holding his finger under the words that he read so quickly, so that I could see them too.
My Dad and I stopped doing chores together when I started going to school all day and we both suffered from the loss of the other. We were close. We often sang in the car together on chore day. We sang all of my Dad's favorite songs.
Waiting for a Train
Peach Pickin' Time Down in Georgia
Train Whistle Blues
Yodeling Ranger
Hobo's Meditation
Frankie and Johnny
A Little Dog Cried
A Fool Such as I
Hello Love
Ninety Miles an Hour
Beggar to a King
Nobody's Child
Sometimes we told each other stories. We had a series of stories called "Our Adventures." I would start by saying that we were on a lonesome old boxcar train when two robbers jumped up and said, "Stick 'em up!" Then Dad would take over. He'd say that an old dog emerged from the back of the boxcar and barked and scared the robbers and they both fell off the train into a ditch while we waved at them out of the window. Then I'd take over and there would be a dragon in the sky coming right at us. Of course, Dad would say that it was a magic dragon who was lonely and we would befriend it and it would take us to West Virginia.
We had the best times.
I loved my Dad's touch and I would lean hungrily into his hand when he pulled me against his stomach for a hug or leaned down to kiss the top of my head and call me his kiddo, his magic bean, his sweet little girl. His touch was always gentle, kind. My Mother's touch was more rough. She was more of a yanker. She was yanking me into a dress for church on Sunday, yanking a comb through my hair, roughly pulling me through a grocery store for a gallon of milk. I never craved my Mother's touch. I craved my Dad's, though. Still do.
Now, I am older and understand better. I realize the incredible stress my Mother performed under. She worked all day long as a secretary and then came home and had to get dinner on the table for Dad coming home for his supper break at work. She had to clean clothes for our whole family. All the mundane, never ending chores landed in her lap. My Dad had the more seasonal, easier chores. He kept up the car and painted the house every year. He gardened. My Mother had no time to sit outside and show me the constellations. She was too busy cleaning and cooking and paying bills. Too busy making sure that her girls had clothes that fit.
I understand now.
That doesn't make me miss him less. It doesn't change the fact that when my Dad died suddenly when I was just ten years old that I felt as if someone had taken out my heart and stomped on it and then put it back, but not correctly. It was askew and all ripped up and the pain reverberated for years. I was ten years old, then 12, then 13 and life went on, but there was this hollow place inside of me. My Mother remarried and I tried to find purchase in a house in a small town in the middle of nowhere.
I missed his voice, his laugh, his tenderness. Even his stern talks. I missed the smell of his pipe, of his rolled cigarettes, of the oil he put in his prematurely gray hair. My step father was an acceptable man. My Mother asked me if I could just try and call him "Dad."
No. I could not. Because there had only been one Dad and he was gone now. I still hear his words sometimes. The way he told me that we must always be kind to those less fortunate than ourselves. That skin color should NEVER matter to anyone. That an old Indian (we call them Native Americans now) once said that we all bleed red. I looked that up in high school. Sitting Bull said that. So, did Martin Luther King.
I think he would be shocked at the world today and the grotesque speech of our president.
He was imperfect. He spent money too frivolously. He was a broody man, his tendency towards depression (which he called "those old blues") runs through my family. He held grudges.
But, he was my imperfect hero and I write all this down so that someone somewhere will read it and he will not be forgotten.
He was a man of great value. I aspire to that. Every day.
He was an incredible Dad. Now, that I am older and I see life with a grown up's eyes, I know that he was imperfect. Yet, that just makes me love him even more. He tried, sometimes against high odds.
My favorite days with him were Thursdays. His day off and chore day. I would wait for him to get up. This was sometimes a long wait as he often slept until 10 a.m. I would hear his steps on the stairs and know that after he shaved, brushed his teeth, gave himself his insulin shot, and had breakfast....it would be time to do chores. He NEVER went without me.
He let me watch him shave and sometimes would put a dab of shaving cream on my nose. He liked his privacy when giving himself his insulin shot, so I would sit on a kitchen chair with my back to him. He always gave himself a shot in his thigh in our kitchen, where his insulin was stored. After that, he would eat a bowl of cold cereal in the Summer or oatmeal in the colder months. He especially loved something called corn meal mush.This came in a long log and he would slice a thick portion of it off and fry it in butter. I hated the smell of it, but would occasionally take a few bites of it to please him. It squeaked against my teeth as I chewed. I hated that. But my love for him ran so deep that I ate corn meal mush just because HE liked it and more than anything in the world, I wanted to be like him.
Then he would say my favorite words: "Are you ready to do some chores, kiddo?"
I was.
Usually, we went to the gas station first. He would fill the car up with gas while I stood next to him, inhaling the gas smell....a smell that I loved. Once, when a man was in the next place over putting gas in his car and had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, Dad made me sit in the car. Later, he explained that it was very dangerous to have fire anywhere near gasoline. I asked him why that guy was so stupid.
He said: "Maybe he doesn't have a little girl to love and protect. When we are young, we are sometimes foolish. When a man becomes a Dad, he becomes a protector."
That made sense to me. Because my Dad was the best protector in the world. I felt completely safe when I was with him. Nothing could hurt me.
After he gassed up the car, we would go inside to pay for the gas and I would sidle over to a little white case where candy bars were placed strategically at a child's eye level. The case had a glass front and I would look longingly at the candy bars until Dad nodded. Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn't. I would NEVER have asked for candy. In our family, you just never asked for things. If he nodded yes, I would pick out my favorite. I cannot remember the name of the candy now, except that it was some sort of white nougat. I would place it on the counter and Dad would say, "9 gallons and my little girl has candy."
If a man named Bill was running the cash register, he would say, "Candy is free to sweet little gals." If it was someone else, Dad would pay for it. A dime.
Back in the car, I would sit and carefully, s l o w l y.....unwrap the candy bar. Candy bars were a special treat. In my family, we didn't just have them laying around. I loved that first bite. Then, we would usually head to the hardware store. There was always something needed for our home, a bottle of air conditioner cleaner, screws, a new hammer, something. I was never much interested in the store, but I loved holding my Dad's hand and walking up the aisles. Once, I was fingering a rabbit's foot key chain and he told me that it was a cruel thing.
"Using an animal's foot for something decorative is cruel."
I told him that a girl in the neighborhood had one, said it was lucky.
"What is lucky about hurting a rabbit for no other reason than to put its foot on a silly chain?"
I thought about it and agreed. Instead, he bought me a set of colored pencils. I was thrilled. Dad seldom bought things for us. Presents were reserved for birthdays or Christmas.
After the hardware store, we would usually go to a store that was filled with baskets of small polished rocks, small hand tools, and polishing oils. I loved the smell of this place and it was downtown. I really loved to go downtown. We would park on the street and Dad would fish in his pockets for change and let me feed the parking meter. I felt important. I loved the rock store. I loved sliding my hands through the baskets of polished onyx, amethysts, and tiger eyes. Dad would give his cutting tools to the man behind the counter and he would take them in the back to sharpen them up. Sometimes Dad would buy a small pebble, he liked all kinds: agates, aquamarines, calcite, the beautiful blue iolites, the dark obsidians, the glittery sunstones, blood red garnets, green peridots, turquoise, and a stone called chicken blood stone that looked exactly like an ugly gray stone with blood red dots. I loved the pyrite the most because it sparkled like gold. Dad told me stories of men who mined for gold in the mountains and brought buckets of these stones down, hiding them in their hack sacks, sure that they were about to be millionaires.
"Pyrite is also called 'fool's gold'," he said. "Because it is basically worthless, but it is pretty, isn't it?"
I told him that I thought it was just as pretty as gold and he said that when I grew up, I'd be a very cheap date. I had no idea what that meant.
He sometimes bought a stone and taught me to hunt for the gemstones with cracks in them, because they would be sold for half or even a third of their price. He liked them the best. Said that a stone is made prettier by its flaws.
My Dad was pretty wise.
After our trip to the stone place, we got to go to the bookstore. I ADORED the bookstore even more than the library. Just the smell of the place made me happy. But, to get to the bookstore, we had to go past someone who scared me.
A man sitting on a rug on the pavement. He had no legs and a fan of newly sharpened pencils would be sitting in front of him. A small silver can was next to them. He was the pencil man and he frightened me. I have no idea why this was so as he was a sweet man. My Dad would hand me a dime and tell me to go put it in the man's can and chose a pencil. I would nervously argue that we had PLENTY of pencils at home, that we didn't NEED any more. Dad would gently bend over and make me look at him.
"In our house, we give to those in need," he would say. "This man has no other way to make a living and we must help him. Now, go give him this money and bring me back a pencil."
It was about as close as my Dad ever got to stern. I would snatch up the dime, run to the man and throw it in his can and grab a pencil on the end. The pencil man always graciously thanked me and I would say in my thin, scared voice, "You're welcome" and run back to Dad. Once that was over, it was on to the bookstore.
The bookstore was a wonderland. All bookstores are. I would immediately go to the children's department and immerse myself in everything. My Dad would go on his own to browse, sometimes not coming back for an hour or more. I think we were both in our own heavens. He never bought me a book, but would write down the titles of the ones I loved and when my Mother took us to the library on Saturday, I would look for them there or get on a waiting list. Except for one time. I was deep into the book The Wind in the Willows when he came to retrieve me one day and it nearly killed me to leave this book. I remember longing so hard to have this book, to take it home with me, but knowing that I must not ask. In our family, as I may have mentioned, we didn't ask for things. I had tears in my eyes, but put the book back on the shelf. It never once occurred to me to ask my Dad why he got to buy a book once a month, but I had to get mine at the library. It would never have crossed my mind to question an adult or say that it wasn't fair, etc. I see children today and am sometimes astonished at the way that they speak to their parents. I was raised in an extremely loving home, but we did not call our parents out....or ANY older relative. Ever. And if we did, our parents would have disciplined us harshly. My Mother and her sister did not get along well at all and once when I was a teenager, I remarked to my Mother that Aunt J was kind of sour. My Mother slapped me across my face. That kind of talk was considered incredibly disrespectful.
But, back to the bookstore. I walked out of the store without The Wind in the Willows. I went to the library and discovered that I could get on a waiting list for it. I was number 100 something. It would be a long wait but that was just life.
My birthday was the following week. There was a special gift from my Dad. You know what it was. Yes. It was The Wind in the Willows. I was astonished. I had asked for roller skates that fit like shoes and didn't need a key. I had also asked for this book. But, in our home, books were rarely given as gifts. We could read them from the library, so a waste of money. And roller skates were too dear, too expensive. I think I got a coloring book and some new crayons, a 64 pack, a real treat.
And that book. I still have it. I bawled over it. I could read, but not prolifically. I was just going into 1st grade. Dad read it to me over the next week, me cuddled up in his lap, he patiently holding his finger under the words that he read so quickly, so that I could see them too.
My Dad and I stopped doing chores together when I started going to school all day and we both suffered from the loss of the other. We were close. We often sang in the car together on chore day. We sang all of my Dad's favorite songs.
Waiting for a Train
Peach Pickin' Time Down in Georgia
Train Whistle Blues
Yodeling Ranger
Hobo's Meditation
Frankie and Johnny
A Little Dog Cried
A Fool Such as I
Hello Love
Ninety Miles an Hour
Beggar to a King
Nobody's Child
Sometimes we told each other stories. We had a series of stories called "Our Adventures." I would start by saying that we were on a lonesome old boxcar train when two robbers jumped up and said, "Stick 'em up!" Then Dad would take over. He'd say that an old dog emerged from the back of the boxcar and barked and scared the robbers and they both fell off the train into a ditch while we waved at them out of the window. Then I'd take over and there would be a dragon in the sky coming right at us. Of course, Dad would say that it was a magic dragon who was lonely and we would befriend it and it would take us to West Virginia.
We had the best times.
I loved my Dad's touch and I would lean hungrily into his hand when he pulled me against his stomach for a hug or leaned down to kiss the top of my head and call me his kiddo, his magic bean, his sweet little girl. His touch was always gentle, kind. My Mother's touch was more rough. She was more of a yanker. She was yanking me into a dress for church on Sunday, yanking a comb through my hair, roughly pulling me through a grocery store for a gallon of milk. I never craved my Mother's touch. I craved my Dad's, though. Still do.
Now, I am older and understand better. I realize the incredible stress my Mother performed under. She worked all day long as a secretary and then came home and had to get dinner on the table for Dad coming home for his supper break at work. She had to clean clothes for our whole family. All the mundane, never ending chores landed in her lap. My Dad had the more seasonal, easier chores. He kept up the car and painted the house every year. He gardened. My Mother had no time to sit outside and show me the constellations. She was too busy cleaning and cooking and paying bills. Too busy making sure that her girls had clothes that fit.
I understand now.
That doesn't make me miss him less. It doesn't change the fact that when my Dad died suddenly when I was just ten years old that I felt as if someone had taken out my heart and stomped on it and then put it back, but not correctly. It was askew and all ripped up and the pain reverberated for years. I was ten years old, then 12, then 13 and life went on, but there was this hollow place inside of me. My Mother remarried and I tried to find purchase in a house in a small town in the middle of nowhere.
I missed his voice, his laugh, his tenderness. Even his stern talks. I missed the smell of his pipe, of his rolled cigarettes, of the oil he put in his prematurely gray hair. My step father was an acceptable man. My Mother asked me if I could just try and call him "Dad."
No. I could not. Because there had only been one Dad and he was gone now. I still hear his words sometimes. The way he told me that we must always be kind to those less fortunate than ourselves. That skin color should NEVER matter to anyone. That an old Indian (we call them Native Americans now) once said that we all bleed red. I looked that up in high school. Sitting Bull said that. So, did Martin Luther King.
I think he would be shocked at the world today and the grotesque speech of our president.
He was imperfect. He spent money too frivolously. He was a broody man, his tendency towards depression (which he called "those old blues") runs through my family. He held grudges.
But, he was my imperfect hero and I write all this down so that someone somewhere will read it and he will not be forgotten.
He was a man of great value. I aspire to that. Every day.
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