My father
My father’s birthday is coming up soon, and I’m feeling a bit melancholy. It’s a cliché, you know, thinking that “I should have asked him more about…” but we’re not storytellers in my family. There are very few incidents in my parents’ lives that I could relate with any degree of confidence (and none in my grandparents’), because we just don’t talk that much about it.
Why didn’t I ask him more about his time in the Navy? Why didn’t I ask him more about his life in California? Did his father die, or were his parents divorced? What happened to his half-brother? Why did he get married at 19, and why did he get divorced at 21?
Does it matter that I don’t know? Only in moments when I want to tell of the kind of man my father was. I know only the barest outline of his life — fragmented, ill-formed, suspect (is that a memory, or a memory of a memory, or a memory of wishful thinking?). However, I think that I don’t really need to know the details of his history to tell you his story.
He was a large man who always tried to avoid intimidating people. He learned early on that size matters. He’d stopped hanging around with “the troublemakers” as a teen because even if he hadn’t done anything, “they’d always remember ‘that big guy was there.’” As he got older, he was considered a “big ol’ teddy bear” by women (most often young and good-looking) who always wanted to hug him. He thought that was a reasonable benefit for putting up with not being able to buy clothing in his size.
He was a good mechanic and would have made a good engineer, if it wasn’t for that school stuff. He had a way with mechanisms, and could almost always make a mechanical object “go,” even if it was held together with baling wire and duct tape. His motto: “It doesn’t have to be pretty, it just has to run.”
Puppies loved him.
He liked to read science fiction, and left it lying around so I could read it, too. Then he’d complain that I was “reading the words off the page” when I’d devour a book before he’d finished it. It became a game with us — could I finish the book before he got back to it?
He had a nice baritone voice and occasionally burst into song, often parodies of songs from the ’50s.
He retired from “the most boring job in the world” — a short-haul truck driver. But he liked it because he was home every night, his boss was 700 miles away, he could control his own schedule as long as his work got done, and being on the road gave him a chance to think about his race cars and how to make them better.
Perhaps I know more about my father than I thought. But really, what more do we need to know?
Just this: He was never stingy with the words “I’m proud of you” or “I love you.”
I love you, too, Daddy.
