Father’s Day

It seems to me that bad fathers, from King Lear to Angela’s Ashes, get more coverage in literature than good ones. From a lifetime of reading, I finally pulled up Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird as an example of a great literary dad. Perhaps the villains outnumber the nice guys in fiction because they drive a plot more easily than steady men. Or perhaps it is true, as the Bible warns us, that the sins of the fathers are visited on the children even unto the third and fourth generation. The impact of bad fathers may resonate in so many directions that they linger long in the collective memory of families.

As a writer, then, I may be destined for the remainder bin. My grandfathers and my father were stable men who got me off to an easy start in life. Their solid stories are probably not fodder for a best-seller, but that’s fine by me. Their loving presence in my early years sustains me even now.

In a curious way, however, I began writing because of my father, so that I could hear his voice in my head again after he died. Daddy could spot the absurd in any situation and get everybody laughing about it. He could also cut through pretense and home in on the genuine. And so I think I write to hear him tell a story again. Maybe I even hope – though he’s been gone nearly twenty years – that he’ll whisper, yes, George, you’re getting there, you’ve just about got it right this time.

But I’ve had trouble writing about Daddy straight on. Like all originals, he’s slippery on paper, defying easy images. He was a tallish man, even as I’m a tallish woman, and yet I think he had to stretch to reach six feet. Perhaps it was his insistence on good posture for both himself and me that made him seem taller than he was. When I was growing up, he would encourage me to practice walking with a book balanced on my head. “Tall girls can’t slump,” he’d say.

Although everyone tells me I’m the spitting image of Mother, I always thought I looked more like him. His hair, when he had some, was blonde, and in the set of his blue eyes and the narrowness of his mouth, I see my own. And if I have a memory for story or detail, it is a pale reflection of his.

Despite his flair for storytelling, my mother’s talkative family considered him a quiet man. And yet men who were young when my father died, tell me even now that they quote Dexter “all the time.” When I press them for examples, they shrug, and say “Oh, you know, things about life.” And so I have a glimpse of my father as a philosopher in the tobacco fields influencing the men who worked alongside him.

He was a man who more often sought the sidelines than the spotlight, but then I remember his boisterous laugh. A whooping affair that could be heard a block away, it punctuated all his stories, and it was wonderful, I realize now, the kind of laugh that got everyone else laughing too. But it embarrassed me when I was a kid. You never wanted to see a funny movie with Daddy – not if you didn’t want everybody in the theater to turn their heads and stare at you.

With the exception of the few years he spent at Georgetown College and in the Army Air Corps, Daddy farmed all his life. He respected the land, and was an environmentalist before the word came into vogue, leaving his place better than he found it. He must have served on the Owen County Soil Conservation Board for forty years. Yet I never thought he enjoyed the business of farming. He didn’t have the passion for it that my mother had.

I’m not sure what livelihood Daddy would have preferred over farming. If there were a job that would have paid him for reading (remember Li’l Abner who napped all day testing mattresses?) he might have liked that. He would come in from the fields every night, settle in his easy chair, and read a book. That is my most enduring memory of him. And so I grew up assuming that reading was routine, like eating.

Daddy was a considerate man, too, who never wanted to put anybody out so I know he would have been mortified at the commotion his death caused. His tractor overturned on a steep hill below the barn on a rainy January day, and it took hours for his body to be recovered. Somewhere, I’m sure his spirit is still apologizing to his friends and neighbors for the trouble he caused them.

More than considerate, he was also tender-hearted. Many stories come to my mind, but one that haunts me is the time his BushHog ran over a newborn calf hidden in the undergrowth. Daddy took it so hard, we nearly had to bury him that morning. The men who were working with him repeated that story to me one after another at his funeral, shaking their heads remembering his anguish.

As for me, he never refused to do anything I asked him to do. Forty-three years ago this week, Ernie and I were married in the small Methodist Church near our farm. It was a simple wedding open to everyone, but I’d been off to college by then and was starting to have highfaluting notions. I wanted a fine bakery cake brought in from Frankfort for the reception. And so Daddy set off in his pick-up truck to carry home a cake wide enough and tall enough to feed two or three hundred folks. How he managed to get it there intact over 40 miles of the crookedest roads in Kentucky, I’ll never know. But he did it without a complaint – even though he personally thought people should simply go to the courthouse and not “worry everybody to death” when they wanted to get married.

Daddy wasn’t perfect of course. He could lose his temper – never at people – but at things when they broke. He was too often quiet when he should have spoken, and sometimes outspoken in his opinion when he should have remained silent. And yet, he was as fine a father as I could have ordered up.

So, no, Daddy’s life story probably won’t get me on the New York Times bestseller list. But surely – if a father’s sins can reverberate for generations – surely, surely a father’s goodness can also echo through time.