My Father

My father’s eyes were crystal blue except for the block of dark brown that took up a solid fourth of his right eye. My mother always said that was why she married him, and to this day I’m not sure if she was just kidding or if she was serious.

If asked to picture my father I immediately envision him in my driveway with his forearms resting high on the edge of the back of a red Ford F-150. His body is facing the truck but his head is turned and cocked a little to the side and he’s looking at me. So many times I wondered what he was thinking when he looked at me like this.

Unless the subject was one of politics or the economy he tended to be a man of few words, more at home tending to a garden or immersed in a book than with people. My mother told me that when he was born my grandmother had read an article that said when your baby cried it was better to leave them alone than to pick them up or console them, and I suppose this was her way of explaining to us why he never said I love you, or maybe it was to help explain why he would get so angry that sometimes we would come home to find a new hole punched straight through the kitchen wall. Nevertheless, the explanation was a logical means that could be used to understand either situation.

It’s interesting how a person can be recalled in drastically different ways by their children. I had two brothers, one a year older and the other six years younger. For my older brother, my father was incessant when it came to training him on pitching baseball. Evenings of my single-digit youth were filled with the sounds of his pitches slapping into my father’s worn-out catcher’s mitts, their practice only ceasing when it grew so dark that it was dangerous for him to catch any more. He always coached the teams, and their hard work paid off as my brother became notoriously known for no-hitters, curveballs and speeds that broke 90-plus miles per hour. Opponents simply dreaded playing us, home or away, and walking onto a baseball field with them was something special.

As for my younger brother, after our parents divorced he was the child who lived with my father the longest and who seemed to have the most in common with him. Throughout my twenties and thirties whenever I found myself complaining about dad, my younger brother always stuck up for him and said things that put me in my place as someone that didn’t know him at all and who might speak differently about him if I did.

For years before my father passed and for many years after, if asked about him my response would have been that he did the best he could as a father. If I had to guess I’d say that he was probably an old spirit trapped in an unfortunate existence where he had a really bad start. His parents divorced when he was young and early on he was exposed to physical abuse, alcoholism and the incestual habits of his father towards his sisters. The one outstanding highlight that his childhood centered around involved a woman named Doxine, whose sheer existence was narrowed down to 2 facts; she was a very large lady, and she got my father his first public library card.

My parents met in Columbia, South Carolina, where my mother was going to college and working as a waitress and my father was working construction, building skyscrapers. I remember her telling the story of when they first met. She looked across the room and there stood this young man with what she always described as “that aloof Rhodus look,” paired with the brightest pair of blue eyes she had ever seen. She fell for him instantly. She said they would talk for hours in the evenings about any and everything and that he was one of the most interesting people she had ever met. I can see them in my mind’s eye, young and energetic and in love, and as one who knows the feeling, it makes me happy to know they felt that way.

There was no stereotypical box that I could have fit my father into. He wasn’t a provider or the protector of the home or a man full of wisdom, teaching his children life lessons and helping them build strong foundations by which to raise their families. If I’ve ever tried to put my father into one of these boxes it has done nothing but make me feel as if I’ve missed out on something that I wish I’d had.

For years I told myself that it didn’t bother me that he never seemed to care and that he never reached out to me or my family, that I always had to be the one to reach out for any interaction whatsoever, because that was just my dad and that was the way he was. He was odd, he was a recluse, he didn’t like people, he had had a bad childhood. Then one year on my birthday I realized how late it was getting in the evening and I remembered that I needed to call him so he could wish me a happy birthday, and the thought of this caused me to break into sobs. I was sitting parked in the passenger seat of our family car as my husband watched me in pain and consoled me. He told me that if it really hurt me that bad, I didn’t have to call him. I had never thought of this, and I accepted it. Once I stopped picking up the phone and dialing, my father and I could go for months, even years, without speaking.

He passed a few years ago just months after he was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. I remember going back to work after my bereavement time had passed, co-workers coming up to me with the saddest looks on their faces. A few were inclined to tell me they had lost a father too and how terrible of a thing they knew that was to go through and how wonderful their fathers were and how close they had been to them. People mean well.

As the complexities of grief faded over the years I stopped wondering things like whether or not his spirit was comforted because it now knew that I loved him, or whether or not he was listening to me as I intentionally sent thoughts to the astral plane telling him that it was ok, that I knew he did the best that he could do and I was not angry. There was no way I could live in these thoughts. I had to rest on something solid, so I limited my thoughts of him to only what I remembered.  

I remember sitting at the dining room table as a little girl while he blasted “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” by U2. He swayed around the house to that song so many times, and it never got old.

I remember he and I packing lunches and going for long hikes at FENCE nature center. He believed in eating whole wheat bread with a short shelf-life and the kind of peanut butter where the oil had to be stirred back into it before you spread it, and it was delicious. We backpacked our lunches through miles of forest to this one single persimmon tree that sat high up on a grassy hill. We ate persimmons straight from the tree, laid back and watched the sky pass us by. I remember the tree being massive, like something out of a movie. It was as close to heaven as I’d ever been.

I remember my siblings and I all squished up into the small space of his front-seat only truck, driving back and forth to Columbia at least once a month on the weekends to visit his mother and sisters. He never used air conditioning and he always drove about five miles under the speed limit, because you got better gas mileage that way. My Grandma Mae Belle would swing open the door as we walked up the porch steps and the smell of her home always came rushing out, every time with southern-style collard greens, pinto beans, biscuits and fresh from the oven pecan pie. In the evenings she would lay out pallets for my brothers and I on the guest living room floor, and she always gave me one of my grandfather’s shirts to sleep in, the smell of which is one of the most comforting memories that could ever be induced.

As a child I sat at the small round breakfast table with my father and drank my coffee just like his. I watched the flip of his newspaper as we listened to Grandma Mae Belle stand at the stove and gossip about local church members and neighbors, and often with his head hidden by the newspaper he would give a playful wink at the juicy atrocities she rambled on and on about, the offenders being all of her closest friends. At some point my aunts would always burst in to visit; thin, smokey and smiling, poor and vibrant, ready to tell their own stories to their brother and their little niece. These were some of the most wonderful days of my life.

I also remember soon after we built our house, him showing up with a truck full of hydrangeas, camellias, gardenias and day lilies, and an enormous amount of the best home-made soil mix you’ve ever seen, customized to offset the acidity of the clay that took up the majority of our two acres. He worked all day in that yard. I remember feeling happy and like he was proud of me for building a home in the country, and that maybe this was his way of showing it.

When I picture my father now, leaning on the F-150 and looking over at me, his face appears as if there’s something he’s thinking but won’t say. The wind is tousling his soft thinning curls around, the sun is shining brightly behind him and his eyes are a softer blue than they used to be. Younger me wanted to know the words so badly, wished that those words would have been heard by me.

I don’t remember exactly when things changed, but one day as I found myself reminiscing about my father I realized that I no longer needed to hear the words. As time had passed and as my own life had matured, I realized that the mysteries that had been him, and all the complexities and uncertainties that had been mine, had faded to the side, and all that was left was the most important piece of it all; I was his daughter. And he was my father. That was enough, and it always had been.  

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Click here to listen to U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”