While having coffee with some friends last week, one of them brought up the subject of early childhood memories. Everyone had a story or two to relate, with most
of them being about their mothers. However, when it was my turn, the stories I shared
were about my dad:
I told about the time when I was just a little over two years old. I was sitting on the ground with him in the shade of a large Chinaberry tree. There was a washtub full of water and a box of old soda pop bottles he had been saving to hold my mother’s homemade catsup. To clean the bottles, I remember he and I picked up handfuls of
tiny pea gravel and funneled them into a bottle, dipped the bottle into the water, and then shook it from side to side. After a good rinsing, it was my job to place the bottle
upside down in the box to dry.
I also disclosed to the group that Dad had given me my very first spanking. I had taken a small oil can from his tool box and in the mind of a five-year-old decided it really
belonged on the back of my tricycle. After stubbornly refusing several times to return it
to its proper place, a rolled-up newspaper quickly changed my mind.
After relating these somewhat trivial incidents, I later began thinking about some of the more important ways Dad had influenced my life. As the older, by ten years, of his two adored daughters, I sometimes assumed the role of the son he always wanted.
He never told me I could not do something “because you’re a girl.” Oh, I did girl things. I had dolls, made mud pies, and played dress up with mother’s hats and jewelry. But, I also had a rubber gun he made by fastening a clothes pin to the end of a roughly fashioned gun-shaped piece of wood. He cut strips of rubber from an old tire inner tube,
and taught me how to load it and get off the best shots against a barrage of
neighborhood boys.
On my sixth birthday, he gave me a small pocket knife, then taught me how to
safely open it, close it, and throw it, blade first, at a target. Thinking back, it is probably
the best present I ever received from him. I still carry it in my purse. His gifts over the
years also included a Red Flyer wagon, a scooter, and a baseball bat. He helped me
make kites using a pages from the Houston Chronicle, and made a sling with his hands
when I was still too small to reach the lowest limb on the tree in the back yard.
He showed me how to catch crawfish when the ditch in front of our house filled
up after a rain, and later how to bait a hook with a live shrimp, cast a spinning reel, take
my fish off the line, and then to clean them.
When I was in high school, he never complained when I asked him to take me
and my friends to out-of-town football games. Somehow, at that time he surely must
have known my interest in the players was greater than my love of the sport.
I was barely taller than my dad’s waist when he taught me to dance to some
Lawrence Welk tunes played on an old phonograph. And he was the one who taught
me how to drive a car and parallel park with the same precision which won him best
driver awards in his company’s competitions year after year. By watching him, I learned
to paint, put up wallpaper, drive nails, unstop a toilet, fix a flat tire-things which have
served me well in later life.
Dad was everything anyone could ask for in a father, but he was also strict and
demanding. My husband and I used to laugh when we recalled my having to be home
by twelve o’clock the night before our wedding!
We didn’t have much in the way of worldly possessions when I was growing up.
But, there was love, respect for privacy, pride in accomplishment, honesty, and
appreciation of books, art, music, the value of hard work and the importance of keeping
one’s word-things no amount of money could buy. My love of sports has continued,
and even now I prefer watching the Houston Rockets instead of a movie.
Just one more time I wish I could hear Dad’s voice say, “Hi doll,” and then
discuss a football game. Sadly, he and my mom were killed in an auto accident years
ago.
Now I think of the things I could have said to him and didn’t, like “Thanks for
being there when I needed you”, or maybe a few more “I love you’s.” I just hope he knew.
