If I were any good at this whole blogging thing, I would have wrote this last weekend, but here we are.
It’s been a busy six months, let me tell ya. A wedding (mine), honeymoon, home projects…a veritable whirlwind. It’s been eating me not having written anything in a while, but the juices got going again last weekend, Fathers’ Day in case you were wondering.
My father died when I was just 21. That’s eleven years he’s been gone now. More than a third of my life. He was sick for five years before that, and not in the best of health his entire life. Like Atticus in To Kill a Mockingbird, he couldn’t throw a football with me, or help me with batting practice, or teach me to shoot a layup. But he had hobbies, and he shared those with me. Watching Alfred Hitchcock movies, model railroading (he built an enormous, never-complete HO-scale layout in our basement), burning early 2000s rock onto CDs for my sister and me, but especially home improvement projects.
Cutting drywall, framing stud walls, and replacing toilets was the right kind of physical and mental activity for him, and he took me along for the ride. I know things today I’ve taken for granted that all dads teach their sons, only to find out that no, all dads don’t teach their sons to use circular saws at age twelve, or that studs are spaced sixteen inches on-center, or how to wire an electrical outlet. Looking back as an adult, I can imagine the anxiety he might have had in trusting me to work on those things by myself so I could learn. (As an indentured servant, I built an entire cinderblock retaining wall by myself, one of six my father built on our one-third-acre lot).
Not being able to roughhouse or teach me any sports, the nature of our relationship was different than the other dads. I suppose it was the teacher in him (he taught high school vocational agriculture at one point in his life), but our conversations often took deep philosophical turns. I had big questions, and he didn’t shy away from having big answers. He gave me lessons about marriage and fatherhood decades before I would need them. Along with my mother, he instilled a work ethic in me. He taught me the importance of writing thank you notes, and that all good things are worth waiting for.
I don’t miss him everyday like the movies say you’re supposed to. Not that I don’t wish he were here. There are lots of things I’d like to share with him, especially entering this stage of adulthood. It’s just that I don’t think about him everyday. But his lessons are with me whether I think about it or not.
And he’s not the only father in my life.
Papa at his workbench.
Losing my dad at an early age, I suppose I sought out other father figures without thinking about it, one being my grandfather on my mom’s side. Papa, we called him. He was a retired dairy farmer, a Navy mechanic during WWII, and lost his own father when he was just sixteen. When I moved to Spring Hill after college, I was close enough to visit him in Dickson and keep him company while he putzed around in his woodshed. Or we’d take his old Ford Ranger up on the cow pasture and drive around after knocking the wasps nest off the headliner (he always left the truck windows open). Or sit and watch Nashville Public Television after eating Jonah’s Pizza from Charlotte.
In his milking days as a farmer, Papa employed several young men from around town to help him bale hay in the summers. Those hot, sweaty summers ended up being mentoring sessions for the young men that worked for him, and the beginning of lifelong friendships. They were pallbearers at his funeral. Maybe it was just that he had four daughters (to his consternation, at times) and no sons to help on the farm, but maybe it was also that he knew the importance of mentoring young men because of his own experience. I was one of his pupils. In some ways, I had him longer than I had my own father. He passed five years after my dad did.
But Papa wasn’t the only father. There have been others. There’s Steve. There’s Mitch. There’s David. It would take too long to tell all the stories, but they saw me through the darkest of my hours. They encouraged me to take risks and step outside my comfort zone. And if they’re reading this, thank you.
Here’s to the fathers, by blood or not. If you don’t have a father to celebrate, maybe you have a mentor. Next Father’s Day, drop them a note. Especially if they taught you to use a saw.