More about my dad

So much about my Dad didn’t make it into the show. But I would still love someone to know.  

My Dad grew up hard and stayed that way, but he was tender about a lot of things. He loved his grandfather who convinced him to put chicken shit on his upper lip to grow a mustache. He loved his mother who would switch him as a little boy if he got wet playing in the creek except the one time he told her he had Baptized himself and she let him go before he could see her laugh in spite of herself. He loved his dad, the master wood worker who kept a drawer full of Wrigley’s gum in three flavors and spat tobacco into a bag full of shredded paper. He told me many times he didn’t think they ever told him they loved him. He loved his mother’s sister, Rose Marie – Aunt Re – who was an actual Rosie the Riveter in California during the war and was twice widowed under tragic and violent circumstances. I mainly remember her cussing with my Grandmother and repeatedly telling the story of my dad being little and she would tell him to “put it in her hand” and he would lay his penis in her palm. It was the only story I ever heard her tell and everyone in my family has heard it multiple times. It is the “Aunt Re story” and she would laugh so hard telling it she would have to wipe the tears out of her eyes. AND NO ONE FOUND THAT STRANGE AND ALARMING. He went into the Navy and became an electronics specialist working on the USS Guadalcanal. I have been told he never stepped out on his sweetheart Bonnie and came home to marry her. They had “little Freddy” and my dad “hired on at the mill” with the promise that he would be moved into the electronics shop at the first opening. That never happened and the legend became that they “stoled his dream.” When he was dying I asked him why after one, two, three years when this became evident why he didn’t leave. I expected to hear more about his homelife and obligations as a breadwinner. But he just said “too chicken shit,” in a way that let me know he was glad that I never had that problem. His ex-wife. Bonnie loomed large in the story as a mythological evil woman. And she was evil. She took his son and illegally changed his name and kept my father from seeing him until he was grown and fully irredeemable in my dad’s eyes. My dad tried to get him a job. He asked for money instead. That was all it took for my dad to be done with him. I wouldn’t know my half-brother if I saw him walking down the street – save for the fact that he probably looks exactly like our dad. My dad left him $1 in his will – an old school tactic against a poor relation contesting the estate. It’s a fuck you dollar. And it’s my legal obligation to make sure he gets it.  All because of what Bonnie did and what he didn’t do. By the way, about 10 years after my parents divorce, the second one, he started dating Bonnie again. None of us knew what to do with that information. He was estranged from his son, but dating the woman who I pictured like a cartoon witch my whole life. I got over it. Whatever made him happy. Not everyone else was so generous in there assessment. My mom told me she was sniffing around at his retirement money and to make sure they didn’t get married. I knew that wasn’t going to be a problem. My dad liked Bonnie. Loved her even. But nobody was getting their hands on his pension.  

My dad had a great record collection and airbrushed panel van dressed very cool in the 70s in denim my mom would embroider with triangles and eagles and turquoise jewelry and an amazing felt hat with a feather. He also did a lot of speed. On his death bed he referred to that time as when he was in his “fairy look” with all the affection and pride of someone talking about the time they were on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar. He loved scuba diving and collected shark’s teeth of Anna Maria Island. We went to Florida once in my childhood, just before I turned 14. We did nothing of note and I got eaten alive by no-seeums and watched Comedy Central in my parents’ room most of the trio. At the time I had forgotten totally how much he loved Florida. You would have never known that from the trip. We lived in two different houses and he didn’t build them from the ground up, but he sure gutted them and made them bend to his will. He added decks and porches and outbuilding after outbuilding. Do you know the cartoon Snuffy Smith? It was always in the local newspaper. Snuffy was a stereotypical hillbilly with teeth gone a missing and the jug marked with Xs to make sure you knew. He added on to his hill shacks in a comically piecemeal way. Just like my dad. And my dad’s dad. And my mom’s dad and his dad. It’s just their way. You build what you have time, money, and immediate need for. There was no plan other than survival with slightly more room for the next necessary thing. One might say my writing has a Snuffy Smith quality to it and I would have to concede the point. My mom didn’t want to lose a big tree in the back yard so he built the deck around it, having to cut the hole a little bigger each year. There was a huge white ash in the front yard that eventually had to come down. He felled it himself and there are pictures of us sitting on it in the trailer afterword. He had that ash cut for lumber and was sure to make that part of his divorce settlement from my mother. Their second divorce, I mean. The one when I was 18, not the one before I was born. He used that wood for picture frames and baseboards in his new house just up the hill from where he grew up. White ash is not very pretty, but it is hard as all get out. I have some pieces of that lumber as slats on the bedframe I took to New York. Those that have helped me move the bed have asked “what the hell are these?” Just my inheritance, I say. My dad moved back to Westwood, as all Mossy Bottom Boys do. They just can’t stay away. Something in the water, I suppose. Cause it sure aint the scenery or the property values. My dad turned that new house – new to him, he bought it from the family that built it in the 50s. A woman named Myra who my mom knew from a group of ladies called the Mystery Club who got together every few months to eat chicken salad off of special trays and do….. nothing mysterious at all. I know because it was at our house once. Anyway, he made that house his, taring down walls and adding porches and buildings and dropping the ceilings and covering the gorgeous hardwood floors with gray medium pile carpet. When he wasn’t working on the house he was working overtime shifts at the Mill to pay for the house as fast as possible because he hated debt even more than he hated the thermostat being messed with. His divorced life was very much like his married life. Himself, rotating shift work at the steel mill, his projects, the Oprah show. My dad LOVED Oprah. I mean loved. As in admired and also wished they could get married. He even called her “Opie” as a special pet name. When his shift allowed -as all but evening tun did – at 4pm you could always find him in his workshop tuned completely in, drinking his probably 8th beer of the day. I loved Oprah, too. I learned so much from her – she introduced me to Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison, and Ekart Tolle and Martha Beck – people whose ideas completely shifted by perspective on the world. I was so grateful. My dad learned… nothing. But he would sit there every day with the most beautiful and powerful woman in the world in his eyes. He didn’t care at all what the topic was because he was with her. And it really was quite wholesome. He loved her brain and every iteration of her looks and styles over the years. Now that I think about it… my dad spent more time with Oprah Winfrey than he did with anyone else. I was not jealous of Oprah. I did not feel like I was competing for his attention. But watching him watching Oprah, made me learn something about devotion. About love.  

Whenever we were both in the same place on a weeknight at 7:30, which was rare, we would watch Jeopardy together. This was when I most had his attention. He loved that I was good at Jeopardy and he would laugh out loud and shake his head at some of the questions that I gave. “Who is Boutros Boutros-Ghali?” “What is “Saturday Night Fever”? “What is a shallot?” “That’s my girl!” he would bellow. And I liked it. And he never took issue with the mistakes I made. I would get the next one.  

My Dad had a huge collection of Avon perfume and cologne bottles from when his mom was an Avon lady. They were guns and little swords and old-timey cars and I loved to play with them when I was little. He got those in the divorce, too. I have no idea what cologne my dad used. It was certainly not Avon anymore, but it sure smelled like Avon, and if you know you know. It wasn’t bad. But it could be loud. And it got even louder in his early 70s. By the time he turned 80 and I showed up on his door, he wasn’t wearing any at all. He was also devoted to hot showers, dial soap, and cases of baby powder. This man prevented chafe at any cost, including “white lung” a condition I swore we all had from breathing the powdered air for so long. No kidding, when my mom and her new husband remodeled the house and took down the drop ceiling in the bathroom, no kidding, they found inches of the stuff.  

My dad always wore “house shoes” (slippers) and “joggers” (polyester knit athletic pants) after a shower. He wore bibbed overalls and pocket t-shirts of varying stages of ware depending on the job at hand. Unless we were going to the Ponderosa Steak House Buffet or, later, the Texas Roadhouse he would wear his good jeans and a colored shirt. Regardless of the occasion, he always had a meshbacked, adjustable baseball hat of some kind. Growing up, he had the worst pickup trucks you have ever seen. Covered in rust, with no internal lights, ripped bench seats and holes in both the floor boards and the door that you could loose a flip flop through if you weren’t careful. They were all named “Huldy” which I think is Appalacian for “Hilda.” He would pick me up from work in these trucks and we would stop at the Super America Gas Station and when I was a freshman in high school he got in the habit of giving me $2 for a snack. When we got home we parted ways to watch Oprah separately and he would leave the drivers side door hanging wide open because “it only had so many shuts in it.”  

But after the divorce he got himself nice trucks – all big, all black, all American made. He also got a Harley Davidson anniversary edition Heritage Classic Motorcycle. I only rode with him once. I liked it. I thought the whole time how much more I would like it if it was someone else in front of me in the driver’s seat. I think I even tried to pick up boys that way. “You know my dad has a Harley that is going to be mine someday. I’m gonna need someone who knows his way around a bike.” Pitiful. So dumb. He sold the Heritage Classic even though it was his pride and joy, because he had the good sense to recognize that he was getting “a little wobbly” in his advanced years. So he got a Harley Davison trike, which I encouraged him to do. “It’s your money dad! Use it to make you happy.” But he eventually sold that, too. And didn’t tell me that time. He didn’t tell me when he drained his hot tub. And when he stopped going to the YMCA to lift weights and sit for a long time in the steam room. He didn’t tell me a lot of things.  

He was very progressive in his politics, a thing that I perhaps loved the most about him, is a very Appalachian quality, no matter what you might hear otherwise. But he looked like a big ole redneck and was very loud and abrasive, so he would make comments that, if you didn’t know him, took a turn you might not expect. “If I hear any more bullshit about “gays in the military” I’m gonna blow a gasket. It just makes me sick. Imagine a person being brave enough and selfless enough to serve this county and give their life for this country and somebody is gonna have something to say about their sex life? It don’t make no kinda sense.” My uncle is the same way, as is his wife, and the man who was married to my late Aunt Susan and divorced before I was born, but since my dad’s death I am friends with all of them on facebook. And it is wild to love all of their amazing liberal posts that have backwoods Kentucky shit talk written all over them in style and are completely Gen Z Woke in their content. You love to see it.  

My dad loved a good meal. He made up for his limited palate in the amount of food that he liked to consume. Cereal is eaten out of a mixing bowl and all you can eat buffets with unlimited thousand island dressing and low quality cheesecake and pump-it-yourself  watery SoftServe are really the only way to go, if you asked him. And he didn’t ask. He told you that was where we were going. 

He worried about me running around barefoot, or sleeping with wet hair. He didn’t let us drink Mountain Dew or watch The Simpsons because they both made him feel bad about himself. He taught me never to carry debt and always tote my own load, which are similar things, but different lessons. He could be wildly funny and deeply warm. I wish he had had a better shake at things. I am eternally grateful that he gave me everything he had. I hope he knows.