The Old Man: Dad

I recall only one time feeling a bit sorry for my Dad as I compared my youth against his own age. I was probably close to double digits in age at the time and we were playing in the yard. I did something to Dad and turned to run away as he gave chase me in order to catch me. Being so much younger and quicker I was able to get away. As I reached safety I recall thinking how easy it was to get away from him and I chalked that escape up to being so much younger than him which, of course, meant he was so much older than me. Not until some time had passed did I ever recognize my own naivety in failing to understand how if Dad had really wanted to catch me at that time he could have. Other than that one moment I never recall ever giving any consideration to my Dad’s age ever.

I came into his world when he was thirty five years old. For a man his age and for that time, some may have considered him a bit old to be having another child. He already had two other children. When I came along my brother and sister were crowding the teenage years. This meant my mom and dad dealt with changing diapers and baby spit-up as well as teaching the other kids how to drive a car and other typical teenage drama. I also never recall measuring his age against the age of the fathers of my friends until later in life. Even now I could not tell you if he was older than any of them because back then such a thing just never seemed to matter.

I never have considered him old. I never have given thought to ever calling him ‘the old man’ like he and his siblings sometimes called their own father, even as some sort of endearing term. I have always just called him “Daddy”.

By trade, he was a jack-of-all-trades, working as part of a maintenance crew for a chemical company. He welded things together. He tore things apart. He put them back together. He found leaks in pipes and plugged those leaks or replaced those pipes. He worked with his hands so much so that they were often calloused-covered and slightly stained from the grease and the oil and the sludge. He spent close to forty years there helping to keep the workflow moving for a company that was then the backbone of the community where we lived. As time lurched forward, the company began scaling back, and my dad recognizing the changing landscape, chose to retire. Since then, a shell of that company remains. It lives on with a different name now and the present owners preside over a village filled with empty rickety, dilapidated shacks and gigantic chemical smokestacks propped up by the laws of gravity, superior engineering and memories of those who once lived and breathed their work life there. Since then, Daddy has spent another lifetime staying busy with a garden or yard work or putting a roof on a house or two here and there or helping take care of others including his own father and other relatives including Mom. He calls it retirement. He defines it by never slowing down, by always staying busy with something.

What those of us in his family understand is that he is the steady force in our family, the backbone of who we really are as a family. He’s the quiet one. He’s the dependable one. He’s the one always willing to do the dirty part of any job that has to be done, even when completing that task comes with little or no thanks. He’s the family gardener, raising and tending a garden for as long as most of us can recall. He can be a mechanic when a car breaks down. He has fixed water leaks, water pumps, cleaned out ditches and can repair a toilet that either leaks or is clogged. He can even be a cook when someone shows up hungry. He is a jack-of-all-trades still.

Recently, we visited my Mom and Dad and I was able to spend some time with Dad. He told me he was writing down some of the things he remembered as a child. He had read a recent newspaper article about a reporter wanting to gather stories from people from an earlier generation. The thought of this ignited his creative spark so he was spending time with paper and pen writing down some of his memories he made when he was younger in an effort to pass it along to this reporter.

I have heard him talk some about his life before. Most of that talk is about his work life. Every now and then, a story would emerge about his life early on with Mom. And on a rare occasion, some story about growing up would be shared. I have heard most of these stories several times. Honestly, it’s hard to relate sometimes to how he grew up since I grew up in a much different way and in a much different time. I recognize though it was his own hard work that paved a road for me that was much easier to navigate and travel than the road he had to travel, one that was unsure, dark and winding. His work allowed me to take roads he never dreamed to take and roads that at least allowed him and Mom to share that ride with me vicariously.

On this night though many of the stories he told were new to me. He began telling some stories about growing up, tales of when he was ten years old, twelve years old and on into later days when he and Mom were first married. There were stories about the house he has shared with my mom for all but the first three days of their married life together. He dropped names of people who had built that house then who had owned that house. He told us the price of that house and how through hard work it was paid off in full long before I was ever born. He shared stories about how he dug out the basement beneath us on his own and built onto the house when he needed to do so to accommodate our growing family. There were stories about his siblings and his parents. There were stories about the hills and valleys on the land where he spent his childhood. There was a scary story about a snake, stories about moonshine and even a story about a murder. These stories left me spellbound by their charm, by their mystery, by their realism. Each story brought up questions and discussions about nearly forgotten family members and the places that now only exist in time to haunt a memory.

My dad is not often this reflective. He provided some explanation when he said he simply wanted others to know what type of life he had lived, especially the life he lived in his younger days, a life gone away with the passing of time.

While he reminisced, I commented how he had experienced a great deal in life when looking at where he started to present day. He had been witness to a lot of change in how life is lived from day to day. I told him how we needed to sit down with him and his siblings and record them all talking about their lives together so that their unique take on life is preserved in some way. We then talked some more about the stories he has held in himself for a lifetime. Briefly, as I listened to what he had seen in his life, I saw a man with slumped shoulders. I saw a man with strands of gray hair twisted and tangled with smaller stands of black hair. I even thought I heard some certain tiredness in his words. For a moment, I saw him as an old man.

I shook off that thought. He can’t be an old man. He’s my Daddy. I looked back at him and refocused so I could see him as I have seen him since the moment I discovered and embraced maturity. I looked for and found those qualities I have long recognized in him, someone who is solid, dependable, hard-working, quiet, dedicated and loving, merits resting on terms set and owned by his own actions and validated by those who know him.

He casts a large shadow and for me, always will. It is a shadow I knew years ago I would always live in. And I am good with being in that place.

We all count time. We all label things. Some may number his days and call him an old man. I just can’t bring myself to do that. I’m not sure I ever will be able to do that. Maybe I am still that naive little boy scampering away from Dad during some childhood game thinking my own skill and talent provides me an escape from some old slow force, which in reality can catch me anytime it wants. Maybe it’s just an escape from reality keeping me from recognizing that time moves on, never stopping and aging all of us along the way.