Drops of Blood

Remembering Daddy

Posted on 25 June 2007

Two blogs I read yesterday reminded me of the importance of keeping in touch with family. So many of mine on both sides of my family tree have died, and I regret how I’ve lost touch with those who remain. And I thought about my Dad, who died of a heart attack at age 44 — two years younger than I am now — when I was just six.

My memories of him are few but vivid. I wrote down a few for you:

• Sitting on his knee in the kitchen, early one morning before he left for work in the fields (he was a truck crop farmer). Mama was teasing him by coaching me to say, “Please, Daddy?” and bat my eyes to persuade him to do something or other she wanted to do — maybe go out to eat that night. He laughed and called me Miss America, but he said yes to her and was grinning when he accused her of playing dirty.
• Peeking through the bathroom door keyhole when I heard a really loud pouring. Did Daddy have a water pistol he was playing with? He threw open the door; I shrieked and ran to Mama, yelling that “Daddy pulled something out of his pocket and peed with it!” She said she was laughing so hard at the tiny pinky finger I held up to illustrate my statement that she wouldn’t let him spank me for invading his privacy.
• Moving to a lonely room of my own. When they built their house, they painted one bedroom blue and the other, pink. Ten years later, I was born and, as a girl, got the pink room. When I was little, I slept in first a crib and then a twin bed in the corner of their giant room. When I got old enough to wake up at night and wonder why Mom and Dad were playing in bed without me, I got moved to my own room. (Totally unfair, I thought at the time.) Even so, I was just next door and could sometimes hear them playing without me. I would lie in bed and roar, “I hear you in there!” Mom would laugh and Daddy would swear, making me even madder and more confused.
• Playing checkers with him, both of us seated at my tiny table and chairs in the kitchen. The checkers were the toy I’d picked out after one of my doctor’s visits. I often had bladder infections and eventually had to have many visits for urethral dilation — progressively larger rods inserted into my abnormally constricted urethra with only the mildest of anesthetics until I screamed enough that they stopped for that visit. It hurt badly, and it burned fire for another couple of days every time I peed. So I always got a trip to the toy store afterward, and both parents would play endlessly with me and whatever toy I’d chosen. I was happily bossing my dad around the checkerboard while Mom laughed at his massive form perched on one of my small folding metal chairs.
• Watching him and my uncles sit around their mother’s kitchen table and laugh and smoke at night. They reared back on their chairs’ hind legs but kept a watchful eye on their brothers so they didn’t sneak a muddy boot under a rung and flip them backwards. I watched avidly to see who’d get caught. My grandmother’s green kitchen floor was pocked with half-moon scars around the table from years of chairs digging into the soft linoleum.
• Riding on the hood of the car with him. My paternal grandmother — we called her Big Mama — lived across the road. I remember for some reason him wanting to sit on the hood of the car while Mama drove us across the street, so he pulled me up beside him for the thrilling ride while Mama fussed and drove the car at a creeping pace down our long gravel driveway and up the hill to Big Mama’s house.
• Helping him drive the tractor while my mother, a transplanted city girl, fussed and fretted beside it. I sat in his lap while he did all the gear shifting and I turned the massive steering wheel. I loved the tractor’s ear-splitting racket and its curved metal seat, the way it bounced over the uneven ground, and the path it left in its wake as he cleared the field, as well as the smell of metal, gasoline, oil, dirt, and hot Mississippi sun on the fabric of my daddy’s Sears Roebuck work shirt and pants.
• Watching him toss a chicken. To this day, I have absolutely no idea what he was doing and why, but I heard one of our chickens making a godawful commotion outside and I dashed into the back yard. There Daddy was, tossing a flapping chicken four or five feet into the air, catching it, and tossing it again. I must have pestered him to “let me try!” and “don’t be selfish!” for a long time because he eventually got irritated, eyed me, and tossed me the chicken. It slashed long, bloody scratches down the inside of my forearms, and I ran yelling inside to Mama, who divided her time between dabbing peroxide on my arms and looking daggers at my red-faced Daddy.
• Perishing of embarrassment at the terribly disappointed look he gave me when I accidentally hurt my dog. For some reason, I’d put rubber bands around each of my beloved beagle’s legs; I think I’d been trying to hold scraps of cloth there to make boots for Spot (he was a long-suffering playmate). I’d forgotten to take off one of the rubber bands, and it had eventually dug into his skin and become sore and infected. I was in the kitchen, watching while Spot whimpered as his paw was being examined. When they pulled out the bloody scrap of rubber, all eyes turned to me, and I remembered. I’ll never forget the look on Daddy’s face, even though I kept saying, “I didn’t mean to!”
• Getting treated for a wound. I’d been staying with my grandmother, and I was playing behind her sofa in a narrow space where I liked to hide and read comic books, color pictures, and pretend I was in a secret lair. I had a pencil in my mouth, point first, when I leaned down to pick up my shoes. The next thing I knew, it was buried deep in the back of my throat. I must have screamed for my grandmother, because she ran into the room just in time to see me pull out the pencil and spit a gout of blood onto her living room floor. I don’t remember anything else, but I was later told that Big Mama flipped out and ran out the front door, down the hill to the road to flag down someone — anyone — driving by to take us to a doctor. It happened to be my Daddy. (She could drive, but she panicked.) Later that night, and for many nights to come, I was plopped atop my Big Mama’s washing machine just inside her kitchen door while someone used a long swab dipped in stinging antiseptic to clean the hole punched in the back of my throat. I only cried the first time, a little. After that, Daddy and my Uncle Frank made a big deal of talking about my bravery, and I thought scornfully that I wasn’t one of those crybabies. They always talked approvingly about how tough I was as they picked me up, under my arms, and put me back down on the floor.
• Watching Daddy sit on our back porch in late afternoon, heat radiating from his sweat-soaked shirt and his fiery red arms and sweat trickling down the back of his neck as he slugged back glass after glass of my mother’s iced tea. After he died, my mother cried when I accidentally broke his tea glass.
• Gaping as he tried to tame the cranky Shetland pony he’d bought me, and laughing as he swore when “Stonewall Jackson” reached around and chomped his thigh (the last I ever saw of that pony).

What are some of your family memories?

[tags]family memories, autobiography, my writing[/tags]

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