Beech Tree News Network

 On the Friday that was the Friday of my father’s funeral; I arrived early and sat in a chair in the foyer of Greenwell-Houghlin Funeral Home in Taylorsville, the town where I spent most of my growing-up years.  I sat across from an easel filled with pictures of Dad—with  county officials, with Congressman Natcher, with Lt. Governor Thelma Stovall, with our family, with his mom and brothers and sisters, with his mill hands,  and finally by himself as a freckled-faced, overall-clad youngster of about ten years old.  

The pictures had been moved from the place they stood the evening before, beside my father’s coffin, alongside my stepmom and my brothers and sisters and me.  For hours we stood, listening to my dad’s friends remember what Dad had meant to them.  Most remembered him as Spencer County sheriff or Spencer County judge or minister at Mission for Christ church.

Many people didn’t know who I was or that I even existed—I’ve been gone from the county for forty years.  I found myself explaining our family to people who thought they knew everything about our family, but didn’t.  I found myself repeating the phrases, “yours, mine and ours family,” and “third daughter from his first marriage.

“I didn’t know they had any children other than Lorrie (my stepsister) and Carl and Mark (my two half-brothers),” they would say.

I wanted to scream, but I didn’t.  I didn’t because I had had the privilege of knowing a man they had never known.  I started out with the share-cropper and finished high school with the sawmill man.  For me and my young memory, he was the greatest man who ever lived.

 My dad told me once that when he and my stepmom gained custody of my three sisters and me, he was worried that I wouldn’t adjust to the arrangements because I loved my grandmother (my mom’s mom) so much.  “But I told Roberta (my stepmom) that you really did love me,” he said, “So I thought you would be alright.”

 He was right, I did really love him, and more importantly, I admired him.  I could lay out for you all of the injustices done to my dad’s and my relationship; all of the wedges purposely or inadvertently driven between us, but that wouldn’t be the sum of things.  The sum of things includes the memories I kept, I guarded, that were just my dad’s and mine.  We cut wood together, we skinned a squirrel, we cleaned a mess of fish.  I carry with me his laugh, his instruction, his approval during those times.  It doesn’t matter that I can count them on one hand.

 I watched and I recorded memories of the man I admired; the man who went to the farmer’s door and offered to pay him for the chicken he had just accidentally run over, because he knew what it was like to be a share-cropper and how valuable a chicken could be to a family.  I listened as my dad climbed out of bed at two a.m. one morning to pull a stranger’s car out of Ashes Creek, and I listened as he refused any money for the good deed.

A few years ago, a friend said to me, “Your problem is you spend too much time trying to please people and not enough time doing what you want to do.”

My friend had it all wrong.  My life has never really been about trying to please other people.  My life has been about trying to do the right thing.  I learned that from my dad, the sawmill man, the greatest man who ever lived.