My father was a complicated man. Most folks didn’t see or know that, but we did—my mom and I, and later my step-siblings. He had a great smile, with a big dimple, and he loved people. He could strike up a conversation with almost anyone and find common ground. But there was more going on under the surface than was obvious.
I’m sure I got all that from him. Seeing it for a lifetime made it easy to emulate. Where my mom was an introvert and preferred solitude, Dad was clearly loved spending time with all sorts of people. But he had his opinions.
All his life, Dad maintained a sense of marvel and adventure. He ran away from home twice at age fifteen in 1937—once to California when few roads existed, and once to Key West where he contracted malaria while helping survey the new Overseas Highway after the railroad got wiped out by a huge hurricane.
Dad was also a sponge for knowledge right up to his last days, mild Alzheimer’s be damned. We had sometimes difficult but rewarding conversations right to the end. He never failed to listen closely and comment, even when he wasn’t wholly sure of the context, which he would laugh about and blame his disease. He was a kind man.
For that reason and more, everyone loved my dad, even more so in his later years when he had time to just sit and listen, to tell old tales and hear new ones. He loved a good story and often heard more than was being told, which led to frank discussions, after. Though he didn’t offer advice, he never declined to provide it, gently, if asked.
But my dad didn’t share everything. In his early nineties, he had me dig up a birth certificate that had a startling fact he’d never mentioned. I brought it up. “I never knew you were adopted.” He had never told me. He said, “Yeah,” and that was it. Mystery on.
He was born “Baby Otto,” with blond hair and blue eyes, but always claimed to be Scotch, based on his wealthy adoptive father’s last name, and used that as an excuse as long as I knew him. One time he said, rueful but accepting, “I guess I’m just cheap.” This came after years of exclaiming, “Hoot mon!” over a bargain or saved dollar.
But Dad wasn’t Scottish or cheap. He was frugal, careful with money, and with good reason. His father was murdered when dad was six years old, and the family fortune was lost to the Great Depression. I don’t think he ever got over that.
I also suspect something else happened to him in his youth that he never spoke about. He had an aversion to being touched and went stiff as a board when anyone gave him a hug, as if it hurt—or scared him. I don’t what caused it, but he never got over it.
Growing up rich and white, then poor and white, in the South, Dad bore the brunt of bigoted grooming and used some of those racist terms in my youth. But I never once saw him act like a racist. He always accepted everyone for who they were.
He was the first and only one in our neighborhood to welcome the first Black couple and would often wait for the man, Willy, to come home from his lawncare work so they could stand in the street and yack for a full hour. Later, when I joined a Black band, he and my mom flew out to Kansas City just to see us play. He hit it off with the whole band and they, like everyone else, told me how much they enjoyed his company.
He married my mom in 1942 and positively doted on her my whole life, going so far as to defend her against my teenage idiocy—the only time he ever raised a hand to me, and only then by threatening to cut the neck off my acoustic guitar.
Mom died in 1991, and Dad was heartbroken. At one point, he told me he didn’t think he’d make it. He’d obviously considered suicide. Then he got set up with Deloris, who was ten years younger, full of life, and the daughter of my mother’s sister’s husband’s sibling. So, of course, for fun, Dad would always say that he married his niece.
He had a great sense of humor as well as inquisitiveness, but more than anything, my father was a terrific teacher, especially when it came to life skills. He taught me how to use every tool he owned and how to repair my things, our things, and others’ things.
He helped me make a cool lance and shield for a school project, refinished a 3/4 Gibson electric-acoustic he bought for me, and helped me build my first skateboard, before they were commercially available. He showed me how to paint a car using a vacuum cleaner in reverse in the front yard, later painted a neighbor’s car the same way, and fixed everything in the house on his own, involving me when I didn’t hide.
When one of our Willy’s wagons blew a head gasket on a trip, he had it towed back to Miami where we tore it down to the block in the backyard in the summer heat. Later, when the VW fastback he sold me blew a cylinder, I tore that engine down beside the house and only had a small handful of nuts and bolts left over, which made him howl.
I owe everything I am and have today to my parents. I have photos of them out where I can see them every day, and I miss them both terribly. I see five or ten things every single day that make me think of Dad and how I wish I could call him and share.
But he’s gone.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
