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Dalton
Roberts |
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After I married and left home, the one daily time slot when I knew I could catch my father alone for a little man-to-man talk was early morning. Mother was a late sleeper and he was an early riser. I took more after my mother in waking and sleeping patterns but something in me seemed to know when I needed a talk with him and I would wake up at his time of rising. I would call him and say, “Put an extra cup of coffee in the pot and an extra biscuit in the oven for your prodigal son.” He was a stickler for getting to work on time but sometimes he would be a little late if we got a good rap going. Most of the time when I arrived he would be working a crossword or crypto quote. That’s exactly what he was doing the morning his fifth and final heart attack took him away. He just toppled over on the floor and was instantly gone. These days I sometimes sleep late simply because I can. But on those mornings when I wake before dawn and pour that first cup of coffee, I will think of my mornings with Dad. A big lump the size of softball forms at the bottom of my throat. Sometimes it makes me miss him so much I wish I could topple over in the floor and go to see him. I am going to bare my soul this morning for every person out there who feels their father whipped them too hard or was too hard on them. Dad put the razor strap to me many times in my life. It had such a painful effect on me that I vowed to never whip my children. I never did. Both of them turned out magnificently so don’t tell me you have to whip kids to keep them from going to the dogs. I am with Robert G. Ingersoll whose “Freedom of Man, Woman and Child” is one of the classics of the English language. He wrote, “If you must whip your child, do it in anger and he may someday forgive you.” If you feel you were over-punished and the painful memories persist, I urge you to do two things to make peace with it. You will be a stronger and better person for learning to live with it. You may develop a closeness to your father that you would have never found if you had not had the inner strength to face it. The first thing is to talk with relatives and see if you can discover the formative early influences in your father’s life. You may discover that hard, painful times molded your father the way he was. When I discovered what my father went through as a child and a young married man, I realized that it might have made me feel desperate to keep my children from going astray. Extremely hard times can harden attitudes. The second thing you can do is to balance off the pain with memories of the times your father was kind and supportive of you. Like buying you a Martin guitar when he worked as a knitter and really couldn’t afford such a fine instrument. Like driving 700 miles to bring you home when your first big job didn’t work out, helping you load your meager belongings in the smallest trailer U Haul rents, then drive you and your family home to try once more to get your life right. I could describe in great detail all the good things my father did for me. The bottom line comes out like this: razor strap and all, my Dad was the best man I’ve ever known and if my life has done any good for anyone, he deserves a lot of the credit. I’d give anything if he could put me an extra biscuit in the oven this morning.
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