As kids, I remember one time Jimmy (my younger brother) and I screamed at the top of a ferris wheel that had stopped at the highest point, as they sometimes do. Our dad’s reaction was to mime a screwdriver as if he were unscrewing the bolts. Focused as if he was working, hands steady as they always were.
If you’re wondering where I got my sense of humor, I inherited it from a man who thought cardiac events were a bonding activity. He was right. It worked.
Spoiler Alert: This is a post about my dad.
Who He Was (the working man)
He owned his own plumbing business, not so he could get rich. He liked working with his hands and fixing things, helping people in general, and he was good at it. He’d trade work for goods when people couldn’t pay in money.
Honestly, he’d have just fixed someone’s broken toilet or pipes or the other million things people broke and needed him to fix, but he was no stranger to pride and accepted the trades. Even found an engagement ring once in a drain; the owner told him he could keep it. Neither realized it was real, so he gave it to me. Then bought it back to give to my mother when it turned out to be a real diamond. I got $50 and two kittens out of the deal. Mom got a kitten too. 😂
He worked constantly; it felt like all the time, but he always tried to be home in time for dinner; Reese’s cups, almost always without fail, for Jimmy and me. (Don’t tell my brother he sometimes snuck me the king-size pack while he was otherwise occupied.)
The Hole-Digger Day
Mom has a best friend; they went to school together, got pregnant together. Or almost together multiple times. I preferred reading to socializing and five kids to entertain on top of my two brothers… well, that was a no-thank-you most of the time. I wanted OUT.
Dad always suddenly had a job come up when she was coming over. I’d beg him to go; he’d tell me how I needed to be a kid and make friends, that I didn’t really want to go to work with him. I wouldn’t let up this one particular day. I really just wanted to read, but working with him seemed more desirable than socializing. He took pity on me for once and set the terms. They were harsh. The job gets done, I learn to use hole diggers. No Reese’s cups or coming home until the work was finished.
I tried to make the post hole diggers work. I really did. But my hands were tiny, and let’s be real. I was pretty weak as a kid. He didn’t lecture or force me through it. He got a couple laughs in, and then we went to the library…for hours. I got my reading time. He wasn’t much of a reader then, so he just watched me read with love in his eyes.
The rule was real, and the rule bent, because the point was never the ditch. My father taught me what work was and what grace was on the same afternoon, and he did it in a library. Knowing it wasn’t his first choice on where to be.
The Man Who Showed Up
I moved out at 17, got a place and a job as a Bather at PetSmart. I didn’t have savings, made just enough to pay rent and utilities (barely), but not enough to cover the gas hook-up needed for the heat to work. He had recently moved to a new place with Renée, my stepmom, after staying with relatives of hers for a while. I knew they were struggling financially, and he still tried to pay for me to have the gas hooked up so I’d have heat for the winter. I firmly told him no, I’d survive with heaters and blankets. If you’re wondering where I got my stubbornness, same supplier as the humor.
I won’t go into too much detail because some things in the past should stay there. But he was my character witness when someone who should have known my character was prosecuting it. He remembered the straight A student who once got him called into a parent-teacher conference for… reading too much. He remembered the kid who cried the first time she got a C on a test. And he stood by her.
What I Carry
I lost him at seventeen, carried questions for twenty-plus years and counting. Sometimes, you don’t always get an answer. But I know he loved me, and I know he wanted to come home. That’s enough.
And I carry him still, in my work ethic, in my dark sense of humor that sometimes gets me weird looks or the side eye. I carry him when I show up for someone else, when I make a door for someone they didn’t know existed. When I make a sticker that makes someone raise an eyebrow, when I spend hours obsessing over the laser and perfecting something because that’s what he would have done. With Reese cups close by, you know…just in case.
The Bear
A few years back, we went to visit my step family in Louisiana. Renée had stuff of his she was ready to pass on to Jimmy and me. Letters, pictures, poetry, a kid’s desk that I can’t even remember the reason it was important, just knew that it was. I told Jimmy to take everything; I just wanted his bear. Dad had given it to Renée the Valentine’s Day before the accident. She’d sewn some of his ashes into it, took him to the store, sent him to Nascar races, let him live the only way she knew how. He lives with me still. Zack even made him a shelf with space for a friend, a bear he’d given to me one Christmas as a kid. I wanted to make sure he was never alone and had a good view of the TV. Hope he likes Rick and Morty.
Laura runs Neurospice Design Shop from North Carolina with the help of one raccoon, one judgmental cat, one very patient partner, and a brain that won’t shut up. Browse the shop on Etsy or poke around the Bestiary Oracle right here on the site.