As the thirstiest guilt sponge in human history, I interpret both Mothers and Fathers Day as an opportunity to beat myself up for all the times I said mean things to my parents as a child or neglected to say nice things to them as an adult. In my case, Fathers Day affords the additional opportunity to review my own manifold shortcomings as a dad, especially in my younger years when I was obsessed with my own career objectives and trying to get our family situated some place where I might earn a decent paycheck and the living was good for all three of us. Lo and behold, by the time I managed that, our son, Ben, who had easily been the world’s most lovable kid, was in college, and save for the two summers when I made the supreme sacrifice by coaching his Little League team, I didn’t seem to have nearly enough “quality” time with him to reflect upon. (Even today, at thirty-seven, he has a standing invite to become the oldest child ever taken to Disney World, a proffer that he appears thus far to have found eminently resistible.) To further compound my guilt , instead of a whacked-out, meth-mouthed mess, he has turned out to be the ideal offspring, stable, successful,understanding and affectionate, in short, everything any father could hope for and far, far better than this father can feel he really deserves.
The matter of my own father is a bit more complicated, and unfortunately he died when I was twenty-one, before it had really even occurred to me to try to understand him. Reared in the country, he had left school after the ninth grade to work on the farm, under the tutelage of a strong-willed father left with three boys to raise after his wife (my grandmother) died in the 1918 flu epidemic, when my dad was thirteen. Like a great many country boys, my father was a lot smarter than he let on, but his world had been circumscribed so tightly by my grandfather’s close oversight—he spent his entire life within a quarter mile of where he grew up—that he found it hard to accept my mother’s-- and ultimately my own--aspirations to experience more of the world than he had. When I was a high school senior, he was quite excited that I had received a recruiting brochure from Nashville Auto Diesel School, whose primary allure for me lay in the fact that because its athletic teams were known as the “NADS,” it would be a terrific place to be a cheerleader. (Think about it: “GO-O-O….”) When it became clear that I wasn’t all that keen on becoming a NAD, he allowed that if I could get “a year or two” of college, I might be able to get an “office job” somewhere in town. None of this is to suggest that he saw no value in education, for he clearly did, but, in my case, as it had for his younger brother, he also understood that it offered an almost irresistible “ticket out” and thus threatened to further undermine the close little family-community at the core of the only world he had ever known.
Not until many years after my father’s death in 1968 did I realize that my coming of age had coincided with his world’s coming apart. He was a small farmer who had lived to see small farming expire before his very eyes and take with it the only thing that had given value and meaning to his existence. It was small wonder that he had difficulty relating to the kind of life I envisioned. He was having even more trouble envisioning the rest of his own life. All of this came to me way too late, for me to tell him I understood, of course, but I did have the chance to tell others, in a little book about the transition from agriculture to industry, that I published –Yegads!!—a quarter century ago:
As the impossibility of making any sort of decent liv¬ing as a small farmer became inescapably apparent, most farm men were forced to accept whatever industrial employment they could find. Having reached this point in his mid-fifties, my father put our farm in the Soil Bank Program, which paid us more to simply let it lie fallow than anyone could remember making when we had farmed it. When he finally found a job in a local shock-absorber plant, I thought we were rich. For the first time ever, I had an allowance, and we were able to trade in our woefully embarrassing (to me, at least) 1948 Chevrolet for a very respectable 1956 Ford. In the material and finan¬cial sense, we were clearly much better off than we had ever been. Yet though my father was doing a good job as a provider, he did so at con¬siderable sacrifice of status, and, I'm afraid, self-respect. He had cher¬ished the independence of farming in a way that all who are born and bred to it seem to, and the idea of submitting to the whistle and the regimen of the factory filled his heart with dread. His morning good¬byes to us were protracted and almost pathetic, as if he was journey¬ing to an alien and hostile place from which he might not return. He lived for the weekends, which he devoted in large measure to tending his garden, the only activity that seemed to give him any satisfaction. As I recall him now, I reel back past the slump-shouldered figure, carrying the unfamiliar lunch pail and shuffling reluctantly toward his job at "the plant," to recall the jaunty pose he always adopted as, Tampa Nugget clenched between his teeth, he steered his John Deere tractor and Allis Chalmers combine across the fields he knew and loved so well.
No posthumous attempt to work things out with a parent is likely to prove fully satisfying, but knowing that I have at least tried does make me feel a little better. At the very least, I figure, it clears up a little disk space just in case my failing memory comes up with any more reminders of why I should feel guilty.
