I tried to be all cute and clever (well, maybe not so clever) by posting some fathers’ day love to my dad
and my daddy
on a super-duper daddy page, but it wasn’t working–probably for a number of reasons. Notably: 1) it’s a sickeningly cutesy pun, confusing my dad and my daddy, when, truth be told, they’re completely different people and play very different roles in my life; and 2) I don’t think I’ve ever had a picture taken in which my father and I are embracing, and it looked so lopsided–it still does–with Jonno and I showing obvious love on a ritzy red background, and my dad just sort of standing there, alone in a field up at the farm (actually, my brother’s in the pic too, but I cropped him out since he doesn’t make sense, visual or otherwise).
[ Side note: Part of this dilemma has to do with a weird sense of empathy my mom instilled in me as a kid–one of my personality traits with which I’m most happy. Specifially–and this is going to sound silly to most of you–I feel sorry for my father, just because he looks so alone in the pic. These feelings have nothing to do with real life (my dad’s hardly ever alone these days, and when he is, he really relishes it), it’s just something about the sight of him that makes me feel sad. It’s as if the picture is actually him and he’s looking at me and saying, “Why haven’t you called? Why haven’t you visited? Are you doing okay?”
This kind of empathizing (psychoanalysts would probably call it a sort of displacement) often gets me into trouble. Case in point: once, when I was a kid, we’d gone fishing up at the farm and caught about a dozen bream. My granddaddy ran a general store in this tiny, tiny town of 200 or so (where I was related to just about everybody–very Eudora-Welty-“Why I Live at the P.O.”), and while my daddy and my brothers went inside to grab a coke for the half-hour trip home, I couldn’t stop looking at the fish. They were in a bucket of water back in the truck bed, still swimming. I felt so sorry for them, when in fact they probably weren’t feeling too bad about life in their new-found home. Their thoughts were probably more like, “Smaller, okay. Crowded, yes. But no snakes or beavers. That’s a plus.”
Almost without thinking, I grabbed the bucket, ran across the road, over a really treacherous cattle-gap, and across a quarter-mile of pasture to a small pond. I got right up to the edge and dumped the bucket out, and some of the fish wound up floating upside down, but I think most lived to see another day. Then I raced back to the store, threw the bucket in the truck bed, and sat down in the cab, waiting for everybody to finish up inside (why they hadn’t already come out and discoverered my treachery, I don’t know). When they finally emerged, there seemed to be some real confusion, especially on David’s part (he who was cropped) about what could have possibly happened to the fish. Of course, all the details eventually came to light and my brothers were furious but my daddy and granddaddy just kinda laughed at my chutzpah (they would have called it gumption). Besides, bream are pretty bony anyway.]
So, somehow all this has led me to the realization that even though I’ve scanned and posted quite a few pics recently, I don’t have nearly enough photos of the people I love. That’s not to say I haven’t tried. Every January 1, I promise myself I’m going to do two things: a) I’m not going to avoid people I know when I see them on the street or at the grocery store just because I don’t wanna get bogged down in conversation, and b) I’m going to take more pictures. I’ve failed miserably at both.
Grab your digital cameras now, guys.
I love you dad. I love you Jonno. I love you granddaddy, wherever you are.
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