Dad

One of the things I enjoy most is reminiscing. It’s like digging through a huge box of old photos. Some of my best memories are of time spent with my father.

I remember having to do a science project in elementary school—I have no idea what grade it was; maybe third or fourth—on identifying leaves from different trees. We had a huge expanse of woods behind our house on Dellwood, so trees and leaves? Not a problem.

Armed with a Buster Brown shoebox, I followed Dad through the yard down into the woods. As we wandered from tree to tree, dry twigs snapped underneath our feet and the wind would occasionally rush through the trees. Dad plucked a leaf from each tree we came to and, after inspecting it for a second or two, told me what kind it was. Some of the names were familiar; hickory, pecan, and four types of oak. But some trees I had never heard of; catalpa, cottonwood, and sassafras. They sounded strange and exotic, and I wondered what kind of life my dad must have led to be so intimately familiar with them.

We collected more leaves from elm, dogwood, sycamore, and walnut trees, and I placed each one carefully in my box. After we decided that we had enough samples to make a nice display, we started back toward the house.

At the kitchen table, we sorted through the small pile of leaves, gluing each to a piece of poster board and writing the names underneath. Dad would hold up a leaf and ask if I remembered what it was. Oddly, I remembered those that were from the trees I'd never heard of, the trees that he introduced me to for the first time.

Of all the science projects I did throughout my school years, that one is the only one that I can recall, and is decidedly the one that I enjoyed the most. That simple walk in the woods served as one of the cornerstones for the foundation of my love of the outdoors.

* * * * *

Dad was a firefighter for 25 years.

There were many times my brothers and I sat with Mom, huddled around the kitchen table with the scanner tuned to the fire department frequency, listening to make sure Dad was OK. One night, the fire was in a huge downtown furniture warehouse. We sat on the edge of our seats as intense voices scratched through the speaker, announcing that the north end of the building was caving in. Mom clasped her hands in front of her lips as tears streamed down her face.

They were looking for Lieutenant Simmons.

My dad was in the building somewhere and they couldn't find him. A few moments later, his voice crackled through the radio. He was alive. Mom buried her face in her hands and wept with relief as we crowded around her and hugged her, not fully understanding how close we had come to losing him.

I was proud to tell people that my father was a firefighter. I remember taking his helmet to show and tell the next week. Most of the kids laughed at the scratches and dents in it, and made fun of the sweat stains in the headband. They didn't understand. The only other kid in class whose dad was a firefighter was Curtis Carter. He understood.

Dad had worn this helmet into buildings where the temperature easily exceeded 1,000 degrees. Where sweat poured from his face and body like water wrung from a sponge. Where flames licked at him from every direction as he made his way from room to room dodging the burning debris that fell around him. When the teacher finally explained that it wasn't a toy or a novelty; that this was the actual helmet Dad wore into burning buildings, they stopped laughing. They turned the helmet over and over, running their fingers across each little pit mark and dent, and along the edge where it sloped down from front to back. I’m still proud to tell people that my father was a firefighter.

* * * * *

Dad was, on many occasions, also a teacher of the lessons you never learned in a classroom. I hated the school I attended in tenth grade. The school I had attended since second grade had closed at the end of my ninth-grade year. As a result, I—along with about 40 other kids of various ages—would be bussed to Southern Baptist Educational Center (SBEC) in Whitehaven, Mississippi, which seemed like it was a hundred miles away.

The bus ride was long, and the rich, preppy kids at SBEC hated us because we were from Frayser, the neighborhood that they referred to as “the armpit of Memphis.” They called us "Frayser trash."

Even some of the teachers seemed to hate us. Coach Riley, who stood well over six feet tall with huge muscles, taught PE and General Science, and referred to those of us who were overweight as "the whales."

I remember having to run laps around the school’s quarter-mile track during gym class. He would go up into the press box at the top of the bleachers and “announce” each runner as they passed the finish line. The overweight kids, of course, were dead last, and he took great pleasure in announcing, “And here come the whales!” over the loudspeaker. As we shuffled, exhausted, toward the finish line, sucking in air through our mouths as fast as we could, the jocks waited in the bleachers, feigning boredom in their ankle socks and New Balance running shoes while laughing at our red-and-white-striped knee socks and Sears Outlet sneakers.

I came to view the place as Hell with lockers. Consequently, I made it my mission to spend as little time at school as possible.

To keep from having to go, I feigned illness of every imaginable type, including amnesia, food poisoning, and—my personal favorite—not being able to feel or move my legs. If I was not successful in staying home, I would do my best to make it through a half day, and then call Mom to come get me. My reasoning was simple; if she had to continue to come all the way to Whitehaven to get me, perhaps she would get tired of it and just let me stay home.

Iron clad, right? Wrong.

One day when I called, I told her my eyes were bothering me. I “couldn't see well” because everything was “so blurry”. It was a brilliant performance, and I hung up with the knowledge that within an hour, I would walk out a free man.

Despite my protest, I was sent back to Algebra to wait for Mom to arrive. What good would it do? I couldn't see. As far as they knew.

Twenty minutes later, the secretary came to let me know my ride was here. Twenty minutes? The ride from Frayser was more like fifty minutes.

As I stepped out the front doors of the school, I saw my father's Ford Escort station wagon in the circular drive. Mom must have called him while he was at his second job, selling insurance. A cold wave of fear washed over me.

My father was not as sympathetic as my mother. In fact, he wasn't sympathetic at all. We kids could be covered with pustulous boils and bleeding from the eyes and he would make us go to school and church.

Walking slowly toward the car, I quickly began to piece together my strategy. I would begin with an apology for interrupting his route. Then I would casually suggest that he just drop me at the house so I wouldn’t inconvenience him further. I made my apology and suggestion, but he didn’t respond.

We rode in silence from the school to the stoplight at the end of the road. I had been waiting for the explosion. Finally, it hit. But it wasn’t the verbal lashing I’d expected.

“Your mama and me are trying real hard to give you the best education we can,” he said softly, his voice trembling.

“Yes sir, I know,” I said.

“And we’re getting real tired of coming to get you two and three times a week because you’re ‘sick.’” His eyes were wet now, and tears began to stream down his face.

“I’m sorry. I know you and Mom are working really hard.” I hesitated. “But most everybody at this school hates me—not just me, all of the kids from Frayser. They call us ‘Frayser trash.’”

“They can’t hate you,” he said, ignoring the tears that streaked his face. “They don’t even know you. If they knew you, they wouldn’t hate you.”

I sat quietly, reflecting on what he’d said, which sounded strangely like a compliment. Except that Dad didn’t do compliments.

I had planned on being home and enjoying the freedom of my room; instead, I would spend the remainder of the day with Dad on his route, going to the homes of his clients and waiting in the car while he attended to their insurance needs, whatever that meant.

The last stop of the day was at a dilapidated old structure that I can only refer to as a shack. It was too small and beat up to be a house and lacked the rustic charm of a cabin. Chickens roamed around the front yard, which was mostly dirt, and wisps of smoke curled up from the small chimney only to disappear, scattered by the cool October breeze.

“You can come in with me here,” Dad said.

Fine. I was tired of sitting in the car at every stop. Plus, I still felt a twinge of guilt after he had shed tears and then offered me what I still had not fully decided was a compliment.

Dad grabbed his briefcase out of the back and we approached the old shack. He knocked on the front door, which looked to be no more than a few boards nailed together at the top and bottom with battens.

“Datchoo, Mistuh John?” a voice called from inside.

“Yes sir, Mr. Melvin, it’s me,” Dad called back, opening the door.

“Come on in dis house, Mistuh John!”

Following Dad inside, I could barely make out the figure of an old black man in a dress shirt and slacks sitting in front of a pot-bellied stove, feeding the small flames with kindling.

The old man raised up and turned his head over his shoulder toward us.

“Who dis is you got witchoo today, Mistuh John?”

“This is my youngest boy, Alan, Mr. Melvin,” Dad said, motioning for me to shake his hand.

“How you do, suh?” the old man said with a smile, shaking my hand firmly with his large black hand.

“Fine, thank you,” I said.
“Y’all come on in dis house and sit down,” he said, motioning for us to take a seat on the couch.

As we sat down, he shuffled into the kitchen area and began to pull cups out of a cabinet.

“How ‘bout some coffee, Mistuh John?” he asked.

“Yes sir, I’ll take a cup. Just black is fine.”

“Does you drink coffee, young man?” the old man asked.

“Um, no sir, thank you,” I stammered.

As he milled around in the kitchen clanking dishes and cups, he whistled a tune I didn’t recognize. It was the kind of whistle you heard in old black and white movies; light and melodic with a heavy vibrato.

There wasn’t much to the room. Except for the light coming from the one window above the couch where we sat, it was dark and it smelled like the old quilts in my grandmother’s cedar chest. There was a small bed in one corner, a chair in another, the couch, another chair that faced the kitchen, and the kitchen itself, which consisted only of a sink, a table, and a small stove and refrigerator. A small table against one wall held several sepia-toned pictures of family in old ornate frames, and an open door next to the refrigerator revealed a small bathroom.

“Can I help you with those, Mr. Melvin?” Dad asked.

“No suh, just don’t let me spill none of dis on you,” he chuckled. “It sho’nuff is hot.”

As I watched him make his way back toward us, I noticed that he was looking straight ahead as if staring at something off in the distance. Without looking down, he lowered one of the cups to Dad’s waiting hand. As he made his way around to his chair and sat down, the light from the window illuminated his face, revealing his eyes, which were covered with a white film, and I realized that he was blind.

Immediately I knew what my father was doing. It was his way of shaming me and educating me all at the same time. His way of saying you think you’ve got eye problems? I’ll show you eye problems. And not only was Mr. Melvin blind, he was also independent. And he didn’t complain even once about not being able to see a thing.

Dad and the old man chatted for a while, and then Dad got out the forms for him to sign and read them to him. Then he guided the old man’s hand to the signature line, where he scrawled a barely legible mark. Once done, Dad began to collect papers and folders and stuffed them back in his case.

“Now, Mr. Melvin, if you have any questions, you know my number at the office and at the house. You call me now, hear?”

“Yessuh, Mistuh John. I sho do, I know how to get holt of you. I’ll sho call you, too, if I needs somethin’.”

He walked us to the door and opened it for us. Show off. As we walked out, he extended his hand to shake Dad’s, then mine.

“You take care of dis man now, you hear?” he said to me, patting Dad on the back. “Dis here’s a good man, yessuh, a real good man.”

I caught Dad’s eye and answered, “Yes, sir. Yes, he is.”

* * * * *
If you’ve never eaten watermelon at five o’clock in the morning, you should. It’s wonderful.

When I was growing up, my parents owned 56 acres of land in Pope, Mississippi, just an hour-and-a-half drive from our home in Memphis. My grandparents lived in a trailer on the property, and we would visit nearly every weekend.

On one particular trip, everyone was getting up early because we were going to Enid Dam to go fishing and swimming that day. Dad came into the living room where I slept on a pallet on the floor. He shook me to wake me, and said, “Let’s go up to the garden.”

As everyone else was still sleeping, Dad and I walked up the slight incline to my grandparents’ garden. The sun had not yet come up, but the pink light from the clouds was reflected on a thin blanket of fog that crept along the ground. At one end of the garden was a watermelon patch with the occasional dark green rind of a melon peeking through the thick weave of vines and leaves running along the ground.

“Let’s get us one,” Dad said. “Look here.” He spread the leaves and vines out of the way, revealing a small round melon the size of a volleyball.

“How are we gonna cut it?” I asked, still a little bleary-eyed.

“We’re not,” Dad said with a smile. He kneeled over the melon and struck it with his fist, cracking it like an egg. Breaking it apart with a juicy crunch, he handed me one half.

“Just scoop it out with your hands like this,” he said, demonstrating his technique. Cupping his hand, he reached in and scooped out a small piece and placed it in his mouth, dribbling juice down his chin and neck. I followed suit, and before long we were sitting cross-legged on the dewy grass covered in sticky watermelon juice.

We devoured the cool, sweet flesh and took turns spitting the seeds as far as we could. It was the best watermelon I’ve ever eaten.

* * * * *

Dad held several second jobs over the years to supplement his fire department income. He sold insurance, unloaded new vehicles from railroad car carriers, and steam-cleaned grocery carts for stores. One of the most interesting—not to mention the most enjoyable—jobs was being Santa Clause for Goldsmith’s Enchanted Forest.

The Enchanted Forest was an indoor family attraction that featured extravagantly decorated Christmas trees, gingerbread houses, and murals of Christmas characters; things like elves standing on each other’s shoulders to place a wreath around a reindeer’s neck. But the elves were sinister-looking and had a Nightmare-Before-Christmas quality to them. It was festive in a creepy sort of way.

But children were willing to overlook the weirdness and stand in line for an hour to see Dad. I mean, Santa. Incidentally, my parents never told me that Dad was playing Santa. Looking back, though, he made a great Santa. He could be extremely jolly when the occasion called for it, and he loved the kids, even though most of the time he came home smelling of cotton candy and urine.

One Saturday, Mom promised to take me to see Santa Claus. Like the hundreds of others there to see him, we waited in line for what seemed like days. As we inched closer, I could see children climbing onto his lap to make their requests. Some smiled shyly and whispered their Christmas wishes in his ear, while others screamed bloody murder until their parents whisked them off of his lap.

When my turn came, I climbed up on Santa’s lap like a pro. His right arm instinctively slid underneath my right arm, his left hand resting on my right knee. It felt familiar, but before I could put my finger on it, he launched into his Santa spiel, booming out a Ho! Ho! Ho! and asking me what I wanted for Christmas.

I knew exactly what I wanted, but I was too distracted by his hands. Like his lap, they were strangely familiar, and not at all what I expected Santa’s hands would look like. Santa’s hands would be white and pasty from doing nothing but eating cookies and ordering elves around. But these hands were brown and weathered with small scars from past cuts and scrapes. They were strong, yet gentle, like iron wrapped in leather.
I knew these hands.

These were the hands that held me up in the water at Sardis Lake as I pretended to swim. The hands that kept me out of the reach of our cousins’ hateful German Shepherd. The same hands that would later help me learn to tie my shoes and hold me steady as I learned to ride a bicycle. Hands that would brush soapy foam on my face so I could pretend to shave and guide my hands as I learned to polish my shoes. The hands that folded in prayer for me every night of my life, then and now.

These were my father’s hands.

As I climbed down off of his lap, I gave him a knowing look, a look that said, “I know who you are.” And I think he understood.

As we walked back toward the parking garage, Mom asked me how my visit with Santa went.
“That wasn’t Santa,” I said matter-of-factly. “That was my daddy.”

Later that same Christmas season, Santa visited my kindergarten class just days before we were to be out for the holidays. He burst through the door and issued an authentic, “Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Christmas!” All the other children rushed to him, enthralled and enamored. I simply put my hands on my hips, cocked my head to the side, and rolled my eyes.

“Daa-aad,” I whined, as if embarrassed by his presence. “What are you doing here?”

Instantly I was whisked out of the room like the president being carried off by the Secret Service after a failed assassination attempt. I was encouraged (read: threatened) to play along. Which I did gladly. After all, how many kids could claim that their Dads knew, let alone helped, the real Santa Claus?