When I was born my dad sold his Harley. Or at least that is what I was always told. "I had to sell my Harley because we had you and I couldn't afford both." Now, I think selling the motorcycle was an effort to become an adult, saying goodbye to self indulgent hobbies. Maybe it was a little of both. Whatever the case, over 25 years later he was able to get another one.
When I was three I put nails into the holes of his truck's engine. Helping him work in the garage, I strategically dropped in nail after nail. He fished them out with a magnet tied to a string, like that school carnival game where you throw the clothespin on a string over a bed sheet hung from the ceiling and hope to get a really nice prize. My dad succeeded.
My dad built our house by himself- aside from pouring the concrete slab. He hates pouring concrete. This always amazed me. How could he get the electrical wires to meet exactly where they needed to, install a toilet and make sure what was flushed down stayed down, and get gas to come out of the stove when I turned the knobs? I am still amazed and even more so when I think how he did all this before he was thirty years old. I will be thirty in less than a year and can't even knit a scarf.
I blame my dad for my fair, acne prone skin. My sisters tan easily like my mother; one hour on the riding lawn mower and they're glistening like Peruvian goddesses. I visited the dermatologist for expensive face creams. I have the square Martin jawline and dark body hair; hairy arms and hairy back. It's just intriguing to think about on a woman, isn't it? I was, dare I say delighted, when I saw the same dark hair on my dad's sister's lower back when she bent to pick up something at a family gathering. It's nice to know I'm not alone with this freakish, unladylike trait.
My dad wears long-sleeved wrangler shirts and wrangler jeans. The denim, pearl-snap kind. He has pulled calves, dug ponds, fixed Farmall tractors, cleaned fish and knows how to use a post-hole-digger. He owns a backhoe, a trackhoe and a truck with a boom on the back. (This comes in handy when cutting limbs out of trees.)
On Father's Day, 1996 I was in a car wreck. I had been driving for four months. It wasn't my fault, but my car was totaled and so was the car that rear-ended me without breaking. Her car came to a stop under an eighteen-wheeler. I think about this every Father's Day. How my sister and I walked away from that mess without a scratch. Poor Dad; what a day.
It was in my dad's lap where I found peace when I broke-up with Chris on Christmas Day, 1999. It was the first break-up in a long line of them; our on again- off again relationship that lasted ten years before we got married. After walking in the front door I collapsed in the recliner on top of my dad. I sat there and cried. This was unlike me. Not the emotionally distraught over-the-top teenage drama, but that I was inconsolable. And he didn't ask what or why. He just sat and let me be; snot and nonsense and all. His not saying anything, not trying to fix anything was what I needed.
My dad likes to grill and even lets us girls cook veggie burgers, zucchini and onions, even though he would prefer a "beef only" grill. It's my personal belief that he keeps cows for a hobby and to fully round out his farm. I only went to the sale barn with him once. I've never been out in the flat bottom boat on the pond or even walked the length of the fence line. But I did pick phlox and catch perch and throw rotten tomatoes at my sisters.
I'd take a huge insulated mug of sweet tea to my dad while he was on the tractor, or sitting in the porch swing or standing looking across the land; his focus was on something in the pasture I never saw, but I believe it was real.
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