Growing up with my Daddy

My Daddy….
Growing up, we didn’t get to spend a lot of me- time with our daddy. It seemed like he was always working, at his job and then at home. He’d come home from work and we’d work in the garden, or mow the yard and he spent a lot of time teaching us how to do things that we needed to know to grow up to be responsible adults. But there were lots of good times. I remember a cold snowy day, when he took me and Bobby rabbit hunting. Just me and Bobby. And I remember the time and patience he had, teaching us how to drive. I remember coming home from school and telling daddy about my day and I remember his thirst for learning as I explained something new I had learned that day. I remember each Christmas Eve night, and how he loved for all of us kids to sing Christmas songs around the tree. And Christmases were always awesome. Mama always made sure of that. I remember one Saturday night where daddy and I stayed up late and watched Marilyn Monroe in “The River of No Return” and it has always been my favorite movie. I remember Sunday nights, when all eight of us would gather in the living room to watch Bonanza and Wild Kingdom. We only had one television so we all had to watch the same thing. I was very thankful that daddy didn’t watch football back then. It was bad enough we had to suffer thru wrestling every now and then.

And we did everything as a family. We took vacations every summer. We visited family in Chicago, Alabama, and Oklahoma. We went on Sunday afternoon drives, to the river, to the mountains, and to Conway and Friday night was our night out. We’d go out to eat at Johns place or if we had supper at home, we might go out for an ice cream cone. We went to the zoo, to the fair and to the circus. And with six kids, it couldn’t have been easy, but we were the happiest kids I knew.

And though I had almost forgotten, I do remember the laughter. It usually came at my expense but looking back I can see daddy almost rolling on the floor. His biggest joy came in scaring one of us. Living out in the country, if we changed the channel on the tv, we usually had to go out and turn the antennae. Some of you may remember that, standing in the dark, turning the pole and listening for someone inside to yell, “That’s it” when you got good reception. Daddy loved to remind us to watch out for the ‘boogie bears’ as he sent us out the door to our doom. A few times, he would sneak out the back door after we had gone out the front door and he would come around the house and scare us to death. I remember one night, when it was my night to wash dishes and Rhonda would rinse. Everyone was in the living room watching tv, except me and I was standing at the sink in front of the window trying to hurry and get them washed so that I could go and watch tv also. It was very dark that night and you couldn’t actually see anything out the window but I did see a hand slowly crawling up the window. I screamed and ran into the living room, knocking Bobby down along the way, and jumped into mamas lap. Everyone but me thought it was hilarious when daddy walked in the front door laughing. I was so mad but I quickly got over it and began to see the humor. I always thought of Bobby as a casualty of that incident because he was standing in the doorway and I flattened him. But I just realized as I was writing this, that he was standing in the doorway to see my reaction because he knew what daddy was up to, so he wasn’t the innocent bystander I always thought he was….Oh well,,,,

I remember when Bobby died, it was the first time I heard my daddy tell me that he loved me. I always knew it from his actions. But daddy just didn’t waste words. And to know that his heart was hurting and to know that Bobby may not have ever heard those words broke my heart. You know it….. but its nice to hear it. And when you do, you know its coming from his heart.

Daddy has never ever let me down. And I sometimes have to careful when asking his opinion because he will jump right in and just take care of the problem. He remodeled my entire house when my son had his accident so that everything would be accessible. He built a 40 ft ramp for Jamie to get in and out of the house. One day, I came home from work, and he and mama had planted 12 crepe myrtles, 30 Rose of Sharons and a patch of wild flowers in my yard. They were beautiful. And it wasn’t the first time that I had come home to find that they had been working in my yard all day.

I love my daddy, I respect my daddy and I admire my daddy. He is an awesome man. He’s sometime a little tough on the outside and maybe that comes from being the youngest of six boys. If he showed the least bit of vulnerability or feeling, he got whooped on. So the words don’t come easy.

But he planted flowers for me…….