My Dad. There are two days in every year, since 1977, that I would rather not have to experience. July 12th and Father’s Day. There are 365 days in a year and I love living 363 of those days. As I age, I realize that my days on this earth are now fewer than the days I have lived. Sometimes it is difficult for humans to come to grips with mortality. For me personally, I have come to accept my life for what it has been and for what it may yet become. I am no longer some bright eyed kid that sees himself changing the world. I am no longer a young father trying to raise a family. Those days are behind me. I now have grandchildren and I watch from afar as they grow and begin to experience life. They are three of the happiest kids you will ever meet and that confirms for me that my daughter and her husband are doing a great job as their parents. Thankfully, I have met the woman of my dreams and desires, after having lost the first person I thought would fill that role in my life but didn’t. She has not only given me the gift of sharing our lives together but she has also given me the love of a second daughter. So I am a very blessed man. Which brings me back to why those two days are so difficult for me. Having lived 56 years, I have experienced the pain of losing many people that were very close to my heart. I thank God every day that my mother is still here and I have not yet had to experience life without her. I am extremely proud of the woman she was, is and has always been. She’s the toughest bird in the bunch and she is a survivor. Did she live a perfect live, was she the perfect mother? No, but she always loved her children. Besides giving me life, the best thing my mother ever did for me was to marry my father. Though I have many reasons to thank my mother, marrying my father will always be the greatest. Thank you, Mom. My story is no different than many of yours. I grew up admiring my father. I worshiped the ground he walked on as a small boy. I wanted to be like my dad. I would put on his work shirt and pretend that I was “Mr. Ralph”. I would sit at his feet in the bathroom watching him shave, I watched as he laid out his clothes for taking my mom out to dinner. He taught me at an early age that the way a man dressed told people what type of man he was. He taught me to always shine your shoes before going to church, on a date or a job interview. He taught me that real men don’t drink from a straw nor wear stripped shirts. LOL He had his reasons!!!! By his example he taught me how to treat a woman with respect, never force yourself on a woman and always walk one half step behind her. He opened my mother’s car door, door to any shop, church or house. He never walked in ahead of my mother. My dad could be mad with my mother about something but he never changed how he treated her in public. He respected her! As a small boy I can remember a few arguments between Mom and Dad but no matter what, my dad never threaten to harm or hit my mother. In my mother’s 30’s she went through a very difficult period, as many women in the 60’s did. For as long as I live I will remember one situation that hurt my father greatly. I was a small boy sitting behind him as he was driving the car, I saw what he saw. I was scared. Sitting behind him in the car I could see his eyes in the rearview mirror. I watched as tears came to his eyes. He was hurting. Without a word, I saw him look into that rearview mirror, see me watching him. For a long moment he just stared at me, then he smiled and winked at me. I sat back into the seat as he drove my sister, two brothers and I, home. My life began to change that day. I realized that no one was perfect. It was time to grow up. My dad was not an educated man as far as schooling. At 12 years of age, he was expected to help raise his sister and two brothers. His dad and mom were very religious, hard-working people. But it was an era where kids went to work early and schooling was for the rich kids after a certain point. They worked the cotton mills of Orangeburg SC. My dad understood what hard work was all about. But he watched his father and mother work their hands to the bone in those cotton mills and he knew he wanted better for his future children. After marrying my mother, he move his growing family to Columbia as the result of a job promotion with the Winn Dixie Stores. My dad worked as a meat cutter manager in the Winn Dixie on Meeting St. After a 10 hour shift, he’d come home, eat dinner, watch the news and then head off to the Olympia Mills to work a full shift as a loom fixer. He was always talking to us about owning a business. He would always be reading books about business and taking some mail order course or test. He had a dream that one day he would be his own boss. He often told us that every man had to work to provide for his family but the man that could build his own business was a successful man. When we got lazy and skipped school it would be my dad that found us and he’d tear our tails up. He believed in educate even though he had little of it. One day my dad came home and sat every one of us down to have a family meeting. He told us that he had a chance to buy a gas station but it would take all the money he and mom had been saving to buy some land. We had already started clearing that piece of property and had visions of building a big house like the one on My Three Son’s. Now we were going to have to give that up for a gas station? My little brother Marion and I were considered too young to understand so we weren’t allowed to vote. My mom voted no, my dad voted yes as did my oldest brother Gerald. Gerald didn’t care about a big house all he cared about was working on cars so in his eyes the station was a dream come true. That left the final deciding vote to my sister Sherill. Well, there was no suspense now, she loved my dad more than all of us boys combined. So we bought a gas station. As it turned out that was the best move our family made right up until July 12, 1977. Our lives changed as my father’s ideas for business began to produce results. We all worked at those stations and true to his business beliefs, we were paid for our efforts. At the time you don’t seem to realize that you had so little until you finally had extra money to buy things. During my teen years I pretty much had all I wanted. I loved horses and was allowed to purchase my own. I loved anything with a motor and was allowed to buy a go-cart followed by a mini bike followed yet again by a motorcycle. As a freshman in high school, I was taken to Ben Satcher Ford in Lexington and told to pick my 1st car. I began my love affair with clothes and since I had my own money, I was allowed to wear whatever fashion I wished too. My dad taught me about life, about business and about money. During the summer days of high school, if I was not playing baseball or off at some camp, I had to work at the station. It was during those days that I came to realize how smart my dad was even without a high school education. He could see that I didn’t have the grease monkey gene that he and my brother Gerald had. He would joke with me about how I had better get a good education because the only job I’d be good at was a “white collar” job. Since I like to question everything and argue, he thought I should have been a lawyer but since he knew little about how college worked, he figured I’d do okay in business. So, he took it upon himself to teach me about accounting and profit and loss statements. He taught me how to manage a checking account. How to use the Rule of 78’s to figure interest on monthly billing statements. He taught me how to read the Stock Market reports in the newspaper. He would point out a stock and tell me to track it for a week. I would come back and show him how the stock had either gained or loss during the week. He would then ask my opinion, was it a good stock to invest in or not. I was 15 years old when I purchased my first share. In the 10th grade I took a Civics’ class taught by Richard Smith. It would be the only class in my entire high school career that I would make straight A’s in. Mr. Smith would often laugh and ask me if I was bored. My dad had already taught me the things Mr. Smith was teaching us. As so often happens in life, the things you want the most can suddenly become the things that cause you the most pain. By the summer of 1977, I had moved away from my parent’s home. I was starting my life. Tuesday, July 12, 1977 began sunny and hot. The temperatures had been hitting the high 90’s for over a week. My dad was busy running his station. Around 12 o’clock my brother Gerald said good bye to dad and headed home to get ready for his afternoon shift job. My mother called to tell dad that she was running late bringing his lunch but would be there shortly. He told her he loved her before hanging up. She felt something strange come over her. The Indian spirits of her heritage were warning her of difficulties that were moments away. She told my brother Marion that she had to hurry to the station, something was wrong. He helped her load dad’s lunch into the car. Then they both heard the phone as it rang out breaking through the heat wave…….. My dad would be murdered on July 12th at his place of business, a business he loved before he ever purchased it. A dream that had come true the day he paid the money to take it over would become a nightmare for the family he left behind. For 36 years July 12th has not existed for me. For many of those years I have tried to be alone on that day. Never wanting to think about the moment my phone rang out, never wanting to think of what I loss that day, never wishing to remember the sights and sounds of the hours that followed that phone call. Never wanting those around me to see me cry again as if those moments had just occurred. Those moments are as real to me tonight as they were 36 years ago. I see the hospital, my sister dialing a pay phone but not knowing who she was calling. I see the floor as I walk through the emergency room looking for my dad. I see the door to the small room where my mother and other family sat crying as the doctors spoke to them. I turn, I must find my dad. I begin looking behind curtains until I find him. He laying on the gurney, on his back. His chest is covered in blood but I can see the gaping stab wounds in his chest. I reach for his hand, hands that were always so big to me, hands that had always patted me on my back when we walked together. His hands now appear so small in mine. Though tears I see now that the biggest, strongest man in my world is just average is size. My dad’s life on this earth is over…. Father’s Day. A day we celebrate the lives of the one man that can never be replaced in our lives. It doesn’t matter if you have a great dad or the sorriest of dads. Your father is meant to teach you about life and how to be respectful, honest and hardworking. He is supposed to teach you about a love that is different from that your mother teaches you. He holds a place of honor in your life regardless if he ever truly earns it or not. It’s just the way we are wired. Daughters are closer to their dad’s while sons are closer to their mothers because secretly they desire to be like the father and win the love of that mother. Though you may have been raised by some man other than your true father, you still long for the approval that can only come from that one man. You may have shared your life with a man that stepped in to take on that roll of father and you may love him as a dad. Still, there will always be something missing. For me, Father’s Day is a reminder of what I lost on July 12, 1977. Yes, I have wonderful children that honor me on Father’s Day, but they can never replace the loss in my heart. The void that has existed for 36 years was not filled the day my son was born. It was not filled the day I became a grandfather or Papa. It can’t be filled. It can only be endured. I have personally had many successes in this life as well as many failures. I always judge myself through how I think my dad would have seen my actions. I know I would have disappointed and hurt him many times in these last 36 years. But I also know that many things in my life would have made him proud. He would have loved to watch his grandson, his name sake, excel in baseball winning a Little League World Series along the way. He would have been as smitten by his granddaughter as I have been by the granddaughter she has given me. He would have been hurt and disappointed by the divorce but he would so enjoy the woman that fills my life with love and laughter today. He would have patted me on the back as we walked and told me that I finally got it right. He would be such a joy if only I had one more day or even a moment to share with him. After 36 years, it is still through tears that I say…..I love you dad and I always will until the day I see you again. I wish I could tell you face to face just how great a dad you were to me…..Happy Father’s Day
Posted on: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 08:03:44 +0000
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