BOOTS

As I went out walking one morning for pleasure,

I spied an old cowpuncher a-ridin’ along.

I cocked my head and smiled in admiration as the tune Daddy sang filled the cab of the pickup truck. The miles whizzed by, gobbled up by the Whoopie, ti-yi-yo, get along you little dogies. I’ve long since forgotten where the road ended, but the pleasure of the ride lingers. Every kid should be so lucky to have a dad swoop her up and carry her off to whatever fancy demanded attention that day.

Daddy was unusual like that, taking me or my sisters off to look at a donkey or pick up a couple of roosters, perhaps scout out a lead for a trade he had in mind. Sometimes I found myself riding shotgun as we went to the weekly livestock sale or holding a shoebox full of day-old chicks to take to the house and keep warm until the entire nest had hatched. Unusual, because in the fifties other dads didn’t involve themselves much in the parenting process, but then, normal conventions held little interest for Daddy, then or now.

I can’t really say when I realized my dad did things a little different. Was it when he brought a baby raccoon home to be the family pet? Or the Easter we had both twin lambs and twin goats? And he let us bring them in the house to love on, never mind they left little round baby droppings all over the carpet—“smart pills” he called them. Smart? My mother failed to see the humor. Did other dads pile their little girls on their laps and tell them a beloved Gramps had died, tears flowing down their cheeks as they choked the words out? Was it unusual to save up for a set of WORLD BOOK encyclopedias and then actually sit for hours reading them, volume by volume? Not at our house.

Daddy reveres knowledge, not for the degrees obtained through formal study or the resulting monetary reward, but for the pleasure of just “knowing.” He would always say you could never tell when you would meet someone and that obscure scrap of information might come in handy. Case in point: One summer I had a date with a college chum from Long Island, and in our part of Oklahoma, any New Yorker was something of a novelty. A little peculiar, to be sure, Hank had lamb-chop sideburns and a thick Yankee accent, and I agonized over what Daddy would think. All for naught as they immediately immersed themselves in a lengthy conversation about the native birds of Long Island, leaving me tapping my foot and wondering if we would get to the movie before the beginning credits. And Hank thought Daddy was pretty “cool.”

We built an addition on our house when I was eleven years old. Child labor laws and minimum wage didn’t exist back then, not when a job needed done. I learned to mix cement by hand using a hoe, a wheelbarrow and the garden hose. The consistency had to be just right to meet the specifications of the job foreman, a.k.a. Daddy.  My sisters and I pulled nails out of boards by the hour, getting paid the household maximum wage—a penny per nail. We griped and grumbled, but we also learned a work ethic—do a good job and get the job done. An added bonus became evident to me as an adult: a feeling of self-sufficiency and fearlessness in attacking projects out of my realm. Today I can operate a band saw, hang wallpaper, refinish furniture or write a story, not because I’m an expert at those skills, but because I learned I could do anything if I put my mind to it.

Daddy’s education came through life’s experiences, but we were encouraged, expected to go to college. During my junior year of nursing school I became very discouraged and disheartened. True to form, Daddy did something he had never done before—he wrote me a letter. Not the usual “take heart, you can do it” kind of prose, but a humorous, poignant tale of “You think you’ve got troubles, let me tell you what happened to me.”  He chronicled the demise of Rover II (he named all his dogs Rover), a recent trade of two guineas for a pea fowl which he penned with the turkeys in hopes of obtaining a flock of peaurkeys, the neighbor’s dogs raiding his henhouse and killing seventeen chickens, causing him to consider buying more land to use as a cemetery. On page six he got around to telling me to “keep your nose clean and to the grindstone,” but by then I had laughed and cried myself into a determination to stick it out. I graduated on time with my class.

I can’t remember hearing the words, “I love you,” growing up, but I knew it instinctively through the times we had—family vacations, holidays, impromptu sessions of Black Jack around the oak pedestal table in the kitchen, supper at six o’clock, sitting in the third pew on the right in our small country church. Daddy tried to “limbo” under the broom handle in our front yard and waited many nights until the wee hours of the morning to pick me up from football games. He taught me important truths like: Don’t pick up a mouse by the tail and you can “shoot the moon” in a game of pitch with just an ace and deuce in your hand, providing it’s the first hand of a new game.

Daddy always wears boots and a crumpled sweat-stained cowboy hat, but no one would brand him as being a “cowboy” in the western movie sense of the word. Sure, he’s roped a few calves and ridden more horses than John Wayne, but he also knows about horse doctoring, ditch digging, church ushering, and being the most original grandpa in the county. What other kid has the distinction of being picked up from pre-school in an Amish horse cart to spend the day at Grandpa’s house? His youngest of seven grandsons was the envy of all the four year olds as Grandpa’s strong hands lifted him up to the buggy seat. Crusty on the outside, but soft as a marshmallow on the inside, a genuine hero with neither wealth nor fame, Daddy just reinvents the role of grandpa. . .dad. . .friend with each new day, usually to the delight of all who encounter him. Like the time he gave my own boys a lesson in religion, telling them how John the Baptist ate grasshoppers in the wilderness. To prove their edibility, he snapped the legs off a few of the nutritious insects and chomped them down. Grandpa Mike became a legend of gargantuan proportions.

People, animals, stories he’d heard, and places he’d visited or read about—he could take just about any subject and weave it into an extraordinary tale of delight and intrigue for his audience. I daresay practically everyone who spent more than five minutes with him could relate some yarn he had bestowed on them, and each story would be different. Paul Bunyan was an amateur compared to Daddy.

I’ve spent many hours held hostage by his narratives, enjoyable and entertaining to be sure. But the same humor and novel outlook has helped him endure some incredible times.   Recently he cared for my mother during her battle with cancer, putting his life on hold to take her to Houston, San Francisco, and countless round trips to Amarillo for diagnosis, surgeries, and treatments. Complaining wasn’t an option as he learned to change dressings, tend the kitchen, and the last few months of Mother’s life, provide around-the-clock nursing for her. Certainly we all helped, but he provided the glue that held our lives together during a tough time.

Now seventy-five years young, you won’t find any grass growing under his beat-up boots. He’s got neighbors to visit, cakes to bake, trades to be haggled over, and as always, a menagerie of animals (dependents, he calls them) to tend. You’d have to look high and low, near and far, to find another human being to fill those boots, and even then, I doubt such a creature exists.  An apt description of who he is escapes me, but if you’re interested in trading a few bales of hay for a three-legged chicken, I’ll give you his number.

 Published in Saddlebaron Magazine, Winter Edition, 2002.

My dad today,

still going strong.