MY FATHER

1938-2008

As much as it saddens me to sit here and write this, I know my dad is in a better place and is no longer suffering.

Most of my memories of my dad, when describing him, are to say that he was a hard-working man. He worked for well over 30 years to pay off a house and raise a family of three kids. He didn't have a lot of free weekends, as he worked most Saturdays, too. His big rough hands and tan skin were testaments to his hard work. I could never re-pay all that he did for myself and my brother and sister. He wouldn't expect it anyway as it was done out of love.

He was an outdoorsman - always preferred being outside to being inside. Even in the evenings when I was growing up he would spend time outside looking at the stars. Pretty much anything outdoors, he loved.

Fishing was one of his big recreational activities - he LOVED fishing. He would take us kids out fishing with cane poles in fresh water and I remember quite a few times he took me out on his little john-boat to fish in lakes and rivers. He was pretty good at cleaning fish too, as I recall.

Now, life with my dad was not all peaches and cream. There were lots of times that we argued and periods when we just didn't get along at all. He could say some abusive things at times. He was a good disciplinarian when we were kids. It seemed like he always had a "switch" cut from a tree that he would swat us with when misbehaving. He always made us say "yes m'am" and "no ma'm," and call our neighbors by their last names (Mr. or Mrs.).

He was pretty good at barbecuing chicken on the grill and had his secret sauce that he liked to use. He would cut small palmetto stalks that we used to roast hot dogs with in the back yard on Friday nights. I also remember when he turned an old refrigerator into a smoker and we had that in the back yard for years.

When talking about my dad, it wouldn't be complete without talking about our Ponce De Leon trips. Every year we would head "up home" as he called it to our family reunion. He would always tune up the car and put a couple of new tires on the week before we left. It was one of those times that our whole family piled in the car and were all together for that 3 or 4 days. He knew all of the back roads and the old families that lived up there. He could tell you who owned which pieces of property and how far their property lines went and all that. He would always get us safely home on Labor Day - just in time for the first day of school.

He had some peculiar habits and other trademarks - one of which was his train whistle. He had a way of doing a train whistle sound with his throat that I've never been able to duplicate - nor anyone else quite like he did it. Then there was his snuff. He liked to chew and spit, much to our dislike most of the time. He had a high-pitched laugh that he always did, too. When in a really good mood, he liked to sing an old country song called "Easy Lovin'."

Daddy was good at what he did. He was a tree expert by trade, working for a tree company in the earlier years, then with the county for his last 26 years of working. He had two elderly women that he did long term work for, too. He never earned any college degrees nor was more formally educated than high school, but he knew his trees and how to work with them. Two great reminders of that are the two oak trees he planted at the house - one in the front and one in the back. They are huge and towering now, much more than the little seedlings he took such great care of the day he got them and brought them home.

I take pain in the fact that he never got to totally enjoy his retirement. Not too long after his retirement from the county was when he first had serious medical problems. He recovered from those, for the most part, for about 3 years, but then things recurred and one thing led to the next - he ended up in and out of the hospital and into rehab for a period of time. He did finally get to come home for one last week about 3 weeks ago. In a wheelchair by this point, he was even making plans for Thanksgiving. He commented every morning about what a beautiful days we were having. It was on Monday night October 20th that, after supper, he fell in the bathroom and went into cardiac arrest. He was stabilized by paramedics and rushed to the hospital, but he never regained consciousness. He had lost too much oxygen to the brain when he went out at the house and he would never never recover. There was just too much wrong with him and they couldn't fix everything.

And so it was that a golden heart stopped beating in the early morning hours on November 4th. God saw him and it was time for Daddy's suffering on earth to end. Much of my family mentioned how surreal it all seemed, We all know, however, that we WILL see him again. For now, it's a great loss for us here, but I'm sure God's trees are looking a whole lot better now!