Leaving the doors unlocked

I follow a few simple rules about maintaining some shreds of privacy when blogging. I never mention living family members by name, nor do I include photos of them. I don’t publish our physical address or even our street name (it’s handy to have a box at the UPS Store for a mailing address). I don’t mention what schools my kids attend. And it’s not just to keep weirdos from tracking down my children. As TDavid pointed out, “when they become adults we feel that they should decide what they do and don’t want Googled”.

And who knows what kind of successor to Internet search will be available by then? Back in the early 80′s when I was clawing at the corporate ladder, I probably would have been pretty embarrassed to have my colleagues see this picture of me and my Dad, taken in 1976. Funny, now I’m more embarrassed about ever having participated in that PHB-dominated culture than I am about having gone through a teenage Messianic phase .

My Dad played a good Satan to my Jesus. He drank, smoked, cursed, stayed up ’til all hours, drove fast, didn’t go to church, and didn’t mind getting into a fight. He and I exchanged the traditional parent/teenager roles to some degree.

But he taught me a lot. As a good Tempter should, he was always trying to make me into a real man instead of some sort of an angel. He would often force me to fight him with real punches (against my wishes) so I would be able to hold my own on the schoolyard. When he’d finally get me to knock him down or draw blood, he’d sit back and laugh, and then get up and give me a big bear hug. He taught me to aim and fire a shotgun when I was five, to drive a tractor when I was eight, and to drive a ’51 International pick-up on the farm when I was ten.

We spent a lot of time together in that ’69 Dodge Monaco pictured right behind us. Late nights after Johnny Carson we would hit the back-roads for more advanced driving instruction when I was about 14. I still remember the way that boat would pitch and yaw over the paved waves of state highway 40. The feel of the vinyl-covered steering wheel in my sweaty palms at 4AM on the way home as I tried to pilot that barge between the lines while Dad snored in the seat beside me.

By the time the picture above was taken, I had become a religious pacifist. I vowed never to become like my father. As Mark Twain said:

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

My father did the one thing for me that helped to humanize me more than anything else I have ever experienced. He put me to work at the auto parts store he managed. Yes, he put my introverted, naive ass right out there in front of the public. And what a public it was: mostly salty old mechanics who had no time for religion or philosophy. It taught me a lot about dealing with all kinds of people. For instance, when you’ve been told that you aren’t to extend credit to a particular customer because of his payment history, and he walks in and says “charge it to my account”, you don’t respond with “I’m sorry I can’t, because you don’t pay your bills.” After he stormed out, my other coworkers were a little too eager to inform me that the gentleman in question had been known to put people in the hospital when they pissed him off. I’m sure that the only thing that separated my scrawny ass from the mutilation it so richly deserved was my father’s reputation.

Dad cultivated his reputation, in his own words, as “the meanest son of a bitch in Pittsylvania County.” He was former NSA. He left the front door of his house unlocked, but every gun in the house was loaded at all times. He used to drill us children on what to do in case of a home invasion. My station was under the foot of the stairs with the .410 shotgun. Dad parked his car (and later his truck) in town with the doors unlocked and the key in the ignition. To anyone who asked he replied that he hoped someone would mess with him so he could have the pleasure of beating the living shit out of them.

That’s why on one Thanksgiving when I was living alone in California and I made a surprise trip back to my parent’s house in Virginia, I knew that the front door would be unlocked. I walked in without so much as knocking. Neither was I surprised when Dad instinctively reached for the loaded rifle he always kept near his chair (it’s by a corner of the cabinet just off the left edge of this picture). Of course, he immediately set it back in its place when he recognized me and gave me a big hug instead of some lead.

My Mom and sister had just taken the turkey out of the oven, so I had timed my spontaneous red-eye trip perfectly. Have you ever tried to get airline tickets for the day before Thanksgiving, on the day before Thanksgiving?

The last time I saw my father alive was on a Thanksgiving four years later, along with my new (current/final) wife and our young child. Dad knew he was dying. He was very thin and frail, and had a hard time getting around. But, as usual when I came to visit, he insisted on driving his grey Silverado pickup to the local store in town, taking me along for conversation. Though his steps across the parking lot were measured and painful, he held his head high and looked everyone in the eye. He left the truck unlocked, and the key in the ignition.

And nobody messed with the meanest son of a bitch in Pittsylvania County.