My daddy: An old post revisited

Someone was posting on Facebook a little while ago about snakes, so I thought I'd bring out an old post and dust it off. Makes me miss my daddy.


  Okay...so last night I was all freaked out and complaining about that damned Murphy whose law just plains sucks eggs.  You know, the one that says if it can go wrong it will?

I was visiting the boyfriend in town and called my dad to see what was going on.

"Dee, Versace is gone.  I've looked everywhere."

Versace, for those of you who don't know, is my daughter's precious little puggle (cross between a pug and a beagle).  The ex-husband decided he didn't want to deal with her anymore after my daughter got an apartment, so I went over to the house on my last visit to Los Angeles and got her and brought her home.  My daughter loves that dog more than anything or anyone else.  So on the few occasions something's happened where we thought we'd have to make that dreaded call and tell her something awful has happened have been truly horrifying times.

Last night was one of them.

My dad lives on 400 acres in the country.  There's a fellow who lives  behind us who raises cows, and he and my dad have an arrangement.  If he'll come and cut the pasture and make it look all pretty like a golf course, he can keep the hay and use it for his cattle.

But Versace loves to chase cars.  So we have to keep her inside if anyone's driving around outside.  So back to the story.

"I'd waited until I was sure Robert had left and then I let her out," he said.  "But a little while later I heard the other dogs making a big racket, and went out to see what it was."

Turns out all the dogs were frantically barking at a big-as-all-get-out water mocassin.  My 85-year-old father, who cut down a pecan tree all by himself last year, got a stick.  Not even a big stick.  Just a stick.  And beat that three-foot-long, four-inch-diameter, mean-ass water mocassin to death.  A little stick maybe two feet long.

"I felt bad for the poor snake," he said.  "But I had to do it."

The closer he gets to his own mortality, the more he hates taking a life -- any life.

I'd have been scared silly.

Then he noticed Versace was gone.  And that's when I called.  We both knew what had happened.  She'd been bitten and run off to die somewhere.

"I'll be right out," I said, along with a few rather horrible profanities under my breath, and drove pell-mell out to Daddy's.  We called and called and called.  Nothing.

I was supposed to have taken her to the vet this week for all her shots, her worming, and her rattlesnake vaccine.  This was a water mocassin...but still.

I was heartbroken.  And exhausted.  I went to bed.  I ranted about Murphy's Law on Facebook for a bit and then turned off the light and went to bed.  I was in that twilight where you're not really asleep but not awake either, when I heard something running into the room and jumping onto the bed.

"Versace?"

She waggled her butt and smiled and licked my face.

Am I dreaming?  I stumbled out of bed and went downstairs.  I crept into Daddy's room.

"Daddy?"

"She came to the door a few minutes ago.  I was so glad to see her I gave her a whole can of cat food."

Canned cat food is Versace's guilty pleasure.  He usually curses at her and kicks her out of the way when she tries to horn in on the kitties' food.

I took her today to get those shots.

How do you spell relief?  W-o-o-f!

Matters Familia - Daddy

A reprint of an old post:


In 1980, I married and moved to Los Angeles where I stayed for 27 years. As the years crept by, I began to worry about my parents, who were getting old, and I began to think it might be time to finally make the decision to come home.

I began visiting more often, and kept a journal of my visits. While looking through some old entries, I came across the following. 

June 20, 2006

Now that I've been home a couple of weeks, my father and I have fallen into a routine of sorts. It's more of a contest of wills than routine. He leaves messes; I pick them up; he complains loudly that he can't find anything because I've hidden everything. I return his withering, long-suffering gaze and reply that it's right in front of him or right where I told him to look.

"No, it's not," he says irritably. "When you're gone I'm not going to be able to find anything around here! I'll have to call you all hours of the day and night." 

He's been a slob forever, and gets utterly irritated that I try to clean up behind him.

"Stop it," he protests. "If you keep cleaning, the housekeeper won't have anything to do and she'll quit! I have to leave enough of a mess to make it worth her while to come out here," he says as he tosses an old piece of ham onto the counter to wither and dry. 

"Don't touch that," he warns. "Where the hell did you put my toothpicks?"

"Toothpicks? I never saw any toothpicks,"
"Dammit, Dee! Now, I'll have to go all the way to WalMart. They're the only place in town that carries them." 

He hates WalMart.

"They're nice and flat and they're really cheap and come in a great big box. I can't stand the ones at Piggly Wiggly." 

"Well, where were they?" 

"They were right there on the butcher block. Oh, why do you have to hide everything?" 

"Oh, good grief! They're right here under the napkins." 

"Why on earth would you put them there?" 

Suddenly his look of annoyance is replaced with one of sadness. 

"Oh, it's going to be so grim when you're gone. What will I do?"

It was the sweetest, saddest moment I remember having in quite a long time.

We spent that afternoon working in the yard. I'd gone after the weeds full tilt when I first arrived, only to break out with a terrific case of poison ivy the next day.

Today the gardeners came -- a couple of women who share a house, a job and a life. The last time they worked for Daddy, they returned the day after they'd finished to clip his golden retriever, for whom they'd developed a special fondness.

(I'm horrible with names, and couldn't remember theirs not five minutes after meeting them, so I've invented names for them here.)

"He reminds me of our golden," said Jane. "And he just looked so darned hot." 

That was all my father needed to hear. They were good people.

I showed them how I'd pulled huge, horrid vines from the azaleas a few days before.

"Somehow I got into some poison ivy while I was doing it," I said, showing off my battle scars. "See those big vines in that tree there," I said. "It was that stuff. I couldn't reach this one." 

"Yup." the short one replied. "That's poison ivy, all right." 

"Impossible," I said. 

Each leaf was as big around as my hand. 

"Poison ivy has small leaves."

"Nope. That's a fully mature poison ivy vine," she assured me. "I'm surprised you only got it as bad as you did." 

I felt pretty foolish. 

After discussing what would make nice plantings for the yard, Daddy handed me his wallet and an old pickup truck and sent us off down Kingston Road to the nursery. We picked out ten big, hardy crape myrtle trees -- seven Natchez whites and three crimson something or others -- and started back down the road. 

The humidity had finally had enough of itself and grumbling with thunder, squeezed out a few fat, overdeveloped raindrops, which only served to muddy the already filthy windshield.

"I have no idea where the wipers are on this thing," I said nervously as the road disappeared in a brown, watery haze. 

"I can't see a thing," said Jane.

"Uh, oh," said Joni. "Here comes a truck." 

I tried to appear calm as my eyes searched for signs of roadway through the watered curtain.

"Aha! Here's the switch," said Jane, and we all let out horrified giggles as the wipers switched on and had absolutely no effect on the glass. We were about to die. The tanker truck and I managed to avoid each other, but not before making us stare mortality in the face.

Afterwards, I picked a clear track on the glass between which I could see and peered cautiously at the road until we'd managed to make it back to Daddy's house safely.

I'd assured them that Daddy would hook up the auger to the tractor and make fast work of any holes we needed to dig. Ahem. We spent the next three hours digging holes in the hardest, rock-strewn, clay soil I've ever had the misfortune to dig into.

After squirting each hole with a high-pressure stream of water to loosen the soil, we attacked the ground with shovels, pickaxes, hoes and posthole diggers. Two hours later, we three youngish women were covered in mud and sweat and blisters and wanted to sit down, but my 80-year-old father was still happily chopping away at the earth with a posthole digger. 

"By the time I hook up that auger," he'd say between blows, "...we'll have these things all dug!" 

When we were done for the day, I asked Jane and Joni how much we owed. 

"Here. Take an extra $10 for combat pay," I said, referring to my father's refusal to let us do anything the easy way. 

"No kidding," said Joni. "Especially after making us ride with you in that truck in the rain." 

Everyone's a comedian. 

Tonight, as I turned out the lights and walked through the house before coming upstairs, I made one last trip to the kitchen. There, waiting to greet me was my father's Bowie knife sticking up in a big chunk of hoop cheese next to a pile of shredded red wax coating, beaded with oil that was soaking into the butcher-block counter. 

I smiled, left it on the counter and went to bed.


*This just in from Casey Ann Hughes: " I believe the women are Andrea & Brenda from Weeds & Things."

Thank you, Casey. I think you're right.

To My Father on Veteran's Day

Daddy was in intelligence and reconnaissance in the European theater in World War II.  Although he didn't realize it at the time, he had a pretty dangerous job, going ahead of the troops to scout and report back what was happening towards the front.   And while he never experienced battle, firsthand, he was always within earshot.

"It sounded like thunder," he recalled.

I always enjoyed listening to his memories of the war -- the small, human experiences that stayed with him.

One of my favorite stories was about coming into a small, burned-out village somewhere in France. His company had come into town after a long march.

"Every building had been damaged or destroyed," he said.

He told me that there was this one little shop still untouched, the big picture window still intact.

"I was so tired.  And I sat down outside the shop and leaned against the window and it shattered.  The shop owner came running outside, crying and cursing in French.  Every time I think about it, I feel bad," he said.  "I felt so bad for him."

Another time, he remembered a German woman calling to him, shouting, "Schießen die katze!"

"Nazi?  Where?" he asked.

Then he noticed she was pointing at two cats mating.  She wanted him to shoot the cat that was violating her female katze.

"Nein," he said.  "I couldn't shoot a cat."

He loved animals.  His grandmother wrote to him while he was in bootcamp that his little dog, Tippy, had been hit by a car.

"She shouldn't have told me," he said.  "I went behind the barracks and cried and cried.  I couldn't eat for two weeks.  I lost weight."

When I looked up his army records not long ago, it said he weighed all of a hundred pounds when he shipped for Europe on the Queen Mary.

"The ship zigzagged all the way across the ocean," he said, "…so it would be harder for submarines to fire on us.  It took about 15 minutes for the ship to list to one side, then 15 minutes for it to list to the other.  I've never been so sick in my life.  I took my pack and climbed into a lifeboat to sleep."

My dad loved guns.  And all he wanted to do was collect as many German guns as he could while he was there.  He didn't smoke, so he often traded cigarettes for weapons.  Once when I was home visiting from California, he told me a story about bringing some guns home.  He was somewhere in Germany in a bombed-out castle.  He was trying to find something to wrap up some guns he'd found lying on the ground.

"I saw these two paintings," he said.  "So I took my bayonet and cut them out of the frames."

Then he brought them out.  I couldn't believe my eyes.  Here were two large paintings -- one of Himmler and one of Goering.

Liter-size bottle for perspective

Hermann Goering

Heinrich Himmler

Because it was close to the end of the war, he said he never saw any American bodies but plenty of German bodies.

"They'd leave the German bodies for the morale of our troops," he said, and to demoralize the German troops."

He remembered being encamped in a little house one freezing German night.  

"There was the body of a young soldier in a room in back," he recalled.  He couldn't have been more than 17 or 18."  My father was only 18 at the time.

"We came back through about three weeks later.  The body was still there.  It was cold, so it hadn't really started to decompose.  I just remember being struck that he'd just turned green, nothing else.  You know, it didn't bother me at the time.  I guess youth is rather callous.  But I still see him now, and it bothers me a lot.  He was someone's child.  How could I have not been bothered then but so bothered now?  I see him a lot now.  And it bothers me."

My father was a talented artist, though he never really used his talent for much.  But he had a great time making fun of his commander and other officers during training.  He'd draw cartoons of them and pin them on the bulletin board at night when everyone was asleep.  It infuriated the officers.  Everyone else thought they were hilarious.  

They never did find out who the rogue artist was, but he brought those drawings home, and I think he might've missed his calling.

He was just a child, himself, in World War II.  After everything was over, he was assigned to watch some German prisoners.  He got in trouble once for his trusting, naiveté when he asked a German prisoner to hold his gun for him while he tied his shoe.  :)  The prisoner held it for him and returned it.

He remembered the German officers who were prisoners, and always saluted them.  I think he felt bad for them.

"They all carried those little weiner dogs with them," he said.  Daddy liked anyone who liked animals.

I miss you, Daddy.  Thank you for your service on this Veteran's Day.

Planting Trees

My father planted these oak and pecan trees in 1973.  He bought 425 acres, built a lake on it, a house on it and lined the drive with oaks and dotted the fields with pecan trees, each bearing a birdhouse.  It's a hopeful thing to do, to plant a tree you know you won't see at its peak.  These trees (the oaks, anyway) will, hopefully, be here 300 years from now, majestic and beautiful. In that way, he left the world a better place than he found it.  One of many things he did.

The front gate