EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 FATHER'S DAY

Each year on this day I get the feeling that I must be the only person on Facebook that didn’t have a perfect father. Oh, mine wasn’t imperfect, his personal radar simply picked up a few blips from time to time. Those made him more interesting than sinister, except when it came to punishment for my myriad transgressions.

Perhaps his most salient characteristic was that he worked. My Sainted Mother emphasized it once when I mentioned a girl with whom I thought for sure I was in love. “Love,” she said. “Let me tell you about love. When I married your daddy, I wasn’t in love. I married him because we all knew the von Tungelns worked. And I knew I would never have to go hungry again. His family didn’t even go hungry during the depression. Then we sharecropped together, butchered hogs together, and bought this store together. After a while, I woke up one morning and realized I worshipped the ground he walked on.”

That thought echoed back to me not long ago when I asked my bride of over 50 years why she married me. “Good looks? Nice personality? Intelligence? Wit?”

“You had a J-O-B,” she said. “That’s important around here.”

It was important in our house. That little country grocery store was open six days a week from before daylight until late evening. In the slow part of the day, my daddy would butcher meat for the store, or cut wood to be sold to folks for heating their homes. During one long period he spent after hours adding two rooms to our house which, incidentally, was attached to the store.

A fond memory involves the annual four-day vacation the family took to the beaches at Florida or Texas. It was on one of those that I learned to read a map. Daddy showed me how. I considered it a minor miracle that one could follow those little lines and know what city was coming up next. I don’t guess the kids today will ever experience that miracle. Too bad.

I guess it was the reputation he and Sainted Mother bestowed on the family that I remember best. On a couple of occasions I managed to find myself under the questioning eye of a police officer who would have been delighted to arrest a careless teenager. Each time I was scolded and ordered home when I told them my name.

Things like that bring back memories as does a yellowed newspaper article I keep in a safe deposit box. It contains a piece written in our hometown newspaper after a deadly tornado tore through our area south of Pine Bluff in 1947. It tells how my father gave away things in our store to anyone who needed them after the damage, the righteousness bankrupting the little business. Another piece, a smaller one, reports how the little town of Lonsdale, Arkansas collected $45 and sent it to us after reading the first article. That would be almost $1,500 today.

So I don’t mind that he kept a cow for most of his life that he fed every night after the store closed or that he did so not for love of cattle but for love of the nightly nip of the Old Yellowstone he kept hidden in the hay.

Life’s radar needs a blip each day like Daddy needed that nip.