GreatDaddy

Dad died in the waning crescent of the harvest moon during the year of his wife’s Lord, nineteen hundred and ninety two, and in the first week of his own ninetieth year. It was just before the election, but he had already voted - Absentee now, in the most emphatic meaning of that word. Fitting though, that he was still fixing and trying to make work, those things which to his mind, weren't working right.

He could fix anything. Even in his later years, when his physical abilities had somewhat diminished, he would apologize at not being able to help, then get that faraway look in his eyes and slowly, as if he were reading something, and with his crooked finger tracing steps in the air, he would tell you how to do what you needed to do. It was as if he could still see and do it in some kind of a close-up spiritual world.

He was a man of many names: Dad, Daddy, Grandfather, Granddad, Grandpa, the Big Cheese (from his grandson) the Leader of the Clan, Granpops, Sweetheart (from his wife), and of course, (to everyone else) Mister Womack; and then finally, Greatdaddy (from his great-granddaughter, Jessica).

He was a farm boy who left home. The farm was hard, and he always remembered that. He found everything was hard, but then he had to build everything he ever got, and he had to build most of it from scratch. There was never a desire to go back, everything else was better than the farm. The depression and the war, he took in stride; the farm had prepared him well for hard times. The later prosperity of the fifties, sixties and seventies were different; he wasn’t as well prepared for those as were softer men. They often did “better” than he; they were more malleable. But yet, he did very well in the stock market.

His few friends were real friends, and their friendship ran deeply; they understood each other, quietly, respectfully. He wasn’t much for small talk; he could do a little small talk if there was no work to be done, but then he would always go find something that needed fixing.

The lessons from the farm were strong. If you don’t work, you don’t eat. Money doesn’t grow on trees. The world doesn’t owe you a living. Hard work never hurt anybody. Daylight was always burning, the night was always coming.

He was tough, he was fast, and every job he ever started, he finished. And when he was through with it, you could tell he had done it. He left his signature on many things, mostly things that needed fixing. The Samurai and the Storm Troopers thought they were masters of the world, but then they had never met men who knew how to fix things that had gone wrong and could not only defeat their armies but would rebuild their countries.

When he was born, power came from horses and steam locomotives. He mastered those things when he was a young man, and then he made a living working on the railroad, showing the crews and men of the Roundhouse and the Train Yards how to make those overworked steam locomotives fit those tight wartime schedules. But when he was in his late prime, the only steam locomotives left were in museums; and horses were only found in zoos and rodeos. He probably didn’t see a horse during the last thirteen years of his life, and he was thirteen when he saw his first car. He could clearly remember when airplanes were rarer than spaceships were when he died.

He would rarely watch television because he was a child of the “radio set” era. He even remembered well those days before the radio set came along, back when people did all the talking and entertaining. Back then, everybody was expected to know some stories. Usually these were tales about things that had happened many years before, and everyone present not only knew about the event, but they also knew the story. Yet they looked forward to hearing it told again, and really expected to find that the telling of it had improved over the past year or two since they had last heard it. It was not completely unlike finding out that Aunt Lucille was going to fix her famous beef stew again, and you would prepare to savor the smells that you knew would come from the kitchen; so too, a good story was a savory tale that you needed to hear again: “Hey, tell about the time Uncle Fred fell off the . . .”. In this area Dad was sort of a hybrid, reflecting both the pre- and post-radio eras. He would tell long stories, and when he began telling them everybody was supposed to remain seated, be quiet, and listen attentively, and then he would scoot forward in his chair and sit hunched over with his crooked finger tracing steps in the air, while he looked at the floor in the manner of one who was listening to a radio set. So, in his later years, he was the teller of the stories and also the listener to the stories.

It’s hard to tell a long story to the sound-byte generation, but that didn’t deter him. The grandchildren would sit around the room and pretend to listen, looking like so many TV’ s themselves; quiet, impassive, blinking on and off. Staring at this man who was hunched over, looking at the floor and talking softly about living a different life in a different place.

©John Womack, 2006, All Rights Reserved