My daddy left us this year, after exactly 93 years and 2 days on this earth. If you didn’t know better, you’d think that was a long life. A life well lived. More than enough. And you’d be wrong. At least about the more than enough part. It was definitely a life well lived and I suppose it was long, given the best we know. But it certainly wasn’t long enough. Two months ago, I would have sworn he would make it to 100. I was even planning the party.
He had unexpectedly and without forewarning become my best friend during the past five years without Mama, a daily presence by at least two phone calls and frequent quick lunches or spur-of-the-moment side trips. The man who had always been one half of a married couple, my protector, my problem solver, my provider, was now my friend. If anything, he probably thought the tables had turned—that he depended on me more than I did on him, but that could not have been further from the truth. The most I think I did for him was go to the grocery store and stock his freezer with pot pies, the only thing I ever knew him to cook, but which he survived on these past five years. His favorite was beef, but he would tolerate turkey. Once I even tried Salisbury Steak and he was good sport enough to try it.
The most he did for me was everything.
His life was simple and it was enough. The only bad days in each week were Monday and Saturday when the Times Daily didn’t print a paper. Other than that, he was good. Well actually, he had a few bad weeks when they closed the local Jacks for remodeling, seriously disrupting his breakfast routine. But other than that, he was content with his life—what it had been and what it was.
What it had been was a long career in education, an excellent marriage, and two lovely well-behaved children who grew into somewhat successful adults and parents on their own accord. His golden years were mostly spent with my mom, sharing the same house they bought together in 1958, two years after they married. When he suddenly lost her in 2016, he stayed on in the same small house, with pretty much the same routine, except that she wasn’t there to keep him warm and well fed. Hence, the pot pies and my ready companionship.
During the past few years of just us, he and I often took field trips. We’d pile into his little blue Honda and head north to one of his favorite destinations, the Amish community near Lawrenceburg. We might pick up some sorghum or peanuts there, depending upon the season. He’d check out Danny Gingrich’s yard stand to see what they might be selling, always commenting on his long-standing relationship with the Gingriches. He had been buying sorghum from him for over 20 years, he guessed. We would stop back by Davy Crockett State Park if the maple trees were in color, winding up and around the wooded hillside and past the covered bridge that just begged for a photo stop.
Another time, I did take my camera along as we ambled down the Natchez Trace Parkway, just for the views. Passing by cotton fields, awash in white, he’d say “Just looking at those fields makes my back ache!” This from a man who grew up in a manually operated cotton field, earning enough money in good seasons to help put himself through college. Along with work as a janitor in the boys’ dorm, it was just enough.
He waited in the passenger seat as I attempted to capture the beauty of the Tennessee River span and the meandering Indian rock wall and the undulation of the never-ending fields of white. We estimated how many cars we would meet on the Trace before our exit, competing to see who would guess the closest, but always forgot to count.
Once, we went on down to the Carolina community in Itawamba County, where the manually operated cotton field had been, just to remember. And he remembered. From the front porch of the old farmhouse where he grew up, he remembered the way the cows were driven across the road each evening and where the barn had stood. He mused about how awe-inspired he was of the farmer who could spit clean through the slats of the old pot-bellied stove in the Conwill Bros. store. “It was nothing but net,” he’d smiled.
I took pictures that day of all that we saw. But what I couldn’t capture on film, what I knew but thought would last forever, was the real beauty of that day spent with him. It’s not that I was oblivious to it. I just knew that there would always be another.
We’re going through the little 1958 house now, not in whirlwind fashion, but slowly. Each day that I stop by to check the place, I pick up an item or two. They’re always things that mean something to me. Things that spark some special memory or that I know he would want preserved. On the last stop in, I wandered back to my old bedroom, the one he was using as a repository for the myriad three-ring binders of his writings. Amid the sea of nondescript white notebooks was a solitary brown-covered book, bound with a ribbon. The copyright is 1938. The title is Leaves of Gold.
And I randomly opened it to page 95.
Leaves of Gold. How fitting. Just like that brilliant October day last year. Looking back, I think it was the last “field trip” he and I took. Back in the Honda, heading west, we drove to Shiloh Battlefield. Because my mom had often taken her students from Farmington High School there in the late ‘50s, she knew it well and it had always been a favorite picnic destination for her young family. That was more than a few years ago. Just a bit. We usually found our way there on a summer Sunday afternoon. She would pack the picnic tote with peanut butter sandwiches and several cans of shoestring potatoes. Maybe a few Chips Ahoy and canned pineapple. We’d pile out at a picnic area across from the Shiloh entrance and settle on a sizzling, scratchy concrete picnic table bench for a snack. Then we’d head in to climb all over the cannonball monuments and marvel at the Bloody Pond. I’d stand beside that still water in the shimmering heat, with no doubt that the muddy depth was actually blood from those dying soldiers, drifting still. I just knew it.
On this golden October day with Daddy, I downloaded the Shiloh Battlefield app as you do now, and let it narrate every stop along the way. The sky was brilliant blue with drifting white clouds. Hardwood trees, especially those maples, literally fluttered in transparent neon. Shimmering jewel tones among the matte brown oaks, beautifully balanced each other. It really was a perfect day. One of those days that you don’t realize is so perfect until you wish it could be repeated, down to the last detail.
We followed the route, beginning where the skirmish took place near Shiloh Church, proceeding on to where General Johnston bled out under the oak, past the Bloody Pond which was no longer as bloody as I remember, and finishing up where the reinforcements came in from the river, ending it all. The beauty of the place belies the tragedy, but that’s not what we thought too much about on that day. We really didn’t think at all. It was just a beautiful day that stands out among all others. Just two friends out and about on a stunningly gorgeous fall day. One of many. One in a million.
He wore his bright blue zip-up jacket and the U.S. Army cap that marked him as a veteran. It wasn’t at all the reason he wore it, but it did sometimes earn him a free Jacks gravy biscuit if someone recognized the significance. Once, it was an entire Cracker Barrel meal.
On the last leg of the battlefield tour, the road winds down by the Tennessee River, past the Indian mound and up to the National Cemetery. It gets more heavily wooded and less traveled somehow, and that’s what I most remember. A gust of wind rattled limbs that were already tentative, loosening a shower of golds and reds and yellows, all skittering across the roadway in front of us, chasing one another like kids in a schoolyard. Happily set free and wild with abandon. Leaving this life for another. Leaves of gold.
A life of gold.
So, page 95. A page from a book that sat on our living room coffee table for decades without ever piquing my interest. But today, I open it to a poem called Away.
I cannot say, and I will not say
That he is dead. He is just away.
With a cheery smile and a wave of his hand,
He has wandered into an unknown land.
And left us dreaming how very fair
It needs must be since he lingers there.
Think of him faring on, as dear
In the love of There as the love of Here.
And so I will. Especially when the leaves begin to blow.
