A Father's Day tribute.

My father and mother in a photograph taken a couple of years before I was born.

Though the memory of my father is never far from my mind, today, on Father's Day, I dwell on that memory maybe a little more than usual, but not so much as he deserves.
He was a sociable man who loved to converse with his friends gathered around a table in a downtown cafe, drinking coffee, joking and laughing.
He was a homebody, he hardly ever went out to eat, preferring his own kitchen over restaurants. On the few occasions that he did go out for a meal it was to a place just on the other side of the small town we lived in (sometimes, if he had the wanderlust, he'd go eat at the Catfish Round-Up 7 miles from town...if he had business in another town and they had a Braums you can bet he would be wolfing down a burger there, covered with enough salt that you could see white lines spread across the meat).
If friendliness was a strong point for him, his major weakness was worrying. He would torture himself contemplating what might go wrong in just about any situation and even though his hope was strong that things would work out alright, he couldn't help but linger over what could happen if that hope failed him. You could see the worry in his face and the way he tensed up sometimes. He probably thought that to worry about someone was to care for or love them. But he let it get the best of him.
My earliest memories of him were trucks, rodeos and country music.
He drove a truck for a long time during the first years of my life (and he went on to drive a school bus during the last years of his life...he was well-loved by the students who rode his bus). He drove for a concrete company, picking up sand and gravel, hauling it back to the plant, dumping it and then going back for more. He loved trucks in general. He dreamed of driving an 18-wheeler big rig, maybe a Peterbilt, across the country. But he had to make a choice as to whether he would go truckin' cross country or take a job closer to home where he could be with his family. I don't know how hard it was for him to make that decision, but he forfeited the dream to be with the things that he wanted even more...his wife, his children, his home, his town.
If he couldn't have his fun behind the wheel of a big truck, well there was nothing keeping him from his favorite past time: riding horses and roping calves at "Round-Up Club Play Days" and rodeos.. In his younger days he rode the bulls and the broncs, but when that got too rough for him (ie. as he got older) he settled into the calf roping, and he was damn good at it, too. He had three horses...a majestic, shiny black coated mare he called his own named Tootsie (it took me FOREVER just now to remember that name...what a cool name, IMO). He had a Shetland pony named Trigger that my brother and I alternately claimed as our own. And there was Tootsie's foal, who dad named Penny. Penny was still pretty young (hadn't been broken yet) when dad bought a new house on the other side of town. There was no pasture land for him to keep horses on so he had to give the three of them away (I don't know if he "sold" them, maybe, but I'm inclined to think that he wouldn't take money for them). Another heart-breaking decision there, but he made it because the new house was so much better than the one we had grown up in. Once again thinking of his family first.
And then there was the country music. Oh, man, did he love his country and western, and he listened to it constantly until the day he died. I remember once there was a George Jones special on HBO. We watched it together because, even though I hated country music back then, Elvis Costello was a guest duet singer, and I was a fan of his. Elvis did his stint (and even dad would admit later that he thought he'd done a fine job, even though he was a little "weird"), and Jones belted out all of his great tear-jerkin' break-up songs. I turned around at one point and saw tears streaming down my dad's face. It happened not too long after my mom had divorced him, and even though he had re-married (the second of three time, and as it turned out, with disastrous results), and it was plain to see that he still carried a torch for her (I think he did until the day he died). It was at that time that I learned just how much the music meant to him, and I gained a newfound respect for George Jones (if for no other country singer at that time).
Though I hated country in my younger years, I eventually came around to loving it, even if I may not have ever had such a passion for it that he did. These days it reminds me of him and that adds to my appreciation. I can still remember the way he would sing those old country songs out of the blue, as we were riding down the road in his pickup truck, or maybe when he was working on something in his shop, or really it could have been at any time, he would break into a line or two from a song and just repeat it. His voice wasn't bad, but he liked to exaggerate the already exaggerated singing of the original, and he found the result to be quite humorous. So he would sing a line, laugh, impressed with how absurd it sounded, then sing it again, laugh even louder...then maybe he'd settle down and sing it normally, after the laughter had subsided. And he wasn't the only one laughing. Even if you thought his singing was silly (I didn't) you still couldn't help but smile at his own amusement.
My dad and I had some bad times together. We were at each others' throats a lot of the time, like oil and water. There are some things I've had to forgive him for, and I know there are a lot of things he forgave me for. But as much as those things contributed to the person I am, I have let them go and chosen to recall only the good things, to celebrate them, as he deserved for all the sacrifices he made in the course of his 65 years, many of which were made for his family. How can you adequately express appreciation for that? Even if he were still with us there would be a barrier, constructed like a wall of past sins never laid to rest, that would likely stay the words of thankfulness. Now that he's gone I accomplish this by forgetting the bad, exalting the good recollections.
My father died in October of 1999. He didn't get a chance to see the advent of the 21st century. I'd hoped he would. Then again he didn't have to witness the terror of September 11, 2001, and see how the world has changed since then. But then I think of how his entire youth was lived in the shadow of World War II, with all the changes that were forced upon the world as a result of that, and I suppose we've both lived through tough times.
He may not have realized it, but he lived a full, rich life, marked by experience, joy and sadness, pain and pleasure, ups and downs, "diamonds" and "stones". And if he didn't realize it was such a life, it's because he was busy living it. I look back on the glimpse of it that I was given, as small as it was, and even I can see what an incredible life he lived. Would that we could all have the same.

JAMES DELMAR CASEY 1934-1999