Dad

Pop Goes The World Joann Ware

This Sunday is Father’s Day.

I was never really close with my father. It’s not because he wasn’t a great guy or that I didn’t love him. I adored my father. My parents divorced when I was very young and my mother had full custody. Growing up I only saw my father periodically and all visitations were supervised by my mother’s sister.

For as long as I can remember, my father was slender, clean-shaven and impeccably dressed. One Saturday when he was visiting, I walked into my aunt’s den and saw someone I didn’t recognize. Dad had grown a full beard. “You look like Grizzly Adams,” I told him. I was immediately admonished by my aunt for saying that. “He’s your father and you need to be more respectful,” she told me.

The beard remained part of my father’s appearance for the rest of his life. As he grew older, his beard started turning gray and he began to look a little like Kenny Rogers. He told me that sometimes when he ate at Kenny Roger’s Roasters, people would ask him for his autograph. I don’t know if that’s true or not. My father was fond of telling tall tales.

At college, my father would frequently make the trip from Radford to Lexington just so he could drive me back to Longwood after breaks. I remember after Christmas break one year, I was still busily packing when he arrived. He asked, “Are you taking all of this stuff back to Longwood?” I was upstairs still throwing clothes into my suitcase. “Yes, Dad.” There was a pause before he asked me again, “All of this stuff goes in the car?” I breathed a perturbed sigh. “Yes, Dad. All of it.”

I didn’t understand why he kept asking me about the stuff in the living room until we got to Longwood and I realized that several of the plastic totes containing Christmas decorations that hadn’t been put away yet were in my father’s trunk.

My college friends always looked forward to my father’s visits. He loved to talk to people and my friends loved his Amherst County drawl. They called him The Colonel.

Unfortunately after college, my visits with Dad became fewer. I found out through my uncle that Dad had taken a construction job in Lexington. When I called Dad and asked him why he hadn’t stopped by to see me while he was here, he said, “Well, I came by to see you one day and you weren’t at home.” I was going to say, “So you thought I had moved?” but then I remembered what my aunt told me.

He’s your father and you need to be more respectful.

We made sure to keep in touch by phone and we tried to call each other every few months. While working at Lowe’s, I became a NASCAR fan and my Dad was a huge fan of Jeff Gordon. It was nice to have something in common other than our genes. I bought Dad a Jeff Gordon sweatshirt for his birthday one year and he said, “Oh, wow! Look at that!” To be honest, I could have bought him anything with the number 24 on it and he would have loved it.

As he approached his 70s, Dad’s health issues began to multiply. He had Type II diabetes most of his adult life and eventually relied on dialysis when his kidneys began to fail. He never wanted to talk about his health, but during the last years of his life he would tell me that he often felt like an old car that was increasingly hard to find parts for and was expensive to repair.

In August 2017, my father went into the hospital to have a cancerous tumor removed from his colon. Though the surgery was successful and the doctor thought he would make a complete recovery, there were complications. Though he was very weak, he seemed happy to see me. When a nurse came in to check on him, he told her, “This is my daughter. She’s very famous. She’s in the paper every week.”

He died just a couple days later.

I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to tell him how much I loved him before his death because I don’t think I told him often enough. And I am so glad that he was proud of me.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.