Father's Day

"I very acutely missed my father. When he was alive, it was a complicated relationship, but now that he’s passed, it’s very simple."

I write these blogs on Sundays in order to publish them on Mondays and I’m usually sitting in the sun on my porch with my dog Dusty at my feet and the fan on the ceiling blowing a warm breeze. I’ve been on the road a lot this month, put a lot of miles on my car. Drove to Texas and back with Huck to play and wander the Hill Country. Drove to West Virginia to play Mountain Stage for the 7^th time. Then drove up north to Maryland with Huck to visit my mother for a week. Drove back 9 hours yesterday and I’m worn out. Mom packed us a lunch, so I stopped at a Rest Area along I-81 heading south in Virginia, a beautiful drive usually full of traffic and trucks, that was empty and easy yesterday in the blue sky.

I grew up on road trips. We always had a Buick station wagon – remember that back row of seats that faced the road? We called it the “back in the back” and my sister Lee and I always shared it, waving at the cars behind us, fighting over space on the bench seats, as I usually spread my Barbies all over the place, touching the invisible line, encroaching on Lee’s side. Matt and Danny, the twins, were in the middle seat. Mom and Dad up front, sometimes with whatever cat with had at the time sitting on Dad’s shoulder, Dad making up voices for her as if the cat was giving Dad directions. I do that now with Huck. “Do the Dusty voice,” he says to me.

For a while, we had a pop-up camper and for a few summers that we lived in Minneapolis, we would do 2 week trips out West to see the national parks. The Dakotas to see The Badlands and Mount Rushmore. Glacier National Park in Montana. Rocky Mountain National Park. We did a lot of Rest Stop picnics. I’ll never forget the smell of that pop-up camper – a kind of welcome mustiness blended with bug spray and suntan lotion. I’ve been dreaming of buying a small camper for me and Huck. Setting up a tent takes so much time and I hate camping in the rain. It’s a dream…

But the rest stop yesterday with Huck was beautiful if you looked away from the road. Rolling hills of green and clover, tall trees for shade over the concrete picnic tables, each with a grill (we would definitely grill hot dogs on those in the 1970s). Huck ran up the hill to the rocks and beckoned me. I kicked off my shoes and ran up barefoot. We lay on the grass and looked at the clouds and named the things we saw. And I was back in 1972, 73, 74, 75, 76 with my family, in that wood-paneled station wagon, fighting in the back seat with Lee. A bell jar half full of urine (the pee jar) was rolling around in the foot well. Homemade GORP snacks (“good ole raisins and peanuts”).

Today is Father’s Day and I was in church with Jamey and Huck and all those memories came back to me and I very acutely missed my father. When he was alive, it was a complicated relationship, but now that he’s passed, it’s very simple. My father was a pretty black and white man. A hard worker. His whole life’s mission was to work hard to make a better life for all of us than what he had growing up (basically, a widowed mother, very poor, 5 kids, no time for emotion). He did that. He was a champion tennis player. He loved old country music and Fox News. He was not intellectual nor really interested in seeing issues from all points of view, but he read all the time, mostly books to reinforce his views. He wrote us all a book about his life, his family, his beliefs, his memories. I proof-read it for him while he was working on it. It has helped me understand why I felt emotionally abandoned by him. He didn’t mean to. He was busy working so that I would grow up with all the possibilities and be able to go to a great college. Mom was my emotional support. As much as I’ve written about my father and had to grapple with some things about him, anger and disappointment and grief I felt after he died, I am able now to write about what a beautiful experience it was to be his daughter and what I learned from him. And, in death, we have this amazing relationship. We all see him in cardinals. I see him in trees. My book of poetry coming out is full of my father. My record There Used To Be Horses is partly about my father and his dying.

Tonight, as the sun goes down and the birds are still singing and the leaves of the hackberries rustle, I feel so much love and gratitude for my father. All those trips were such an extension of my father’s Boy Scout days, his days as a forester. His own dad died when he was 8. He gave us what he didn’t have. And so I will try to do the same for Huck, making peanut butter & jelly sandwiches and stopping at a rest stop to take my shoes off and roll down hills with him until he’s too old to want to go on road trips with his mom.

Happy Father’s Day Dad. You did the best you knew how to do. And it was extraordinary in so many ways.

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Father’s Day – Amy Speace

(Song is from There Used To Be Horses Here released in 2021)

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Amy Speace is an award-winning Americana folk singer and songwriter discovered by Judy Collins. Her songs have been recorded by Ms. Collins and many others and she has won International Song of the Year from the Americana Music Association (UK). Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Working Mother, and Salon.com. She received her MFA from Spalding University and teaches English at Cumberland University. She resides in Nashville, Tennessee, with her son, Huckleberry, and her dog, Dusty Springfield. The Cardinals, coming Sept 1st with Red Hen Press , is her debut poetry collection.