Happy Birthday, Dad!

Dad and I discussed his upcoming 81^st birthday on our week-end phone call”: “old” is anyone fifteen years older than you are, and you’re old when there is no one fifteen years older than you are. “I’m getting’ close!” he laughed.

Today (March 2) is his birthday. He’s getting closer!

Dad and I have similar senses of humor, so we find one another amusing. Both Southern-raised, we tell our lives and our truths in stories.

Dad grew up in the small North Carolina town voted most like Andy Griffith’s Mayberry.  His father and “Unca” Johnny owned a downtown hardware store, and Dad went to school with the white kids who lived in town and on country farms. (African-American kids, who lived, literally, on the other side of the tracks, led separate lives.)

Dad was small town cool. When his teenage friends wanted to look wealthy one August day, they drove a convertible to Chapel Hill, the nearby college town, with the top and windows up so that the college girls would think they had air conditioning. (I’m guessing in North Carolina’s heat and humidity, the pretty girls thought those were some sweaty boys and probably stank. In my day, convertibles were cooler than air-conditioning, but this was their day.)

That’s my favorite story about Dad’s childhood home. Another favorite story is about the first time he remembers seeing my mom.

“I looked up the stairwell and saw this woman on the landing above me. ‘Golly,’ I thought, ‘That’s the most beautiful girl I ever saw.’” (Golly, in case you didn’t read that right, is a three-syllable word or at least stretches its first half an extra beat. If you ever heard Gomer Pyle talk, he said it right.)

Mom was a big city beauty, and Dad was a small town “hottie” (according to my much more hip younger sister.)

Dad tells good stories, and loves poetry. He learned his favorite from a fraternity friend, and decades later was befuddled to learn it was “a real poem.” It’s not a long poem, but I can’t remember the beginning, and Professor Google doesn’t know it. It ends like this:

White folks hogs

Eat ‘em all.

One-eyed black snake,

Tearin’ through the bushes.

What a terrible thing,

A terrapin are.

He also loves Andy Griffith’s early stories. I’ve heard pieces of one so often I remember them and love them as well. The snippets come in handy. Whenever my partner Ann and I pull into the garage after being away, I say,

            That’s the end of the ride.

Pete and his gang are waitin’ inside.

At night, Ann says, “I hope Pete’s not there. I’m tired. If he’s there, I’m telling him and his friends to go home.”

            I continue:

            [voice one] “I hope you know what you’re talkin’ about.”

[voice two] “You just count ‘em while I throw ‘em out.”

[fighting noises] bing bang bam shwoom…

[voice two] “One!”

[voice one] “Stop countin’. It’s me.”

[Raucous laughter]

Only after the performance do we get out of the car and go inside. It can take a long time for a poetry-lover to get in the house.

Dad loves history as well as poetry, so he also loves Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address:”

            For score and seven years ago…

The tone’s a little different in that one, and though it’s older than the others, Professor Google knows it.

I’ve inherited some things from my father that I’m not so pleased with, like his inability to find something in the refrigerator unless it’s on the front of a shelf. However, I’m glad to have inherited his love for poetry and his sense of humor.

Happy birthday, He-who-is-getting-close-to-being-an-old-man!