(That's me on the right, looking about 8 years old, perfecting the pose I sported in most pictures during my party years. Bonus: That's my natural hair color.)
My daddy is the consummate guy's guy, a good ole boy, as we say in the South. He's always driven a pickup, never went on a job interview, spends just about every spare moment on his boat, loves his Wolfpack basketball and NASCAR at man-volume. My memories of trips half-an-hour away after church on Sunday to Wilmington or Myrtle Beach for lunch are overriden with the misery of him blaring the race and smoking Vantage cigarettes with the windows of the Country Squire wagon rolled up.
My mother gave birth to me alone with her doctors as was the custom in 1969. Daddy, who'd been whiling away his nervousness by playing pool and smoking cigarettes in the doctors' lounge at the hospital, came to see me with two days' worth of beard.
I was the firstborn, the apple of my Daddy's eye at the time. My mama tells me stories of him coming home from work every day to gaze at me. When I was a toddler, he started instilling his sense of humor in me, instructing me to yell, "big fat mama!" at my pregnant mother in public and to call him "pretty papa."
When I was three and a half, Jill came along. She looked EXACTLY like our daddy, and he was floating on air, though he'd been hoping for a boy to call his own. But Jill was his mini-me and quickly became his pet project.
Two years later, Amy was born. When my daddy went to visit my mama, postbirth, in the hospital, she told him it was a boy. He just about hit the ceiling with elation. "Just kidding," she smirked, deflating him.
They had planned on stopping at two, but now they had three. All girls. My daddy had wanted a son, as I suppose most men do, whether they admit it or not. I overheard him on the phone congratulating his buddy: "A boy? You lucky sumbitch!" Though I was about nine years old at the time, it perplexed me (and hurt my feelings): "What can a boy do that I can't?"
Here's why. My daddy wanted sons, but fate was against him on that one. So he treated us like boys.
* We'd toss a baseball back and forth until Daddy would inevitably toss it to heaven (pretending to throw it then hiding it behind his back). He'd tell us to wait for it, and we'd stand craning our necks straight up as he went back in the house.
* I fired a shotgun for the first time when I was nine and weighed about 50 pounds. Daddy stood behind me, steadied it on my shoulder and told me when to pull the trigger. I'd pull it and get thrown five feet backward onto the ground. I wouldn't cry as Daddy picked me up, dusted me off and said, "Okay, this time, aim higher."
The best thing, though, was going out on the boat on the inland waterway between Shallotte Point and Ocean Isle Beach. We'd wait on the front porch for Daddy to come home from work, then chase his truck down the driveway yelling, "Take us fishing!!!" When he was in the mood, he'd hitch up the boat, bundle us in our life jackets, and drive off teasing us that a boat was following us. Our favorite joke at the time was, "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood?" Daddy would always shout, "Three!" over and over, pretending it didn't get old. Silly responses never get old to little kids.
I called Jill yesterday to ask her what her favorite memories were. She said, "The smell of motor oil and salt water." I agree. Daddy would back the boat into the water and tell one of us to hold it steady while he parked the truck and the other two scampered off to watch the minnows in the giant bait tank at the marina. Just about inevitably, the small-framed little girl holding the boat would refuse to let go of it as the tide took her away, and Daddy would wade/swim out to bring it back for us to get in.
Daddy has always been a net fisher, as it works for shrimp and flounder, which are abundant down home. I learned so much out on that boat. We'd drink Sundrop and eat Vienna sausages while Daddy drank Shlitz, waiting for time to drag the net back in. When the nets came in and were dumped in the bin, as he released the non-edible sea creatures, he'd tell us what each of them were. His favorite thing was to set a croaker on the bench next to us to freak us out with its bellowing, bullfrog burps.
Our favorite thing, though, was going clamming. From Shallotte Point, we'd motor out to one of the little marsh channel islands. We didn't clam with rakes, we dove for them. In fact, that's how we all learned how to swim. My daddy would put one of us on his shoulders, wade out to his chest level and dig around with a foot until he found a clam. Then he'd tell the little girl on his shoulders, "Left foot, go!" And she'd dive over him, swim down and not surface until she had a clam.
We all eventually grew out of being daddy's little buddies into, in our varying ways, the kind of fearless adolescent girls that make men say they're afraid of having daughters. But it was probably because we took so much after our Daddy.
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Random memories that don't fit into the narrative, but I love:
Remember the Juicy Fruit tree commercials in the 70's? Daddy would go up to the tv and say he'd pick us some gum, then grab it from his pocket while we were distracted. We thought he was magic!
He'd tell us to look up at electric lines and tell us he could walk on them, but he couldn't find his acrobat shoes in the attic. He'd freak us out by telling us we had ancestors or that we had hesitated in the hall. But he'd make up stories about wampus cats and thrill us for hours.
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