Thoughts About My Father

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For Father's Day I thought I'd post an excerpt from a memoir I am writing.


A thing I can look at, and do often, is a photo of my father that I took on our last trip together to his hometown of Battle, Alabama in May 2001. It is one of him sitting in a folk art gallery. It was located not far from where he grew up in Russell County, in the southeastern part of the state, not far from the Georgia border. He is sitting in a rocker, relaxed, and smiling. Primitive paintings done by local artists make a colorful backdrop. What I love about this picture of my dad so much is that I had coerced him into taking me to the gallery—really just a somewhat broken down general store run by a white man in his seventies, Frank Turner, who called himself the Mayor of Pittsview. Dad, because he had a father’s heart for a daughter, went along with my "art collecting" shenanigans, and we wound up standing in "The Mayor's" office. If you knew my father, you would know his tastes ran toward the Renaissance, Realism, and Norman Rockwell. Things that looked like chickens made it with their feet were not his thing. But he went along with me, his wacky daughter

Still dad tried, in vain, to get me to buy a landscape painting that he thought was "real peaceful and pretty," but I got a drawing of a dinosaur and a dancing man painted on an old shutter and even though he really didn't understand, I was so happy with my finds, and he was so happy that I was happy, he even paid for them, as a treat.

I snapped the picture after he bought me the art. You can see the twinkle in my dad's eyes; they say that just moments before he was able to indulge his daughter. Out of the frame is Frank Turner, who is preparing two glasses of elderberry wine. He tells us more than once he is a staunch Republican and is unapologetic. He and my father marvel at the idea that a black and a white who decades earlier would have not exchanged more than a few words, stayed in their own necks of the woods, were sharing a glass of homemade wine together. It was a sheer wonder to them as they sipped and chuckled in the land of Dixie.

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