On the importance of being Dad

By Kelly Kazek
kelly@athensnews-courier.com

June 13, 2008 10:36 am

— The old photo, one of those 4-by-4 squares with a white border, shows my brother and me standing in tiny, matching Keds facing away from the camera watching alligators in an enclosure that must have been in a zoo or a Florida sideshow.
He was about 4 and I was 2. It’s a favorite photo that I keep framed but I’m not sure where it was taken. A family friend said the photo was taken in St. Augustine.
I made a mental note to ask Dad.
It’s been a while since we’ve seen him. It’s time for a visit. Maybe today, on Father’s Day.
I know every daughter thinks her father is the most special. Mine had proven how special by being a great father not only to my big brother and me but to my daughter, Shannon, his only grandchild.
After Shannon’s father died when she was 2, my dad stepped into the role, teaching her the important things in life —how to blow into cupped fists to make a whistle and, when we went to the beach, which seashells were still being used as condos by tiny sea creatures.
Shannon was the only girl in eighth grade who could whistle into her fists.
She’s reveled in tales of bygone days when her “Pop” water-skied barefoot on Lake Tobesofkee, and of Pop’s one-and-only true love, whom he’d married and buried when she was much too young for both.
Shannon read a quote from Jackie Robinson once: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”
She said, “Pop would say he wasn’t an important man but look at the impact he’s had on all of our lives.”
She said it after he’d left.
That’s when she realized it, when he wasn’t there. Like you always knew breathing was important but it wasn’t until you stopped — just for half a minute, a minute — and tiny spots formed before your eyes, that you realized just how vital.
Breathing was life.
Pop was life.
Without him, Shannon would never have known a father’s love.
Lately, she’d been missing that.
I’d been missing him, too.
I missed having someone I could call at 2 a.m. because I heard a noise in the house, someone who would stay on the line until I checked to make sure everything was OK.
I missed having him to talk to when someone slighted me or hurt my feelings, who knew I might be at fault because he knew my flaws — impatience, stubbornness — but who always took my side anyway.
I missed the person I would call, crying, thinking my head would explode from the pain of yet another migraine, just because I needed someone to share my misery, because it was too much to bear alone. Dad would have taken it upon himself if he could have.
I missed having someone to ask, “Where was this picture made?”
It’s been six months since he left, since the moment I stopped calling him “Pop” and began calling him “Daddy” again. Somehow, no matter how old she is, when her father’s not around, a daughter can only think, “I miss my daddy.”
But I couldn’t bring myself to visit.
I knew how we’d find him; I could imagine the place.
I could envision the stand of kudzu-covered trees that reminded me of all those summers ago in Georgia when Dad took my brother and me to the woods behind the house to see if the tadpoles in Moose Lake had lost their tails overnight.
Now, Dad was hundreds of miles north in an isolated spot in Tennessee.
I know that on a grassy, shaded knoll there’s a spot of earth that still looks freshly turned. No grass will have grown on it as it has on my mother’s grave beside it, which has had 19 years to recover from the indignity of burial.
There is no marker, not yet.
When it arrives, it will say, “Charles Caldwell, December 30, 1939-January 19, 2008. Our Pop.”
It won’t say enough about the man buried beneath it.
It could never say enough.
I want to go almost as much as I can’t bear to.
“Happy Father’s Day, Daddy,” I will whisper and lay fresh flowers on the grave. “We miss you.”
We always will.