I'm writing my life story for an extremely fast ethnography course this summer. The trouble is, life seems to be a random collection of stories, tied together by a few characters, of which you never can wholly know. With that difficulty, I'm attempting to construct some sort of coherent and hopefully entertaining story to have in hand for the rest of my life. The first chapter is about where I came from and my early memories. Most people can't go back any further in their minds than the age of four, and I am no different. So I wrote about what I could remember: Grandma, our lower/middle-class neighborhood, how big everything looked. I've just started on chapter two, a bit more indepth look at my relationships with my family. Here's a draft of a section about my dad and me:
The family: We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together. -Erma Bombeck
“Son, I’m proud of you.” My dad and I stretched out under a tent at night by Falls Lake after a long day of hiking, paddling and cooking.
“…thanks dad. That means a lot, you know.” We sat in the silence - the silence of nature that is, which is not the same as the silence of men. No, this silence consists of water lapping the edge of our cove, the crickets and frogs chirping and gulping and the swift breeze running quickly through the trees. The silence of nature can never be awkward like the silence of men. In nature, there is so much to admire, to become preoccupied, with its beauty. The problem with the silence of men is that there is nothing to become preoccupied with except your own thoughts – thoughts often negative because of their preoccupation of self.
“Man, I love it out here. Don’t you like listening to the all the noises”, my dad whispered, to not to disturb nature’s silence.
“Yeah”, I whispered back, “It feels good to get away from the city for a while.”
“Heh, you’re telling me.”
You see, my dad actually really deserved the opportunity to get away from the city, much more than I did. I usually just said that, even though we both knew that I had a much less stressful life. I was a pre-teen, and there is nothing stressful about that except for the fear of making a bad decision. Even then, my bad decisions did not have a huge effect on my life then or for the future. I stressed about what my friends really thought of me or how I was going to pass math class. My dad, on the other hand, had a real family to support with a real job. He had employees to manage and clients to pander to. He worked as a regional manager at Hardees’ Restaurant, founded in our hometown actually. His day normally started before six a.m. so that all the early birds (old people) could get their biscuits and coffee before their long day of doing nothing, cat napping, doing some more nothing, eating an early dinner and finally retiring to their bed shortly before the hour of eight o’clock. While they were all going about that routine, my dad was staying on his feet, constantly between different Hardees. His job was to make sure all of the managers were doing their jobs properly. Now my dad did not come from the corporate world to manage the unique individuals that staffed the restaurant. My dad, himself, started as an employee then manager before his larger position became available. It was in his early days as manager that he met my mom, an employee still in high school.
“What time do we need to get up in the morning?” I knew the answer the answer to this question before I even asked. Just in case you ever go camping with my dad, just know that he will be up with coffee before you’ve even thought about picking the nighttime crust out of your eyes.
“Well, I’ll be up to make breakfast. I’m sure you don’t need to sleep any longer than 8 or 8:30.” I knew what that really meant though: be up around seven or you’ll probably miss breakfast. I always worked futilely to set a mental clock or sleep lightly so that I could wake up when my dad did. It never worked, no matter what. I wished I could be like my dad. I hoped that I could at least turn out slightly like him, and then I’d feel accomplished as a person. I didn’t think this just because he could wake up early. I thought it because he was an all around great person. I don’t think I could ever write down all of the ways my dad proved this. His work never seemed to be mere work. It was a chance to meet someone new, start a new conversation, friendship, a chance to offer his help. By the time I was in high school, he knew all of the homeless people in our town by name. We often had over visitors to our house that were poor, drug-abused or helpless. A chronic homeless man would borrow our ladder to perform odd jobs for people around the neighborhood. A young mother and her baby found shelter in our house during a hurricane when her home was unsafe and she felt scared. My dad’s heart has for years been larger than anyone I’ve ever known personally. It is the piece of him that I want the most. And moreover, for this man to be proud of me, the self-consumed pre-teen boy, seemed ludicrous. His pride in me felt undeserved and at the same time, sustaining. It was a reflection of his love for me. Again, an example: to love because I have been loved first.
The silence of nature grew louder and sang to us. It didn’t take long for dad’s snoring to settle in. Dad always fell asleep before I did. So I laid for what seemed like two hours, to fall asleep to the battle of the nighttime soundtracks: snoring and nature.
-to be continued.
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