On my fridge is an old, cherished photo of my dad and me. The photograph was taken at a thanksgiving family reunion in my dad’s hometown of Graham, Texas in 1987 when I was 27 years old. One hand holds a glass of tea, and my other hand reaches up around my father’s still strong back and shoulders with my pink fingernails just showing and draped there. His 63-year-old splotched face is in the shadow of a typical Northern Texas panhandle scrub oak and his gray “Vitalised” hair is neatly in place. My father had a skin condition that made him loose pigment so there are ghastly white and pink splotches that cover his entire face and neck. But despite his disfiguration he still has handsomely arranged features with startling blue eyes that match the blue short-sleeved tieless but under-shirted, starched dress shirt he is wearing. I have on a sleeveless knit beige and black sweater with matching choker beads clasped together with a gold nugget and matching earrings. My hair is wildly curly, and I am tossing back my head slightly in laughter.
I had only just met my grandmother Lola, my father’s mother, and his sisters for the first time this same day that the photo was taken. My husband Randy and I had flown from North Carolina to Houston earlier in the week and I was reacquainted with my brother John and my father at my brother’s home there in Houston after a twenty-year separation. Randy had brought his Autoharp and endeared my dad by playing old time hymns. This rekindled family drove thirteen hours across Texas from the Houston shores to the northern Texas panhandle through tumbleweeds, oilrigs, mesquite, and roadrunners all the while sharing stories and burying the years. I came halfway across the country to understand Texans because I wanted to understand my father. It seemed that the landscape was whispering to me in the spare moment when we rested from our sojourn to play music on the Texas radio and ponder. I came to Texas to reestablish long lost family ties.
A few years earlier, I sent him my scrapbook showing him the missing twenty years chronicled. The scrapbook contained such things as a picture of me in my yellow Easter outfit when I three on up to pictures of me with my engineering projects in college. I had been baptized the year prior for the first time at twenty-four and had included my Christian testament, several birthday cards, and other meaningful writings. He later told me how much it meant to him since he too had been to engineering school and had been baptized later in life. He said it gave him permission and relieved some of his guilt to be able to offer an outstretched hand of welcome after so many years of regret and uncertainty. My curiosity and need for family ties helped me bury deep the pain of the forgotten discarded years.
My mother and father were divorced when I was three years old, and we moved away from my father when I was six. We were the victims of such abuse from him in those early years of separation that my mother was never able to forgive him. For instance, he had us evicted because my mother had been able to qualify for a new FHA house, but he found that she no longer qualified as her income raised out of compliance. He was jealous and turned her in therefore she lost the house, and we were evicted. They hated each other and we were tortured because of it. My mother raised us on her own with little help from him. Later in life she moved to live a mile from me in North Carolina. I love and respect her for all those long years. I almost felt like a traitor when she saw that picture of dad and me on my fridge. Her hatred was so deep and unfathomable that she said she wanted to piss on his grave before she died.
My father called me every Sunday evening for his remaining eight years of his life after our big Texas reuniting. Although he lived and died in Pensacola, Florida, his last will, and testament, like all good Texans, asked that he be buried in Texas. His service in Pensacola and another trek across Texas brought my long-lost brothers and I closer still. Although my father had done some dastardly deeds, he redeemed himself as loving father and allowed me to be that loving daughter in those last years of his life and for that I always remember with fondness that big Texas Thanksgiving and am truly thankful.
