His Heart

Looking back, I see that daddy was so happy with his five kids. Mom didn’t need five for her part but she had them. To please daddy, I guess. We were his life, practically, but that doesn’t mean he was always calm and in charge of his emotions. In fact, he was a very emotional man, much like an Italian or Frenchman, I always thought. He probably wasn’t in control of his emotions much of his life.

We went fishing and camping a lot as kids. The preparations we’d make for a trip of three or four days were overwhelming.
Even for a weekend. We’d load up the station wagon with everything you can imagine for creature comforts. Then we’d load up the boat that was on the trailer attached to the rear of the car. People always laughed that it looked as if we were going away for six or seven months instead of three or four days.

Daddy loved these “adventures” and would fish and fish us to death. Once we went to some state park near Destin, Florida, or Panama City. We found an aunt and uncle and a cousin of my dad’s and the cousin’s family. So, the grownups all had a good time talking, eating, drinking and laughing over times past. We kids played and played to our hearts’ content it seemed.

The Florida Panhandle beaches are the ones that are shorter but whiter. The sand is like bleached sugar. The Atlantic beaches are longer, the waves usually bigger, but the sand is darker. We mainly went to the Panhandle beaches because they were closer to where we lived. One vacation we went to St. Augustine, however, and to Fernadina Beach north of Jax. That beach was beautiful. It has been many years since I saw it. I don’t know how it looks today.

People will come around if you feed them and that’s what daddy did. He fed a lot of people when he was young and busy working and earning. He loved to do it and to have them round us—the joking, laughs, warmth, etc. The fried fish of every kind we ate! Juicy and mouth-watering. Daddy had a large iron cook pot that he would place on the portable iron stove he made himself and fry the fish out of doors. Hush puppies and the other trimmings would accompany those fish.

Here I’m just remembering a little. Daddy is still living at this writing but he’s having trouble. He has been a widower for nearly seven years now. He will turn eighty-four in two months, April. His dream of living to be one hundred years old is beginning to stagger and to become less certain a probability. I don’t know what to think about that. I don’t share that dream for myself. I have visited senior citizens’ homes and homes for the mentally ill and know that in one’s eighties and nineties the “going” is truly rough. Too rough, certainly, for me. I don’t even allow myself to “dream” about it. But anyway, I’m sad. Sad for him in some way. And until I, myself, die, I will always remember and be grateful for having had a daddy who provided so well and responsibly as did he for his wife and kids. We were simply his heart.