Smartass

"Hi Daddy."

I've said those words, literally, thousands of times over the course of my life. I said them as a child, racing up the driveway on my bike. I said them as a teenager, crashing into the house two minutes before my curfew. I say them now, as an adult, when I enter my parents' house for a brief holiday visit. He's always responded with a gruffy, slightly raspy "Hey Kel" or "Hi Honey" and a big hug.

My father always appears to me in vivid, full-color 3D when I think about him. I can see him sweeping out the garage or fixing one of the cars, a classic-rock station on in the background. I can see him sitting in his recliner and hear him yelling at the Packers. I can smell the not entirely unpleasant aroma of motor oil, tobacco, and Lava soap that he always smells like, even after he's showered and changed out of his work clothes.

Dad is a diesel mechanic. He owns a shop with his brother and while he's reasonably happy as a small-business owner, he often talks about what he would do if he had a chance to do his life over. His biggest regret, apparently, is dropping out of college and not becoming a teacher like his mother was, like his eldest son has become. Given the scars, the burns he sustains, the hellish heat in the summer and freezing cold in the winter and the tinnitus he has in both ears, I often wonder if he wouldn't have been better off as a teacher myself. Unless I've done something profoundly stupid like neglect to check the oil in my aging Ford before driving to see him or forget the lyrics to Badlands, he's always been infintely patient when teaching me to do something. He taught me how to take a fish off the line and the joy of finishing a project and the quiet pride that comes with knowing you've done a good job. He even gave me my first lessons in writing, correcting my early short stories or poems before I handed them into my language arts teacher.

He's not the kind of person to really ask for help with a big project. He might inform me or more likely, my younger brother, that there is wood to be stacked or weeds to be pulled, but he doesn't ask for help. He simply announces that there's a project that needs to be done whether it's hanging gutters or re-terracing my mother's gardens. People, usually my younger brother Stephen, will show up to help. Or they won't and he'll do it himself. Either way, it gets done. I inherited a similar independent streak from him. I was the first person in my family to attend a college out of state. I moved away when I was 18 and since then have been paying my own bills, taking care of myself, building my own bookshelves, seeing to my own oil changes. But regardless of that independent streak, when something big comes up I always find myself calling the house and asking for Dad's advice on how much I should be paying for new tires or whether or not I should make a career change.

So, as a child, I watched my dad's independence. His self-reliance and confidence. I also watched him kneel in our small-town Catholic Church and ask God for help. my parents aren't church people, but they are very devout Catholics. Weekly Mass, Eucharistic adoration, praying the rosary, these were all parts of my life as a child. And they would have made sense if they were limited to my mother. But to watch my father--the most self-dependent man I knew--get on his knees and ask someone else for something, even if that something was a benevolent, divine Creator, shocked me. Dad taught me the importance of prayer the same way he taught me to land a bass or my younger brother to reroof a house. We watched him do these things over and over and it was carved into our minds.

I think about watching him in church now, when we're on the phone or sitting across the dinner table from one another. Dad has two tones of voice. When he uses the first one and calls me a smartass, my hackles raise and I immediately go on the defensive. I know what's going to follow will be a drawn-out, angry conversation about politics. But there's another, softer tone of voice that he uses that makes it sound like he's actually happy to have a bright daughter, one who questions not only his authority, but my teachers' authority, my bosses' authority, even God's authority. Surprisingly, this last one has caused the least amount of difficulty in our relationship. It is, at least to him, necessary that I cede a certain amount of authority to him, to teachers, to bosses, because they had a direct impact on my life. God, of course, directly impacted my life as well, but his authority was so established it was beyond questioning. While if I smarted off to a teacher there would be serious immediate repercussions in the form of detention of poor grades, when I smarted off to God nothing happened. There were no floods, not lightening strikes, no smiting of my family. Smarting off to God was an academic pursuit, and I could feel free to question his authority as much as a I wanted. And I have.

He seems to think I'm a smartass too.