My Favorite Man

I am a daddy's girl. Always have been. I still count myself as a daddy's girl, I guess. I genuinely believe I have the most awesome dad out of anyone, so I guess I am a daddy's girl. But for some reason, it's not the same anymore. I've understand that for a while now. However, it was made particularly apparent to me when I realized that I wrote the following essay in past tense--nothing is in the present tense at all. It sort of made me sad. It's one of those relationships that you don't really know what happened to or if anything in particular happened at all; you just know it's different and you don't know how to fix it. It may be just that I got older. Suddenly, it was weird for me to go jump on his back or sit in his lap and play with/squish his face. Not that that wasn't probably weird at the time or anything either, but... I don't know. I wish that I could get that relationship back in a real way. We were buddies. And now I feel as if the only reason we are still close might be because we were in the past. A lot of it is based off of a memory. But it's not for a lack of admiration. It's just... different for some reason now. Honestly, it may be because, as you grow older, you tend to judge closeness somewhat based on the type of conversations you have with people. Growing up, we never really talked that much--he was extremely quiet (except with me) and I preferred to make noises or pretend like I was a gopher or something--the awkward, self-entertaining child, that was me. And that was fine at the time--conversation wasn't really that important. But when you grow up and it suddenly becomes important, conversation between parents and children becomes slightly odd. Parents and children always tend to have some unspoken rule of "don't ask, don't tell" that should be respected on top of the fact that they already have spent their entire life with each other--there's not too much you can say that they don't already know.

I guess we are still close--I guess it being different is not necessarily bad. Bottom line is he is still the same guy he ever was--the model guy I had in my head since I was a little girl.

And this is what my first essay of the Fall '11 semester was about for my memoir assignment in my creative nonfiction English class. Here it is.

Every time I think about my dad, I remember the side of him that no one saw but me. I remember that silly side of him that showed when we would make faces at each other in the mirror. He would always make the same face--my favorite one; I never forgot to ask him for it. I was particularly thrilled when he would accompany the face with that crazy laugh he saved for only my sister and me. He would never do the laugh in front of my mom; I think he thought it scared her. However, when he did the laugh for my sister and me, we would collapse on the floor in laughter. He never wanted to do it too much; I believe he said it hurt him. My sister and I would wait for a few months and then ask him again. If we waited long enough before asking, he would always, with as much enthusiasm and fervor as was painfully possible, oblige us in bursting forth with that cackle--that silly, ridiculous cackle.

It wasn’t as if he was all fun and games. In fact, it was usually the opposite. All of my friends’ parents didn’t understand my dad because he was so reserved, so quiet. He played guitar, violin, mandolin and banjo. He played the kind of music to which you couldn’t help but just sit and listen; his Steve Howe, Phil Keaggy and classical guitar renditions were the soundtrack of my childhood. Sometimes he would play original pieces that he had written, which were always my favorite. He felt the music like no one else did. He didn’t have to be able to sing or convey his thoughts through lyrics. He would play a string and it moved with him. I still think of the songs he played, and I feel as though I’m dancing. Dancing in my own head, where the memory is--that quiet place he and I always connected.

He was a quiet man, but he had so much heart. He could never say an unkind word to anyone; in the same way, he never really said a word to anyone if he didn’t feel a deep sense of affection toward the person. This is why I thought my dad was the best man in the world. He was honest; he didn’t try to convince anyone of some affection that he didn’t feel. He was genuine. In this way, the time he willingly put in with me meant more to me than anything else. It mattered so much because I realized that he wouldn’t have put in that time with me if he didn’t want it.

I studied my dad. I watched his every move and spent as much time as I possibly could with him. I wanted to be just like him. I remember asking him to wake me up “as soon” as he got out of the shower. When he woke me up, I would jump out of bed and go pick out my morning cereal. It was usually Honey Nut Cheerios; after all, my dad ate Cheerios, and, despite that I hated Cheerios, I wanted my cereal to at least look like his cereal.

Every once in a while, he would forget to wake me up in the morning before he left for work. I remember waking up to hearing the back door close; I would jump out of bed and run to the front door, where I stood every morning to wave as he drove out of the driveway. But if he forgot to wake me up, he also forgot to look at the front door to see me wave. It broke my heart. I suppose I felt forgotten; I felt as though he had been doing me a favor to eat breakfast with me each morning. It’s funny how, when I think of my childhood, I laugh at how silly my thought processes were; but when I remember particular instances, I realize how real all of those emotions were, even as a child. I can still feel the heartbreak and sadness that came from thinking that I might not mean very much to my dad.

More memorable than those doubts I had as a child are the feelings of closeness and the traditions that I had with my dad. I remember driving home from church each Sunday with him in his squeaky, old, red truck he saved up for a year to buy. I would be in the dress and those clingy tights; I hated those tights so much, but my mom always made me wear them every Sunday. The seam always bunched up underneath my toes, sometimes running along the length of my foot versus the width of it. That seam would stretch and bunch in every possible crevice a child’s foot can muster. Those blasted tights were gymnasts inside my Mary Janes. Daddy always understood that I would take them off as soon as I got in his truck; it was as if it was a ritual. I would take off my tights and look at the bottom of them- it always looked like little paw prints, which we would laugh about before I tossed them on the floorboard of the truck in half- pretend, half-genuine disgust. He would roll the window down for me so that I could angle myself in the front seat and dangle my tight-less--thank God--feet out of the window. It was a ritual, I suppose. We would talk for some of the thirty-minute drive home; that time usually consisted of me asking him to tell me stories about when he was a little kid. It was never about anything very important; but then again, I rarely remember any important discussions we had. I remember the stories, the feeling. Mostly on those Sunday drives home with the windows down, we would listen to the music he grew up on--the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Queen, David Bowie and YES. I still remember the first Queen song I heard; it was “Hammer to Fall.” I remember feeling as if I was on top of the world with him-- as if nothing else mattered but that moment with my daddy. I still feel the breeze from those days. I still remember the stories. I remember all of it.