Dad didn’t want any more kids, but Mom did. She got a babysitter (for the four they already had), met him at the airport and swooped him up and off to dinner, drinks and a night away…and I showed up nine months later during a tornado, or so I have been told. (I have two younger sisters—not sure how mom worked that out!)
Dad is a bit of a mystical figure to me. He died of a heart attack when I was twelve years old. Tough, remote, a pipe smoker…always reading (multiple books at a time; a trait I have inherited), out-doorsy. Old Spice. Horses. Guns. Broad minded.
He studied religions before he landed on Christianity (though we almost became Mormons at one point.) Once he chose Christianity…or it chose him…he was all in. Our home became a way station for all kinds of people. Eventually some of them stayed for longer periods of time. The first was a stringy-haired teenager we called Duck, not to be confused with our turkey that we called Tom. By the time Dad died he and mom officially ran a ‘boys ranch’ dubbed “Wilderness Ranch”. We kept one of those boys for keeps, my brother, Carl.
The last time I saw my dad, he was standing on the stoop, pipe in hand. I was heading off with a family to Tucson for a week. By some prescient impulse I ran back to hug his leathery, weathered person, my last touch and smell of him.
I recently found a picture of him holding me in his lap, looking happy…like, maybe baby me made him happy. This is a revelation to me. Not that I thought he didn’t love me, I assumed he did in his non-touchy-feely-way–a way that inevitably grew more distant and opaque through the years. But in this picture a wisp of something eternal–something more real than the empty space that has represented my dad for the last 48 years–drew me in; a bonding experience. I have so much to look forward to.
Odom's Odyssey 