Besides, Dad
wasn’t upset about the butter.
The two of us were groaning under the weight of something neither could
bring ourselves to discuss. Two days
before I had insulted and hurt him.
Lost in thought,
I missed a throw onto the platen and messed up the ticket sequence. I didn’t notice Al come up behind me.
“God dammit,” he shouted at me, “you screwed up
the counter. We gotta go back to 2972 and print them all over again!”
“I’m sorry, Al,” I said, “I was …
“You was staring out the God dammed window at
the sky is what you were doin! What’re you gonna be when you grow up, a
weatherman?”
“I don’t know what I’m going to be,” I
said. “Maybe I’ll be a bum.” I said it seriously, feeling down on myself.
“You ain’t gonna be no bum, youngster. I
get a feelin’ about people, ya know? Yer one of those lucky bastards that
God takes care of. Me, I gotta work for a livin’, so get outta my way
while I reset the counters.”
I was soon back pumping the press trying to stay
alert and not get the counters out of sync again.
But my mind drifted back to when I was
younger. Although my father and I were
often at odds in my teen years, I couldn’t deny that he had meant the world to
me when I was a little kid.
Dad was a newspaper pressman and an expert at
his trade. When I was six or seven years
old I thought he was the smartest man in the world. I can’t count the number of times I told anyone who would
listen that my father printed the
newspapers that went all over the city and even down the valley to the small
mill towns along the river.
Imagine me, a seven year old kid brought down to
the newspaper and walked into the pressroom to watch the men mount the heavy
stereotype plates and thread the huge rolls of newsprint up from the basement
into the gargantuan Hoe presses. Wrenches clanged and after a few minutes
it grew quiet. Someone called, “All Clear.” Lights began to blink in
warning and a sharp staccato buzzer blared out from somewhere above, echoing up
and down the line of presses. It reminded me of a submarine’s dive alarm
I’d heard at the movies when the crew filled the tanks and dove beneath the
waves. Soon I was dragged below the
surface of the noise as the presses clunked and groaned and quickly got up to
speed with a roar that was deafening. I wanted to hold my hands over my
ears, but none of the men seemed impressed, so I kept my arms at my side and
suppressed the urge to scream in delight over the thundering
machinery. The presses began to spit out the afternoon edition and
sent a stream of miraculously folded newspapers of 54-pages each along a
conveyor contraption that went up and across the ceiling and over to the
waiting men who bundled them up in the mailroom.
When I left the newspaper that day with my
father I was the proudest seven year old one could imagine. Only a few years later I was a teenager when I
stopped by the pressroom one afternoon to get the keys and borrow his car. When his boss asked me to pose with Dad in a
photo for the company in-house newsletter, I refused. I didn’t want to be seen in public with my
father in his coveralls and printers cap.
I had said only, “I can’t,” and Dad had laughed it off, but I could see
he was hurt.
That night when we got home I ate the food he
provided and went out in the evening wearing a new jacket he had bought me with
the money he earned working in his coveralls.
The next day I sat in math class up the street
in an old brick high school building with roots down to the sub strata of rock. My soles could just feel the vibration of the
presses start up for the Valley Edition at 10:30 in the morning. I felt exactly like the person Al told me I
wasn’t, a bum.
“God dammit, Davey,” I heard Al shout in my
ear. “The counters are off again! What the hell’s the matter with you this
morning?”
I mumbled something.
“Here,” he said.
“Get over here and take the glue pot and make up this order of
pads. You’re not good for anything else
this morning!”
I did as I was told.
“What’s buggin’ you, huh?” Al asked, and he seemed to mean it.
“My father and I had a fight,” I said. I told him about my refusal to be in the
photo, hoping he would take my side, although I knew no one would agree with
me.
“So you’re not proud of your old man?” Al asked.
“I just didn’t want to be in the photo,” I said.
How come you’re not too proud to work here with
me in this shit hole garage?” he asked.
I’d never thought of that.
“I know what your problem is,” he said. “You don’t know how to apologize.”
“Sure I do!” I said.
“Not to your father. Have you ever done that?” he asked.
“Well, I’ve never had any reason to,” I replied.
Al glanced across the work table at me. He looked stunned. I remembered he was a
father and for a moment something about his countenance reminded me of my Dad. Then he leaned back and laughed. And he kept laughing. All morning.
Every ten minutes or so he’d look over at me and start laughing
again. Eventually he got me laughing and
told me all the dumb things his kids did when they were teens. He told me he loved them more than the air he
breathed.
That night I went home and
apologized to my father. He nodded. He never said, “You’re a good son,” or
reached out to give me an affectionate hug.
He wasn’t capable of those actions, but something in his eyes told me he
loved me. I can still see it and I have treasured
it over fifty years.
It has since occurred to me I
never did anything to earn his love.
That may be the first great lesson of fatherhood.
copyright 2011, 2015, David Griffin
The Windswept Press
Murrells Inlet, South
Carolina
