Dad

Sundays too my father got up early 

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, 

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. 

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. 

When the rooms were warm, he'd call, 

and slowly I would rise and dress, 

fearing the chronic angers of that house, 

Speaking indifferently to him, 

who had driven out the cold 

and polished my good shoes as well. 

What did I know, what did I know 

of love's austere and lonely offices?

— "Those Winter Sundays," Robert Hayden

Menton Lafayette (Tony) Childress was born in 1920, in that transition between the 19th Century and the 20th.  He was born of people who made their living in 19th century ways, through growing and mechanical ingenuity, and he inherited their skills.  He left school at 14, probably somewhere in what we would now call middle school... also a 19th Century trait, when attaining a high school education was a statistical anomaly.

He adapted to some but not all of the 20th Century.  He loved his union and his fraternal organization, loved working with precision tools, loved pickups and campers and outboard motors.  He had, in many ways, a common life for men of his era—Navy service, hunting and fishing, cigarettes, a long career with one massive organization that became global and disloyal and a shorter but even better career with a smaller local one.  He stayed married to a woman he no longer understood, and raised a son whom he never did.

He died when I was 16, on November 16th, 1974.  He was 54 years, seven months and two days old.  Tomorrow, I'll be 55.

Nora's mom was born three months before my dad, and she lived to be 92.  Once I got to know her, it was difficult to not think about what my dad might have been like at 80, at 85, at 90.  His own father outlived him, the original Herbert Allen Childress reaching 1981 and accomplishing the age of 83 years and two days.  I have a photo of Grandpa, taken at about his 80th year: he's wearing a Pendleton plaid shirt and a fleece vest, and looks like the Blackfoot Indian that he's reputed to have descended from, craggy and brown and firm-eyed.  And now the only one of my father's four sons for whom he chose the name, to honor his own father, has also outlived him, not merely in the calendar but also in lifespan.

What would we make of one another today, I wonder.  How would we receive each other's gifts? How would we differ in telling the same stories?  How would we, finally, come to know each other's dreams?  

Thanks, Dad, for all the things I knew about, and all the things I never will.