My Dad: Muscle, Mystery & Tease

My Daddy was six feet of muscle and mystery. He kept his emotions under careful control. Pleasure and displeasure were seen in his eyes. He didn’t laugh out loud (often), raise his voice (hardly ever), or cry (ever). On the other hand, every time he left for work he gave each of us a kiss on the cheek and told us he loved us. Momma was always last and her peck was always on the lips.

Dad was a tease in the truest sense of the word. He would set a trap and methodically lure the unsuspecting into it. Often there was a truth he was trying to help the other person discover, but sometimes he just loved to tease. He took great care not to hurt or offend; he innately understood that the best humor was that which helped us all to laugh at our shared humanness.

When my cousin Alice Pearl was a teen and had begun wearing makeup, upon her arrival he would always say, “Alice, looks like you got too close to that stovepipe again. We’ve got soap and a rag back there if want them.” It seems to me he especially liked to tease my brother Jimmy. At least I paid extra attention to those events.

On his sixteenth birthday Jimmy received a set of exercise weights, the simple barbell and dumbbell kind. With all of the disks balanced on the barbell it weighed 110 pounds. Three or four of his friends gathered on the front porch like young bucks to see who was the strongest. Each had had several turns when Dad walked in from work. Seeing what was going on, he bellowed out, “who’s the best man? Who can press it the most?” Jimmy named his nemesis reporting how many times each boy had pressed the bar. The winner had gotten it full length above his head twelve times.

Dad asked if they minded if “the old man gave it a try.” “Sure, go ahead” was the choral response. Setting his satchel down beside the weights, Dad grabbed the bar firmly, exhaled and took a deep breath. He jerked the weights up over his head with great effort and began to strain toward the record. By the time he got to eleven he was red-faced, eyes-bulging, and muscles shaking. With all of his might he tried for the twelfth but dropped the burden in mid-air, guiding it as it bounced on the cement floor.

With the young bucks grinning and jabbing at each other, Dad began to speak of his puzzlement. “Boys, I don’t understand that. When I was y’alls age I cut pulpwood and it was my job to throw those logs up on the truck.” As he spoke he was motioning the act of throwing a log up to his invisible partner. At the apex of his thrust, he suddenly jerked, snapping his fingers, “That’s my problem. I threw those logs up with one hand.”

Leaning over he grabbed the barbell set with his right hand, smoothly raised it over his head and without any sign of exertion began rapidly pumping, “one, two, three...” Effortlessly he continued on to “… thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.” Then, with one motion he gently lowered the bar to the floor, and saying nothing, picked up his satchel and walked into the house. The boys just stood there, eyes following Dad, jaws dropped. After a long silence, one exclaimed, “Wow, did you see that?” Briefly they chattered in amazement, but none bothered to pick up the weights again, at least not that day.