Daddy's Girl

 It started with special daddy-daughter lunches.  Dad would dig out the shiny red helmet and place it like ”her majesty's crown” on my tiny head. It always felt so heavy and my head would feel wobbly from the weight. The next thing I knew, I was flying as he picked me up and tossed me over his head. Squeals of laughter filled the morning air as my little pink dress floated up toward me and then back down while my patent leather shoes shined in the sun. I would hang on tight to his arms as he swung me onto the back of his motorcycle. 

Town was ten minutes from home. But those few minutes felt like hours as a little girl riding with the wind in your face, little wisps of hair tickling around the bottom of the helmet and hugging your dad as hard as your tiny arms could. The thrill of the tilting and turning of the bike was so awesome but the fear of falling was still there. It was the greatest thrill ride that will always surpass any roller coaster I've ever been on.

 Dad worked third shift all week so Saturday was his day to get things done. We would drive the few minutes into our small town and dad would run his errands.  We would be greeted by shopkeepers and bank tellers. They would say how pretty my dress was and ask if I was excited to ride on the motorcycle. The bank lady always had a sucker for me and I remember everyone smiling.  I would look at dad and his smile was different. His bright blue eyes seemed more open and his face looked like it had lost the weathered look from the work week. He looked...happy.  I couldn’t understand how running errands made him feel so happy. 

 Our next stop was to the only diner on the main square. We would walk in and get our usual stools at the bar.  He had to lift me up onto the red leather seat that sat on a metal pole. It was scary to have nothing to hold on to, but it was so much fun to be taller than the other people in the restaurant. Sometimes, while we waited for our food, he would spin me as I clung to the underside of the seat, just to keep me entertained. It felt so fast but as I look back now,  I see that the spins were slow and careful as he always had a hand around my tiny waist to keep me steady. Everyone knew us and he would chat with the staff as we sat through his third cup of coffee of the day. But, he kept his focus on me as we talked about all of the things I would do and become.  Every time we went to the diner, I “had to eat everything on my plate”, but when I was starting to slow down, he would place another order. My plate would disappear and in it’s place was always a hot fudge sundae with chocolate ice cream, whipped cream piled higher than it was probably supposed to be and two cherries. We would feed each other bites of ice cream and laugh about the chocolate dribbles that he would catch before they hit my dress. As we rode back home, we reminded each other that the ice cream was a secret.

When we walked in the door, he would tell my mom what he had gotten or who he had seen and she would ask me what I had for lunch. Keeping to our solemn promise, I never told her about the ice cream. I would show her the sucker that I had gotten at the bank and tell her what flavor I thought it would be. Then I would wiggle it like a rattle at my baby brother (who was too small to ride on the motorcycle and eat suckers). She would tell me to go eat it outside while I played. Then she would go back to cooing and playing with my little brother.  

The one memory I could never forget about my mother was the story she loved to tell about the day I was born. She said that dad had really wanted a boy. When I arrived, she refused to hold me and told the nurses to take me back as they tried to hand me to her. She told them " I wasn’t a boy".  Hearing this as a small child, it would hurt my feelings so much and I didn't know who to be more mad at.  Mom for enjoying the story so much that she had to keep telling it or my dad for wanting a boy. But as I grew older, I realized it didn’t matter as much.

 The lunches happened less often when I was about ten or twelve. Then one day at the diner, dad stepped outside for a smoke and Gretchen, the owner came over and told me that she couldn’t believe how grown up I had become and she remembered how we came in every weekend.  She told me that I was daddy’s little girl and he was always so proud to walk in with me and show me off and brag about the tiniest things I had done.  I knew then, that he never cared that I wasn’t a boy.  I tried even harder to make time for him after that.

When I was sixteen, I got a job at the market in town. I would rush home from school, do my chores and head to work.  I struggled with my grades after that.  I wouldn’t get home until after 10 p.m. and would fall asleep with books around me on my bed. At one point, my grades were so bad that dad sat me down.  I was so scared I was going to be grounded or told I had to quit my job.  He told me that he knew how hard I was working and that he knew I was taking extra shifts so I could pay for my car on my own.

  But, he said, “This is how life works”. He held his hand horizontally in front of him above his head and said, “family”, then he dropped his hand and said, “education”, dropped his hand again and said, “work”. 

He said, “Family is there to help each other. You need your education to go farther so you can support your own family and work is something that you do to support that family. Work is never supposed to be your whole life.”  The next night, I asked my boss to cut my hours back to four days a week and one of those days off had to be a Saturday or Sunday.  I saved that one day off, to take my dad to lunch.

There are three things that my brother used to tease him about as we grew older. My dad always had a pack of cigarettes on him and smoked continually. He was always yelling, “anyone see my glasses?” And, he had the slowest fastball in town.  Now dad is dying from lung cancer with only half a lung functioning, we could always find a pair of glasses on his Bible on his nightstand and he and my brother reminisce about all of the catch they used to play in the backyard.

When we both moved out, as a joke, We would both get dad a pair of reading glasses on any occasion we could think of, just so he could find a pair.  When I would visit, I could find them near the kitchen sink, on the back of the toilet and always 2 or three pairs on the kitchen table and night stand.  And every so often, when he wanted to read something he thought I would enjoy, he would say, “Do you see my glasses anywhere?”

When my now husband asked my dad for my hand, we were both scared to death.  I wasn’t sure what dad would say or if I’d ever get married. Of course I waited in the kitchen with my mom while we both strained to hear what was going on in the living room. I heard dad tell him that he seemed like a nice boy and he could tell that I loved him. He told him the rules of the family, like he had told me so many years ago and then out of nowhere, he said that he had kept his old hunting rifle. That was it. Just that one comment. I think that’s the one time my mom and I bonded. We laughed so hard that we were crying.

On my wedding day, dad came into the room after I had gotten ready. He tried so hard not to cry. As we stood there hugging, he told me how proud of me he was and that I had chosen a good man.  Then he let go and handed me a jewelry box. Inside was a charm bracelet. He had chosen them himself, he said. There was a motorcycle, an ice cream cone, baby shoes, a bike, a Volkswagen beetle and a few other charms marking important events in my life.  He had kept all of our memories alive in one little bracelet.  I promised I would never take it off as he put it on my wrist.  I kept that promise through the years.  He would always look for it when I would visit.

After my mother passed away, we were sorting through her things and helping dad get rid of the stuff he couldn't look at anymore. We came across some pictures of a very young dad with some other young men standing in some really tall trees. They all had a cigarette in their mouths.  He then told me about being in the Vietnam War.  He had never spoken of it my entire childhood so this came as a shock that he had kept this secret.  Like many other men, he didn’t want to talk about the things he had seen there.  He did tell me that that's where he took up smoking and adding salt and pepper to every dish without ever tasting it. He was able to talk about some things. Like how the food was so terrible that the salt and pepper made it edible and he would tell me about the men in the pictures. But he would never tell me what happened to any of them. If I asked, he would tear up a little, tuck the pictures away in an envelope and change the subject..

I tried to get him to move in with us when he found out he had cancer, but the stubborn old man refused to give up his house or independence. So I hired him a housekeeper and someone to come and sit with him. He threw a fit, but in the end, I won because his other option was to move in with me and my family.  

One night as I sat with him, he told me that he and my mom had buried a time capsule in the backyard shortly after they bought the house.  He had planted a tree to commemorate their first big purchase and decided to put the capsule under it.  The only tree I remembered in the back yard had gotten so old that they ended up chopping it down and the remaining stump had rotted. Dad had refused to have it removed every time we suggested it. Now I knew why. He told me that when he passed, my brother and I had to dig it up.  

Dad passed away a few days later. I never knew a heart could be that broken. He had a military funeral and I was given the folded flag that now sits proudly in a case on my mantle along with the picture of him and his buddies smoking in the trees. 

My brother decided to buy dad’s house so he could start his family there. We talked about it and decided that it was time to dig up the time capsule. So, my brother hired some professionals and told them about the capsule so they would be watching for it.  He called me and told me that they had found it and he was waiting for me to open it with him. For some reason, we stalled and talked about anything and everything until we admitted that we just couldn’t bring ourselves to open it right then. Maybe it was too soon, or too private. Either way, my brother put it on the book shelf in the living room and we didn’t talk about it for years. Dad had said to keep it. He didn't say we could open it. 

My daughter would see it when we visited and ask what was in it and I would tell her we didn’t know. She kept insisting that we open it.  I finally explained what it was and that we weren’t ready to look inside yet because we didn’t want to feel that sadness. 

One day as she was standing there just looking at it again, she said she wanted a special box too. My brother and I looked at eachother and it was clear what we had to do.  I told her to find something that she wouldn’t miss too much that reminded her of grandpa and my brother and I started making a list.

We took one of the old cookie tins that dad kept in the garage and started putting things in it. My little girl put in the last birthday card my dad had sent her. She said it was her favorite because she could read the words “I love you” in it.

My brother went into the basement and brought up a box of dad’s things he couldn’t throw away. He had kept every pair of glasses my dad had lying around the house.  We laughed as we put those in the tin. Dad’s Bible was a must. My brother put in the old baseball that dad had caught for him at a game, and a pack of my brother's cigarettes. It was the same brand dad smoked. We went through the albums and put in pictures of dad with us and a picture of his wedding day.  I made my brother wait until I had looked around my house for things to add.  I went back the next day and put in a picture of dad and myself on my wedding day, dancing the father-daughter dance, a copy of the picture of him with his buddies and lastly, I put in the bracelet.  My daughter didn’t want me to put it in there because she had played with the charms on my wrist her entire life. She would touch each one as I held her when she was sick, read her bedtime stories and as we sat together in a booth during our special lunches with grandpa. I had told her so many times the meaning of each charm. But she would ask for the stories again and again. My brother and I promised her that when she got married, she could dig up the time capsule and the bracelet would be hers. 

Another tree was planted but we decided that this time the capsule wouldn’t go under it. We planted the time capsule three large steps to the east of the tree so it would be easier to dig up. 

 Every few years, my daughter would ask how much longer we had to wait to dig it up.  Before I knew it, she grew up and went to college and I thought she had forgotten about it.  Two weeks before her wedding, she asked if we could find the time capsule.  We let her and her future husband dig it up in the back yard and she wore that bracelet on her wedding day. The day after, my brother and I decided it was time to see what was in the box on his bookshelf.  My daughter and her new husband sat with us as we struggled to open it.  We had plenty of time to talk about their honeymoon plans and joked that we needed to hurry up because they had a plane to catch at six the next night.

We all took our turn trying to pry it open with various tools and ideas. In the end, with a lot of oil and swearing, we finally got it open.