My Father's Face

Writing last week about Wendell Berry and my father kicked in some good memories growing up. You’ll have to bear with me. I’ll be back to the standard fare next week.

Even though my relatives would tell me that my father was proud of me, I knew the truth. We were walking through the hardwoods of central Kentucky one time and he noticed a vine as thick as your wrist hanging from a tree. He grabbed it and swung a perfect circle. I then grabbed the vine - I was probably 10 at the time - and swung out and then crashed back into the tree. I fell to the ground making all kinds of racket. Dad said I swung like a “spastic orangutang” (with a ‘g’). Mom came after him with a switch.

I had big shoes to fill in baseball. Those same relatives would recount the time that my father hit not one but two home runs in a baseball game attended by Governor A.B. “Happy” Chandler. I think the Governor offered to sign one of the balls for my father, but it was in keeping with Dad’s character (even at the age of 12) that my father offered to do the same for him. My Little League team was sponsored by Woodford Feed (each team had a sponsor), owned by Lester Ballard. (Southern vernacular would peg him as “ornery”, pronounced onn-ree.) Lester had a neurologic disease and once pointed to the outfield, telling me to go to right field. The problem was that his hands were perpetually bent in a slight curve and so the other left fielder and I stood there looking at each other in the grass.

Lester was a bit of a foil for my father at Woodford Feed. (It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m partial to Woodford Reserve bourbon). Dad drove in to get some gravel for our half-mile long driveway - It’s not gravel, it’s crushed rock; Dad asked for a bed liner but was met with, A truck’s a truck. Later before a trip out of town, he asked Lester for an automatic fish feeder - Dad liked to keep the catfish fed in the upper pond - Lester looked out from underneath the brim of his Woodford Feed hat, Why don’t ye get your neighbors to do it? I think after that, whenever Dad went into Woodford Feed and Lester’d say, Kin ah hep (barely an ‘L’ in help) ye?; Dad would reply, I think I’m beyond help.

This, of course, was well after my father took me fishing for the first time. I grew up in a house filled with fishing trophies; my old man was a card-carrying member of the Kentucky Bluegrass Bass Fishing Club. Oakley Underwood was his primary rival and fishing partner and to be honest these men were serious - it wasn’t a ruse for getting out of the house to drink beer (Olympia and Blatz) with the boys. As previously described, Dad was a bait and lure fisherman looking to land small-mouth bass (“they fight better than the large mouth”) at many of the reservoirs and lakes of central Kentucky - Harrington Lake being the standard go-to water.