Top Drawer Dads

In his father’s top drawer, Dan remembers a worn and weathered piece of paper. At a glance, it is nothing much, but, unfolded, it is a link to his father’s heart. For on that paper, opened and folded until torn on the crease lines, is a poem. That poem is a celebration of his dad’s brother. Jay was killed in WWII. One of eight children, Dan’s dad was particularly close to Jay, who was next to him in age. The poem is titled, “When a Brother is Lost at War.” There was just that one copy. After stumbling upon it, Dan asked his dad about it … and his father told him. His dad never said why, but he gave the poem to Dan. Dan treasures it. Perhaps his dad knew Dan would treasure it. “A number of years ago, it was so cracked and so messed up I retyped it. I typed it – this is before the computer – on a typewriter and gave him a fresh copy of it. I still have the torn copy. When you open it now, you have to open it gently, because … he wrote it in ’44, ’45, so its 65 years old – some-thing like that. That was always important to me.” Dan keeps the poem in his drawer with a plaster-of-Paris bust of a Cub Scout. It is about 4 inches tall, with all the little bubbles that came with those casts made from red rubber molds. It shows the painstaking paint strokes of a 10-year-old boy making a gift for his dad. “You know – the stupid little things you make for your parents. And you bring them home,” he says. “But dad kept it.” And he treasured it. “It stayed somewhere around, on his desk at work and on his desk at home,” recalls Dan. “A few years ago he gave it back to me. He said, ‘I’ve kept it all these years and I want you to have it.’ And I have it – very nice – very nice.” Getting the Cub Scout back wasn’t ceremonious. It was one of many things his parents handed back, thinking they would be meaningful now that the kids were older. Dan and his father were together at the home-stead in Texas about 10 years ago. His dad turned to him and said, “Here, take this. If I keep this, it may get broken or something.” The bust was on his desk. It was one of those big, roll-top ones, handed down from an aunt of his mother who had raised her. Her parents had been ill, so she was raised by Aunt Annie. And when Aunt Annie died she passed down the roll-top. “So the roll-top, even today, is much discussed,” he reflects. “You know, when dad passes, who’s gonna get the roll-top? Of course, it should go to the oldest – I burned my name on the back with my little wood burner a long time ago. Now, I’m the oldest – so it’s no question,” he jokes, “but dad had the Cub Scout sitting on top of the roll-top that day.” Today, the little, hand-painted bust is in Dan’s drawer. “You know, you’d think you’d keep stuff like that in a safe deposit box, but you can’t pull it out and mess with it if it’s at the bank,” he reflects. “I’ve got some cuff links I never wear – and the Cub Scout. “Back from my wearing-religious-paraphernalia days, I’ve got all these necklaces and things, with all the various kinds of crosses, and so forth. This was when I was in college and shortly after – living in Europe with the Air Force. All the crazy things I wore then that I don’t anymore,” Dan pauses in reflection, “but I remember, so I can’t throw them away.” “I expect that maybe my kids have gone in my top drawer – but they have never told me. I never told my father. We never talked about it. “We’ve talked about things that are important.” Dan doesn’t remember his first visit to his dad’s top drawer. He does know it wasn’t a one-time event. It’s the kind of place you revisit. And part of what he revisited was the strangely foreign touchstones of the preceding generation. For each generation brings its own cultural peculiarities and wisdom. Dan’s dad was a product of World War II. After the war, he finished college “real fast, like a lot of guys in that time,” and went to work in the oil industry in Houston. Somehow, socks were symbolic of his dad’s placement in his generation. “Nylon socks were a big deal then, not those thick cotton things. In dad’s case, growing up on a farm in Southeast Texas, he often had no socks or, when he had them, his mother probably made them, just like she made the dresses out of the 100-pound flour sacks for the daughters. That’s when the flour sacks were embroidered and flowered and all that – for that very purpose. They knew that the mothers were making dresses out of them. So they were fancy.” “Remember the thin socks that older men still wear now,” he queries. “When nylon was first out actually? We’re talking early 1950s to late 50s.” The thin socks were trendy for his dad. Not for Dan, he disliked them. Dan bought his socks – “the gold-toe stuff” – at a place in Houston called Mr. Duds. But his dad stuck to nylon, in basic blue and black. “No shades of brown or gray, or anything on them,” reflects Dan. They were just thin socks that hung somewhere be-low the calf. His dad’s drawer also held a wrist watch and a knife with a small blade. The knife wasn’t something he remembers his father taking to work. “He messed with it around the house.” His father’s drawer held nothing belonging to his dad, who was a dirt-poor, sharecropping, cotton farmer from southeast Texas. He maybe had a dairy cow and some laying hens. He was from the Victoria, Texas area, a place called Cuero. Dan remembers visiting his paternal grandparents four or five times a year. “(My parents would) pile all the kids in the car and go. Hot! Pre interstate, when I was little, oh gosh, farm-to-market when you got that far out, but mostly just your basic highway.” None of that heritage was symbolically captured by memorabilia in his dad’s top drawer. Maybe it came from being a sharecropper’s son, but his dad’s closet, like his drawer was function-al and frugal: basic black shoes, basic brown shoes, all laced up. “The shoes were always shined,” he says, “And he could wear out a pair of shoes and have them resoled until, oh gosh … . “You know, it’s hard to buy for dad. ‘Dad, you need a new pair of shoes.’ ‘No, I don’t. I got a black, I got a brown, what do I need a new pair for’?” His dad’s shirts came from the cleaners, but they weren’t hung on hangers under plastic. White, and heavily starched, they came folded and stacked, held together with a band of cardboard and bound with paper. “I remember the odor when he would open them – that starch, that kind of semi-singed (smell) from the ironing. I’d watch him unfold that sucker and put it on. That was cool, watching dad get into his white shirts in the mornings; that was kind of cool.” There were five children in his household. Dan was the oldest. In reflecting back, he describes his parents as “totally clean and totally messy.” Clothing for five kids was strewn all over the house, “but built up in their room somehow. You kind of have to wade through things.” But his dad’s top drawer was organized, everything in its place: the terribly thin socks, the underwear were all there. After his dad came on a recent trip to see the grandchildren, it struck Dan that with all he’d known about his dad, he still didn’t know him. “I knew the father image; I knew the church leader and I knew the business leader. I knew the images of the husband that he was – but he was from a generation that didn’t sit down and tell the kids his emotional responses to hope and dream, to gain or loss. “He didn’t sit and talk, but he did keep that Cub Scout and that poem.”