I Saw Daddy Angry Three Times

 

I always called my father “Daddy” until Charlene and her clan came along. Even before that, others were referring to him as “Daddy May.” When Winnie joined our little group as Cecil’s bride, she called Daddy “Daddy May” – a natural extension of Cecil’s “Daddy.” When Daucie’s offspring became a part of our family, they picked up on Winnie’s name for our beloved “founder of the feast.”

I have always felt a certain proprietorship toward Daddy May. From the time I was eight until I was sixteen, it was just him and me. There are a lot of good stories from that time-period, but not for today. This morning I was reminded of one time he got angry.

It is hard to imagine him angry. He was as even tempered a man as I have ever known or heard of. But this event broke through. His barber shop proudly displayed a “Union Shop” sign. I never talked with him about the pros and cons of being a Union Shop but one of the cons was that the union set the hair cut prices. It was a slow time for barbers and probably for a lot of other small businesses. The union’s answer to the decrease in the number of haircuts was to raise the prices. That did not fit with Daddy’s sense of economics. They raised the price of a haircut to $1.00. Daddy thought that would keep even more people away or at least cause them to spread out the time between haircuts. He was probably right, but he still had no control over what the union told him he had to do. He was “hopping mad.”

That reminded me of two other times Daddy got angry. My little black Cocker mix, Bobo, was my best friend at the time. He even appears on the cover of one of my books today. I don’t know what got into the dog, probably confusion over my mother’s abrupt departure from our home and Bobo being left in the house alone during the day. My daddy and I returned to the house one evening to discover that Bobo had chewed up one of my socks. Daddy flashed hot and declared that we would get rid of the dog. Arguing with Daddy was not in my repertoire, so I did the only thing I knew how to do - I cried. Then Daddy cried, and we held on to each other for a while. Nothing was said of mother’s departure, but we both knew we were really crying about that. In the end, Daddy repented and said we would keep the dog.

I was younger than that on the third occasion I remember Daddy getting mad and this time he was mad at me. The 1000 member Union Avenue Church was renovating its auditorium. There was no where else for 1000 people to go on a Sunday morning, so we continued to meet during the renovation. We never sat in the balcony, but something about the progress of the work caused us to move up there. The workers had stored some 2x4’s along the space in front of our row of seats. I am thinking I was four or five and my feet did not reach the floor. The only place for me to rest my feet was on the stacked lumber. Every time I moved, the lumber shifted and made a loud clatter. I was fairly warned not to make that noise any more, probably at least twice. On the third time my daddy got up, took me by the hand and marched me to the basement where he gave me the only spanking I remember ever getting from anyone. This may sound a little odd, but I still believe the only spanking I ever got was unfairly administered.

These are not memories I think of often and are not how I think of my daddy. He was the best daddy any little boy or free-range teenager could have ever asked for - at a time when single fathers were not in vogue. The reason I do remember these events is how dramatically out of character they were.