“Your father was an interesting man.”
That was a statement from a lawyer whom my brother and I had engaged to clear up some legal issues regarding a financial arrangement instigated by our Dad many years ago. There were no major problems, basically just some needed clarifications, but the lawyer had to clear away the cobwebs in his mind to recall what had been done in the past. As he recalled working with our Dad he said, “Your father was an interesting man.”
My brother and I could not help smiling at each other. “Interesting” was a diplomatic way to describe him. The pastor who preached at Dad’s funeral captured his essence much better when he said, “John wasn’t always right, but he was never in doubt.”
He was a man of great contradictions. He was a man who could quote Shakespeare while the two of us tromped through the woods on one of those armed hikes known as a bird hunt. He was a man who was equally at home in the exquisite tones of Handel’s Messiah, and foot-stomping melodies like Flop-Eared Mule.
He was a man with a college degree, and several years of graduate school, who nevertheless made his living manufacturing and selling church furniture at the Roswell Seating Company, which we referred to as “the shop”—a business started by my paternal Grandfather and continued by my Dad and his brothers. The brothers stayed with it for a living. I always got the impression my Dad stayed with it out of devotion to his father, as if keeping the saws buzzing and the blowers wheezing would keep Grandpa alive forever. Like a twist on the Samson story, Dad’s strength came from the sawdust clinging to his hair and stored in his cuffs, and when he cleaned up to go talk to a customer and tucked his old dilapidated maroon briefcase under his arm—the handle having long been lost in antiquity—he never noticed anything paradoxical about his appearance. We all pretended we didn’t notice either.
He was a man who would make the same speech to us every Christmas Day. It usually came after we had opened presents, and were wading knee deep in crumpled wrapping paper. “You know,” he would say, “every year at Christmas I can’t help but feel a little guilty. We’ve got so much while other people have so little. It just doesn’t seem right. It makes me feel guilty.”
It was a strange speech coming from him. It’s not like we were lavish with each other. We did not exchange gold-plated watches or anything similar. Sweaters and books and hand tools were about as ritzy as we ever got. And these words, mind you, were coming from my Dad—the man who thought all homeless people were alcoholics or mentally ill, and all poor people were just lazy. He was not exactly a champion for the downtrodden and marginalized, you understand.
This was a man who now felt pangs of guilt over economic injustice? Maybe he was thinking of Christmases during his own childhood when an apple or orange were real treats, when a package of Black Cat firecrackers, or a set of jacks were great gifts, when a new shirt or pair of overalls were not presents which generated disappointment, but gratitude.
Maybe it was the realization that while most everybody in that part of Georgia was poor in those days, the Donehoos were a little worse off than most. Dad used to tell us his family never celebrated birthdays when he was growing up because they just did not think they were important. My Grandma, however, told me it was because they never had the money even for token gifts.
I have never known a life like that. I have never known a Christmas like that. Oh, sure I have had my share of sorrow, but Christmas always seemed to rise above it somehow. Even that year, late Fall of 1970, when our lives were turned upside down.
I was in my first quarter of study at a local community college, and I remember coming home from school that afternoon. It was cold, terribly cold for Georgia. I chunked my books on the kitchen table and started peeling off my coat when I saw my Mother sitting in the rocking chair, my baby brother Timothy asleep on her shoulder. And she had that look on her face, the look all moms have when they are about to impart bad news, a look of strength as if sheer resolve could stare down a freight train, and she said, “The shop burned down this morning.” She could have shouted a profanity or claimed she had converted to Buddhism and the words could not have sounded more unnatural on her lips.
“How bad is it?” I finally managed to croak. “It’s gone,” she said. “It’s all gone.”
And I was out the back door, sprinting into the woods, tracing the path I had walked hundreds of times to the back of the shop. On warm Spring and Summer days I would top the hill and gaze upon the shop’s massive tin roof glistening in the sunlight, partially hidden by the trees, and think how it presented the illusion of a small lake until I would get a few steps closer and see the rust spots and hear the rhythmic thud of machines and the whine of exhaust blowers.
But this time the lake was black, charred, flecked with twisted ribbons of metal, anchored with huge smoldering chunks of machinery, silent as a coffin save for the muffled voices of shop hands pawing through the ashes to salvage what they could.
Just a tiny spark. That’s all that started it. A fire in a pile of wood shavings that would have been out in a moment except that the water in the pipes had frozen overnight, and when the fire trucks arrived they could not get any water either. By the time they got the hoses spraying it was too late.
I sat with my Dad in the kitchen that evening, the same spot where I had found my Mother that afternoon. The shadows lengthened, but we sat in the growing darkness, lights somehow as obscene as a dirty joke in a eulogy, and I listened to him talk, dry-eyed, of dreams shattered, hopes incinerated. “I always wished,” he confessed, “that we could make enough money to give furniture away to little churches that couldn’t afford it.”
I had never heard such tenderness in his voice before, and I could only sit there, mute, quiet as a sinner in an empty church. Christmas was only a few weeks away and I was plenty old enough to know what it meant to be without an income during that season. Keeping the bills paid was tough enough the rest of the year, much less financing the annual Christmas extravaganza. Now… Well, at least maybe there would be a little something for Timothy this year.
But a job appeared a day or two later. Temporary work, carpentry work putting together a display at the Merchandise Mart in Atlanta, but it was a paycheck through December. And I decided the incongruity of him with his crippled briefcase was nothing compared to the absurdity of my Dad leaving in the morning with his lunchbox to fight traffic into town and take orders from another man. Other men did it every day of their lives, but not this man. I honestly believe if he had done it for a year it would have destroyed him.
But he found the strength to do it through Christmas, do it long enough to sort out his options, long enough to believe in the prospect of re-building the business, which he did in the months that followed. But by that time we had celebrated Christmas, and it was as wonderful as ever.
As I reflect on the state of our nation and world in these times, I too am tempted to acquiesce to feelings of hopelessness. But all I have to do is remember the holiday season of 1970, and I am convinced again that despair does not have to have the last word.
Yes, my father was “an interesting man.” Thank God.