Today would have been my dad’s 100th birthday. He went hungry during the depression and started school at age 4. His mama was the teacher and couldn’t leave him at home. He was a good and Godly man who could fix anything. We drove the most humiliating cars in town b/c he took pride in repairing someone else’s castoff. He was a Navy medic in WWII serving in the South Pacific. He cried telling the story of burying his commander’s son at sea. If the times, finances, and family circumstances had been different, he would have been an engineer or nurse. He recited parts of Canterbury Tales at the supper table and taught me square roots at an early age. He gave me my first piano lessons and, by example, taught me to love reading. He loved public speaking and traveled to churches raising money for the Gideons. He loved handing out New Testaments in Mississippi’s Parchment Penitentiary. We didn’t take vacations, but he took me on factory tours and to revivals in black churches. He was a complicated man who loved me fiercely. The day he died, I fed him a banana split. He didn’t know his own name but he called me sugar, as usual.
