DAVID MURDOCK COLUMN: On Father's Day 2022 (and being a father's son)
My brother and I are our father’s sons. Greg and I both have physical traits that remind other people of our dad. “You look just like Sonny!” is a comment that I hear quite often. Another oft-repeated observation is “You look just like your brother!” So, suffice it to say, there must be a strong family resemblance.
Now, the strange part of all these observations to me is … I don’t really see it. To be more precise, I “sorta” see the physical resemblances, but not nearly as strongly as other folks do. What are obvious to me are the habits and mannerisms Greg and I share with Dad.
One habit that all three of us share is a love of reading, but I didn’t realize how much so until recently. The books that we three read differ substantially in genre, but we all read for entertainment. I never realized how much until I researched reading habits and saw that Dad read quite a few more books per year compared to the average person.
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Dad never set out to be a role model for reading; he just loved to read. The nature of his job as a long-haul trucker made paperback books the perfect way to unwind before he sacked out. My earliest memories of Dad are those of him sitting in his chair and reading Louis L’Amour Westerns. Dad loved Westerns and adored L’Amour. At one time, he had a box under the bed with every book L’Amour ever wrote in it — fittingly, it was a box for cowboy boots.
Eventually, Dad had to toss many of those books; they were so old that they were yellowed and falling apart. I still have a few, but I wish that I had the others. Everything about the physical nature of those paperbacks is instructive, even the prices of them. Some of them were only a quarter back when he started buying them!
Another thing is the length of the books. Most paperback Westerns published back when Dad was zipping through three or four (or more!) per week were about 200 pages. Over the years, they grew longer and longer — some of them two or three times that length. Dad still read as much, but the longer books dropped the number of “books per week” he read.
Dad would occasionally read a book that I suggested to him — especially Westerns and “adventure thrillers.” We both loved Tom Clancy, for example. One type of fiction that I never convinced him to read was science fiction. He just didn’t like it. In fact, one of the coolest things that Dad and I ever did together was to see a movie together. He let me pick the movie, and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” was playing in the theaters. So we went. Let’s just say he didn’t enjoy himself too much. When I asked him what he thought, he said, “It wasn’t that bad.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but honestly, that’s not the best “Star Trek” movie.
What really sort of strikes me about going to see a movie in a theater with Dad is that it’s the only time we did. We watched lots of movies on TV together, and once I went to see another movie with Mom and Dad and a bunch of our friends, but that one movie was the only one Dad and I ever went to by ourselves.On a side note, I only saw two movies with Mom, one at a drive-in and one in a theater ... one of the “Star Wars” movies! Mom and Dad just didn’t enjoy going to movie theaters.
That’s not too unusual for people of my generation, I think, but it’s quite a difference compared to how many times my friends tell me that they take their own children to the movies. Times change.
Times change, but there are some habits Dad inspired that haven’t. I still read for pleasure every day – just not the same books that Dad read for pleasure. I still love the movies Dad and I saw together — on TV. The last book Dad ever read was a Western that I brought him from the library, and Greg read it along with Dad.
What’s got me thinking about all of this right before Father’s Day is something that a friend of mine — one who knew my father really well — said to me the other day. We started talking about … books. He remembered Dad’s voracious reading, and we chatted about it for a long time. It was a very pleasant memory for me, recalling all the different fiction writers Dad enjoyed — L’Amour, Clancy, Zane Grey, Clive Cussler and all the rest of them.
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That same friend pointed out something else to me in that conversation that has become so common that it doesn’t surprise me anymore. He said that I walk just like Dad did. Others who knew Dad really well have said the same. It cracks me up. Dad didn’t walk as much as he swaggered — not so much out of arrogance as much as out of confidence. But he swaggered.
So does Greg.
Evidently, so do I.
We are our father’s sons.
Happy Father’s Day to all y’all.
David Murdock is an English instructor at Gadsden State Community College. He can be contacted at murdockcolumn@yahoo.com. The opinions reflected are his own.
This article originally appeared on The Gadsden Times: Father's Day: Columnist David Murdock takes a look
