Dad

My dad leaning down and going through the books at the store, me standing excitedly beside him. I felt like I knew what was going to happen next but was too nervous to say it out loud. It was like he was handing me a sword and telling me to be brave, but it was a book he was holding out. "Who's that for?" I asked. "You."
A book. With chapters. Henry and the Clubhouse.

***

When my dad was little he rode the train to school every day. The county paid for it, he just had to get his ticket punched.

My dad took college courses while he was in the Air Force, stationed in Montgomery, Alabama. An intoductory course in French, among them.

My dad took speaking courses from the Dale Carnegie program, and has a plaque saying he'd done so.

My dad was signing the paper work for a '64 Chevelle when it came over the radio that President Kennedy had been shot.

My dad operated a coal mine in central West Virginia from 1971 to 1997 with no fatalities. He has a plaque for this, too.

Recently I drove my dad to Louisville, Kentucy to see an old Air Force buddy of his. On the way, this is some of the stuff we talked about.

Largely, I knew all this stuff already. I had a pretty clear image of my dad in my mind. That being said, the image I had carried around all my life was pretty well rocked to the core a few weeks ago when I had to get his license number for one reason or another. (I can fix a few speeding tickets for Pops every once and a while, right?)

When he read it off to me I paused and asked why he had two X's in his number?

What happened next is what I would describe as a solemn moment. He told me there were two X's in his license because when he applied for it, so long ago, he couldn't read or write.

I was understandably floored. Now that scene of Dad handing me my first book was all that much more important. This illiterate adult had pulled himself up by his boot straps and trudged ahead in a world that may have been closed off to him had he not the iron will hammered out by destitution! You can imagine my image of Dad became a whole lot more romanticized after that. He had this Citizen Kane quality to him now. And I know that doesn't exactly fit, but just go with it. I liked this revelation, my dad had entrusted me with a secret and I didn't want to give it up. So I didn't think too much about it. I didn't think of all these things I already knew, these things we rehashed in the car on the way to Louisville.

It clicked around mile 174. He had been talking about this neighborhood boy who the conductor wouldn't let on the train because he'd been acting up. The boy's dad had told him he had to go to school anyway, and so he walked. I was led to understand it was quite the distance. Dad was telling me he still remembered seeing the boy walking beside the tracks early in the morning...if there was more to that I don't remember, because that's when it clicked: me remembering that my father had had some kind of formal education. As a child.

"Dad...why did you tell me that the X's in your license meant that you couldn't read or write?"

If I had had the foresight to record the cackling that my dad erupted into just then I would have prepared a link for you here. Whenever he could speak again he said this, "I just tell people that. The X's just mean I'm licensed to drive double and triple trailers. You know, when you see a truck with two trailers behind it?"

Seriously, Dad.