Once upon a time

 My earliest memory:

I am crying.  All alone.  No one to touch me.  No one to hear me.  Nothing to see or behold.  And then my brother Tillman picks me out of my crib and takes me into his bed.  There are many reasons why I have fond members of my brother, but it started there.  

That crying episode makes me reflect one of my early memories of my father. 

I am riding on top of the stack of hay on the hayrack my father is pulling on his tractor.  The aroma of fresh hay fills my lungs.  There are birds serenading me.  

Another day, we are in our yard surrounded by lumber and saws and such.  I am helping my father build something.  "What are we making?" I ask.  

"A new shit house," he says.  

We continue working, and soon the teacher at our little country school stops by. My father becomes a little subdued.  He was after all on the school board, the man who hired him  "What are you building?" Mr. Fursteneau asks.

"A shit house," I say.

My father glared at me, obviously disappointed.  My first lesson in the appropriate use of language.  

One day he is teaching me to drive out in the field.  I run directly into a haystack. 

 At another time my father and I go to town, I know not for what.  When we park, he gives me a full pack of gum. A full 5 sticks.  I have never had even a full stick of gum before. I patently wait in the car chewing, first one stick and then add another, and perhaps another.  When he finishes his business, we head for home.  I am still in gum hog heaven until he says, not looking my way at all, "I hope you saved some of that gum for your brothers and sisters."  

I am stunned.  I spend the rest of the way home trying to flatten out pieces of it into the little aluminum backed folders that I had saved.  Of course I saved them.  It was during the war.  We saved the gum wrappers and peeled the back off of them and added them to the wad of aluminum we were saving to support the war effort.  

My memory blanks out at that point.  I don't remember who got the fresh sticks and who got the already been chewed mess.  I know I did not get punished for it.  I had already been punished.  All my father had to do was express his disappointment in me, and I was stunned.  

Reflecting on it now and knowing better the kind of man my father was, I am pretty sure it was all a ruse.  He was inwardly smiling, knowing exactly what I was doing and enjoying the drama I was enacting.  

Now you are stunned, why would my crying episode remind me of the joys of spending time with my father?

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