Stories From Under A Bootheel (Rants, Laughs, and Tears)

Chapter 7 My Dad Part 7 Manners and Passions

There is no doubt in my mind that my father loved my mother very much. First, because I'm pretty sure it is a genetic defect in the males of my line to be hopeless romantics.

When cleaning out their house after my grandparents' death, my cousin Pie found a love letter our grandfather had written to our grandmother. She and my sister were making fun of how passionate it was. I refused to read it. It just seemed wrong to me, but being idealistically loyal and loving did seem to fit what I had observed of the males of my family.

I still remember one evening when my father came home three sheets to the wind and grabbed my mother from behind wrapping his arms around her and putting his face next to hers and saying, "this is my girl," or something like that. My mother looked rather put out by it. I'm sure she loved my father. She would have had to in order to stay married to him that long. She just didn't believe in public displays of affection. She was very much into being proper and PDAs were not. My mother's manners were impeccable.

Both my parents strived to do right. They just had different motivations for doing it. With my mother it was a matter of good manners. She always did what she thought society expected of her. Even when the family couldn't really afford it. My father was also generous to a fault, but with my father it was more about caring and helping people. He had no problem acting outside the limits of the socially acceptable especially if he thought the result would benefit someone.

Often the benefit was just to make someone laugh. He especially looked for opportunities to do this when it could be at the expense of the prim and proper.

My father always took my sister with him when he went Christmas shopping for my mother. One year he took her to the most exclusive upscale women's apparel shop in town. As my sister told it my father was busy examining women's various undergarments and asking the new young sales lady the most ridiculous questions, trying to embarrass her. The sales lady that is. My sister was used to my father's antics and so was beyond embarrassment. My sister was a little worried he was going to start trying on the garments so she tried to pretend she didn't know him.

She only turned her back on him briefly and the next thing she knew he was in the display window that displayed the latest fashions to passersby on Main Street. He was undressing the mannequins to check out their undergarments and putting on quite a show for the whole town to see. Well, maybe not the entire town, but this was in the early 1960's before our town had a mall so most of the people in town were doing their Christmas shopping on Main Street. Fortunately, my mother wasn't there to witness this because she would have been mortified. The young sales lady certainly was. The older woman who ran the store knew my father and simply persuaded him to get out of the window.

My parents were two very different people. My mother was manners and my father was passions.

Speaking of manners and passions, I'm reminded of the scene in the movie Lawrence of Arabia where the British commander is discussing the disposition of Turkish prisoners with Prince Feisal and what he thought Lawrence was going to do with them. The prince stated, "With me mercy is a matter of good manners. With Lawrence, it is a passion. I leave you to decide which is more reliable." Later in the movie Lawrence in a fit of rage slaughtered all his prisoners. Manners may be more reliable, but honestly, I relate more to my father's passion even though he did occasionally get it wrong.