I Sure Am Going to Miss My Dad

Tags

dads, family, fatherhood, my life, Stephen Roth, tribute

Dad talking business; me playing with my stuffed giraffe.

Some time in the summer of 1977, when I was a six-year-old happily growing up in LaGrange, Georgia, my mom took me to a fish and chips place for lunch. She ordered me a basket of hush puppies and explained that my dad’s job was going to be transferred to the headquarters of Milliken & Co., and that he would be moving to Spartanburg, South Carolina.

“Well,” I said after some thought. “I sure am going to miss him!”

My mother then went on to explain that she and I would also be moving with him to Spartanburg, and the strange reality of an impending uprooting, away from all my friends and everything else I had ever known, slowly set into my six-year-old mind. There would be other moves, all of them between South Carolina and Georgia, in my growing-up years as my father’s career evolved. It was nothing compared with Dad’s own Army childhood, which took his family from Washington, D.C., to Germany to Seattle to San Francisco, as well as some other places in between that escape my memory now. My dad, like me, was an only child.

Today, I’m reminded of my naïve reaction to my mom’s big news of so long ago. “I sure am going to miss him!” I had said in the carefree, confident tone of a kid whose dad was smart and strong and probably going to be around forever. Today, I say the same thing, but in a different tone. Art Roth Jr. passed away early Monday morning, October 14, after more than a year battling bladder cancer in the same tenacious way he took on everything. This foe, however, proved even more persistent and formidable than Dad, who had survived two tours in Vietnam and later three firings in his long career as a brilliant turnaround artist for several different companies. Each time he experienced a setback, my dad came back stronger and more successful than before. Nothing, it seemed, could keep him down. It would be the same way with cancer, we all felt, until the last two months, when tests showed it had expanded to other parts of his body. “Like an unstoppable rebel force,” as Robert De Niro’s character described his late mother’s cancer in Meet the Parents. It was an uncomfortably funny line in the movie, perhaps because the description is so very true.

My dad traveled a lot when I was growing up. I used to entertain my friends and their parents with a Ricky Nelson song I had heard on television (“He’s a traveling man and he’s made a lot of stops all over the world.”) My friends could relate – most of their dads worked for the same company and also traveled frequently. Still, my dad was around for almost every big moment of my childhood. He was at every birthday, every school event. He helped me learn how to swim, helped me craft a Pinewood Derby racer from a block of pine, and taught me how to throw a football with a tight spiral. When I jumped into the corner of the Country Club pool and busted open my chin at age 3, my dad was just arriving from work to have lunch with us. He drove me and Mom to the hospital, all the while insisting to me that the cut wasn’t all that bad, and how tough I was being about it. Years later, when I went to retrieve a ball underneath my aunt and uncle’s deck and was stung by about nine wasps, my dad marveled at how fast I shot out from under the deck and into the swimming pool a few feet away. “Butch, that was probably the most perfect dive you’ve ever made,” he told me, and that made me feel proud.

He was a fun dad, but he could intimidate when necessary. I feared him a little, knowing he’d survived West Point and Vietnam, and now had an important job with one of the largest companies in the South. He did not need to scream or yell, because he possessed a cold, withering stare. I remember being trapped in that gaze for several long minutes after being caught lying about my grades. It was worse than any spanking or grounding I could have ever received, and I retreated as soon as I could to our living room piano, where I was more than happy to do my mandatory 30 minutes of practice. “Very nice playing,” Dad said when I was done, and my fear subsided.

As it is with a lot of fathers and sons, we grew closer as I got older. My dad never pushed me to get into sports, but I know he was pleased when I began taking an interest in football, tennis and golf. Some of my favorite memories involve watching sports with Dad, and I have ticket stubs to football and baseball games from Atlanta to San Francisco because of him. In 2009, he took me to the Augusta National for the Masters, and it was like getting to visit heaven for three days. Not just golf heaven, but actual heaven, with almost every blade of grass pristinely manicured. I opened a box of Dad’s things last night and there, atop all his Masters tickets dating back to 1975, was a spectator guide to the 2009 tournament. I’d like to think he saved it because it was the only tournament he and I attended together.

Perhaps my dad’s greatest gifts to me were always letting me know that I was loved and supporting my dreams, even if they weren’t what he would have envisioned. Every phone conversation we had ended with an “I love you.” He had a great way of building me up and making me feel good about myself even in the worst moments. He was always optimistic and excited about what I was doing, whether it was taking a $16,000 job as a reporter in Mexico, Mo., or getting to work for Hallmark Cards. “Butch,” he told me when I took the low-paying reporter job, “I’ll bet you’re going to be making $36,000 a year within five years.” He was wrong, but it was a nice thing to say.

He wasn’t a hugger. His way of affection was tossing the football, or playing “mercy,” or rubbing my back as we watched a game together, usually with a bowl of popcorn nearby. I miss those times most of all, feeling his hand giving the back of my neck a tight squeeze, and me trying not to let on that it hurt a little. I’m going to miss that. I’m going to miss my dad.

I Can’t Quit You, Mizzou

Tags

college, college football, fifth down game, football, gamecocks, missouri, my life, south carolina, tigers

It was a happy night for Carolina.

Immediately after Missouri’s horrific, deplorable 27-24 loss last night to South Carolina, in which the Tigers blew a 17-point fourth quarter lead, then gave up a touchdown on 4th down and 15, then botched a chip-shot field goal that would have tied the game in overtime, I received a text message from one of my best friends from college.

“I quit,” my friend wrote. “I’m serious. I’m not watching, listening, or caring ever again.”

I wish I could say the same, as last night’s debacle will surely join many other infamous, heartbreaking defeats in Mizzou sports history. Unfortunately, I am hooked on the Tigers permanently, and there’s a part of me that feels strangely proud to have survived so many ridiculously devastating defeats (for a rundown on some of the bigger ones, see my post here from last spring). I imagine that fans of the Chicago Cubs, the Cleveland Browns and other star-crossed sports teams feel much the same way. Even the followers of the victorious South Carolina Gamecocks can relate to our pain – their team has only won one conference football championship in its 100-plus year history.

Being a Mizzou fan is tough. It’s like falling in love with a woman who wears a lot of glitter and knows the name of every bartender in the metro area. It’s fun for a while, but you know she’s going to eventually break your heart.

“I liked it better when we were regularly getting thumped by Iowa State,” my friend went on to text. “At least I didn’t get my hopes up.”

Defeats like the one last night take me back to one of my first experiences with Missouri’s version of Lady Luck. It was the notorious Fifth Down Game of 1990, and I would like to say that I was there in the Faurot Field stands that sunny October afternoon, screaming at the officials. I would like to say that, but the fact is that I chose that weekend to attend a church conference in Overland Park, Kansas, with a group called Campus Crusaders for Christ. Me and my devout friends had taken a couple of cars from the DoubleTree Hotel to dinner that Saturday afternoon. When we arrived at the parking lot of Fuddruckers, two guys got out of the other car and asked if we were listening to the Colorado game.

We huddled around one of the car radios and listened breathlessly as Tiger announcer Bill Wilkerson called the game’s final, frenzied minute. When Colorado quarterback Charles Johnson surged toward the end zone on the last play, Wilkerson screamed, “They stopped him! They stopped him!… Wait! They’re signaling touchdown! No! No! No! No! No!”

If Christian boys had been prone to cussing, there would have been a lot of expletives flying around Overland Park that night. Some of the words might have sounded a lot like “Fuddruckers.” Instead, we sadly filed into the restaurant and lined up for the burger buffet. “Man, if we had won that game, we would have been three-and-two,” one of my friends said. “Can you imagine that? Three-and-two!”

We didn’t know about the fifth down controversy until the next morning (here’s an excellent article about the whole thing from ESPN.com). We drove past Faurot Field on our way back to campus that Sunday afternoon and saw that the stadium had been trashed – both sets of goalposts were torn down. For weeks afterward, Missouri students wore T-shirts defiantly proclaiming Tigers 31, Buffaloes 27, the “real” score of the game. I quit Campus Crusaders later on that fall. Maybe it was because nothing seemed to make sense anymore. Maybe it was because my involvement in the group caused me to miss the most historic sports moment of my college career.

I’m a lot older now, and the games don’t affect me nearly as much. I’m only depressed for about a 24-hour period after one of the Tigers’ signature defeats. Still, as I watched that last field goal attempt sail into the black night and bounce off of the left upright, I jumped up and down and channeled Bill Wilkerson from that Colorado game:

No! No! No! No! No!

The Tossed Angel, Part 2

Tags

humor, marriage, Stephen Roth, stories, tossed angel, yard ornaments

Alert readers of my humble blog may remember a story I shared a few months ago about how I accidentally “tossed” my wife’s favorite concrete angel yard ornament over our fence, and broke it. If you don’t remember this heart-wrenching tale, you can read it here.

Today I am pleased to report that there is a happy ending to the Tossed Angel saga. A couple of weeks ago, we visited our friend, who was getting ready to have a garage sale. We were chatting on her back deck when my wife happened to look out on the neighbor’s backyard. There, hanging from an iron hook was a concrete angel, exactly like the one I had defiled more than two years ago. My wife stared at that angel, knowing it belonged to the now-divorced wife of the disgraced concrete sculptor.

Meet the new angel…

“How much does she want for it?” she asked.

“Oh, that thing?” said our friend, taking a long drag from her Marlboro Red. “Hell, she’ll pay you to take it.”

My wife gazed longingly at the angel.

“Just go get it,” our friend said.

Without another word, my wife walked over to the neighboring yard and plucked that cherub off his hook.

“Shouldn’t we at least tell the lady that we’re taking it?” I asked, but my dear wife was already headed toward the car, the angel looking at me over her shoulder with a hollowed-eyed, vacant stare.

…same as the old angel.

I still don’t know what she sees in that thing, but I did get a few laughs today as I read my Tossed Angel story to a gathering of Hallmarkers at the company’s annual “Word Week Coffeehouse Readings.” I am lucky to have a spouse who not only allowed me to read the piece, but was actually quite enthusiastic about it. I don’t know what that says about our marriage, but I hope it’s mostly positive.

Review: A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage

Tags

a death at the white camellia orphanage, book review, fiction, great depression, hobos, marly youmans, mercer university press, novel, south, southern fiction, Stephen Roth

It’s a rare achievement when a work of fiction contains enough detail and nuance about a particular place in history that you, the reader, feel like you understand and inhabit that world. That’s how I felt reading Marly Youmans’ A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, which is part murder mystery, part road story, but also a poetic rendering of life in the rural South of the 1930s and early 40s.

White Camellia tells the lonely story of Pip, a Depression-era orphan who loses his half-brother to a horrific, unsolved murder at the Georgia orphanage where he lives. Soon after, Pip decides to leave his squalid existence of picking cotton and sleeping in close quarters, “breathing in the scent of near-naked boys and the stink of the chamber pots.” It is the golden age of the hobos, so Pip chooses a life crossing the country and hopping the rails. Like another fictional orphan named Pip, his coming-of-age journey comes at a brutal cost, but he also experiences kindness from a series of eccentric strangers who are drawn to the equally eccentric and fiercely independent Pip.

Throughout the tale, Youmans captures the surroundings, mood and language of the era so convincingly you almost expect to find red clay caked around your shoes when you set the book down. Her description of a giant locomotive arriving at a small town depot is just one example of how aptly she sets the scene:

The monster took no notice but plunged, vaulted, and dived over the slight rolls of the land, shaking the earth as easily as a hound shakes a kitten, spewing cinders and smoke, drive wheels pounding and somersaulting over Emanuel County, so swift and thunderous that it seemed nothing in the world could cry halt! to such an extravagance of force. High as a house, the engine swooped down on Pip, hissing and hooting in his face, in his very being, turning him inside out, ringing him like a bell.

If you enjoy beautifully crafted descriptive prose and a coming-of-age story that is in turns heartbreaking and uplifting, check out A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. You can find it on Amazon.com, or at www.mupress.org.

Feels Like the Very First Time

Tags

driver's license, driving, driving test, highway patrol, humor, missouri, tsa

“License and registration, please.”

I think it was the American composer Eddie Money who once said, “I wanna go back and do it all over, but I can’t go back, I know.”

Ah, but you can go back, I learned as I passed through airport security a few weeks ago while making a trip home to Atlanta.

“You should know we can only accept this for a year after it’s expired,” the TSA guard said as he handed me back my driver’s license.

“Expired? What do you mean?”

“I mean, ‘expired,'” the guard said glumly. “Your license has been expired for more than eight months.”

Crap, I thought. Eight months of driving on an invalid license is pretty bad. I didn’t realize just how bad it was until I returned home and read through the regulations on the Missouri Department of Revenue website. Since it was so long since I had been street legal, I would need to go through the full battery of written, visual and driving tests to earn my license back. It would be just like being 15 years old and applying for a learner’s permit. Who said you can’t go back and do it all over?

Twenty-seven years ago, it took me two tries to get my learner’s permit from the state of South Carolina. On my first attempt, I settled into my mom’s 1984 Buick Park Avenue with my driving instructor, who asked me to turn on the headlights. I flinched, not knowing where they were. It should be noted that 15-year-olds weren’t allowed to drive alone at night at that time, so why on earth would I need to know how to turn on the headlights?

“Well, you failed,” the bureaucrat said, getting out of the car.

“What?! That’s it?”

“Yep. You can come back tomorrow and try again.”

I eventually did return, and gave my instructor a sweaty hug when I barely passed the driving exam the second time around. Twenty-seven years later, at 42 years old, I was determined to get everything right the first time. I spent an entire evening devouring the Missouri driver’s manual before getting a ride from my wife to the nearest highway patrol testing station. I breezed through the written test (20 answers right; three answers wrong), as well as the visual exam. I had advanced to the final round, the driving test. I am not ashamed to admit that I was testing the limits of my Old Spice underarm deodorant as my uniformed instructor, who looked to be about 18 years old and actually wore braces, stepped into my CRV.

“You’re obviously an experienced driver,” she said, peering at me from under her tan Smokey the Bear hat. “So just try very hard to avoid any bad driving habits you might have developed over the years.”

“Okay,” I said, my hands gripping the steering wheel at 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock, respectively.

I’ll spare you the details, other than to say that the rule requiring one to use one’s emergency brake when parking on a slight incline is ridiculous, and to add that I have always been, and continue to be, an outstanding parallel parker. I passed the test, earning an 85 out of 100. This time, I did not hug my driving instructor. I gave her a polite nod, which she stoically returned as we walked back to the testing station.

Riding in the passenger seat as my wife took the wheel (she had to transport me to the licensing bureau before I could officially become legal again), I couldn’t help beaming with pride at the knowledge that I had deftly defeated one of the great speed bumps of teen-aged life – not just once, but twice.

“I really kicked that test’s ass,” I told my wife.

“You sure did,” she said, smiling. “Now you can drive me to work again.”

I sure could. In a month or so, I will receive my real driver’s license in the mail. Until then, I have a folded up piece of paper in my wallet that officially verifies I am, once again, a certified driver of automobiles.

Image courtesy of www.khmoradio.com.

Tags

a plot for pridemore, boulevard beer, fiction, mercer university press, Stephen Roth

I apologize for not posting lately. The above photo illustrates what I have been doing most nights over the past week, which is reading and editing the final proofs of A Plot for Pridemore (usually without the beer). I’ll mail these pages with my edits back to the publisher, Mercer University Press, next week. The next step will be cover art for the book, which I’ll share with you as soon as it’s available.

Speaking of Mercer, I made a trip to Macon, Georgia, last week to meet the fine folks who run the University Press. They took me out for a barbecue lunch and patiently answered my questions about how this whole publishing business works. I knew I was back home in my native Georgia when I walked into the Press offices and publishing assistant Marsha Luttrell immediately began talking about which restaurants in town served the best Brunswick Stew. It was a wonderful visit, and I appreciate Dr. Marc Jolley and his team taking time from their busy day to talk with a first-time author.

Again, apologies for the lack of posts. I hope to return to my regular routine/goal of two blog posts a week very soon.

Incidentally, the beverage featured in my photo is called “80-Acre,” a new wheat beer from Boulevard Brewing Co. If you’re ever in the Kansas City area and you enjoy a good beer, you should definitely try one of Boulevard’s fine products.