My Dad, My Adversary

My four-year-old was sitting on a board hooked over the barber’s chair to make him taller. We had recently moved back to southern Illinois from Kentucky and I was reconnecting with people in my hometown. Monk the barber knew everyone and everything going on in the village boasting a population of 2,000. When he realized who I was, he switched the conversation.

“How is ole Duck doing?”

With nicknames like Monk, Duck, and Butt-cut, I didn’t know where this may be headed. I knew my daddy (Duck, short for Donald Duck) and Monk had some kind of history together from way back, so I wasn’t sure what he wanted to know.

Did he want to know if he was still drinking or had been in trouble lately (no to both)? Did he want to know about his health (healthy as a horse and climbing roofs)? Or did he want to know how he was doing this week because he had just cut his hair last week?

I misjudged the loaded question and ventured an answer. He had meant the latter.

“Oh, you know him, he’s his own worst enemy.”

A person really doesn’t know how others perceive them or their family. As a child, I grew up embarrassed by my father. I thought everyone might know about the screaming and shouting that went on at home when he was drinking. Did people in town consider him the town drunk? I thought my comment was safe enough, but I was wrong.

Monk laid into me. “Don’t you talk about your dad like that. He is a good man and would give anyone the shirt off his back. Don and I have been friends for a long time.”

I felt foolish. I had thought he might laugh and agree with me. Monk forced me to look at my dad from someone else’s perspective for the first time in my life; to see him as a good human being.

Being a jack-of-all-trades, I remember my dad not charging elderly women for trivial work he did for them, saying they couldn’t afford it. He would go out into the night for a leaking hot water heater or cover up a roof in a downpour. He held the keys to several houses in town and would check on them while the owners were out for extended periods of time or maybe in the nursing home. He was trustworthy and they knew it. He was kind and generous and had a soft heart.

It is hard to shake childhood pain, anger, and resentments, but I treasure Monk’s words and the love behind them. Since then, numerous people have told my sister and me what a good man Don Nolen was. The overflowing funeral home was a testament to that.

I saw Daddy as my adversary, the antagonist of my life. It is a shame it has taken me so many years to become at peace with who my father was. Research into his tumultuous, colorful past has also given me a new understanding of the demons he began facing at age eight. My daddy was sober almost the last 30 years of his life and I couldn’t be more proud of him. His life is truly worthy of a book.

Today will be a day for remembrance and storytelling; “The Duck” as his grandsons lovingly called him, would be 92 years old today. And that’s one of his greatest successes: a wonderful grandfather to five grandsons. Happy birthday, Daddy.