There wasn’t much for men, or, for that matter, women or
children, to do in Auxvasse, Mo. in the 1950s and early 1960s but even if there
had been, my father wouldn’t have done them.
Unlike my friends’ fathers, he didn’t hunt. He didn’t fish. He
didn’t hang out at the town tavern. He never attended a high school
basketball game, didn’t even listen to the Cardinals on the radio.
Bud Dryden worked. Dryden’s Grocery and Drygoods, located in
a three-story redbrick building at the corner of Main and Harrison
Streets, was his life.
He opened it every morning at 7 on the dot, and arrived home
around 8 that evening for supper. On Saturdays, when farm families came to town
to do their weekly shopping, he kept the store open until 10 p.m. or so.
Dad was in motion from the moment he turned the key
in the lock in the a.m. to the minute he reluctantly turned off the lights in
the p.m. If there were no customers to wait on, he occupied himself restocking
shelves, arranging the meat case, washing windows, carrying heavy cartons from
the back room down to the basement (eschewing the old-fashioned rope-operated
elevator that would have saved him a lot of work) and making deliveries to shut-ins
and the elderly in his red Chrysler sedan.
If, on a Sunday, anyone needed a quart of milk or a pound of
bacon, everyone in town knew they could pick up the phone and Bud would open
the store for them. On winter Sundays he had to go to the store several times anyway
to stoke the ancient coal furnace and, as long as he was there, usually found
other tasks that needed his immediate attention.
It drove his family – my
mother especially – crazy but we all knew Bud Dryden was a perfectionist
about his store and that we’d better not make him choose between it and us
because we would come out on the short end of the stick.
Dad expected his three children to be as obsessive about the
store as he was. From age 8 on, we were required to report for work immediately
after school, and to stay until closing. Saturdays, when other children were
doing whatever it is that children do on Saturdays, we were at the store
all day restocking shelves, filling delivery orders, waiting on customers, fitting
shoes, slicing lunch meat, measuring bolts of fabric, marking prices, polishing
the glass on the meat and dairy cases, accepting soda bottle returns in the
back room, building window displays or anything else our father decided needed
doing that very minute.
One morning dad looked out the front window as I was
sweeping the sidewalk half-heartedly, a task I detested. He came
out, grabbed the broom, and started sweeping vigorously. “This is how you do
it,” he said. “If you are going to do something, either do it right or don’t do
it at all.”
That is the most important lesson I learned from my father
who died in 1966 when I was 14, and it’s the credo I have abided by ever since. Ask my former employees and most, I would have to guess, will say I was a
perfectionist taskmaster who drove them crazy. Some will grudgingly admit I
taught them a thing or two along the way. The few who appreciated and/or
understood what I was trying to accomplish have, by and large, done well for
themselves.
Now that I’m retired I realize that, as my father did, I
spent way too much time – too many nights and weekends – obsessing over
picayune details that mattered to nobody but me and not enough time with my family,
Unlike my father, I have been lucky to live long enough to
recognize my priorities were misplaced, and hope to spend the rest of my life
making it up to them while trying to find something I enjoy doing other than
work. So far that has been a challenge. I have never learned to relax and
probably never will. I need to be busy doing something productive, even if it's nothing more than writing this blog post.
Thursday afternoon I finished painting the trim of our new
house. It’s a beautiful house, the nicest we’ve ever owned but, for some
reason, the exterior trim was painted the same shade of cappuccino-brown as the
walls. The day after we closed on May 30, I started painting the trim creamy white,
a task I figured would require three days at most. It took 12.
Not more than two hours into the job, I realized I should
have hired a professional painting contractor. It was hot under the Florida sun.
I’m 62 for Chrissakes, I could have a heatstroke. Or a stroke stroke. I shouldn't climb ladders, I could break a hip or worse. But once I started,
I couldn’t stop because of the lesson my father taught me on that sidewalk 50
years ago.
I could, I suppose, have applied two coats to the fascia and overhang instead
of three. I could have removed the detailed ornamental trim above the front porch – 360 six-inch metal
squares – and spray painted it instead of painting it with a brush. It would have been faster to spray the 16 columns and wrought iron railings, too. I could have purchased new
white gutters instead of removing the existing ones, spending a day cleaning
the moss and algae, then sanding them down in order to paint them the
exact shade as the rest of the trim. Nobody would have ever known the
difference. But me.
I have no way of knowing if my father would approve of much
of what I’ve done with my life, but I do know he would approve of the job I did
painting that trim.
It’s perfect, a fitting and satisfying Father’s Day gift to
myself, compliments of my old man.
