A Father's Day gift from my father

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.