As we were celebrating Father’s Day Sunday, I remembered a time when my dad became overwhelmed while briefly trying to handle our family’s parental duties by himself.
My mother had been diagnosed with a serious illness and was admitted to a hospital in Shreveport for treatments. My dad, brother and I had just completed the hour-long drive back home.
He told us to get our things together for school the next day while he fixed supper. There were no fast food places back then to pick up meals. Folks did their own cooking.
We had seen our dad do dozens of different kinds of chores around the house all our lives, but none of them involved getting food on the table at mealtime. Our mother always did that.
He worked hard at the paper mill and came home sweaty and tired year-round. The mill, with all of its boilers, steam lines and massive paper-making machinery, was hot even in the winter.
A lot of times when he walked in after his stint at the mill, the phone would ring before he could get his shoes off. He was being called back for another eight-hour shift.
He never complained because he knew he would have been working as hard at home as he did at his job.
No project seemed too big for him. We had a sprawling back-yard garden that he rowed up with a hand plow, weeded and watered to grow crops of tomatoes, corn, beans, okra and other vegetables.
There was a wire and wood pen that he built himself for the flock of chickens that he tended to keep us supplied with meat and eggs.
He kept the grass cut with an old cylinder-type push mower and got weeds out of drainage ditches with a sling blade.
The things he could do never failed to amaze me, and none of those skills rubbed off on me. I have problems changing light bulbs.
When the paint started peeling on our little frame house, he got on ladders and his homemade scaffolding to scrape off old paint and put on a new coat.
Storms would rip shingles off the roof, and he knew how to patch and replace them to keep rain out of the house.
If there was a water leak, he crawled under the house with his pipe wrench to fix the plumbing problem. He rewired appliances and light fixtures that quit working.
He changed the oil and fan belts in the car, patched flat tires and put on new windshield wipers.
But he was helpless the night we got home from the hospital. He took three of the T-bone steaks out of the freezer that my mother kept for special occasions and baked some potatoes.
My mother always cooked the steaks in butter in a black iron skillet on the stove, but he put everything in the oven.
When he called us to the table for supper and put the food out, there was still ice on the steaks and the potatoes were raw.
We pushed the steaks and potatoes aside and made some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
My mother always called on me to do the blessing at suppertime, so my dad asked me to offer a prayer before we ate the sandwiches.
“Be sure to pray for your mother to get well,” he said, “because I can’t do anything without her.”
I have thought often over the years about the all the things he could do that impressed me, but cooking was not one of them.
He phoned Barrett’s Grocery the next day and had them deliver more peanut butter and jelly, lunch meat, mayonnaise and what he called “light bread.”
We prayed every night for my mother to get well.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES