Family Stories

“The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it...I would discover that it hadn't washed me away.” 
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

I spent some time today with a dear friend who has also lost a parent. We agreed life is too short to be unhappy, that we owe it to the ones we’ve lost to make the most of the time we have. I want to do that. I will do that, but I must admit sometimes the grief is still so fresh for me that I lose my breath. I still viscerally feel the loss of my dad. Beyond that physically painful sensation, though, I fear that I’ve also lost so many stories about my family. My dad was the last of his family: I have no aunts, uncles, or cousins left to retell our family stories. My mom and brothers are the only ones left who remember my Uncle David, and only the four of us remember my Aunt Hazel. I don’t want to lose what recollections I do have, so I’m going to begin collecting some of them here in hopes that I don’t forget. I think my dad would like that.


I very rarely use this space for personal writing; I’ve established this as a professional space and, as I argue in a forthcoming article, it feels very dangerous as a female academic to appear too emotional or to share too much of my personal self. It gets messy. But I’m breaking the rule anyway, and I’m doing that because I want there to be, somewhere on the internet, a digital monument to my family. (I’ve begun to do this, I suppose, through my Mystory project, but that’s more a monument to my formative years than to the characters that populate my family stories.)

I’m going to start, then, with my dad because he’s the whole reason I’m here (both here writing and here on this planet as the person I am). And I thought I’d begin by sharing a portion of the eulogy I gave at his memorial service. It does a better job than I’m capable of at the moment of articulating why it’s important to me to tell my family’s stories now.

There are three things my dad loved, as evidenced, I think, by the way we’ve decorated the fellowship hall. My dad loved his cars, his dogs, and his family. 

My dad was a fanatic about cars, especially old cars. We used to joke, in fact, about the McIntyre car lot: there were often between 3 and 6 cars in front of our house, even though there were only 3 drivers living in the house at any given time. He also spent countless evenings and weekends at cruise-ins and car shows with Kenny. Car shows were just a part of our lives, though only tangentially for my mom and me. Until November 1996, that is, when my dad decided to take my mom, Kenny, and me to a classic car show. It just so happened that the day of the car show also happened to be my mom’s 50th birthday. I don’t think anyone spoke the entire two hour trip from our house to the car show, and I’m sure my mom didn’t say more than 10 words to my dad the whole day. But he won a trophy, and my mom never let him forget that he’d taken her to a car show on her 50th birthday. 

As much as he loved his cars, though, I think he loved his dogs more. During the summer before my senior year in high school, while I was off at church summer camp, my dad appeared with another of his strays, a beautiful black lab/chow mix named Serendipity. Dippy, as he became known around our house, was supposedly two years old, crate trained and well-behaved. I’m convinced it is one of God’s great miracles that the dog survived his first year with us: he chewed on the chairs for the kitchen table and ripped open the Christmas presents left under the tree. The most heinous of his crimes, though, was chewing on the leg of my mom’s curve glass china, which had been in the family for generations. 

By the spring of my senior year, Dippy seemed calmer. One evening, though, it seemed like his luck had run out. After school, I let him outside, but when I went back to the backyard to let him in, he was gone. We searched the neighborhood; Dad must have looked for hours, but didn’t have any luck. Finally, heartbroken, we went to bed. The next morning, Dad suggested that I try the county animal shelter, which was located only a few miles from my high school. And there was Dippy. He whimpered when he saw me, and I burst into tears. When I went to spring the dog from jail, however, I hit a snag: I wasn’t 18, so I needed a parent or guardian to get Dippy. I called my dad’s work in tears. He told me not to worry, that we would get Dippy out before they closed for the evening. So my dad left work early, met me at home, and drove with me to get Dippy. I cried the whole way, and he talked to me about football, school, and whatever shenanigans had happened at his work that day. We arrived at the pound 2 minutes before they were supposed to close. At first the woman behind the counter told us that we were too late; Dippy would have to stay another night. But then there was, what we like to call, the McIntyre temper moment, that moment when the person you’re talking to realizes that they have made the wrong decision. Fairly quickly, dad convinced her that he wasn’t leaving without our dog. Up until then, I considered Dippy my dog. But after that, there was no contest: Dippy and Dad were a team.

It seems appropriate, given the time of the year, to end by telling you about my dad, the Christmas shopper. He was fond of saying “Bah Humbug,” but the truth is that he loved Christmas. A number of the pictures on the collage below and in the frames in the Fellowship Hall are from Christmas days over the years. My dad may have been all smiles in the Christmas pictures we found, but the most fun he had at Christmastime when I was a child happened not on Christmas day but on Christmas Eve. My dad was notorious for leaving all of his Christmas shopping until the night before. I have vivid memories of my dad getting home from work at 5 or 6 pm and, still in his Able Pest Control uniform, calling me to “come on.” I threw on my jacket, if it was actually cold enough for a jacket, and ran to the car. Dad drove, sometimes like a bat out of hell, yelling at terrible drivers as he went, the 15 minutes to Gulfview Square Mall. He’d park in front of the Sears, tell me to “Hurry” and take off toward the store.  Once inside the store, we went from department to department picking out presents for my mom and the wrapping paper so I could wrap all the presents. After he felt we’d exhausted the store’s inventory, we’d check out, and he’d let me pick the spot for dinner. These Christmas Eve shopping trips and dinners were our tradition, and even this year, when Christmas doesn’t hold quite the appeal it usually does, I remember those trips fondly; I remember how important it was to him that he made my mom smile Christmas morning, and how much he seemed to enjoy spending dinner telling me his latest stories. Because that was how my dad showed his love: he bought things and built things and fixed things, and he told stories.