I’m Denny’s daughter

A rather long time ago, I took up this space by writing about my mother. It’s been long enough I can’t really remember what I wrote, but I’m 99.6 percent sure it was mostly all complimentary. I love my mom after all.

While I don’t remember what I wrote, I do remember my father’s reaction.

“What about me?”

I do love my dad, but that man ... Not everything’s for you, my dude.

Family dynamics are complicated, weird, fraught things. You love both your parents, all your kids, etc., but sometimes you “like” one of them a bit more. It’s just human nature. Some people you just click with, and that includes family.

Growing up, work was often divided along typical gender norms in our family. Mom handled the laundry and cooking, Dad strung fencing and cut firewood, but if I recall correctly, I wrote about how Mom was usually out there with Dad, stretching wire, carrying wood and working just as hard.

As a kid, I was out there, too, as was my brother. Hauling hay, picking weeds in the garden, helping move cattle to the next field.

There were some things I was asked to do that my brother wasn’t. For instance, when we moved the cows a long enough distance, I was the one on our second horse making sure they all made it down the road.

There were also occasions when I was summoned up to the barn to help my dad pull a calf that was being birthed in a complicated way.

Gender norms would dictate those were “boy” things, but I was the oldest and for a good period of time, taller and stronger than my younger brother. He was also scared of the horses, and the chickens, but that’s another tale for another day.

Back to my dad.

He did all the dad things you’d expect growing up in rural Missouri — drove the tractor, built fences, plowed the garden (quite literally, pre-tractor) laid rock and brick, renovated the house, rewired the barn, changed the oil on everything, made up songs about the dogs, whistled while he worked and like a furious gladiator of old, one time whipped a belt sander around his head by its power cord and chucked it across the road. Still don’t know where that thing landed.

We never went to a “daddy/daughter” dance but we did other things. Long rides on horseback through the nearby national forest while he explained that horses have lousy depth perception so mud puddles kind of freak them out.

Taking a ride out back to look at the cows while he talked about who had birthed what that season. Whether the genes of that one crazy heifer were well and truly bred out of the herd. They weren’t, by the way.

Tall and broad of shoulder, as they say, with long hair and a ZZ Top beard, Dad didn’t quite fit the mold of a typical Ozark farmer. He was from somewhere else, lived a bit of a different life before settling into the life he chose.

Even as a child I realized that life involved hardness, difficult choices and sometimes not being extended the courtesy of being nice. I remember seeing my dad cry twice — when his mother died and when his city, New Orleans, was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

He could make the name of our old dalmatian, Bozo, rhyme a million ways and he learned numerous Garth Brooks songs by ear when he played drums in a country band during my teens.

He was also responsible for disposing of the calf that didn’t make it though that complicated birth.

When I tell stories about my dad, especially the ones from childhood, people are often left a little uneasy at the hardness, the violence, that was a part of him and our life. Things weren’t always easy with him, but I am who I am in large part due to him.

After I graduated high school, I went off to college and I guess I changed a good deal during the time I was gone. I’d come back for holidays and breaks, and sometimes people would ask me if I was from around there.

I would just smile and nod. They’d get that look — you know the one — the one everyone from a small town gets just before they ask you who your people are, how you’re connected to this place.

“I’m Denny’s daughter.” That’s all that needed to be said.