Great Fathers Were Present, Not Perfect

(Before you ask, I'm the tall one on the right in the top right photo, taken in my mother's beauty shop.)

My father may have missed his childhood, but I believe he enjoyed ours.

All my two sisters and I knew about my father’s past before he met and married my mom was he was from Louisiana and had about 4-5 siblings. Since he was a junior—Willie Morris, Jr.—that means his father was Willie Morris, Sr.

His mother’s name was Alice and that became my middle name.

Otherwise, he frequently compared us to siblings by name. That helped identify him later when census reports became available. 

My middle sister, Sonja, was just like his sister Ida, he reminded us frequently. Sonja's middle name was Lee, a brother my father mentioned occasionally, 

He had harmless nicknames for us. Mildred, his favorite, he called The Milkman because she loved milk so much. (At least he gave for that nickname.) She didn’t mind because she often had the telltale milk mustache after downing a glass of milk.

My dad walked us to elementary school every morning even though it was only two blocks from our house. These were old-fashioned blocks, not the triple blocks like we have in the suburbs.

We loved him walking us to school when we were in the lower grades, but began to complain as we progressed toward 8th grade, the highest grade in our elementary school.

So, he’d trail behind, shadowing us until we insisted that we could get to school quite well by ourselves in the company of our giggling girlfriends.

One of my Facebook friends who lived in our old neighborhood mentioned online one day that he still remembers my father.

That’s amazing given that my friend and I are both in our 80's now.

We always looked forward to Saturdays.

That’s when my father would whisk us away to walk a few blocks to the movie theater while my mother pressed and curled a lineup of ladies in her beauty shop.

There were two movies in our neighborhood: the Roosevelt and the Criterion. We went to the Criterion because it was the nicer of the two. We arrived just as they opened at noon and stayed there until the end of the day. 

In those days, your admission ticket entitled you to stay at the movies for many hours as you wished. They showed not only two major films, but also newsreels, cartoons, and short subjects. To keep from buying the overpriced snacks in the theater, we'd plan ahead and take our own "outside" treats.

The only time we came close to being caught by the theater ushers with our "outside food" was when we got older and tried to sneak in the little cartons of steaming hot pork fried rice in those little white containers from the local Chinese restaurant. You couldn't hide that aroma, so we waited until the ushers went up and down the aisles checking that we were behaving. Once the theater was completely dark, we could scoop up fork fulls while we enjoyed the movies.

During "King Kong" and other scary movies, my sisters and I would cover our eyes with our fingers spread apart just a bit to cut down the full fear and scream, but then ask, "What's happening now?"

My father would chuckle and say, "Uncover your eyes if you want to know."

During the love scenes in the romantic movies, I'm sure he wished he could cover our eyes, but with three girls he couldn't manage that, so he just suffered through them. They didn't rate movies in those days.

We loved The Little Rascals, the roadrunner, Abbot and Costello, Frankenstein, Hitchcock movies, war movies, and so many, many others. From those movies, I got a glimpse of what life was like in cities, neighborhoods, and with people much different from those in our segregated neighborhood of the 1950s. Those movies helped me design how I wanted my life to be and not be.

Although my father didn't attend church with my mother and us on Sundays, I don't think it had to do with any aversion to religion. Because he lacked a formal education, I think he felt out of place in our church where many of the members were highly educated and some pretty snooty.

I'm grateful to him for patiently sitting through those movies dutifully every Saturday for over a decade and even sometimes yielding to our request to see the movies again when we begged to stay longer.

Not once did he drop us off at the movies and pick us up later. He sat through every feature, every cartoon, every newsreel and never once dozing off, at least to my knowledge. What a guy!

He wasn't perfect, but he was present.

If you’ve longed to write your life story, but hesitated for any reason, I urge you to reconsider. Don’t wait until you’ve accomplished something great or honed your writing skills. Loved ones or even strangers you’ll never meet will cherish, be entertained by or maybe even inspired by what you share about the everyday, unremarkable, and sometimes messy parts of your life.

I was motivated to write my micro-memoirs when I reflected on Wayne Dyer’s famous quote: “Don’t die with your music inside you.” I’ve created a $9 pdf to encourage you to write the story only you can tell. https://www.florabrown.com/wait-dont-leave