My Daddy is better than your Daddy…

There are just certain things about the south that I love. One of them is how no matter what the situation, we find a way. Maybe that is human nature but I would like to think it’s a ‘southern thang’ so just humor me, okay? There is nothing like good ‘ole hard work, duct tape and using whatever is at hand!  

When I was a kid, and actually still to this day, I figured out pretty quick that my dad doesn’t back down from anything. I could have easily been one of those kids that always pitted ‘my daddy vs. your daddy’…though I never did because he would frown on it. But I can tell you, there ain’t a ‘dawg’ big enough to scare him away. He literally was and is the ‘big dawg’ on the street. He just didn’t brag about it…

‘He just did his thang’.

That being said, he NEVER backed down from a project/challenge. You know what you think about your parents when you were a kid right? Your parents could do the impossible. They were somehow magical and could make anything work. Boy that was my dad. He could fix or build anything. 

A good example was the fireplace. There is a romanticism about having one. To this day, I still love one. My mom wanted one and that was enough for her man. Dad built one… literally ordered the fire box and kit, had it delivered to our neighborhood on a flatbed 18 wheeler, (Not something you saw in Random woods every day), built a monster hearth in our downstairs den, cut the holes in the floor and roof and put it all in.

He’s like that!

Well, I don’t remember what age I was, but like I mentioned above, we had a house with a downstairs den. It was a split level design. Come in the front door, look to your right and you would find steps that led down to the den/fireplace room. At the bottom of the steps, go left, look to the wall to your left then face opposite of the direction you just came down the steps and there was a sliding door closet.

I think it was a Saturday morning, Bugs Bunny was running the show for us when dad came down the steps, pick ax in hand. He pulled the aforementioned sliding closet doors off their rails, and literally started breaking through the concrete with his pick ax all ‘Paul Bunyan style’. I don’t remember there ever being any discussion at the family table about this project. He just started doing it.

I thought to myself, “This looks fun… tear a hole in the floor!!!!”

I had such a awesome childhood!

So the project this year was to build something under the house. A little background here could help you. My family is a photo family. We took LOTS of slides and pictures! Dad was a photo geek, before the word geek was used. We grew up with the frustrations of ‘posing’ in direct sunlight for what seemed like hours for just the ‘perfect shot’. Back in the day, the art form of photography was to take the ‘film’…yes that was a thing then, and have it developed. It would be gone for a few days or a week and then you picked it up from the developer.

So I have no idea and have often wondered, how the pillow talk went around the ‘new project’. Was it as simple as, “Honey, I would like to build a dark room so I can develope my own pictures. It will cost very little and I will do most of the labor.”

Did my mom yawn and roll over saying something like, “Sure honey, whatever you like…” and then drift off to sleep? I doubt it, but I do wonder…

Next morning or whenever, Dad, with pick axe in hand, was pounding through the concrete to the amazement, love and thrill of this three boys. To me, it was sorta played out a few years later in a movie called ‘Close Encounters of a Third Kind.’ The father, played by Richard Dreyfuss, has a ‘close encounter with aliens and he is now possesed with recreating this ‘image’ he sees in his head. Turns out the image in his head is Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. Well, the father realizes he is going crazy and makes the commitment to the wife to give up chasing this these images. Then, next morning, he sees something that triggers off the images again. He gets this crazy idea to build a larger scale image of Devil’s tower in his living and…he get his kids to help him! The wife wakes up to find the boys pulling bushes out of the yard and throwing them, with as much dirt as possible, through the the kitchen window.

Yea kinda like that. “Oh cool! Dad is digging through the foundation of the house. Can we do that also!!!!???”

My dad literally dug through the concrete floor, then kept digging down further and further ‘till he dug out a room size hole. As as child it was fantastic! “Voyage to the deep, Land of the Lost”, you name it, we had in under our house! I feel like we mixed 100’s of bags of concrete in a portable mixer we got from somewhere. (I hope it’s somewhere is a million rusted pieces by now! There were were also just ‘odd’ things about these kind of projects. We had a wheelbarrow IN the house and would shuttle dirt OUT of the house, through the small back room to the back yard where we piled up all of the dirt. You would never have a wheelbarrow in the house let alone on carpet! What! When it rained, mud got everywhere! It was fantastic like, imagine me going to school with all of the kids bragging about what their fathers do. “Well, I have no idea what my daddy does for work but let me tell you, he is digging his way to China…THROUGH THE BASEMENT FLOOR!  I bet your dad isn’t do that!”

No one believed me.

Like I said, I am not sure how the pillow talk went, but I wonder if there were promises of, “It will not cause a problem… no, the house will not be damaged, the kids will be safe, and no it will not interfere with life around here.”

Are you kidding me? The first ‘frog strangling’ rain storm raised enough dirt and mud in the back yard, from the small Devil’s Tower we were building from the dirt under the house, that the mud traveled BACK UP and through the heat exhaust for the dryer. You can bet, now just think about this for a minute, what a fiery redhead is going say when that happens to her house! I bet that wasn’t a good day for Dad when the phone rang at work because mom wanted to know ‘why mud was coming INTO to her dryer…’

But when it was all said and done, there were 4 concrete lined walls and a floor, with a sump pump to keep the room dry, that Dad could use as his own dark room. He set up tables and had his own set of developing chemicals. He had his own developer and could create his own black and white photos in the ‘secret’ room. It truly was something to behold and very cool. I am sure, though I don’t have specifics, that we ‘tortured’ neighborhood kids with tales of “that’s where we go when we are bad”, or “the bodies are buried down there!” In all of my years of travels and souls I have met, I have yet to find anyone who can say, “My dad dug a darkroom under our house when we were kids!”

I have often thought, what did the realtor say about this ‘room’ when we sold the house and moved to Raleigh? Was it considered extra square footage? Did they tout it as a ‘wine’ seller? Who knows but my guess is, given the state of our old neighborhood it could be a meth lab for all I know now or some kid growing weed.

But at the end of the day, there are two thing that that hit home for me.

• My father included us in his adventure.
• My daddy is better then yours! 🙂

Peace on your Journey…