Day: Fourteen
Location: Mountain Mist Coffee House, Kingsport, Tennessee
Mileage: 1964.2

Father’s Day was easy and sweet. My brother and son joined up at Dad’s house, and we made our pilgrimage to the nursing home to visit with our 95-year-old aunt. She is legally blind and can be ornery as hell, especially with my brother who takes care of things for her, but she’s usually pretty sweet with me. It’s a product of time and distance I think, and Jerry doesn’t have the luxury of either with her. We had a lovely visit, minus my father, because even at these ages, those old sibling wounds can still be opened and my aunt has a unique talent for doing that with my dad. Dad also has a unique talent for taking the bait every time, just like a kid brother.

My suspicions about this dissonance were confirmed today as I listened to them separately discuss their mother, who was related to A.P. Carter by the way. She died when my father was eight and my aunt was sixteen, and it still haunts both of them. Dad remembers The Carter Family coming to sing around her bed before she died. She had tuberculosis, and in 1928, all they knew to do was to put the sufferers outside to get fresh air. He remembers snow on her blankets as A.P., Sara, and Maybelle gathered around her to sing those sad songs. I have long thought that they must have sang their repertoire, which includes “Poor Orphan Child,” “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone,” and of course “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” What that does to an eight-year-old boy is hard to imagine, but Dad revealed today that after a while, he left the porch where they had gathered because he couldn’t take it anymore. He has long had an ambivalent claim to his famous kin, and I know why. The pain of those memories is simply too great to bear, and he and his sister both deal with it in different ways. She told us today that she has no memory of the funeral service or burial; she has simply blocked it out.

I also believe that such a traumatic experience at such an early age, exacerbated by the plaintive wail of The Carter Family music, has made my father who he is today. He’s a true renaissance man, self-educated and interested in everything. Determined to live life well and fully and, as Thoreau said, “to suck the marrow out of life.” He worked forty-four years at the local chemical plant, then created a second career by working at the local funeral home for the past twenty-five. I remind him that Socrates said that the true philosopher studies death, and he does that every weekend at the funeral home. He only took off this weekend because I was here. He is also the longest-serving Grand Jury Foreman in the history of Sullivan County, relinquishing his appointment only last year. Natural storyteller, blue-collar philosopher, prescient thinker, and kind and generous human being—I sing the song of my father today.