The Crab Chronicles

Learning from Dad

Like most folks my age, I have now experienced the deaths of both of my parents. Mother left me in June of 2020 and I am still processing that loss. My father died in 1996. I had just turned 34 years old. Although at the time I felt middle-aged, I look back now and realize I was embryonic. I had led a fairly sheltered life up until then. I just didn't know it.

One of the nice things about being on the dark side of 50 is that you may have developed the ability to look back and see how the puzzle pieces of your life fit together. When I was in my twenties I found the future terrifying. I had calmed down a lot by the time my dad died, but his death still felt like someone had kicked the chair out from under me, and I couldn't get off the floor for a long time.

I wanted to share with you some things my dad shared with me, that I only realized in hindsight were really important.

Dad had an amazing ability to forgive people who had wronged him. There was a man who had worked for him and gone over Dad's head to say some ugly things about Dad to the big boss at the bank, which in my mother's view was utterly unforgivable. Dad forgave him readily. Another man Dad worked with was mentally ill and wouldn't take his meds, and Dad had to fire him, which was really painful. The man threatened to kill him, and Dad carried a pistol in his car for years and was hyper vigilant as a result. Years later, the man heard Dad was dying and went to see him in Augusta and Dad was gracious and nice. My mother was horrified -- but Mom was much more inclined to hold a grudge.

In my own life, I have friends I rarely exchange a cross word with, and friends I fuss and fight with frequently, but I forgive them (and they forgive me) and we remain friends. My brother is like mom in that he holds grudges, but I don't really see that as a positive trait. In the end, not forgiving is more harmful than forgiving someone because you are holding onto ill feelings that are poisoning you, not the person who wronged you. Forgiving releases you from that prison of negativity.

Dad always hated hypocrisy. I remember him going to a funeral of a man he knew professionally who wasn’t a personal friend and coming home really disgusted. Everyone at the funeral had spoken about the man in absolutely glowing terms. Dad told Mom they guy was a real jerk, but nobody was telling the truth at the funeral. Everyone felt they had to only say nice things because the guy was dead. Dad hated the dishonesty of that. Mom’s attitude was well what did you expect?! I see hypocrisy sometimes now and I feel like Dad; it’s nauseating to me. However, I refuse to let it bother me. Hypocrisy is like death and taxes; inevitable.

Snobbery is a terrible thing. I’ve seen Dad go out of his way to be kind and friendly to the janitorial staff and be just polite to the bank president. He had a way of being friendly to everyone which made people love him, because they could see that he was the opposite of a snob. Even though Dad had a master’s degree and spent 95% of his professional life as the vice president of a bank, he was never snobby. I think that humility was one of his defining characteristics because Dad was raised by two parents who couldn’t have been more different. Grandaddy was raised in a poor farming family in South Georgia and he had to quit school and help support his mother and siblings at a young age. Grandmother was also raised in a farming family, but in a prosperous, socially prominent southern family. A lady in her position shouldn’t have fallen in love with an uneducated man who had very little money and wasn’t her social equal, but she did. Mom said when Thompson was dying she nursed him faithfully and would talk about how beautiful he was, and Mom had never seen someone so loving and devoted to their spouse. Grandmother obviously was not a snob.

I like to think I inherited Dad’s anti-snobbery. I have known girls [mostly in high school] who came from well-to-do families who were just obnoxious. I also had a friend in high school who came from an obviously poor family, but he was far more friendly and interesting to talk to, and he was brilliant. I was delighted to find him on Facebook a few years ago and see that he is doing really well. To be fair, most of the obnoxious girls are now nice people, I am happy to report, and many are grandmamas now. People mature – a good reason to forgive. [Nobody should be judged forever by how they acted in high school!]

One should always be kind to young people who are still learning. Dad was always unfailingly kind to my friends, our neighbors, people he worked with, people at church, etc. but he had a soft spot for younger folks and I think that came from being raised by a teacher. Helping someone learn and grow as a person is a hugely rewarding thing. I’ve seen him mentor and nurture folks at the bank only to lose them to higher-paying jobs but Dad always wished them well.

I have tried to be a good friend/mentor to younger folks, personally and professionally, but I’m not sure if I am always successful. I do try.

Savor the joyful moments in life. Sometimes we are so anxious and/or stressed out that we forget to be joyful. I have fond memories of seeing Dad’s unbridled joy at something as simple as going swimming, or getting a phone call from one of his brothers, or discovering a new barbeque joint. His joy was contagious, too – I would see his delight and it would make me happy. He loved Christmas and would always take great delight in opening presents and seeing us open presents. I sometimes forget to enjoy my life, because there are so many things that are worrisome. I need to try and remember to seek out and cherish things I enjoy, and to put aside fear as much as possible. [Covid has made that difficult to do consistently.]

Love fearlessly. If Tony Thompson loved you, you knew you were loved. You would have no doubt. We would have some major disagreements sometimes, but I never doubted his love for me. I try to tell my kids and my friends I love them, fairly often. Some people say the words are meaningless but that’s not true. Saying the words is important. At the end of your life you are not going to look back and say “I shouldn’t have said I love you as often.” No, you will regret not expressing that more, because in the end, you will realize that material things are meaningless, and love is the most important thing in life. I hope when I am gone people will say If Dee loved you, you knew you were loved! It would be the highest tribute.

Teachers I Remember

I grew up surrounded by teachers and I think they deserve a lot of credit for keeping me in line. My mother was a teacher and loved to tell stories about her days as a teacher, and my father's mother was a teacher. Two of my uncles were teachers. One of my aunts was a teacher. I have a cousin who is a [now retired] teacher.

I considered a career as a teacher but I lack the required patience. When I was young and had not yet learned to control my Hot Mess characteristics, if an irate parent had given me grief I would probably have told them off in no uncertain terms, and gotten fired. I did take on a volunteer teaching job one summer in college, teaching art at a children's museum for a few weeks. I couldn't control the class. I was a disaster as a teacher -- but my respect and admiration for teachers grew immensely that summer. I would go home after teaching for a few hours and be a zombie for the rest of the day.

I remember asking my mother how on earth she had managed the stress when she was a teacher and she said something like "I had a nice vodka tonic at the end of the day" or something equally [or more] funny. Not long before she died she was telling me about my grandmother Cordelia, who had been a teacher before she married, then gotten called back to teach during World War II, and Cordelia had told Mom that at the end of every day she would have to just go home and be in complete quiet for a while to unwind from the day. She was teaching in a very tiny school, the only one in Hephzibah, Georgia, and one year she had to teach her own son. Dad said it was the worst year ever because he never got away with anything!

Anyway, I have been thinking a lot lately about how teachers are so influential so here are some reminiscences from my school days.

[[right, me age 7]

I was working the other day and I had a phone conversation with a lady who was French Canadian but she spoke perfect English. At the end of the call she asked me "What is your name again?" I said "My name is Dee." She said "What?" I had to repeat it about four times. Finally she said "Okay..." sounding very skeptical. After I hung up I sat and chuckled a minute. In French, my name means "of." In Italian my name means "of" too... I recalled sometime later that I had a real run-in the first day of kindergarten when my teacher asked me my name. My teacher, Mrs. Hibbs, was French. I told her my name was Dee and she didn't believe me. She kept saying "No, what is your REAL name, dear?" and I finally said "DEE is the name on my birth certificate!" My parents were called and questioned and had to clear it up, which likely would not have happened if I had had a teacher who was American. (After that rocky start, I grew to love Mrs. Hibbs and she was a delightful teacher.)

Nowadays I am betting teachers are never surprised by any name of any child -- Apple, Dakota, Wolf, Bear, Mars, etc. I had a call yesterday from a lady whose name is Precious. That was my mother's nickname for me when she was in a good mood. My other nickname -- when I was being a pill -- was Miss Priss...

I had a teacher in middle school who was my English teacher 3 out of the 4 years, so a huge influence on me, Miss Gettys. I liked her handwriting so I copied it. She taught me how to think creatively because I always got extra credit for writing short stories. I learned how to diagram a sentence and most of my knowledge of grammar and punctuation comes from her. She tolerated the fact that every year I wrote a book report on Gone With the Wind because I had read it so many times I could pop out a book report on it in about 15 minutes. In 8th grade I was seriously disappointed when, at the end of the year, instead of getting the prize for being the Best Student in English I got the Most Improved in English. I sometimes think my entire writing career is my way of thumbing my nose at her and saying HA! HOW WRONG YOU WERE! -- but then again I hate to think of myself as being so petty...

I had an English teacher in high school who was a huge influence in a couple of ways, Mrs. Beverly. One, she announced at the start of the school year that she would not dumb down her vocabulary. I love words and I knew most of her vocabulary. Many of the kids complained. Two, she wore whatever she liked and didn't care what anyone thought. It was around 1977 and she was wearing clothes from her college days in the 1960's -- miniskirts etc. -- and some of the kids made fun of her wardrobe. I envied her her ability to not care what anyone thought!

I had an Algebra teacher in high school who was a very negative influence. He had been a fighter pilot in Vietnam and he was very intense and scary. My math anxiety skyrocketed in his class. The first day of class when he got to my name he stared at me and said "You're Bruce Thompson's sister aren't you?!" and I said yes. The look in his eyes told me that was a big negative. When I got home, I asked my brother about it and he said something about making some sarcastic/disrespectful remarks to the teacher and I thought oh great, now he will think I am as obnoxious as my brother! OH NO! - I was not, of course. Around teachers I was very respectful and polite. / I could not figure out how on earth he connected me with my brother though, because Thompson is a pretty common name, and I felt like I looked nothing like my brother. Only much later did I realize there was, in fact a resemblance; very blue eyes and high intelligence... That teacher called my mom and said "Mrs. Thompson Dee is making A's and B's in her other classes but failing my class. Can you or her dad give her some extra help at home?" Mom replied "We will try, but the only way I passed Algebra in college was by wearing very low-cut blouses and sitting on the front row!" Dad was great at math but not the "new math." [they hired a tutor for me]

[above, me [in glasses] and my brother [in vest] in high school, with family friends]

I had a Biology teacher in high school who was a huge influence. He hated teaching Biology. He loved Physics. So he very begrudgingly taught one class of Biology with minimal effort on his part. He would give tests by writing a sentence on the board and making us just write out the answers on our own paper. I still remember one test -- "Trace the path of a bite of food from the mouth all the way out the other end, explaining all the processes of digestion in detail, and drawing an illustration." He also introduced us to the controversy between Creationism and Evolution, by reading to us from a book that talked about humans starting out as one-celled organisms, then becoming fish, apes, and finally upright humans. The more conservative parents were horrified. My parents were sort of amused, and just said "Look, the bible is allegorical. You can believe in it AND evolution without going to Hell."

The world was a very different place when I was a child in school. I was probably the last generation of kids to be taught by ladies with high bouffant hairstyles, who weren't allowed to wear pants. I was in middle school before I ever saw a teacher wearing pants. We also had PE every day through the 8th grade, and Art and Music twice a week. We said the Pledge of Allegiance every day. Watching a movie in class was a big treat. When writing papers, we had to go to the library and research the old-fashioned way -- there was no Google. I never saw a computer until I was in high school and I wasn't allowed to touch it. I had never personally used a computer until I was out of college!

Those days are gone forever...