I write a lot about my father and grandfather. They were two of the best men – real men – I’ve known, and they were the alpha males that largely shaped me. I don’t write as much about my mother, but should. Mom was just as much of an influence. The fall before I was born, she was squirrel hunting and chasing coon dogs while seven months pregnant. Some outdoorsy men claim they’ve hunted all their life – I was hunting before I was born.
Before I ever kissed a girl, Mom had me in the woods, squirrel hunting and coon hunting. She never minded me getting greasy muddy dirty or tick infested, she let me roam the woods with a gun or a bow, and she bought me my first pistol when my dad wouldn’t. The way my mother embraced the outdoor – you could say, “hillbilly” – lifestyle, it made it seem like a way of life as opposed to some hobby the men engaged in. She’d spend summers in a pine board shack covered in tar paper so I could fish, kill snakes, and run the river. Then in the fall, it was a cramped cabin with a wood stove and an outhouse, so I could roam the hills and drag dead stuff back for her to put on my plate.
She told me I could be the president, said I could be a lawyer, a doctor, and even a scientist, but I didn’t want to do any of those things. When I became a cop, she worried about me, but thought I was saving civilization. And when I started writing she said I was better than Hemingway. I didn’t markedly move society towards a better place, and was probably more Francis McComber than Santiago. At best, I put a few bad guys in jail and maybe penned a word or two that made her smile.
But my mother taught me two of the most important lessons I’ve learned. The first was partly rooted in the clannish ways tied to the Scots Irish heritage of Appalachian folk. It was a mindset mostly, a creed or conviction, a commitment that the good of the family always comes first.
The second lesson was the most important, but just as with the first, she didn’t give it as a talk or deliver it by sermon. She illustrated and communicated it through example, by the way she lived her life and the choices she made. Mom showed me the kind of woman it takes to keep a warm and loving home — the kind that’s needed for a stable, respectable family. And she showed me the kind of woman a man wants as the mother of his children. One that could pass on — in the same way — the learnings she gave me. What she Mom didn’t tell me was how hellaciously hard and difficult finding that woman would be.
But I did find her, and somehow, someway, convinced her I was the one. That made my mom proud – damned proud. In fact, I think it made her prouder than she would have been had I become any of those things she told me I could be.
