Daddy Taught Us Stuff
My dad knew how to do stuff. He ran three businesses at one time when I was a kid. He owned the local Texaco, the Feed & Seed store, and ran a construction business. He took Sunday off because God doesn’t like you to work on Sunday and “book work” had to be done sometime.
He learned how to operate a bulldozer as a teenager and up until the day mom told him to retire, Daddy spent many twelve hours a day on a dozer. Daddy built roads; dug stock tanks; built dams; and always smelled like grease and dirt.
During the summer, we’d go out with him on a worksite. While most kids were at the city pool or going to the movies, the Nickell kids would hunt rabbits or fish in old stock tanks near Daddy’s worksite. Sort of a poor kids version of camping. At dusk, daddy would pull the tractor in for the night, my siblings and I would grab our grease guns. From a young age, we were taught what to grease and how many hand pumps of grease needed to go on something that needed to be greased. At the end of summer, our job was to paint Daddy’s tractors to make them look new and for thirty years I have disliked the color “yellow.” Those summers laid the foundation for things that I have come to appreciate.
Jumping up and down on those bulldozers took a toll on his back, his knees, and affected his hearing but it paid the bills, kept his family fed, and years after his death I still find cancelled checks he wrote to charities that none of us knew he supported.
My father took his hat off when a funeral procession passed us on the road; he held the door for a lady and the next dozen people that trailed behind her; he taught this daughter to change a tire and check the oil in her car; and told me that I could drink all that I wanted, as long as I did it in front of him. My dad was a good man.
Over Mother’s Day weekend, I helped my brothers build a deck for my mom. Pipes were driven into the ground by machine…back in the day, my brothers would be taking turns at the post hole diggers. While David carefully measured twice and cut once, Paul screwed the boards in…the size of this deck is ridiculously large, covered, ramped, railed, and has stairs on two sides…my brothers do things the way my dad would have — RIGHT.
It took them four days over three weekends to finish. As I watched my brothers lay out all the tools for the project it reminded me of all the different things that my dad would shout out to one of us to hand to him.
I’m so glad that I had a dad that taught us stuff.