A friend of mine, Harrison Scott Key, wrote a memoir about his father several years ago entitled, “The World’s Largest Man.” Even though we grew up only 20 minutes apart, Harrison and I didn’t meet until college. In his book, Harrison details how he spent his whole life seeing only the differences between him and his father, and it wasn’t until his father’s death that he began to see how his life and ways had imprinted themselves on his own life and in his soul. He describes his father as a man who was absolutely larger than life, and uses the phrase “world’s largest man” as a metaphor to describe the aura that followed his father.
I was talking with my sister Annie a few hours after Dad passed. We were trying to come up with the best way to describe him when she said, “Dad was just a Force.” And he was. He was a force. An incredibly strong presence whether he was physically there or not. I have spent the last few years, and especially the last 4 months since he passed, thinking about the kind of force he was in my life. He left indelible marks on me and on all of his family.
In the loft where my 3 little boys sleep, we have written a code on the wall called, “What Real Men Do.” It’s a running list of some of the traits of manhood: things that real men SHOULD do. There are items up and down that code that were imprinted on me by my dad long before I came to know the Lord. Today I want to look at just four of them.
Number one: tell the truth. Always. I could get away with a lot if I just owned it and told the truth. My Dad would say, “Once you lose your reputation, it’s almost impossible to get it back.” It’s a lesson that comes up daily in our house. If you did it, just own it.
Number two: Respect Women and your Mom and Dad. It was not pretty in my house when I spoke disrespectfully to my Mom.
Number three: Work hard. You work until the job is done and you do that work well. My dad told me a hundred times, “If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing right.”
And the fourth: Real Men are capable. The family simply relies on the man to know how to do certain things and here my Dad was eminently capable. He was an airplane mechanic in the Navy and that translated into knowing how to work on most mechanical thing, or anything that involved a drill, wrench or screwdriver. He was especially good at working on cars. He would pick up a bolt, give it a quick glance and say, “Son, grab me a 11 millimeter socket,” and he was right the first time, every time. If anything needed to be done around the house, he had a tool or gadget to do it and he knew how to use it.
He was also an expert fisherman with a lifetime of experience that even included fishing in some bassmaster tournaments. He was an avid hunter of deer, ducks, quail and hogs. He raised bird hunting dogs, though he made me clean out the dog kennels everyday. Fun. He was a skilled trap shooter and even shot in the National Trapshooting Tournament in Vandalia, Ohio on several occasions. But he wasn’t just off enjoying his hobbies alone. He taught me to fish and to shoot a gun, and when he did any of those things he always brought me with him and we did them together.
As an avid outdoorsman, of course he needed a truck to pull his boat or get him in and out of the woods. He got on quite a hot streak at one point, trading in and trading up new trucks almost every year. Over the span of about 8 years, he went from a new GMC Trailblazer, to a Ford Explorer, Ford Expedition, Ford Excursion, Ford F-150, then an F-250 before finally settling in on a brand new white, loaded, and not so humble F-350 with after-market tuning for a touch of extra horsepower. I remember giving Judy Kay a boost just to get into this behemoth and thinking that it was probably the best truck that that Jackson, Mississippi dealership had on the lot. She took a look over the dash at the arsenal of gauges, buttons and switches that looked more like the cockpit of an airplane than the dashboard of a daily driver and was quite impressed. Her face lit up and she looked over at Dad and said, “Wow, this is quite something.” In a completely monotone voice and with a straight face, he looked back at her and said, “It’s just a truck, baby.” I thought, “Yeah, right! I think someone may be getting worried that mom is going to do the math on your eight consecutive trade-ins and figure out you have basically ascended to the pinnacle of truck ownership one trade in at a time!”
Dad always wanted to do things with me or any of his kids, whether it was fishing, hunting or playing sports. Some of my very favorite memories as a kid include getting out of bed at 4:30 so we could be on the lake when the sun came up. We always had a boat, sometimes even two. Yes Judy Kay, sometimes two. Sam and I travelled to Lexington last year to see the Kentucky/Kansas game for his 16th birthday. It was a huge game and was great spending time with just him and I. I’ve never actually lived in Kentucky, but I grew up travelling the southeast with my Dad and brother to watch Kentucky play in Baton Rouge, Knoxville, Lexington, Nashville and other cities, and so I watch now with my own kids. Currently, Ben is eagerly waiting for a pair of custom Nike shoes to arrive that he designed on their website. He placed the number 44 on the ankle of the shoe. He did that because he’s seen me wear that number for eight years on my church softball jersey. What he doesn’t know is that that number was the number of my favorite baseball player growing up, Eric Davis. He played for the Cincinnati Reds. We couldn’t take a summer trip to Kentucky to visit Dad’s family without my dad arranging for us to go to a game at Riverfront Stadium, and that number 44 serves as a permanent reminder of the time we shared together with uncles and cousins.
Dad coached my baseball teams as well and kids loved playing on his team, partly because he was fun and partly because he was fair. Coaches in those leagues tended to be all about self-promotion of their own kids, but my dad never did that. One of my most vivid memories of my dad came from my 11-year old season. At that age, boys would still cry if they got hurt or mad or for some other ridiculous reason and I hated that. I never cried and I scoffed at any boy who would cry over a boo-boo or a baseball game. We won the league championship that year so Dad got to be the coach of our league’s all-star team. I was one of the boys selected to be on the team. For our team, I was an average hitter, an average pitcher, a pretty good first baseman and the kid that always hustled everywhere. In the second game of our single elimination playoff bracket, we were down by one run heading into the bottom of the last inning. With one out already and the tying run on second, it was my turn to bat and be the hero. I was excited and ready for the challenge, but Dad put me on the bench and told me that I wouldn’t be batting. Someone was pinch-hitting for me at this critical part of the game. He felt like this other kid had hit more consistently and would give us a better chance to win the game. I was crushed. I sat down at the end of that bench and bawled my eyes out. Instead of cheering on my teammate, I cried - did the very thing I hated - because I thought this moment was all about me. But my dad taught me that this moment was about our team. And the other boys who also worked hard to get there deserved the best chance to win. He wasn’t going to put me over the best interest of everyone else on the team. I don’t remember who batted for me, but I do remember that he got a hit and that we won that game. I learned a valuable lesson about fairness, about the team being first, and about the mission being more important than the individual.
I learned many other things from watching my dad. You should rise early and get your work done first. Don’t dilly- dally at your job, get it done and get home. Spend time with your family, and lots of it. He was always quick to play a game, fire up the grill and barbeque wings or fire up the fryers for his freshly caught fish. He loved to do things, anything, with his grandkids. Living in central Florida, he might have taken them to Disney World, Sea World or any other fun place a time or two. He also enjoyed taking them kayaking and going for bike rides along their trails.
The first time (and one of the only times) I saw my dad cry was when his dad died. I was about ten years old. We arrived at my Grandmother’s house the Wednesday before Thanksgiving at around 5:00 after traveling all day from Jackson. My Uncle Chris greeted us in the driveway to let us know that Grandpa had died that morning, and my dad broke down sobbing. He turned to hug me. Except I don’t think he was hugging to comfort me, I think he just needed me to hug him.
I watched him serve my mom faithfully. He was rough around the edges but kind and gentle when he needed to be. Now, my dad was very far from a perfect person. He was a Navy Chief to the core and he was not afraid to elevate his voice to make sure you understood where he was coming from. But he was also very soft when it came to his wife, his kids and especially his grandkids. He did have broken relationships in his life. Important ones. But those grieved him deeply and I watched him spend the second half of his life trying to mend those relationships. He was incredibly smart. Not the kind of smart you pick up in a classroom, the kind you earn on the battlefield of life. The kind you learn from going places and doing things. He never thought much of himself or needed to talk about himself or his accomplishments. As Tim Keller puts it, he was self-forgetful; a humble person in many ways.
When I told my Dad in college that I was joining the Marine Corps, he was very upset. He didn’t want me going into harm’s way and he tried to convince me that I was too good for that. The problem with that advice was that, as all parents learn, their children tend to not listen to their words but rather to follow their example. And so I did. And so did my two brothers and my sister’s husbands. All of them. A few of the grandchildren have followed that example as well, and I think he was proud of it all.
Harrison Key spent almost the entirety of The World’s Largest Man, the first 331 pages of his 332-page memoir about his father, talking about how they were different. It wasn’t until his father passed that he realized how right his Dad was about so many things and how similar they were in so many ways. I know I carry some of my Dad’s best and worst traits (Judy Kay is trying desperately to sand off some of the hard edges I inherited), but on page 332, the last page of the book, Harrison concludes with the most important lesson he learned from his father and he says this, “My Dad’s greatest lesson was the one he never said out loud, the thing a father should do, which is this: Be there ….. Always be there….. And never stop being there, until you can’t be there anymore.”
Dad, you loved your kids and you loved us well. Not perfectly. You had many flaws. Your kids all had different journeys and I’m sure you would do some things differently if you had it to do over again. But you loved us - all of us - unashamedly until you just couldn’t be there anymore. And you were very proud of all of your kids. All of us. You were proud of your sons and your daughters and our spouses. You loved my wife like a daughter from the first day I brought her home. You loved your grandkids and lavished them with your time and affection. You loved your brothers and your sister and their kids. And you loved Mom well for 44 years until you couldn’t be there to love her any more. Life is not easy and there have been hard days in our recent past. I wish you could be here for the hard days to come, and especially for the many blessings that life will bring us in the future. I wish my kids could have known you better and for longer. I wish you could have seen them marry and make your kids grandparents. But you were definitely all here until you couldn’t be here anymore. Our lives were better with you in them. And so we long for the day when our Lord will wipe away every tear. But until that day, Chief, we wish you “fair winds and following seas.”