The times, they're a-changing

Come Daylight Savings Time each year I can't help but think of my daddy.
My daddy, sitting on his couch with his blond yippy pooch in his lap fumbling with his cell phone, calling me (usually more than once) to remind me to change my clocks. He's done it ever since I've been an adult, or, if that doesn't work for you, ever since I haven't lived at home.

Except he didn't call to remind me this year. Must have slipped his mind. Daddy's mind has been slipping more and more in the past couple of years. He's nearing sixty. He's got liver trouble. Alzheimer's runs in the family.

I'm expecting him to call in an hour or so, though, after he thinks he's given me enough time to shake the sleep off. He's good about letting me get up and around before calling on Sunday mornings. He'll tell me all about the Ole Miss game yesterday, how my high school's team isn't going to make it to the playoffs. He'll tell me who we know that went to jail over the weekend--Daddy's an avid paper-reader and police scanner-listener--and who's in the funeral home (because to say Ms. Francis died just isn't polite).

I will listen. I will nod, and he'll know I'm nodding even when he can't see me. I'll say yessir, and then, when he's finished not talking to me as much as talking at me, he'll tell me he has to go and hang up without saying goodbye. And my feelings won't be hurt, because that's just how he is. For some reason or another, goodbyes are too hard for my daddy.

This Robert Hayden poem has always reminded me of him:

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Remember to set your clocks back an hour.