My Daddy's Smile
A number of people have asked when I planned to write my memoirs as a book. So far, I’ve resisted the idea. Trying to sell a book that I wrote about myself seems like a pretty ungentlemanly thing to do. It's not that I’ve ever been all that great at being a gentleman, but I try. I’ve also resisted the idea because I didn’t know my way into and out of the story, and you can’t have a book that’s just a whole lot of middle.
Last night, I was watching a movie about whales on my big-screen TV, which isn’t really all that big by today’s standards, but if you look at the six-inch TV I grew up with, it’s ginormous. I started thinking about a photo I posted earlier on Facebook of my dad and George Harmon eating Wendy’s Hamburgers and celebrating selling a twenty-five-year lease to Wendy’s for a spot of land on the Millsaps Campus and just looking awfully damn pleased with themselves and more than a little amused at something.
It reminded me of a story about how my mother and Pat Jeffreys spent about twenty-five years trying to convince Daddy that he should have his official portrait painted. He was against the idea. Having a portrait of yourself painted seemed ungentlemanly to him, even though he joined Pat in insisting that his own father had one done.
Ultimately, his resolve weakened, and he agreed to have two paintings done not long before he died: one to hang at Missco and to hang at Millsaps, his other job, the one that didn’t pay anything.
My mother felt, and Pat agreed, that the portrait to hang at Millsaps should have him smiling since it would hang in the administration building. People would see the painting when considering whether or not to send their children to Millsaps, and they felt like he should look inviting. George Harmon didn’t particularly give a crap if he was smiling. Neither did my dad.
When the paintings were revealed, I saw what they were calling the smile on my dad, and I told my mother that it should make people feel very invited, like my dad wanted to either enslave or murder their children.
Daddy didn’t have a very natural smile. I don’t either. It’s genetic. My unnatural smile has gotten a little better since Bell’s Palsey obliterated one of the nerves in my head. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told to “smile for the picture” only to insist that I was smiling, goddamnit!
Daddy could smile—quite a lot—but you had to make him laugh. It had to be a genuine smile, not something you demanded as a performance. That picture of him and George Harmon eating Wendy's burgers was a pretty genuine smile.
So, I started turning this idea over in my head, while I lay in bed, unable to sleep, as usual, and after an hour or so of pasting sentences together in my head before trying to type them out with my fingers, I realized that was probably the way into a book of my memoirs, even though I was against the idea.
The thing is, if I write a book about me and my daddy, there will be parts that are really happy, and there will be parts that are really sad, but more than that it’s probably gonna have some of your daddy’s in it too, especially if your name is Lewis, or Woodward, or Harmon, or Deaton, or Wingate, or Goodman, or Taylor (especially Taylor), so, if I ever do that then you’ll know what’s coming.
But, I’m not entirely convinced that I’m gonna do this. Putting all my secrets in a book forever is a whole lot of bald-faced honesty. If I’m gonna ask anybody to read a few hundred pages of my words then I owe it to them to tell even the hard parts.
I can’t promise this is ever gonna happen. A book about me still seems a pretty ungentlemanly thing to do. My plan is to go eat tamales for lunch and think it over. Daddy and I used to eat tamales from a can and liver sausage with saltine crackers, and he’d try to talk me into seeing the world the way he saw it.