This is a little bit stream-of-consciousness, so bear with me.

Yesterday, my dad died. Today, I will write his obituary.

I loved my dad. He was a good man. Fallible? Yes, of course. Very human and definitely from a different generation than me. But today none of that matters, because today, I’m remembering the way he knew every birdcall that we heard when we sat together on our old screened-in porch. He loved wildlife, all animals, really.

And man, did he have a green thumb. When I was a kid, he had a garden. It must have been half an acre. He grew corn, tomatoes, okra, yellow squash, green beans, potatoes, onions…and sunflowers. I don’t know if he ever harvested the sunflower seeds or if he just let the birds come and peck them off themselves.

He grew the most amazing roses, too. If he planted the rosebush, it would bloom, and the longer he tended it, the more amazing the blooms were. I often sent him a miniature rose bush and would come home a few months later to find it planted and flourishing.

My dad worked hard. He worked at DuPont Plant for more than thirty years. Part of that was 12-hour “swing shifts”. During one of my summer breaks, I worked these shifts with him as part of a summer program for college students. The day shifts were tough. Getting up at 4 a.m. and driving thirty minutes up a mountain to start work at 6 a.m. and work until 6 p.m. while most of my schoolmates were working 6-8 hours at McDonald’s was one thing. Forcing myself to sleep during the day and get up to go to work at 6 p.m. was in some ways even worse. I sometimes wonder how many of those drives up the mountain I was actually awake for. In fact, my dad said he knew those hairpin turns so well, he could drive them with his eyes shut.

He may have.

My dad loved music, but to this day I could not tell you for certain what his favorite song, musician, or even genre was. If there was music playing, he was enjoying it. He could sing, too. When I was very little, I have a vivid memory of him clapping his hands and stomping his feet and singing:

Old Dan Tucker was a fine old man
Washed his face in a frying pan
Combed his hair with a wagon wheel
Died with a toothache in his heel

…and my mother scolding him, “Carl, you’re going to bring the house down!” And I believed her because he did make the house shake when he wanted to. When he “roughhoused” with me and my brothers, for instance. My dad was a champion tickler. He’d make us shriek until my mother told him to cut it out, and we’d take a good five minutes laying on the floor giggling to recover.

I could go on about my dad and what a good man he was. He didn’t drink or smoke or gamble. Every penny he got, he spent to make the people and animals in his life happy. Us kids never wanted for anything. He fed and clothed us, took us all on a family vacation to the beach every year, bought us all cars to knock around in once we had our driver’s licenses (remind me to tell you about the Chevy Citation with power steering on only one side). He borrowed money from the government so I could go to college, and he was always there when I went over budget.

In every way, my dad was a good man. But more than that, he was an excellent father.

I love you, Daddy.