Some mundane appearance, like a Tom Petty song, strums up memories of my father. Or more accurately, memories of my mother gifting me with memories of my father — the small morsels of information she could remember, like “Tom Petty was his favorite.” But he’s not around to tell me that it’s the truth, or an outright lie, or “Dadgummit, how could you tell her that when it’s so obviously [x]?!”
My father died when I was 9 years old. There’s almost nothing to remember him by. There are flashes of me sitting on his lap, of our home, his cars, his fingers tapping on the steering wheel to the beat of a song on the radio. Liquor bottles. Little else.
So, I have subsisted on strips of biased information: My father was a misogynist. He thought women shouldn’t be lawyers. He owed someone-or-other cash. He was a great attorney; he was a bad one. But who really gets to have a say? Not him, and so not anyone as far as I’m concerned. He is a blank slate, a newborn, a cadaver, a distant fact left to be marred by the words of ex-wives and the radio silence of all-too-quiet family members. (My ‘father’s side’ is like an alien species. We speak different languages, live in different ways and places, but I know they’re out there.)
I wonder if this, these blurry fragments of his worst moments, is how I will be remembered — or is it just an unlucky few? What is one’s legacy left in the hands of another? I have newspaper clippings that seem unbiased enough, but in all honesty, they point to a common theme: People remember you at your worst. History doesn’t remember your smile, or the way your eyes lit up, your tousled hair, your singing voice, your voice at all. It doesn’t remember the way you loved your daughter if she can’t remember it herself. There is no written record of my love for him.
So, here it is: my written record of Ray Price, with love.
My father was a defense attorney. People hate defense attorneys, but I still love him. He was a public defender in the heart of Mississippi: he helped people who truly needed it. That’s admirable, and I love him for that. He was a Democrat, and he ran for state senate, and he lost. How endearing. I love him for that, too. I still have his campaign T-shirt in safekeeping.
Ray was also bipolar and a drinker. It got him in trouble — sometimes that lineage threatens to get me in trouble. But still I love him. I love him for trying his best to live with a condition that few had compassion for or understood in his time. I love him for making it through school, for having a wife, for having a daughter: for trying. I love him for the good and the bad, for all of the times that he hurt me without meaning to because of it. I don’t love him in spite of it, I love him because of it: because he taught me that it’s important to care for people, to see them, to take care of them before they’re gone.
I love my dad for my childhood. I was a princess, and he was my king. We ruled over Richton, Mississippi, with a house full of dogs, a home full of food, a backyard big enough to run and run and run in, rolly pollies abounding, where we collected pecans in a roller basket and swam in the pool on weekends. I love him for raising me there, for my pink bedroom, for the Pecan Festival, the people, the full embrace of my girlhood.
Sometimes, I love him for dying. I miss him so terribly, but I know if he were here, he might not be happy, and so might I. I love him for leaving me with this big question mark, a story and a person, and a legacy I get to build all on my own. He is not an assortment of others’ broken memories of him, at least not to me. To me, he is a monolith. My biggest supporter, the guy who saw everything I went through and was watching from the other side, on my side, always. I deeply needed that, and I’m grateful for it, and I love him for it.
I love him, and I thank him for leaving me with his story in my hands. I hope I’ve told it charitably. I don’t care about being accurate — for you, dad, I’m not a journalist, but a storyteller. Your history is mine to rewrite. I hope someone gives me the same courtesy one day.