The Flog – The Fabry Log

Five years ago today my father died. He had slipped away from my mother, and my brother and sister-in-law suggested I get there quickly. I drove up to the house with crickets and frogs providing the soundtrack to that West Virginia requiem. The air was thick and humid and I knew this was the end of something good.


The other night as we sat on the front porch my wife looked at me and said, "You look just like your dad." I acted as if it bothered me, but it didn't. I'm okay with becoming my father, looks and all. I'm okay with all that entails, and some of it isn't pretty.

My father wasn't perfect, though. He made mistakes. He yelled on occasion. Wasn't politically correct with his views. But it's not his mistakes I think most about these days. That's the funny thing about time. It erases most of the mistakes and replaces them with warm memories. And both are true. The negatives and positives are real, but time seems to bring the warm ones to the surface more often.

His haircuts, for example. As a kid I hated them. I didn't like sitting on that rickety, metal chair and having hair go down my neck. It was musty and hot in the basement. I just wanted to go outside. As a kid I couldn't wait for that haircut to be over. What I wouldn't give to feel his hands on my head today, pushing those clippers around one more time.

The smell of the peppermints he ate on the way to church. His laugh. Seeing him at the kitchen table reading the paper. Walk with him and our dog, Shep, up the hill and into the woods. Hear him tinker with some machine that wouldn't run. Or ride the tractor into some impossible incline to cut the hay.

I wrote about my father in the book The Promise of Jesse Woods. He was not a pastor in real life, but he had the heart of a good one. There are echoes of his grace and faults in those pages. I suppose I will write about him in some way with each story, but this one captured a different side of him.

The death of my father was the end of something good. But it was also the beginning of memories as rich as the loamy soil he loved.