Like Father, Like Son?

Bob and I go back. Way back. Back before September 11^th. Back before the internet. Back before ludicrous seat belt laws. We go all the way back to middle school, which was around about thirty-five years ago. Bob was there the first day I walked into my new school in the sixth grade. I had just moved down to Florida from Georgia. I still remember the first whole sentence he spoke to me – “You gonna eat that?”

If you’ve never met my father, this opening paragraph from his book of short stories1 can serve as a tolerably effective introduction. Take the name “Bob.” The description of seat belt laws as “ludicrous.” The picture of a best friend as someone you met over the question, “You gonna’ eat that?” And Florida.

My dad and I are different in innumerable ways. What we like to do at home is gives a simple illustration. I am usually most content in a chair from which I can read, write, research, meme, code, edit Linux configuration files, and modify video games I will never get around to playing. My dad has a much different inclination. Perhaps his favorite place to be is his barn, inherited from my grandfather, in the midst of hundreds of acres of Smith family land, most of it covered in pine trees. There he works: sometimes on most needful things, such as maintaining the land and the pine trees for their vicennial cutting, or repairing cars. At other times he simply reorganizes, redecorates, or repurposes old things for the fun of it. Indeed, the older he gets, the more the barn looks like a tropical hangout2 and the less like a base of farming operations, though it still gets plenty of use both ways.

This difference between us flows neatly into our broader profiles. The contrast is superficially quite dramatic. On one hand, you have a man at home in the Florida soil, whose back has been gradually baked by the sun into a dark red, speaking in an immediately recognizable Southern drawl, probably about his favorite local seafood restaurants, as you visit with him after the service at his Southern Baptist church, a tradition he’s been part of his whole life. On the other, you have a guy who would hardly ever gone outdoors in the first 18 years of his life had he not been made to, who gets whiter every year, speaking in the closest approximation to a generic “American accent” that can grow in north Florida, probably about no-knead pan pizza, as you catch him in the midst of the Psalm Roar at his CREC church, where he’s been for about three years.

Still, for all this jarring contrast, we have a surprising amount in common underneath. Take, for example, our naming conventions and general vocabulary. Neither of us can quite abide either bestowing or calling anything by a conventional name. I grew up being called, despite my skeletal frame, “Chunky,” or even “Chunky Monkey.” Every single cat we ever owned was to him “Fang” or “Fang-O,” while a good number of our dogs were just “Dummy.” One important reference file on his computer I had to consult from time to time was (and I assume still is) named “Peradventure.” When my dad’s doctor got him on regular injections of some sort, he always labeled in the calendar “Shoot ER.” And his prose (sometimes even his speech) is littered with such popularly neglected expressions like “whilst,” “betwixt,” “vex,” and “I reckon.”

As for me, anyone who has seen my blog posts have guess I have struggles with “normal” naming, but there is more to it. One of my son’s often goes by “Potato” or even “Mr. Potato Head.” Any time we have had a pet (in those brief periods), the only names I recognized were “Doggo” and “cat.” Rather than a “to-do list” I have a Faciendum that I access on my phone named Moto Patri or perhaps my desktop Daemon Moderans. I make extensive use of circumlocutions in conversation about anything that counts, and my expressions include “in no wise,” “most certainly,” “What needest thou?”, and “verily.”

Musical taste is another way one can easily see our curious mixture of similarity and difference. Neither of us really listens to the mainstream things around us. Our preferences are largely opaque to our peers and sometimes family, with our wives tolerating the quirks as the kids might have mixed feelings. For my dad, the most distinctive love is reggae, trop-rock, calypso, and the like, almost anything that might mentally transport one to a tropical island. For me, we’re talking video game soundtracks, film scores, Owl City, Lindsey Stirling, and, just to keep things a tad more normal, some old Relient K. And he has passed on to me an appreciation for Dr. Elmo that goes beyond “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” into the eccentric selections “Grandpa’s Gonna’ Sue the Pants off of Santa,” “Texas Chainsaw Christmas,” and “Grandma’s Killer Fruitcake.” And whatever our respective playlists, we both play the same music over and over until our families beg for mercy.

Then there is our writing. It is a point of similarity indeed that we both write. What we write, however, has historically been quite different. While I believe I have seen E. R. Smith Bible commentaries typed up somewhere in my dad’s stuff, the vast majority of content he’s finished (unless in secret) is fiction, usually short stories. Thus Sun, Sun, and Salvation, which I have discussed before, and Holly, Jolly Christmas Tales.3 By contrast, I have been blogging, and occasionally writing published articles, about theology, ethics, and philosophy for the past 15 years, and while I wrote a lot of fiction in second and third grade, good luck finding any stories I’ve written as an adult.

Perhaps the area in which our differences and similarities are most curiously intertwined are in our vocations. Both of us are teachers, though in very different positions. He’s been at this for over 20 years at a public school4 in Perry, Florida of all places, navigating bureaucracy and all manner and range of behaviors, beliefs, and backgrounds in students all over the place with multiple grade and class shifts. I, meanwhile, have only recently finished three years at a small classical Christian school, all in a sixth grade class never larger than 13 students of roughly the same theological and moral bearings. We both love the job (even if I can’t fathom surviving the version of he handles), and indeed I sometimes think I have discovered a bit about his own life and heart over these past couple years stepping into such similar shoes. When I was at home I never knew much of his school life, but starting my own version and reading the Mr. Pratt stories in his books have opened my eyes a hair to a world I never quite saw he’s been living in.

For all this mix of similarity and difference, as a kid I often found the differences more visible and, I must admit, often frustrating. We both woke up early, and I would immediately start reading at the breakfast table, irritated that he would make me put my book away once the next couple people sat down. If there was no school, chances were high I would soon again be dragged away from my book, or the computer, or the GameCube in order to head to the barn and do outside stuff. I might have to work on cars (who needs to learn anything about those, amirite?), help cut and/or haul limbs in the fire lanes, repair a shed, dig up and transport a palm tree to the front yard,5 or otherwise inconvenience myself. Sometimes I could have sworn he was making up things to do, and in retrospect I don’t doubt this was sometimes true, whether because he thought that it would be fun or that a kid with that attitude needed more things to do anyway or that we could use some skills and some time learning from our father. Occasionally, I glimpsed a valuable lesson and tried to embrace it. More often my dad tried to tell me and I wasn’t prepared to hear the wisdom, imagining my adolescent reasoning was superior. We always could argue, and I was fairly good at it, and now I tell clever sixth-graders what’s wrong with their attitudes and find myself wishing their confident little minds could see what I see as an adult. Sorry, Dad, I see now the error of my old ways.

It is on this last point, the many efforts my dad put into teaching me, that I find myself reflecting most significantly. Neither of us, I think, has a natural knack for earnest conversations, but my dad always saw to it that he communicated the most important things I needed to learn. He taught me to work harder than I felt like and to listen to my elders with respect even on the occasion I could out-argue them. He taught me that if a pan full of grease catches fire, you should put the lid back on rather than let the flames loose. He taught me to drive both the tractor and the truck, even though I never let on to occasionally enjoying the tractor. He taught me to sing at church lest I rob God of the sacrifice of praise, a conversation he might have forgotten by now but I certainly never did. He tried over and over to teach me that social conventions matter whether I find them rational or not, and I eventually learned the lesson the long way around by reading people like Richard Hooker, only to realize I could have just listened to Dad to begin with. He taught me about women, at least to the limited extent I was able to follow along, and made sure I knew to look for “God-fearing, good-looking, and good-cooking.” And on the note of the fear of God, he taught me more than anything else to entreat God as Father, to rely only on the blood of the Son for salvation, to listen to the Holy Spirit by reading the Bible with faith and prayer, and to return all blessings with abundant thanksgiving, enjoying the pleasures and kindnesses with which God has filled our lives. If there is any similarity between us that really counts, all the quirks and tics aside, it is the view of this life he successfully communicated and planted within my own soul, represented by the Bible verse that makes up his whole Facebook bio:

Nothing is better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and that his soul should enjoy good in his labour. This also, I saw, was from the hand of God.

— Ecclesiastes 2:24

Thanks, Dad. Now go eat at Deal’s, grab a drink from the barn fridge, and go enjoy some good in your labor.