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Dad's Legacy Indicates Paths To Take, Avoid

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By TOM JACKSON

The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 15, 2008

When it comes to establishing in my mind the year of my father's death, I have to do the math. He was 75 the spring his body gave out, eroded by decades of ruinous consumption ranging from fried and fatty foods to cigarettes to an over-reliance on Kentucky bourbon over ice, cut with ginger ale, and the inability of medical science to rectify his indulgences.

He went into a Jackson, Tenn., hospital for repairs to a colon with more holes than a soaker hose and didn't re-emerge. Complications from surgery, the death certificate said, but I blame the Nazis.

But for the Germans' expansionist desires - and their application of Panzer divisions over peaceful leveraged buyout - David Preston Jackson most likely would not have been wrenched, at age 31, from his family and the operation of the hometown hardware store he'd run with his dad.

And he would not have returned, nearly four years later - having been punctured by shrapnel on Anzio and a sniper's bullet somewhere on the Western Front - subtly but fundamentally altered in ways that seemed to limit his attention span, dull his capacity for joy and throttle his ability to express admiration for his children in their presence (while praising them to strangers).

Such men often develop unwise, compensating appetites. So, I blame the Nazis. Göring mostly.

A Profession For Inherited Traits

Now, the math. He was born in 1912, and died months shy of his 76th birthday. So, 12 plus 75: Dad died in the spring of 1987.

Among my inheritances, then, along with his sharpshooter medal and the rosary beads handed the old Cumberland Presbyterian-cum-Southern Baptist by Pope Pius XII when the Army's Third Infantry Division liberated the Vatican, is Dad's abbreviated attention span. One of its manifestations: Between my birth and the end of second grade, we lived in five different states, six different cities and eight different houses.

To gaze upon me - my profile, the color of what's left of my hair, my word-driven profession - is to conclude that the profound influences in my life originated from my fair-skinned, blond-haired, oval-faced, English-teacher mother.

My quirks are my father's. From him I inherited the lifelong love of a baseball team (the St. Louis Cardinals), a tendency toward contrariness for its own sake, a weakness for hand tools, a sense that (world wars notwithstanding) things tend to turn out for the best, and a weakness for new projects that, owing to our shared fickleness, often are abandoned in various stages of completion.

Luckily, This Space requires only slightly more than 500 words to fill, making the sating of its appetite almost the perfect occupation for a genetically inclined contrarian with a constrained facility for focusing.

What The Dad Does

From my father I learned that Dad drives, grills the steaks, mixes the drinks, pitches backyard batting practice, goes to work, attends every game, is ever-ready with a story, loves Mom, lends the car keys, grows vegetables and never loses affection for that place called home.

From my father I learned that "talking a good game" applies not just to playing fields, but also to the proper rearing of sons. On this Father's Day, I am reminded of this as I recognize certain familiar tendencies - attention span, garrulousness - in the Heir Apparent on the cusp of his 10th summer. Good luck to me.

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

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