as small as a world and as large as alone

6:46am November 13, 2014

Why aren’t you wearing mourning colors?

[This woud be spoken word if I could talk.]

“Why aren’t you in black?
Black is the color of mourning.”
(Well, maybe in some cultures)

My father grew up a farmer
Farming cotton and sheep
When the family farm
Was dying out
Strangling them with debt
So his father insisted —
Insisted! —
That he go to college
He didn’t want to go
He wanted to be a farmer
But his dad made him go

He became an electronics technician
Working with great physicists like
Martin Perl, whose team discovered
The tau lepton

And my dad went to work every day
In blue jeans just like the farm
In suspenders just like the farm
In dad-shirts just like the farm
You can take the farm boy
Out of the farm
But you can’t take the farm
Out of the farm boy

What is a dad-shirt?
I bought my first one
In my early twenties
When I first wanted to look
Just like my dad

They are button-down shirts
Some plain
Some striped
Some plaid
Some thin
Some thick
All with a collar
And they all go with blue jeans
And suspenders

The most important part
Was the hat
I knew my dad was going
Somewhere important
When he put his hat on
If there was a meeting about me
At school
On went the hat
Last thing before he walked out the door
Where it hung on a peg
Waiting for him to grab it

His hats could tell quite a few stories
He took them everywhere
And they were the most important part
Of anything he was wearing
He favored broad-brimmed
And Australian-made
To keep the sun off his face
And if he found feathers on the ground
Then the feathers went in the hat too

When I was little
I was given a hiking hat of my own
And I was so proud of it
That I was angry when i outgrew it

These are my mourning clothes
Because these are the clothes
That my father wore

These are the clothes
That told his employers
You may have dragged me into 
Almost-white-collar work
But I’ll always be a farm boy

My father was never ashamed of who he was
He was proud to be a farm boy
He was proud to be an Okie
He was proud to be a technician
And when they finally, finally
Recognized his talents, despite
His lack of enough formal education
And promoted him to engineer
He was proud of that too

He never saw a contradiction
Between being a farm boy and a technician
Or being a farm boy and an engineer
After all, it was on the farm
That he went into hte attic
And took electronics apart
And put them together again
And built radios
To see if they worked
Not what you expected?
You wouldn’t
Not if your stereotypes of a farm boy
Are the same as most people’s

But all over the world
There are farmers, villagers, 
and other people without educations
Educating themselves
Sometimes with spectacular results
Like Kelvin Doe, a boy from Sierra Leone
Who built his village a generator and radio station out of spare parts 
At the age of thirteen
There are poor and working-class geniuses
All around the world
Inventiveness is not just the domain
Of white, straight, male, nondisabled, and middle-class
But people think it is

And every day
My father wore these clothes to work
Sometimes not exactly farm clothes
But sometimes yes, exactly, farm clothes
Not your average
Electronics technician clothes
And certainly not your average
Electronics engineer clothes
He wore the clothes he was comfortable in
He wore the clothes that showed who he was
Underneath all the bullshit he had to do every day
He was a farm boy, and a mountain man

And when he retired for good
He moved straight to the most remote area
Of the mountains that he could find
And comfortably live in with my mom

He never wore all black
I never saw him in all black
Ever
So I’ll never mourn him
By wearing all black

I will mourn him by wearing:
• blue jeans, overalls, other practical pants
• dad shirts 
• suspenders, or a belt whose buckle is decorated with mountain scenes
• my brown wide brimmed hat with blue jay feathers 

And if you’ve got a problem with that
Take it up with my father. 

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