Private Stock #1: Eulogy for my Father
Jim Gilbert Hendrick
June 26, 1919 - January 22, 2001
Memorial/Primavera, 2001
I’m Becky Hendrick, Daddy’s middle daughter… the one that got away.
In the hours between Daddy’s consciousness leaving him last Saturday and his dear heart stopping on Sunday, I was at home a thousand miles away. I had time Saturday night to walk alone outside and look at the wonderful stars we have overhead in the desert. I thought big thoughts --- about life and death and consciousness --- but I found myself smiling and smiling as wonderful little memories made their way through the sadness.
I am so lucky to be Daddy’s daughter, and luckier still to have been his daughter in the 1950s, in a simpler Mississippi. I went with him on housecalls and sat outside in the car or in some stranger’s living room while he examined a sick child. I “got” to go with him to Lena on Sunday afternoons. Janet was old enough to not want to spend her day in the country, but I remember as if it were yesterday how we’d ride home with the big red sun setting between the trees along the Natchez Trace. Jack Benny was on the radio, and Daddy would laugh and laugh and explain all things a five-year-old wouldn’t know were funny.
He always brought home some stalks of sugar cane: “candy” to him, but a chore for my little mouth. He’d peel and score the stalks and hand me a half-inch chaw that I’d work on so hard, determined to enjoy it, he seemed to love it so.
I think it is no accident that Daddy’s memorial service is on inauguration day. A genuine liberal, he might not have liked the next four years and, now that I think about it, he seemed wrong for the 21st century. Or it, being meaner and messier, was perhaps not made for one so sweet and innocent as he. He was a gentle man, a gentleman from an earlier, kinder time.
When we were little girls, Janet and I slept in beds placed at right angles so we could hold hands --- she denies this, but it is true --- until one of us fell asleep. Daddy sat on the floor in the vee of the beds and told us stories of his childhood on the farm.
And he’d sing to us: (singing)
The girl that I marry will have to be
As soft and as sweet as a nursery,
The girl I call my own
Will have satin and laces and smell of cologne.
Her nails will be polished and in her hair
She’ll wear a gardenia, and I’ll be there,
‘Stead of flittin,’ I’ll be sittin’
next to her, and she’ll purr like a kitten.
A doll I can carry,
The girl that I marry must be.
(Remember: it was the Fifties.)
Looking through the knot-hole of grandpa’s wooden leg
Why do they build the shore so near the ocean, the ocean?
Go get the Lysterine, sister’s got a beau,
Oh, a boy’s best friend is his mother, his mother.
And my personal favorite:
Alice, where are you going?
Upstairs, to take a bath.
Your form is like a toothpick,
Your face, it makes me laugh.
ha ha ha.
She climbed into the bathtub,
Slipped on a bar of soap,
Ohmygoodnessohmysoul
TheregoesAlicedownthehole!
Oh, how he loved his granddaughter Jennifer, he was so happy to have another little girl in the family. Once, when she was two and we were living in Virginia, Daddy phoned to tell her he’d gotten a new puppy. “What do you think a good name is?”, he asked her long-distance. And Jennifer, being the center of the universe, naturally answered “Jennifer,” --- and he named the dog Jenny!
When I was a teenager, my best friend --- “Cindy-hold-your-shoulders-up,” Daddy called her, and, if she has good posture, she can thank him for it --- Cindy and I came home from seeing the movie “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” Daddy knew it was a scary movie, so he hid behind a pile of boxes on our back porch for who-knows-how-long, waiting for us to drive up so he could jump out and scare the living daylights out of us.
For such a busy doctor, he seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time on silly projects. His Easter egg hunts were legendary; he painted an egg with heavily textured browns and glued it to a tree trunk; he balanced a violet-dyed egg inside the bloom of a purple iris; and the best was an unpainted egg glued on top of the finial of the garden’s white fence. There weren’t children at home; we were fairly well grown, and yet he still painted and hid those eggs. Once when a college boyfriend was visiting at Easter, I was wearing a sweet blue dress with white flowers. Daddy labored over an egg painted sweet blue with white flowers and installed it --- I don’t know how --- under my collar. “You’re getting warmer,” he’d say to my poor beau; “Colder…hotter…” This particular boyfriend passed muster and became a husband.
Those unsuspecting boyfriends were also subjected to “trial by muscadine.”: Daddy could learn a lot about a young man by the way he responded to an invitation to join in the annual grape-picking in the arbor.
Daddy loved his life. I know this because he loved my life, and he and Mother made frequent road trips to visit us. Daddy and I would take long walks through the countryside --- for his heart, of course --- and he’d talk about how thrilled he was with the art-life Ray and I were shaping for our selves. More recently he talked about Jennifer and her husband’s decisions to strike out on a new life, and he reminisced about his own life, his decisions, and fate, and how happy a life his was.
The thing that struck me most on these walks was that on every one he’d talk about Mother and how much he loved her. The last time was when he was 79, just last year. “Don’t you think your mother just gets more and more beautiful?” he asked. Make no mistake: this was not a person trying to convince himself of something; he meant it. He thought Mother was the prettiest, smartest, and the most amazing person in the world. Mother, that love for you didn’t die last Saturday; it is Daddy’s gift for you to treasure forever.
The last song Daddy would sing before we went to sleep went like this:
Go to sleep, little baby.
Go to sleep, little baby.
When you awake, we’ll bake a little cake
And ride a pretty little pony.
Night-night, Daddy. I love you.
