July 24, 2008 Issue

My father is coming home.

After many years in a nursing home my father is coming home to the house he and my mother have had since 1970. The Davenports and their extended family have been my father’s caretakers for years, and now they are coming with him.

My mother has had my father’s office remodeled, and he will be able to rest amongst mementos of his career as a civil rights attorney. He’ll be able to sit under majestic live oak trees dripping with Spanish moss. He can watch his herons, feed them cigar minnows, and enjoy their newly hatched chick.

When I was growing up, I was aware that my father was fearless in his profession. Fighting for civil rights in the south in the 1960s was not without its dangers. My father didn’t seem to worry much about that. But he did worry about those around him. Throughout my youth his parting words to me were always, “Be careful.” Like most young men, I didn’t want to be careful. I’m sure it showed, and one day my mother must have had a talk with him.

He never once told me to be careful again. He replaced that admonition with a simpler one. “Good luck,” he would always say. But he still meant “Be careful.”

I learned from that experience. My family has been vacationing in the Bahamas for 25 years. The Bahamas is all about water and our favorite past time is to dive along the reefs. You can’t go diving off of Guana Cay without coming into contact with sharks. We’ve even caught them off of our dock.

To me, sharks are about like rattlesnakes. I appreciate them, but I don’t like them. I once saw a fellow kill a snake along the Choctawhatchee River. It sort of looked like a water moccasin, but I don’t think it was. “I don’t think that snake was poisonous,” I told the guy. “I think it was just some kind of water snake.”

“Don’t matter to me,” he said. “They’re all leaping cobras as far as I’m concerned.” Good point.

Early on, when diving with my children, I knew that if I scrambled back to the boat every time I saw a shark, my kids would sense my fear. Chatham, my youngest son, was a deep thinker as a kid. One afternoon, as we sat in the boat and watched a shark chase away a school of yellowtails, I had a talk with Chatham.

“You know Chatham, we’re all going to die of something,” I said. “Most of your friends’ fathers are going to die of heart attacks or of pancreatic cancer or something in a hospital somewhere. Getting attacked by a shark wouldn’t be the worse thing in the world.”

Chatham looked at me for a while. I could tell he was deep in thought.

“Besides,” I continued, “just think. When someone asked what happened to your father, you could say that he got eaten up by a shark in the Bahamas.

“They’d think your dad was a bad ass,” I said.

My father was unafraid of so many things. But he did worry about others. He used to say that most of the things you worried about never ended up happening. But I think deep down he felt that there were probably some things that you needed to worry about that you weren’t aware of.

His approach to risky, daredevil activities was that life was dangerous enough without being foolish. He felt that there were too many necessary risks that needed to be taken in life to waste time on unnecessary ones.

Of course, as the late Little Jimmy Shirah once found out, just riding in a car with my father as the driver could be a near-death experience.

Next week my father will be home. He can watch his herons. Every now and then, a coyote, a raccoon, and an occasional fox will slip through his yard. For the first time in years he’ll be able to watch mullet jump as the sun sets over Choctawhatchee Bay. There should be no worries.

I’m hoping for my father the same thing that he wished for me his whole life.

Good luck, Dad.

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