A VERY AVERAGE MAN
By David Sapp
My father was an average man. He would have told you so himself. He had a middling job. He started college on the GI Bill, but never finished. The only time I remember his name appearing in the newspaper was in his obituary. He was your typical family man and conservative Southerner. Still, he would occasionally say peculiar things, things you wouldn’t quite expect from a man like him. They seemed to run against the thinking of the world around us, but not to worry. They never amounted to much.
I remember some of these sayings very well. One of them occurred on one a trip to the beach. The beach for us was Tybee Island, just a thirty minute ride from our house in Savannah. Some of the best memories of my childhood happened there.
As soon as we would put our feet in the sand, Dad and I would run together across the beach and splash into the surf. We could hardly wait to get there. Mother, on the other hand, just sat in a beach chair while Dad and I played in the water. I could never understand her behavior at the beach. I still can’t.
When I was very small, Dad would hold me with my feet dangling in the breakers and let me feel their force. Later, he took me beyond the breakers, out into the big waves. Standing there in deeper water with Dad holding me under my arms, we would watch those huge mountains of moving water, swelling high above our heads, and rolling inexorably toward us. When they were only a few feet away, they would draw my heart right into my throat. But Dad would hold me and the wave would lift me and then set me back down safely on the sand.
Coming and going from Tybee, I noticed the beach houses and envied the people who lived in them. Practically all of them were built behind the big sand dunes, and none of them faced the ocean. In fact, you couldn’t even see the water from the first floor of most of them. In those days, you see, it was considered dangerous to build a house fully exposed to the water.
I don’t remember how old I was, but it occurred to me on one beach trip how frustrating it would be to live that close to the ocean and not be able to see it. So I asked my Dad a question that has now been answered by thousands of beach developers, “Dad, why don’t people buy part of the beach and build their houses right out there on the water so that they have their own beach?”
Then came one of those peculiar sayings from a very average man: “God made the beach for everyone,” he said. “It wouldn’t be right for people to own the beach.”
That is a prime example of the kind of statements he was always making. When I became “educated,” I learned that statements like this must have been un-thought through for they were radical. For them to come from my conservative father must have been an indication that his mind was at least a little dull. After all, he voted conservatively. He shared the racial prejudices of his time and place. He was a rabid patriot, and spent 32 years in military service. He was just a simple man. No one expected him to think through his beliefs so as to make them consistent.
Another time I asked him about the War (the big one, WWII). “What would have happened if they had taken you prisoner, Dad?” I asked with boyish excitement.
“I would have been required to give them only name, rank, and serial number,” he answered.
“But what if they tortured you, Dad? Would you still have given them only name, rank, and serial number?”
“I would have tried my best,” Dad said.
“Well, why don’t we torture them so we can find our their ware plans?” My question was born of some TV show, I am sure.
“Oh,” said Dad, “Americans don’t torture people. We live by a higher standard. That’s what we are fighting to defend.”
There it was again: That simple mind of his at work on problems that were obviously too much for him. Why, even I as a child saw could see it more clearly than he did. I was a little neo-con, much ahead of my time. Dad’s kind of thinking had only led to the end of a war in which our enemies became our friends. Mine would later lead to unending wars with little countries in order to bottle up the hatred they felt for us and let it simmer.
He had odd ideas about taxes, too. You’ll never believe what he thought about taxes. He actually believed that the graduated income tax was moral. The way he saw it, the rich (who did not need all they had made) had a moral obligation to pay a higher portion of their incomes to support our country than the poor (who needed every penny). Strangely, he saw “the fair tax” as the most unfair tax of all.
He’s been dead sixteen years now. His portrait does not hang in any offices (except mine), and his name will never be recorded in the annals of history. He never rose to greatness in the eyes of the world and he never accumulated any wealth. He was born on a small farm in Middle Georgia, and he was not raised to think too highly of himself, or to be self-servingly ambitious.
College was not even a word in the vocabulary of the people with whom he grew up. His chief concern when he graduated from high school was to be sure that his four younger siblings had the same opportunity. So he left home at 19, joined Mr. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, and stayed for six years. Most of his meager wages were sent home, and they did in fact keep his younger brothers and sisters in school.
Maybe it was these “make-work” programs of the Depression Era that so warped his thinking. He never studied economics very much, so he didn’t know that programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps did not end the depression. He just knew that they kept hunger at bay for his family, and allowed his four siblings to finish high school and better contribute to the economic boom that came later.
The odd thing about his strange ideas was that they were subversive. They subverted my mind so that I have never been able to see everything the way the culture around me does. Every time the culture wants to swallow me in one of its waves, it’s like he is there again, lifting me as the wave passes, and setting me back down on the sand.
I have often wondered what put these half-baked ideas into his head. Maybe it was the time in which he lived. Maybe it was the rural poverty in which he grew up. Maybe it was some liberal teacher who had infiltrated his one-roomed country school.
But I’ve always harbored another suspicion. Dad was a Christian. He was taught the faith from an early age, went to church every Sunday, read the Bible and tried to take it seriously. I’ve always wondered if maybe it was Jesus.
David Sapp is pastor of Second Ponce de Leon Baptist Church and is a member of the board of Christian Ethics Today.
