Thoughts of My Father

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Thoughts of my father are like a waking dream. I hear the whine of his lathe running in the garage at home where he and Mom lived nearly fifty years, and I see my father’s back in the dim glow of a bare, sixty-watt bulb. He’s wearing his old, faded work shirt and striped engineer’s hat, and he’s bent over the lathe making wood chips fly. He was often at his lathe creating small wooden gifts to give to newlyweds or young parents or anyone who might appreciate a set of three finely turned, highly polished walnut or maple or cherry biscuit cutters in graduated sizes.

 

One of my earliest memories of my father is from when I was four, maybe five. I’m sitting on his lap, peeling dried wood glue from his fingers. I didn’t know it then, but I realized later that he put extra glue on his hands and allowed it to dry before coming in from his workshop. It gave him an excuse to invite me onto his lap and “help” him get the glue off his fingers.

 

Dad was the oldest of five children growing up on a farm in Eastern NC. The family worked the land raising tobacco and dewberries for export north. High school for him terminated at the eleventh grade, and he was one of eleven students in his graduating class. Dad’s youngest sister was born when he was in college at UNC-Chapel Hill. His mother died soon after giving birth, and responsibility weighed heavily on him to assist his father and younger siblings any way he could.

 

Melvin Turner “Cam” or “M.T.” Cameron graduated with a teaching degree in 1933 as the Great Depression gained purchase. He realized teaching would not allow him to support the family back home in those hard times, so he took courses qualifying him to sit for the Certified Public Accountant exam. Accounting was not his passion, but the credential promised a steady, well-paying job. He eventually ended up at a textile mill in Gaston County, NC, where he worked until retirement.

 

Dad was 35 before he permitted himself to marry and 44 when I, his last child, was born. He didn't play catch in the back yard and rarely offered unsolicited advice, but he was always there. Dad never watched sports on TV unless his beloved Tarheels were playing basketball. His favorite pastime by far was going out to the property he and Mom bought in the early 1950s where they had a cabin constructed. The cabin was electrified, but it had no plumbing. Cold water came from a hand pump, and an outhouse down the hill was our “resting” place.

 

Dad’s bliss was tilling the garden or mowing and making new trails through the woods with his tractor. He wanted to provide his children a place to experience a little of what he had growing up. I hauled water from the pump to the house, and I worked a little in the garden, complaining the whole time. Mostly I roamed the woods, caught crawdads in the creek, and let my imagination run as wild as the muscadines and blackberries I ate.

 

When my father died, 200 or more attended his funeral. I was touched by testimonies from people who knew him through work, his contribution to Scouting, his service to Rotary, and his church. At one point, the minister asked the congregation for a show of hands indicating who owned a biscuit cutter shaped and given to them by Cam Cameron. Heads nodded, smiles broke out, and nearly everyone raised a hand, including the minister.

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