Red

I was well past the reasonable age for a child to know her parents' names when I learned that my father's name was, in fact, Jeffrey and not Red, a moniker coined in his childhood. The nick-name had stuck throughout his life, unlike the vibrant color of his hair from which the name originated. In my lifetime I have only known his dusty no-longer-even-strawberry blonde hair, that fades further with each year.

He often told us how, in his youth, he had grown it long down his back and how that fire-mane was his pride and joy before us kids. He kept a relic of his past, locked inside a clear coin bank on the mantle of our fireplace: a ponytail’s worth of crimson hair that he could hardly bring himself to part with, even after 10 years. My older brother, sister, and I would tease him mercilessly about his obsession with hair when we were younger, unable to understand its importance to him. How it had represented his youth and the frivolity that came before raising a family. Or in other words, his partying and headbanging days. I remember asking my father once when I was younger why he had cut off his hair if it was as glorious and important to him as he claimed.

“Your brother was a toddler, too afraid to get his first haircut. The hair trimmers frightened him so much that he wouldn’t stop crying. So, to show him there was nothing to be afraid of, I had your mom buzz off my hair, as well.”

I don’t think it had occurred to me before that day what it meant to sacrifice for your children. This simple observation sent me spiraling down a long train of thought. My father’s hair was far from the first, or last sacrifice he would make for his children. He had always been a hero, if a bit flawed, in my eyes, but I felt like I had taken him for granted. I took inventory of the life we lived, that he had built for us, that I had only ever criticized, and saw it in a new light.

Looking at my father, I saw a man whose hands were cracked and leathered, the entirety of his exposed skin sun-spotted, almost as if he were tanned and not simply a series of nearly connecting freckles. A man who smelled industrial and earthy, a scent that seemed to stain him from working 14-hour days as a garbage man to support us three children single-handedly. A toothless smile emanated from him, as his mother had had a calcium deficiency when she was pregnant which caused my father to lose his teeth at an early age. He would forgo dentures until I was nearly twelve years old, because the cost was too great to spend on something superficial for himself. This man in front of me, worn and spotted and sheared, etched with worry lines of our making. I felt as if my siblings and I were his undoing, and yet, he never said a word against us or asked for anything in return.

The home in which my father gave us was fairly small for a family of four. A single bedroom in which my two siblings and I shared for nearly six years together. My father slept in the living room, claiming one of our two sunken couches as his bed. When we eventually moved to a larger, three bedroom home, he chose to let each of us have our own room and privacy instead of claiming one for himself. I remember being a child, afraid after my nightmares, curling up at the foot of the already-too-small couch where he slept. He never once complained.

One of the greatest, and simplest, acts of parental love he has shown me perhaps comes off as insignificant as his Hair Cut. When I was 16 years old, my older brother and sister had moved out of the house, and it was just my father and I. There was a strange loneliness without my older siblings, since I had spent so many years of life right beside them in our small home. My father must have felt their absence as well, and I believe he tried to make up for their presence in small ways.

Growing up, we were not very wealthy; a single father with three children, we did not eat out or indulge in unnecessary sweets very often. One day after my father had returned home from work, my father, who was exhausted the moment he entered the door, who would try but not succeed to scrub the scent of oil and dust from himself, who probably had a million more important things to worry about, told me he had a surprise for me. He was giddy when he told me to look in his lunch bag. I pulled out a full sized candy bar that he had thought to buy for me on his lunch break. Something so simple, but it meant so much to me. Just to know that he had been thinking about me, that he could have saved that candy bar for himself, that he could have saved a couple bucks and I would have been none the wiser.

It’s the little things like that which make me appreciate my father and all he has done for me. He taught me what it means to sacrifice for your family, and what it means to love unconditionally. He taught me that the quality of your life can be changed by your perspective. I’m sure many people probably would not understand the significance of that candy bar or that lock of hair upon the mantle, but it fuels the hope for me to become as selfless of a parent, or even just a person, as he is.