Clinkers, Carpet Tacks, and Other Words My Father Taught Me

By Brenda J. Evans

My husband Bill was brushing his teeth and foaming at the mouth when I asked him to remind me what a nanosecond is. “The time between when the light changes and the guy behind you honks his horn,” he sputtered. White foam spewed out, and a little dribbled down his chin. He sucked up the foam, grinned, and said, “But ask Google.” So I did: one billionth of a second.

That’s when I remembered the way I learned many words and phrases I know and use. Call it the drip-drip method, a trickle of words my father, Guy Hampton, taught me. Words I needed to know in Neptune, Tennessee, where we lived in a roomy and weary two-story, tin-roofed house that might have stayed whiter if we had painted it every year. Ours was a home where useful words counted more than annual paint jobs.

Some of my father’s words were from the practical arts, like building a fire in a coal-burning Warm Morning stove—like kindling and wood fire. Wood fire was the one you built first, so you could then start a coal-burning fire.

Others were only a little more technical. Damper: a movable metal disk in a stovepipe to open up or close off airflow in order to rev up or slow down the fire. Grate: the metal frame inside the stove to hold the wood. Clinker: the stony residue of burned coal that clogs up the stove’s grate; also the black chunky substitute for gravel used on red clay roads in Neptune. Soot (pronounced sut—rhymes with hut): a black oily residue of burned coal or wood that collects in chimneys and can cause dangerous chimney fires. Jag: a small amount of coal or wood; also a small acreage or a load of corn or tobacco. Coal oil: a light oil distilled from petroleum to burn in lamps, start wood fires, dissolve grease, treat cuts and burns, and kill head lice. Also called kerosene. Hosepipe was Daddy’s term for a garden hose. I’m still teased by my husband for saying it. But recently, I felt vindicated. My Appalachian friend with a doctorate says hosepipe, too. We like redundancy.

Daddy also taught me to look at more than one side of a thing. Six of one and half a dozen of the other was often his way to assess a squabble or disagreement among friends or relatives. There were usually two sides or more, he said. Each could have an element of truth. Take sides cautiously; only when it is a matter of right or wrong.

What’s his daddy’s name? was the first question when I asked to go on a date with a fellow he didn’t know. If I didn’t know the answer, he would probably say no. If I knew the father’s name, and he didn’t know the father to be good and decent, he definitely would say no. Apples don’t fall far from the tree. Though he never said that about apples or people, he believed it.
Daddy was plainspoken and wasn’t much for delicacy or nuance. He rarely clouded his meaning. His yes meant yes and his no meant no. Once he said no, it did no good to quibble or beg. Besides, quibbling could get mighty close to sass, and he wanted nothing that smelled like sass.

Socially, Daddy expected me to show respect. Mr. or Mrs. preceded all adult neighbors or friends’ names, unless we substituted Aunt or Uncle, as we did for our neighbors Uncle Charlie and Aunt Sally, Uncle Bud and Uncle Buck. None were kin. No adult was addressed without a title.

Daddy saw both the comic and tragic in life. He loved to laugh. He had a curious friend (pronounced cure-us), an odd guy, a strange duck. But he’d tease the man with amusement, not judgment. Tight, on the other hand, was tragic. It meant drunk. He wouldn’t say drunkard for his friend who was one. It was too harsh. “He’s tight,” Daddy would say with grief in his voice. Daddy was not a softhearted man in my raising days, but he showed me how to know and feel tragedy: you do something. He spent many late nights sitting in his friend’s car in our driveway, talking him into soberness.

Some words you have to see to believe. The first time I visually and audibly experienced deadening felt was in our living room in the 1950s. If you don’t know, deadening felt was a thick, weighty gray paper used to insulate walls and ceilings in old houses. It also made a fairly smooth surface for wallpaper. It came in fat rolls a yard or more wide and was at least an eighth inch thick. Heavy stuff.

As I said, heavy. That night, Daddy and his helper, Uncle Gentle, cut it into long sections to keep it smooth with few seams. To make matters worse, they needed to tack it to our ceiling. Walls were tricky enough, but tacking deadening felt to ceilings would make you cuss if you were a cussing man. Uncle Gentle didn’t cuss, but his By Crackies and Guy, it’s killing me, reverberated through our high-ceiling living room for an hour or more that night. Mother and I watched with awe and grins, handing up sharp, black three quarter-inch carpet tacks. We pretended sympathy while wanting to belly laugh.

Finally, Uncle Gentle, then Daddy, dropped his arms, hammer, his end of the deadening felt, and climbed down off the make-shift scaffold of planks and saw horses in exhaustion. By Crackies, Guy, I’m dying up there, he said. Daddy climbed down, too. We let go and roared.

Mother poured coffee and milk, and I served teacakes. Afterwards, we females watched from our turquoise sofa while the two men nailed together a dead-man brace out of scrap two-by-fours. The brace helped. By midnight, the deadening felt was tacked up, smooth and warm, to our living room ceiling. The deadening felt, like life, had needed us all.

Daddy taught me moral lessons, too. Don’t yarn, he warned, a verb that meant don’t lie. He’s crooked meant the person would chisel, cheat, and deal underhandedly. Make no deals with him. I gave him $50, Daddy sometimes said to Mother. She knew Daddy had lent $50 to a friend or relative but accepted the fact he might not be repaid. He did not lend what he was unwilling to give. He’s no ‘count meant good-for-nothing, immoral, lazy, or mean. Be warned.

We don’t believe in that always began with we. We meant our family. Daddy was not leaving it up to my sister Grace and me to fumble our ways toward Christian behavior, consideration, respect. Common humanity and Christian values were our family beliefs.

My father also taught me joy. He liked peppy songs that made him tap his toe, laugh, and get happy in his soul. “Let’s sing,” he’d say after supper when the dishes were done. We’d get out church songbooks. Anybody could choose. I’d play the black upright piano and do soprano. He and my sister would read the shaped notes and make tenor and alto harmony. Afterwards, he’d sometimes stand on his head to make us cheer or destroy us at Chinese Checkers. He never sent me to the porch or bedroom when adult visitors came. I could listen, even ask questions if I didn’t butt in. Talking and listening were pleasures. He showed me how to relish conversation, to love the give-and-take of words.

Daddy never said, but I think he knew words were Edenic gifts of God. Language was one way our Lord, our Creator made us in His image and after His likeness. The ability to think, say, and tell blessed Daddy.

I’m glad he shared that blessing with me.

About the Writer: Brenda Evans is a reader, writer, wife, mother, and grandmother living in Ashland, Kentucky.