As
sure as principal Tom James would ring the bell at Orange Street Elementary
School, I knew I was going to get teased about my father’s undertaking profession.
I heard a thousand times: “Your daddy is
the last man to let you down.” Another
favorite was “Your daddy is a Southern planter. He plants ’em six feet deep.”
As
a third- or fourth-grader, that teasing bothered me. In time, I laughed with
them. But I didn’t laugh at Big Dink because I knew there was a deeper meaning
to “the last man to let you down.” Other than in graves, my daddy didn’t let
people down. To him, a promise made was a debt unpaid. When he died in 1998,
Dink NeSmith Sr. went to Heaven debt-free—financially or otherwise.
Soon
after I delivered his eulogy, I made a promise to put his life’s story in a
book. I am embarrassed that it took so long. For two decades, I wrote and
collected stories and photographs. I kept saying, “I’ll need to get this done.”
And one morning, I looked in the mirror and said, “No more procrastinating. This
is the 20th anniversary of his death. Get it done!” And with that
figurative slap in the face, I got moving.
My
mother used to say, “I’ve been moving so fast that my shirttail hasn’t touched my
back.”
And then there’s a saying that
life is what happens while you are planning to do something else. That sums up
my drawn-out book project, but I was determined to have it off the press by
Father’s Day 2019.
Two
boxes of the 323-page hardback book arrived last week at 252 W. Walnut St. in
Jesup. The full shipment will be arriving soon. An eBook edition will be
available, too. A university press showed interest in publishing The Last Man To Let You Down, My Daddy the
Undertaker, but the delay would have been another 18 months. I was honored
by the offer, but my shirttail wasn’t just flapping. The starched pinpoint
cotton was on fire to get it done. I had dillydallied around long enough, so The Press-Sentinel is the book’s
publisher.
There
is a multitude of reasons that I wanted to write this book. The first is to pay
tribute to the man who gave me more than his name and nickname. His love of family, the value of friends, his
tireless work ethic, his determination to keep commitments, his sense of humor
and even his skinny legs are all a part of my inherited DNA. Friends and six
generations of our family are woven through every page.
Another
key motivator was that I barely knew my grandfathers. My mother’s dad, Howell
Vines, died when I was barely tall enough to stand on my tiptoes to peek into
his casket. W.C. NeSmith died in 1971, when I was in Army basic training at
Fort Campbell in Kentucky. The last time I passed him on a Cherry Street
sidewalk, he didn’t even recognize his teenage grandson. Shame on me. I should
have said, “Hello, Granddaddy.”
Our
eight grandchildren never had the privilege of sitting in Big Dink’s lap or
feeling the tickle of his moustache. People die twice. The second time, the
memories and stories stop. My hope is that The
Last Man To Let You Down, My Daddy the Undertaker will keep Wyatt, Hayes,
William, Henry, Fenn, Bayard, Smith and Stella’s great-granddaddy “alive” for
generations to come.
And
I wanted them to know that Big Dink would never “let you down.”
dnesmith@cninewspapers.com
