Four years. It seems simultaneously as if he’s been gone forever and just left yesterday. A couple of weeks ago, I was going through a file and found a note I’d scribbled about my dad:

All of us had to be somewhere. The whole family. And we couldn’t be late, so it dismayed me. I was the first one in the shower, and the water was rising around my ankles, and I thought, “Damn.” I heard my mother in the hallway, asking — water was backing up in her bathroom, too.

Let me back up. I was not really first in the shower. My father was. Hours ago. Long before the rest of us even turned over good, and he was out the house, in the yard, probably raking. Breathing the air before everybody else breathed it, as he liked to say.

I was concerned by what’s happening with the drain, but I soldiered on because I was shampooed to the hilt, and when I finally rinsed everything out of all this hair, I cut the water and heard: the plumber.

Before I could even step on the bathmat, the plumber was at the house, with a crew, waiting. The main drain pipe was clogged, but they made quick work of that and were gone. Thirty minutes, tops, from crisis to resolution. Even my mother, who had seen much of this kind of thing over decades of marriage, was amazed: “Red, where’d you find that plumber so quick?” (And on a Saturday.)

“Wait,” he said. “I’m your husband. I ain’t no joke.”

And then: “I can get stuff done. That’s why you married me, girl!”

(A few hours later, when she remarked on the house being a little humid, he said, “You want me to get somebody to get the muggy out, too?,” and they both laughed.)

If you knew my father, you know he had a saying for every circumstance. This fell under:

“You gotta get up. You get up, you can get something done. And you gotta know somebody. I know folk. I been here all my life….”

Rederick Caswell Henderson was born in Wilson, and he died in Wilson, four years ago today. I miss my father bone-deep, but the day seldom passes that I don’t grin ear to ear and give a nod of thanks as one of his aphorisms pops into my head. Rest in power, Daddy.