Through a Child, a Parent Lives On : Imagining how age might have mellowed a man whose disposition was forged in the struggle to exist.

Around his birthday, I found myself amazed that my father is still dead. It has been more than a decade since he succumbed to cancer at the age of 62. Every year, the list of the things he is missing out on grows.

J.T. Fields would have had a VCR: He worked nights for most of his adulthood and missed his beloved “Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson. He definitely would have subscribed to the All Sports Channel. A lover of butter pecan ice cream, he would have welcomed the gourmet influence on ice cream, though perhaps with a healthy suspicion of frozen yogurt. He would have enjoyed the drive to Atlanta in 1990 to see my daughter graduate with honors from Spelman College. He would have worried mightily when his youngest son went into military service and to the Persian Gulf, but he would have been proud that my brother achieved the rank of sergeant. He would have loved his first great-grandchild but not the fact that my 20-year-old niece was an unmarried mother.

It was not easy, being my father’s daughter. He was the youngest of his large, poor farming family from South Carolina and, according to one of his surviving sisters, “the meanest man I ever met.” He was deeply moody, suspicious, funny, tight with a nickel, but creative in a kitchen full of hungry faces. His limited education dictated our standard of living, much to my disappointment. I wanted middle-class trappings, like my own bedroom and the freedom to pursue any amusement I chose, no matter what the cost. But my father had working-class capacities: layoffs, rather than wages, were guaranteed for many of his working years. He was a janitor at the local Thom McAn shoe store during one of his periodic layoffs from the place where, he said, he “slung steel” for a living. He wanted me to do better with my life than he had done with his, and I wanted him to lighten up. When I was growing up, we did not like each other much.

My mother wanted it said, at my father’s funeral, that he gloried in his family. But while he was alive, he deadpanned his way through our various high school, college and law school graduations, feeling that overt expressions of pride would ruin us. We got, instead, negative admonitions about living in the world: “Men die,” he regularly warned his four daughters, to encourage us to educate ourselves, “then who’ll take care of you?” My father would have liked my husband, a man who believes that all it takes to do just about anything a man wants in the world is the willingness to try. In that way, they are so much alike, even though they wanted to do different things.

Along with the hard memories of my father are the memories of a man who showed me the sand dance, bought me a Hula-Hoop and taught me how to spell Mississippi (M-I-crooked letter, crooked letter, eye, crooked letter, crooked letter, eye, humpback, humpback, eye). There were the rainy days with him playing “Little Darling” and “Satin Doll” by ear on an old upright piano. He had a certain dry humor: This was a man who convinced a little girl that the boathouse lights along Kelly Drive on the Schuykill River came on only when she arrived in Philadelphia for the summer and blinked out, disappointed, when she went back to California. When my daughter figured out the truth, she loved him fiercely for the lie. But the business of keeping the wolves from the door limited the opportunities for easy humor. He took his job as provider and protector seriously.

The man I miss was inside the weary, moody guy who did not show affection easily. It is easy to believe, in hindsight, that the hard armor was just that. Against the real memories of how he was, I run a reel of the possibility that he could have become a splendidly irascible, crusty senior citizen, softened by release from responsibility. He would be 73 in this year, and I like to imagine that my dad would have mellowed by now. His grasp of the detail of every wrong against him would have lapsed, leaving him easier to talk to or to hug. He would drive across the country from Philadelphia to California to visit, now that I have title to real estate and am not living in somebody else’s house, as he called renting. We would compare the merits of butter pecan and Rain Forest Crunch. He would apologize for not having said often enough that he liked me, and I would graciously accept, admitting that I know, finally, that he loved me the best way he knew how.