About

Of DADS and CARS and tattoos ... and love

Father's love has a language of its own

Jamie Hudson and her dad, Frank, rebuilt this ’65 Mustang together. They share a love of working with their hands.

By JAMIE HUDSON
Item Staff Writer
jhudson@theitem.com

“It’s a ’65 coupe with a stock 289 and a four-barrel Holley,” I say, responding to a stranger who asks about the vintage Ford Mustang in the parking lot.

For the four years that I’ve owned the car, I’ve earned more than a few glances from rubberneckers and conversations with the curious. It’s really become part of my identity, but not just because of its V-8 engine or its high-performance carburetor. It represents almost a year of work that my father — Frank Hudson — and I spent together assembling it.

It’s the physical evidence of my father’s love.

I was born weighing 11 lbs 6 ounces; my mom would later say my heft made me more comfortable to my father, whose hands and arms were hardened by years of working in a local tool factory. My unusually large size made me more durable, I guess, which probably set the stage for the more than 20 years I spent working with my father.

I was his rough-and-tumble girl, the one who delighted in showcasing my dirty fingernails to Mom after I spent all day Saturday packing wheel bearings with Dad.

And as his shadow, I was constantly by his side.

Jamie’s been fixing things with her dad since she was little.

When my dad fixed the broken frame of our couch, I was there, a 4-year-old eagerly stabbing the cushions with a Phillip’s head. At 15, when he roofed my great-grandfather’s house, I was there catching the sticky, tar-laden shingles and loading them into Big Red, my father’s pickup. A week before I was married, I was helping him build a cinder-block addition to his shop. I walked the aisle proudly with callused hands.

But the most important project by far was the car.

I was 17 when we brought “Sally” home. She was little more than a steel frame whose innards had to be placed in about two dozen boxes, waiting to be resurrected to her former glory.

My parents couldn’t afford to get me a car and pay the tuition at USC Columbia, so I stayed in Sumter and attended the branch campus here.

Secretly, I was infuriated that my friends could go away to school. I held my heart from my father for insisting I stay at home for my first year of college. I was angry that I wasn’t afforded the same opportunities as my friends. I convinced myself it was his fault.

I was working for a local artist and had earned enough to buy the 40-year-old car I found in Carolina Trader for $2,800. We got it from a man in Irmo whose own impending fatherhood — or perhaps it was just his wife — forced him to sell the old beater.

We got it home, and Dad and I carefully organized the pieces in his shop: the bell housing with the transmission parts, the eight pistons with the push rods and rocker arms. It made no sense at the time, but neither did my dad’s decision to keep me home.

For about 10 months, we spent the majority of our free time in the shop, putting the car together. Most of the time we looked for a part whose necessity had stopped progress on the car.

And while I was looking for the elusive lock-washer in a 300-square-foot shop, we would talk, sometimes about Dad’s relationship with his own father.

His father had abandoned his family when my dad was in his late teens, leaving him to help take care of his mother and sisters.

But instead of passing that relationship style on, as statistics have shown is likely with adult children of an emotionally absent parent, he chose to end the cycle.

He resolved to be present, both physically and emotionally, for his daughters. Maybe he couldn’t give them all the material goods they wanted, but he could be or do whatever was needed to show us we were loved. And in that way, at that time, the car was his best shot.

My anger slowly melted away. I had lost sight of who my father was because I was blinded by my selfish teen angst.

Between those chrome bumpers, I found him.

Dad was the blue-collar worker whose hands were permanently stained with grease so that my sister and I could have the opportunity to go to college.

He is the man who denied his own wants so that I could have a cell phone, a computer and a present father.

It was a cold day in November when we took our first ride in the car. Without the windshield, the biting air stung our teeth as we flew, smiling, around the neighborhood.

I think we both realized something in that moment: When we finished building Mustang Sally, I would no longer need a ride.

When I would come home from college on weekends, I would work Saturdays and spend the rest of the time with my boyfriend. My father would be in his shop working on another car.

The odometer now reads 41,283 miles driving since Dad handed over the keys. It has taken me through college, to my first “real” job, away from my wedding and consequently away from my family home, but it has been the glue in my father’s relationship with me.

The car is our secret language and often our private joke. When time or decorum prevents him from a deep conversation, he will default to the question he knows will cut to my heart:

“How’s the car?”

It is never about the car. The question is a touchstone in which my father and I are transported back to the time when we were renovating the car, the time we spent cementing an unbreakable relationship.

Now that I’m married and living under a different roof, the conversations have changed, but the language has stayed the same.

“Have you checked the oil in the car?” he’ll ask.

I’ll reply, acknowledging what he really said.

“Yeah, Dad. I love you, too.”

Contact Staff Writer Jamie Hudson at jhudson@theitem.com or (803) 774-1222.