INTRO
[music plays: “Only a Moment” by Offering Band]
Hello, and welcome to Daddybuck’s Notebook. I’m Lindsay, and my grandfather, who we called Daddybuck, was a creative genius. In this podcast, my goal is to find the beautiful things he made and share them with the world, and with you. I’m also going to be sharing my own works with you, paying it forward from the inspiration he gave me. So let’s get started!
We’ll start with some Poetic Inspiration. Today’s poem is called:
“Gentle”
Don’t preach to me
Of a scary Jesus
Nor witness to these ears
Of a thundering God
For
They are gentle in Heaven.
They forgive quicker
Than the evanescent flicker
Of your favorite star.
Shining in the Holy Wind
That tangles unbound angel hair
And spreads joy about like
A welcome spring breeze.
By the Master’s side rejoicing,
Accepting His help in both worlds,
Knowing you do not need to teach
An unborn heavenly being
Like me, like you,
To fear Heavenly Friends.
This poem is kind of unique to the ones that I’ve found from him. It’s about God, who is usually described as all powerful and all good, but Daddybuck doesn’t usually describe Him in sort of an intimate or gentle way. My grandfather didn’t seem to have great examples in father figures from what I’ve learned. I always thought that sometimes that colored his idea of God. I grew up very differently, and always imagined God with a lot of fatherly affection.
I think this poem is courageous. I think it was hard for Daddybuck to feel that love that I think he really believed God had for him – he talks about it all the time. But you can believe things and you can tell yourself things without really feeling them. This poem… it shows me there’s a part of him that could sometimes feel that, and I’m glad he wrote it down.
INTRODUCING REBECCA
So. I mentioned that I grew up differently regarding Father figures. On this episode I’m going to take a slight tangent… to wish my own dad a Happy Father’s Day! Mark Holt is the cellist you hear behind all the poetry in this podcast, and he’s also the first person to listen to every episode and give me extremely unconstructively positive feedback that I absolutely need and love to get. Thanks Dad! Love you!
So, a bit of time-hopping to acknowledge: I’m recording this episode a week before Father’s Day, in June 2019, but because I’m terrible at planning things out, you won’t be hearing this until most likely after August. I’m ok with this. I’m making peace with this.
And to help me acknowledge and navigate the trouble I get myself into is someone that has seen it all! I want to introduce my younger sister, Rebecca Holt. Rebecca is an accomplished metalsmith with her own business, Rebecca Holt Jewelry, which I’ll link in the show notes. She’s also the second-most experienced expert on being the daughter of one Mark Holt, and I didn’t really tell her when to turn off mute so here she is!
COMMENTARY: INTERVIEW WITH BECCA
REBECCA: *laughs* Hello!
LINDSAY: Sorry about that! I did say your name.
R: You did! You did, I prematurely unmuted myself. That was lovely. Good intro!
L: It’s organic, that’s what we do in podcasts. So hi! How are you?
R: *laugh* Good! Also happy father’s day to Dad!
L: Yeah this is a surprise for our dad by the way. He is the first person who listens to these episodes and he’s going to think this is just another regular poetry one so, Hi!!
R: Surprise!
L: I invited Becca on for this episode because, I want to talk about fathers, I want to talk about Dad, but… Becca, I sent you this poem today. And it’s different from the one we said we’d talk about so… thanks!
R: Yep!
L: I like that we went with this one, just because like I said earlier it’s rare to see him sort of be into that kindness and gentleness perspective when it comes to God so. But of course we had a different view of father figures! I don’t know how much it colored your understanding of god and all that,w e don’t have to get into that, but we can talk about our father figure and the person who influenced us if we want to segue!
R: Yeah! That’s a good segue.
L: We’re very different people you and I, and I think we had different relationships both with our grandparents and our parents. But one of the main things we shared was being a passenger alongside our dad’s love of adventure and exploration.
R: Yes, always exploring! There’s so much to talk about. He would randomly take us up to the mountains to explore. If there was even a side street somewhere in the car while we were driving somewhere when we were little, he would be like, what’s over there? And before we could say, I don’t know Dad, I’ve never been over there, he would veer into that street, and go look at what was over there!
L: I don’t think he even meant to sometimes. I think he just he just looked and the steering wheel followed.
R: Well, the words were an afterthought of his actions. Dad is a very… He doesn’t say stuff randomly, he’s a very thoughtful person. But when it comes to adventure, you just do stuff. There’s no talking about doing it, you just book it and you go, and you figure out where things are. He wanders off when we go somewhere new because he wants to explore all the crevasses of where you are.
L: It kind of makes a lot of sense when I think about it. Our dad grew up in Kansas, and from what I know… For example, his first job was de-shucking corn out in corn fields. And I think he and his brother had a competition about how many fish they could shoot in the river. And dad won. Do you remember that? I remember hearing about that and I want to believe it’s true.
R: *laugh* I’m sure that they did. I did not know that, that’s really funny.
L: If it’s not true, Dad can tell me privately (but listeners, you’ll never know!). But I think it wasn’t a very supervised childhood. There’s a lot of places to wander! So, I appreciate it. One of my favorite things we did as a kid: The YMCA has really great programs for parents and kids, and they have a father-daughter program. And back in the day, that program was called… Indian Princesses. *really awkward laughter* I know, I know. We’re moving on. Point was, it was basically camping and crafts and building fires, and getting fathers to take their daughters on adventures together. IT was a huge group thing. We made friends otu there, we got stung by bees, you know, the normal things… I had a lot of fun on those trips.
R: Me too. I faceplanted into a tree in the middle of the night.
L: *laughs really loud in surprise, cannot stop*
R: *unphased* I remember we were coming back from some ceremony where the dads lit a gigantic fire, and it was the middle of the night when we were coming back and it was so dark, and I faceplanted into a tree. And Dad and everybody was really worried because they were like, ‘You could have hit it really hard! Is your head ok?’ And I just said, “I’m fine,” and I sort of snickered. I think I was ten or something.
L: I missed that one! I do remember getting YOU lost. I was so confident in my own, like, nature druid-ness or whatever, I thought I could do this – I just went off in a direction and brought you along. And we ended up on top of this hill and we looked around and we couldn’t see ANYWHERE the road we came from. Do you remember this?
R: Yeah!
L: And you started crying, and I think I was crying but trying not to, and we just screamed bloody murder until Dad or one of the dads came and found us.
R: I think dad showed up. He noticed that we were gone and heard us screaming probably not far off from where we were supposed to be, and I’m pretty sure he showed up. And of course he showed up onto the scene after something like that and it’s like, ‘Hey, how you guys doing?’ Like totally chill, nothing is wrong everything is fine, and we just go back to camp and eat marshmallows and it’s all good!
L: As an adult, I think we probably scared the crap out of him so many times.
R: *laughs* Yeah, most likely. And he just never shows it, so it never seemed like it.
L: He just wanted to Adventure all the time! It was great.
R: Whenever we hang out – I live in Atlanta now and he’ll come see me with Mom, and we’ll go somewhere, and he’ll wander off down some hallway and come back and tell me what he found. ‘Did you know this was back there?’ ‘No actually I’ve lived here for six years and I didn’t know that was back there!’ You know? He just has a knack for that.
L: I wish I were better at it.
R: You’re pretty good at it too. You’re more like Dad than you think, just in your nature. You and him both like to come into a new area, and instead of getting out of the way of a doorway you like to LOOK…
L: *fake exasperation* Alright, this again.
R: *laughs*
L: Well go ahead and describe it as if you’re describing it to someone who’s never heard this before. I’ll just turn off my microphone…
R: You guys both do it! It’s the funniest quirk ever –
L: What do we do Becca?
R: Okay. So you walk in to a new space, you and Dad both, and because it’s new you have to look at it all! Because it’s a New Thing and it’s cool! So you’re looking around and looking around and looking around and you don’t realize that you’ve only taken TWO STEPS into the doorway and there are other people trying to get through the door –
L: You. You mean you.
R: You’re too interested in looking at the things in the walls! And ‘What does that hallway lead to?’ and ‘What is the food like?’ and ‘What does that person have over there?’ Meanwhile I have anxiety, and I’m just like ‘GUYS. Come on come on come GET OVER HERE.’
L: *laughing* Yeah you’re just like, migrating to the sides of things and getting out of the way as much as possible and we just –
R: I stick to the walls, yep yep!
L: – taking in information… I think there’s a Myers Brigg type for that, and I think we’re on opposite ends of it.
R: *laughs* I think so too!
L: Everything is wondrous!
L: OK, so. One of the things about Dad’s wanderlust is it’s something that he really really cares about. Just learning new things. You and I both get him books and coffee every year… Specifically what are the books?
R: Musty old books.
L: Musty old books, yes. We always get musty old books because he’s always interested in all sorts of weird stuff, stuff that people generally don’t talk about or know about. One thing I wanted to bring up (I don’t know if I’ll keep this) is the fact that when I was in Cairo, a lot of stuff went down…
I went on a study abroad trip in Cairo that happened to happen at the same time as the Arab Spring. No one could have… okay, a lot of people could have expected that, but nobody really wanted to. So I was there. I was actually there to study student activism, so I wanted to stay. At one point everybody is trying to make me evacuate and there’s a bunch of stuff going on between me and the school… I decided I needed to stay. And dad, against everything he’d been hearing, against everything that he probably worried about, heard how much I wanted to and that my passion was there, in learning about this thing that’s happening… and he actually supported me on it.
In the end the school said no and I had to come home anyway. But that conversation is seared in my brain as being such a extremely important one to me. I got to make a choice that was so much against the common sense of everyone around. I don’t know what have happened, but either way it meant a lot to me that he respected me enough, and respected the idea of learning and experiencing and taking risks enough, to do that.
R: That’s really cool. That’s kind of how he is, too. He always would say, ‘What do you think you want to do about the situation?’ That was always his first question. Whenever we were in some type of a bind or we didn’t know what to do here or something like that, it wasn’t him jumping into the conversation and telling us exactly what he thinks immediately. It was always him being like, ‘Well, what do you feel like you should do in this situation?’ And then after we already put her two cents in he would say his.
You know, if it were me having a kid in Egypt and studying abroad like that… well, I am not that person. I would not be what you need at that point. He was a perfect person for you to talk to.
L: It’s such a hard choice. I could never predict it at this point – I’m really glad he can do that for us. He allowed us to feel empowered in a world that does not usually do that to daughters, let’s be clear. I’m USED to feeling listened to. He listened to us and he let us make those kinds of calls and think for ourselves, and when people try to tell me that they know better than me, especially all these older men who don’t have the type of knowledge or experience that I have in my job but they believe they have enough to go by to just tell me that I’m wrong… It’s bizarre. It’s a bizarre thing to me, which I’m actually really grateful for now that I think about it.
R: Yeah, I feel like I’ve watched him NOT dismiss women my entire life.
L: That’s true! He’s got really great relationships with the people that we know.
R: Yeah, he doesn’t assume, he doesn’t talk over people. He listens. So he didn’t even have to say a lot to me for that to make an impact on me, we could just watch him do that with people growing up and it’s something that stayed with me.
L: I think it’s been a really kind of cool dynamic. We’ve gotten to see the men in our family be around really strong women with their own voice a lot. Mom and Dad have a really respectful relationship of each other, and he’s got a relationship with the women in his life that are like that. And to tie it back, Daddybuck also had that relationship. Nana was a firecracker. She had everybody, they just listened to her anyway, but he was like the first to really… I don’t know, there’s something about Daddybuck that made Nana feel safe. And I think one of the main things is how much he just loved to listen to her because he just loved her, you know?
R: Yeah. And you can see it immediately. When Nana would start telling a story, it doesn’t matter if Daddybuck had heard that story a hundred times, he would sit and listen intently to everything she was saying. I don’t think I ever heard him say ‘I’ve heard that story before.’ He never said that.
L: No, not around us. I know we’ve got a bit of a biased perspective because as little kids we didn’t pick up on things – there might have been tension sometimes.
But honestly, we grew up, what, 3 hours away?
R: Two and a half.
L: So wasn’t difficult to see them. We would go almost every holiday. We would go sometimes on weekends – I feel like we were there a lot when we were little.
R: Yeah, Mom would make sure to drive us and Dad was with us almost every time.
L: Yeah Dad was driving. We would all drive down and Dad was driving because remember, you and I would comb our hair in the car –
R: Yes! And Mom will be passing snacks back that she had packed for us –
L: And we would get there and Dad would take a very long nap because he was tired after driving, and we will get to play.
R: Yeah! I think we went down once a month for years, it felt like anyway. Maybe it wasn’t once a month but it was a lot. We were down there all the time for holidays and stuff, we would just go down there – they had a great backyard.
L: So in Nana and Daddybuck’s backyard, they’re in the South, so you got the house and the screened-in back porch, and then you’ve got this beautiful huge yard with a fence that was perfect for two adventuresome some little girls to go running around in the trees. They had a couple really really big old trees but the third big tree was definitely the best because it was a climbing tree
R: Yep yep.
L: That one had a huge branch that went out really really far and both of us could get to it. Then you could climb up very very high from there if you wanted to, number 1, and number 2 if you found all the ways to get there, and number 3 if no one was watching and yelling at you to get down.
R: Well that was you. I was not a high climber. That branch that was shaped like a seat that was super super super thick? I loved trying to get up there. You were the one that would go to the tippy-top of that tree! Lindsay, I do not know how you did that, I was too scared! I would never do it.
L: *laughs* Nana was angry when she saw me that one time –
R: EVERY time! I went inside a couple of times when you did do it and she had like the fire department already dialed in and ready –
L: No. You’re kidding!
R: Yeah she did! She like had their number out in case, just in case! It was not that she was saying that you were you were stuck and you couldn’t get down already. She would just look over to mom every time and say, “Hey, Lindsay might get stuck up there, do you want me to call A B C D?” And every time you got back down just fine. I don’t know.
L: I want to ask you about Daddybuck because I feel like I got to spend a lot of time with him and I didn’t get to spend on the lot of that time with Nana, and you had it kind of the other way? And even though you didn’t get to spend a lot of time with him you and Daddybuck did have these massive similarities that you only kind of touched on way way late in life.
R: Yeah. I know that we had similarities in that we want to figure out how things work. We like to… I wouldn’t say to take it apart put it back together kind of thing, it’s just… He would like to take things apart. I like to fix things. And we have that in common.
L: You both invented things! I mean, you invented a button on the end of someone’s sleeve just because you needed something to keep your sleeves rolled up when you were working. You made this gorgeous pin out of it, because you could! I feel like that’s the kind of thing that… I? I don’t have the physical manifestation of creativity.
R: *laughs*
L: That is well-established all over my life. I cannot put an image onto anything and make it a thing. I just, I can write, I do words. But Daddybuck had this skill that I could never tap into. Some people would call it engineering – where he could understand the electrical currents moving through an item. He created our own intercom system back in like 2001, way back in the day, nobody had those, very cool, he made that! But not because he was like strictly a scientist or an engineer. He really loved the idea of invention. He never wanted to do the same thing twice. So he would take things apart in order to understand them and make them do something completely different, and that’s what I think you do with these metals that you work with! From an outsider’s perspective, you’re taking something apart – you’re taking something that’s already established, like it’s a piece of metal, it’s a gemstone, leave it alone, it’s gorgeous. But you decide that, No, it could be something else. And then you make the thing! It’s alchemy to me, both of them.
R: Yeah… that’s way better than what I said. And way more accurate.
L: *laughs* Words, baby! I got those.
R: Yeah that’s better, do that and cut out what I said.
L: I’m not cutting out anything, this whole thing is going in.
R: Nooo! That’s so embarrassing! *laughs* Yeah I know you’re right, we definitely could connect on that level of liking invention and things like that. But I don’t think I knew how to communicate with him with words with about that? I preferred to show him pictures. I didn’t start metalsmithing until very late until college and that was when he had already started kind of declining, health-wise. Not in his mind, obviously, his mind lasted like to the end of days, but yeah. I showed him pictures of things growing up that I would draw. Obviously they’re not going to teach metalsmithing to a bunch of high schoolers because you can’t bring torches into a high school, so I didn’t learn that until later. But all of my art and all the stuff like that, I would show him all of that. We sort of connected in that way, unspoken. I’m not that great with words obviously, I’m not articulate like Lindsay is.
L: *laugh* So you make money and I have a podcast, that’s how that works.
R: *laughs* Right, exactly! But he had a goofy sense of humor, he loved cartoons, and I have a goofy sarcastic sense of humor. So we were able to laugh a little bit together in the small amount of time I got with him. Which wasn’t anything bad, you know. It’s not a problem that I didn’t spend a ton of time with him or anything. We talked whenever we wanted to talk and we connected with whatever we wanted to connect with, and that was great.
L: I think that’s really telling. For me, I have this serious problem where I absolutely have to have a deep conversation with everyone I know. It’s kind of limiting to some people! But it was easy to do with Daddybuck. I kind of needed that time to connect. I mean, if you’re… you know how that whole thing about “a picture is worth a thousand words”? There’s something to be said for the idea that both of you had in mind, that could take something beautiful and say, “Yeah, that’s enough. I get it.” You two got that. And that’s really cool. I don’t think it’s surface-level at all, I think it’s absolutely just as deep as the massive amounts of words that we put into things just to get somewhere. That’s really cool.
R: Yeah, I feel connected with him. It wasn’t the surface level relationship at all. I think we understood each other in a different way than Nana and I did, but me Daddybuck, both of us just happen to have that side of our personality where we both don’t mind solitude. I picked a career where I work alone all day in a studio –
L: Very much on purpose.
R: Very much on purpose! And I don’t talk to anyone and I don’t need to rely on anyone to make anything happen, to make money, other than the customer of course. I’m not in an office setting. And I think Daddybuck liked to go into his workshop and work for hours by himself, and he was completely content and super happy doing that. So for both of us to connect our personalities, we’re not really going to be huge talkers with each other I don’t think *laugh* I mean he could be when he wanted to be, and same with me, but we just didn’t need it I guess.
L: Is there anything else you would like to say if you could say something to Dad or Daddybuck that you specifically want to mention?
R: Yeah! Well I told Dad this already, but I do want to thank him for taking us on family vacations in the mountains. I want to thank him for raising us like that instead of forcing us to try and be something that we’re not, which is, I don’t know, going to a beach or going on cruises or whatever. There’s no “forced”, it’s “What do you like doing? Okay, let’s do that.” Or, we like to adventure, but we don’t like A B & C, so let’s find something that fits that. He never forced us to be anything we’re not. I guess it helps that he’s a lot like us too, but that I’ve always been really appreciative of that – to be like, “Oh, you’re weird? Good! Then let’s do things that are weird.” Our whole family is kind of like that.
L: I think I would probably say the same. And just that that absolute limitless need to learn new things. Both Daddybuck and Dad gave me examples of that and I’m so grateful that Dad knew about Google before anyone else knew what Google was and taught us how to find out things, just by example. He was always trying to find out things. It makes a huge difference on how to view the world, on how to not be caught in someone else’s view of the world. When you can think for yourself, you can find out for yourself.
R: They were both big on information and research and that was huge. I do so much research now on things that I need to and for sure I relate to that heavily.
L&R: Thanks Dad, we love you! Happy Father’s Day!
L: And thank YOU Becca! I appreciate that you got to come on my podcast! I feel like I… learned a lot? Which is not something I expected. I thought we’d talked about all this stuff already.
R: Same! It’s a different level of understanding, though. I guess because we have our own isolated experiences with Dad and with Daddybuck, it was kind of nice learning about the other side of things.
L: Yeah, I felt like I knew but, there you go! So I”m really glad we got to talk about it, thanks.
R: Me too, thanks for having me on!
L: Love you Becca!
R: Love you, bye!
CREDITS
The music in today’s episode is called “Take Me Away” by Offering. You can find out more about Offering through their Facebook page at facebook.com/offeringband.
The Poetic Inspiration music is called “Lindsay’s Theme” by cellist Mark Holt. You can find him at cellokeys.wordpress.com, or on Facebook by searching “cellokeysva”.
The poem “Gentle” was written by John S Townsend from his collection “Poems About God”, copyright 2003, all rights reserved.
This podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. This means don’t sell it, but feel free to share it, and keep the inspiration going.
And now for my favorite poem to close us out: “Creativity”
If you could create
New word or new shape
Put your mind in a box
And watch it escape
Stay creative.
[music fades and ends].
BLOOPER SCENE
L: Well say hey to the family, and um… oh wait. I should probably make it sound like I’m signing off on the podcast and then I can tell you goodbye.
R: Oh yeah, ok.
L: Yeah, thanks Becca, and I’ll talk to you later! Oh that’s terrible…
R: *laughs* Do it again! Do it againnnnn!
L: How am I supposed to do this?
R: I don’t know.
L: Um… Thanks for coming on, Becca, and… you know what? Whatever. Thanks for coming on!
R: *laughs*
L: Thanks for coming on, and um… say hi to Dale, and um… I guess I’ll… talk to you… later… since you’re my sister, and that’s pretty easy to do…?
R: *laughs so much*
L: I don’t just have to talk to you on a podcast… *loses it* It’s crazy that I’m doing this.
R: Oh my god, PLEASE keep that last one!
L: Ugh!
R: That last one is the best one I think.
L: All right, YOU say goodbye now.
R: Thanks for having me on, Lindsay! I’m gonna go feed my dog.
L: *dies laughing*
R: *realizes how dumb that sounds and dies as well*
L&R: *both just die*
R: That’s almost as awkward as yours! That’s like if someone said “I’ve got to go wash my hair”
L: *cackles* I know!
R: We need to figure this out.
Lindsay, Written Down 