Sally Huggins Toner

What is joy?

A dear friend posted the question last evening, and today is the perfect day for me to weigh in–given the answer involves fathers.

I have often said, when you lose a parent young, you gain, if you’re lucky, several more. I’m one of the lucky ones. I could go on and on (and have) about the father Jim Huggins has been to me–all the love and support I have felt all my life from amazing men–the incredible dad Mark is to our girls.

But Anna’s question brought me to the first father I ever knew, and a reframing of the question.

Instead of “What is joy?” I’m going to answer the question “Who is joy?” And I’m going to talk about my grandfather.

My mother says that Father’s Day was the first time I realized what separated me from most of my classmates. We were making cards for dads in preschool, and, for some reason, that didn’t compute. The story goes I went home, asked my mom who my dad was, and that’s when she brought out pictures and explained that I did have a father who loved me very much, but he had died when I was a baby. Happy to have an answer, I gleefully explained to the teacher and the entire class the next day, “Guess what, I DO have a daddy! He just died in an F4, but I promise he loved me very much!” 

Then I made a Father’s Day card for Popa. 

That’s the name I gave my mom’s dad, David Ashley Tompkins, since I couldn’t say “Popsie,” which is what my older cousin called him. He was, in every way, my father. (I would find out later that this is the first thing he said to my grandmother when they found out my father had been killed. “Well, I’m her Daddy now.”) When my mother remarried, and I gained the most amazing dad, Popa gladly shared that responsibility. Joyfully, I should say, as he adored Jim Huggins.

Joyfully–the way he did everything.

Another thing I often say–there is that person in every generation with the contagious laugh. In our family, it’s my older daughter Aimee. From the time she first giggled, from the back of her throat, a resonant chuckle that no one can resist, I recognized it. Popa had that same laugh. A giggle, almost, that erupted into a full mouthed hiss and shaking of the body the funnier the joke (often his own) got. It didn’t matter what it was, either–a dirty limerick or a Saturday morning cartoon episode with me on his lap. He effused over everything from a well-done t-bone with just the right amount of pepper to someone else’s hole-in-one (or his own) to a seagull paperweight I gave him for Christmas one year. Joy.

In her post about joy, Anna mulled over whether it’s also a lack of self consciousness. That may be, but I also think it’s an abandonment of fear–fear of the swing.

Popa was an avid golfer. He learned the perfect swing as a young caddie, a lefty searching for someone else’s balls in the rough. He’d brush the vegetation aside, smoothing out his approach, over and over, and he learned early to keep his head down as he did. 

He tried to teach me as well, with a seven iron and the crab apples in my parents’ backyard. He explained there’s a rhythm to everything, to treat the club like a pendulum.To keep it smooth and realize it should move forward as far as you pull it back.

We can look at grief and joy as two sides of a coin that a lifetime flips over and over. But that makes these states two separate spaces we inhabit. 

The more accurate view is that we move through grief to joy and back again on a pendulum. The middle might be a lull, a rut, or a period of contentment. We putt delicately, scared to overshoot and miss the hole.We know, when we haul off and let her rip, there will be highs, and lows, we can’t always anticipate or control. 

To feel joy, we must accept the backswing. I don’t remember too many of those with Popa, but I recall a few–loss, disappointment in others, in himself. I remember Meemaw, my grandmother, whose fierce love girded him through those low points and helped him sway to the other side. He gave us permission to bogey, and he was the best cheerleader when we made it onto the green. He taught me joy. He taught a lot of people joy. We were the lucky ones.

So happy Father’s Day, y’all. Don’t be afraid of the swing. I learned mine from someone who was joy. Not a bad example. Not a bad one at all.