Bedtime Stories

Reading Daddy's hunting magazines

It’s Father’s Day weekend. I’m still remembering that tattered brown couch and a stack of hunting magazines…

Daddy’s hunting magazines always sat on the end table next to the scuffed black rotary phone tucked in the corner beside the tattered brown couch.

The covers featured glossy whitetails and largemouths. Shiny at first, until he’d thumbed through them a hundred times. I learned early to be careful with the pages. He could dog-ear them. I wasn’t allowed to wrinkle them with fingers still chubby from childhood.

Mama was usually at work. A cashier at a dusty convenience store up on Beach Road. So it was just Daddy and me. On those quiet nights, he’d hand me a copy of Field & Stream or Outdoor Life and tell me to read something out loud.

He couldn’t read a lick. Couldn’t name the letters, let alone string them together. He could barely sign his name unless no one was watching. So he’d flip to the article he wanted to hear, choosing it based on the illustrations alone.

I didn’t think anything of it. I was the best reader in my class by a long shot. Reading was my superpower, and it was something I could give him. So I sat cross-legged on that beat-up couch, bare feet grimy from running outside, all knobby elbows and scabbed knees, and I read.

Daddy stared off toward the blank TV screen like he could see the story there. Cigarette smoke curled in the lamplight, thick as fog. He smoked them in a chain, one after another.

If I hit a word I didn’t know, I’d break it apart, sounding it out, trying to make it behave. Sometimes I got it wrong. Somehow, he always knew what I was trying to say. I used to think it was magic.

Now I think he just knew enough about the woods and water to fill in the gaps. He already spoke the language behind the words.

In those pages, I was exposed early to some of the best outdoor writers to ever string words together. That matters more now than it did then. Because I am a writer.

I learned to tell stories in the same breath I learned to read them aloud.

My first Field & Stream byline hit me hard. All I could think about was that couch. That lamp light. That cigarette smoke curling through the air while I read aloud to a man who never got to read me a bedtime story.

Then this week, I ended up on a Field & Stream podcast reading an essay I’d written about him. My voice came out of speakers I never would’ve imagined as a kid sitting on that brown couch.

And it hit me.

Somewhere along the way, I ended up on the other side of the story.

A little girl was sitting beside her daddy reading out loud because he couldn’t. She had no idea she was training for anything. Nobody in that room was building a writer. I was just being a daughter, and he was just being my daddy.

He couldn’t read the words on the page, but he understood stories mattered. He loved them enough to ask me to bring them to life for him.

All these years later, I’m still reading to him.

It’s just a different room.