The radio was on. WSM 650 AM. It was a summer night. The crickets were out. The garage door was open.

Daddy was changing the oil. He was lying beneath the Ford. I was sitting there, watching him work. Because that’s what kids did before TikTok.

The garage was peppered with posters of fighter jets, and model airplanes. My father was obsessed with planes. All kinds. He wanted to be a fighter pilot as a boy. But he was deaf in his left ear. So he became an ironworker.

His voice came from beneath the car. “Be a pal and get me another one from the fridge?”

He wasn’t talking about Coca-Cola. He wanted another bottle of Weekend Lubricant. I didn’t have far to walk. The fridge was beside his workbench. Our family’s beer fridge was always kept in the garage because we were Baptist.

I fetched another bottle. I handed it to my old man, who slid from beneath the car on one of those slider things with the wheels.

He was still wearing work clothes. Denim. Boots. He was still covered in soot from a day of welding column splices. It was Saturday. He had worked overtime, but still somehow had energy enough to cut the grass, paint the shed, and change the oil after work. Just how he was.

“Turn up the radio, Opie,” he said.

He called me that because I had red hair. Although the truth was, I was pretty chubby and looked nothing like Ron Howard. In fact, I looked more like I had eaten Opie Taylor.

The radio was playing the Grand Ole Opry. The garage swelled with the sounds of steel guitars and twin fiddles.

My father discovered that I was a musical child from a young age. I was 4 when he marched me into the music minister’s office and said, “My boy can sing. I want you to learn him to do it good.” Daddy paid $9 per week for voice lessons. That was a lot back then. The first song I learned was “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.”

“Do you have regrets?” I asked my father.

“Huh?” came the voice beneath the four-wheeled piece of Dearborn Steel.

“Where’d you hear that word?”

Shrug.

He slid from beneath the car. He stared at me. “You mean do I wish I’d done anything different? Of course I do. Everyone has regrets.”

“Like what?”

He was still lying on his back. Socket wrench resting on his chest. “Why do you ask?”

Another shrug.

“Well,” he said, “I wish I’d gone to college. That’s Number One. Wish I’d made something of myself. Wish I didn’t walk on iron beams all day. Lotta men die doing what I do.”

“What else?”

He thought. “Oh, I wish I would’ve taken flying lessons. I always wanted to fly. But when they told me I’d never be a Navy pilot, on account of my dead ear, I cried for a whole year. I hated myself. Hated this gimp body God gave me. But I shouldn’t have given up. Shoulda taken flying lessons. But I didn’t. I regret that.”

“Is it too late?”

“For flying lessons?”

Nod.

He sighed and took a sip. He looked into the faroff. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

The music of Loretta Lynn filled our garage. “But it doesn’t matter, because you know what I’ve learned?”

“What?”

“When you were born, I learned that the most important thing I would ever do was be a daddy. I didn’t care about me no more. I only cared about you. Cared about watching you succeed.”

“Me?”

“Yessir. You shoulda seen yourself. You were pitiful. You came out of your mama helpless and nekkid. You didn’t even have a name. So I gave you mine.

“And when I held you that first time, I promised myself that anything I ever did, from that day on, would all be for you. That was my job. To look after you. Not to be a pilot. Not to be rich. Even after I die, so help me, I’ll be looking out for you however I can. Because you’re mine. And I’m your’n.”

I am a middle-aged man now, older than my father was in my memory. But tomorrow night I will be performing at the Grand Ole Opry. And I wonder if he isn’t the reason why.