By Katy Goforth
After I hit 40, my relationships started to change. I’d heard this can happen, but I thought it was one of those things that people over 40 said to people under 40. Turns out I was wrong. I also started to understand that the dynamic between me and my parents was shifting.
They were getting older—slower and softer. Neither was bad necessarily, but it was different. I was growing more sentimental. What didn’t change was my special connection to my dad.
Growing up, I loved what he loved because I wanted to have his constant attention. Ric Flair wrestling for the championship belt? I was by his side. Baseball at the historic Duncan Park Stadium? I was seated beside him. He was a long-haul trucker his entire working life. When I moved away to college, one of his routes came right by an exit on the interstate that I wasn’t far from. He would often stop just to grin and say, “How you been doing, darlin’?”
I never moved back to the place I called home, but my sister did. She bought a house ten doors down from my parents. My dad walks every morning, and his route goes by her house. He waits on her in the driveway, letting one of the rescue cats flop around and bat at his walking stick. During these walks, he talks, and she listens.
Their walking route ends at his house. Early morning darkness is still holding on, so he often drives her the short distance home because he worries she will somehow get hit by a car without his supervision. Once home, she messages me whatever story he’s weaved that morning.
“Daddy and Earl Moline were guarding missile silos in Cheyenne. Their camper was rammed by buffalo one morning. They thought a missile had gone off. Finally got the buffalo wrangled.”
These are the types of messages I would wake up to. And then I would write.
At first, I didn’t know why I was writing. It was something I couldn’t not do. My husband calls me a sprinter. I get a story on paper quickly. Then I sit with it, debating its merits. Slowing down to chip away at it and see how it ages.
It didn’t take many stories relayed from my sister for me to realize I was trying to preserve my dad. Find another way to spend time with him.
I know he won’t be with me forever, and I was desperately trying to find a way to keep his voice. I was in a work meeting one morning and a phrase kept knocking around in my brain.
“Daddy was a diesel ghost.”
I doodled it on the top of the meeting agenda in the hopes I could concentrate on work. But it kept picking at me and sneaking in. When I was able to sit down and get something on paper, it hit me. I write, so I won’t forget the people I love. I write, so the people I love won’t forget that I love them.
My dad is a storyteller. His dad was a storyteller. Now I am a storyteller too. As I get older, I find myself almost desperate to save these stories. Make sure they live on long past all of us. It’s our generational wealth. It’s what we are leaving for those who will be here long after us. For those we may never even know, but they will know us. They will know us through these stories.
My dad weaves his way into everything I write. He’s always present. I think he feels our connection through my writing as well. He has a three-ring binder where he keeps a printed copy of anything I’ve published. The last time I visited he sheepishly told me he needed a three-hole punch because he had a few stories that were loosely secured to the binder with a paper clip.
The difficult part of my dad having such a close connection to my writing is rejection. Editors are going to reject pieces that connect me to my family. Rejecting our generational wealth—what we’ve accumulated to leave with others. But it’s part of the process, and you move through it. Some stings more than others, but pieces tend to find the right homes.
I recently had a prose collection selected for publication. If I’m being honest, it’s not something I saw happening for myself. Whether or not it’s true, I feel like an outsider to the writing community. I know I’m not alone in that feeling.
The stories in this collection weave my tale of growing up in Upstate South Carolina as a kid of working-class parents. Many of these stories began as those nuggets from my dad. He turned 80 this year. We celebrated with a tasty nacho bar and fancy cupcakes. He held up the 8 and the 0 candle from his cupcake and said, “I’ve gotta hold on to 2025, so I can see that book of yours, darlin’.” It was the first time we’ve both acknowledged what we’re doing, passing the family tales, our wealth, down from generation to generation.
_________________ Katy Goforth is a writer and editor for a national engineering and surveying organization and a fiction editor for Identity Theory . Her writing has appeared in The Dead Mule School, Reckon Review, Cowboy Jamboree, Salvation South, and elsewhere. She has a prose collection forthcoming with Belle Point Press (2025). She was born and raised in South Carolina and lives with her spouse and two pups, Finn and Betty Anne. You can find her on Twitter and katygoforth.com .
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