Dad, Part Three
Carl A. Ellsworth (My Dad): The Interview.
You can listen to this interview in your browser by clicking the voiceover button above. Even better: Read this if you need instructions on how to listen to episodes on your podcast app.
As part of this series, I conduct interviews with fascinating people who have resided all over the country and the globe. These occasional interviews appear as podcast episodes (available through your browser or on various podcast apps) and while the starting place for these interviews are questions about physical “homes”, we get to talk about all sorts of other things that are (or are not) “home” in their lives.
This is Part Three of Dad. Listen to Part One and Part Two here!
If you get the chance to interview one or both of your parents, ask them to tell you their story, don’t hesitate!
My dad is 78 and in excellent health, but we all know that we’re not here on this planet forever, so I finally got the chance to sit down with him and find out a little more about what home has meant to him throughout his life.
With a Lutheran pastor for a father, he and his brother and mother lived in several small towns around South Carolina until he was about seven years old. Due to my grandfather’s declining health, he moved in to a farmhouse with seven other family members on North Main Street in Columbia, South Carolina (right across from the former Coca-Cola bottling plant). It was not without hardship, but he fondly remembers roaming free on the wide land and learning what it means to take care of one another.
He now lives just about a mile from the hospital where he was born. And while most of his life has revolved around the center of the state of South Carolina, there’s another place that he spent almost two years of his life: Vietnam, where, as an able-bodied young man, he had no choice but to fight in the war. He would come back changed, and far more grown-up than his peers who used excuses and family connections to finagle their way out of the draft.
Over the course of an hour and a half, we get to talk about his early years, his close connection with his “Grandpop”, how going to Vietnam interrupted his plans for law school, and how the thread of music has carried him through his whole life and continues to give him as much purpose in his later years as it did many decades ago. We also talk a lot about family and the ways that home has more to do with a mindset and who you’re with than an actual, physical place.
Thanks (no thanks?) to free Zoom’s time limits, this interview is broken up into three shorter pieces. You can find Part One and Part Two here.
I hope this interview will inspire you to have a conversation with some of the older members of your family while you still can!
Reflection Questions:
Did your parents have any sort of musical influence on you? Why or why not, and if so, what was it?
What is something that about a parent that you took for granted when you were younger? Do you try to appreciate it more now?
Image: On the Appalachian Trail above Hot Springs, NC/TN, Summer 2006.