My daddy is the consummate guy's guy, a good old boy. He's always driven a pickup and owned his own businesses, and he spends just about every spare moment on his boats and loves his NASCAR at man-volume.

My mother gave birth to three babies alone with her doctors, as was the custom of the times. When my daddy went to visit my mama, postbirth, in the hospital after baby number three, she told him it was a boy. He just about hit the ceiling with elation.

"Just kidding," she smirked, deflating him.

They had planned to stop at two, but now they had three. All girls. My daddy had wanted a son, as I suppose most men do, whether they admit it or not. I overheard him on the phone congratulating his buddy: "A boy? You lucky son-of-a-gun." I was about 9 years old at the time, and it perplexed me: What can a boy do that I can't?"

Here's why. My daddy wanted sons, but fate was against him on that one. So he treated us like boys, teaching us to throw baseballs, shoot guns and fire off sarcastic comments.

The best thing, though, was going out on the boat on the inland waterway between Shallotte Point and Ocean Isle Beach. We'd wait on the front porch for Daddy to come home from work, then chase his truck down the driveway yelling, "Take us fishing!!!" When he was in the mood, he'd hitch up the boat, bundle us in our life jackets, and drive off teasing us that a boat was following us.

Daddy would back the boat into the water and tell one of us to hold it steady while he parked the truck, and the other two scampered off to watch the minnows in the giant bait tank. Just about inevitably, the small-framed little girl holding the boat would refuse to let go of it as the tide took her away, and Daddy would wade/swim out to bring it back for us to get in.

Daddy has always been a net fisher, as it works for shrimp and flounder, which are abundant down home. I learned so much out on that boat. We'd drink Sundrop and eat Vienna sausages while Daddy drank Schlitz, waiting for time to drag the net back in. When the nets came in, before he threw out the non-edible sea creatures, he'd tell us what each of them were. His favorite thing was to set a croaker on the bench next to us to freak us out with its bellowing, bullfrog burps.

Our favorite thing, though, was going clamming. From Shallotte Point, we'd motor out to one of the little marsh channel islands. We didn't clam with rakes, we dove for them. That's how we all learned how to swim. My daddy would put one of us on his shoulders, wade out to his chest level and dig around with a foot until he found a clam. Then he'd tell the little girl on his shoulders, "Left foot, go!" And she'd dive over him, swim down and not surface until she had a clam.

We all eventually grew out of being daddy's little buddies into, in our varying ways, the kind of fearless, adolescent girls that make men say they're afraid of having daughters. But it was probably because we took so much after our Daddy.

I've worked in downtown Raleigh for more than a decade now, and my days are spent dealing with traffic, construction and generic office lighting. But the thought of the smell of salt water and motor oil will always take me to my happy place.

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