An Unexpected Gift

This week, I received the most wonderful gift. An old friend of my Dad's sent me an email detailing how he met her, and the time they spent together when he was in the Marines, in 1944 and '45. Considering that my Dad was not an "open" man, most of his life was, and will remain a mystery to me.  He passed away at the age of eighty four, on 12/2/2007.

This is what she wrote:

"It had been 57 years since I met your dad when he was in the Marine Corps.  He was stationed at Mojave and I was going with his buddy Steve.  Steve and Forrest had Christmas dinner with me and my family in Bakersfield in 1944. He and Steve used to visit us when he was on leave.  Your dad didn't remember but  he spent my 17th birthday with me on February 22nd 1945 riding horseback up and down the street where I lived.  A family on the corner of our street had some horses and let us ride them for a while.  Good Memories.  Never thought we would ever see each other again.   I got married in June of 45 and we lost touch with each other.  It was a miracle that I remembered that he was from Kentucky.  I got on the computer white pages and put his name in and the state and his name popped up.  I wrote him a letter and he wrote back.  we talked on the phone many times and he invited me to come visit him.  I am so glad I did  and got to meet so many of his family. Sounds like a fairy tale, 2 old friends meeting after all those years."

I had been writing to Billie, his old friend,since my sister died in November. It was she, my sister, who kept the lines of comunication open to all of us. She was our "News Desk". Now she is gone, and I wanted to stay in touch with Billie, who was most certainly, a beacon in his last few years.


This aroused my curiosity. I didn't know my Father well. He was a stoic man, never one to open up and talk about his life. I suppose that comes with his generation, but there were  events he experienced that I wished he had shared with me, or anyone in the family, for posterity, if nothing else. He experienced some amazing things in his eighty four years, but rarely, if ever, spoke of them, especially his wartime experiences in WWII. 

My memories of Daddy are a crazy quilt of contradictions, some happy, some sad, some puzzling and some downright mysteries.

I guess I should mention at the outset, that I am the youngest child of six. A surprise to both my parents. My closest sibling was seven years my senior, and my oldest brother was in the Marines, in Korea, when I was born.By the time I was twelve, all my siblings had married, moved away, or both.

Needless to say, I always felt like an outsider at family functions. I was the designated babysitter for my nieces and nephews on family vacations, and the one who was sent from the room when "the adults" were talking, which was most of the time.

I was extremely close to my Mother, or "Mommy" as she was called to her dying day, which unfortunately, occurred when I was but twenty, and she was fifty three.

Daddy was an enigma. He rarely showed emotion toward me, and when he did, it was shocking, and unexpected, whether it was a show of anger or weeping  at a funeral.  

I know little about my Daddy's upbringing, other than he was the oldest of eight children of a Kentucky farm family. He joined the Marines in 1941, and served in Italy and on an aircraft carrier. He married Mommy on August 2, 1939 or '40, I forget which.

After the war, he received training as a pipeline welder, which became his trade. Mommy always said he entered the Marines not only to serve his country, but to avoid being pulled into the family tobacco farm. Apparently, he hated farm life.

When I was small, we moved every few years, going where the jobs were, for my "journeyman welder" Father. When I was eight, we settled in Columbus, Ohio, where we would reside until I was grown.

After moving numerous times over the years, Mommy had decided she liked Columbus, and that is where we would settle. She refused to move again. So, from the time I was eight, my memories of Daddy were exclusively on weekends, barring his inevitable winter layoff of a couple months, and vacations.  Daddy would leave for work on Sunday evening, and return on Friday night.

I find that my memories of him come in snatches. In retrospect, we had very little dialog between us until he was old and ill, and even those are sparse.  I sincerely cannot remember one benign conversation with him, for conversation's sake. I always got the feeling that I was intruding upon him, even if he were only watching one of his western movies  on TV he loved.

I remember:

- The one and only tale of his war experience was spending two days, lying amid the bodies of his comrades,in a mass grave, playing dead, until the Italian forces left the area.

-He always carried a sterling silver hip flask, filled with moonshine. Did I mention the family in Ky. were also 'shiners?

-He worked for a year on the Alaska pipeline. I never heard one story of that time, and I don't really remember him being gone for an entire year.

-He spent nine months in Saudi Arabia, working on another pipeline. Not even a souvenir.

- He would allow me and my friends to stand on the back of his welding rig(truck) and take us for short rides. I loved that.

- Me, coming home after a night of partying with my frinds, to find my uncle totally ruining a John Denver song on his guitar. My folks often included guitars and singing in their own weekend "parties". I told him he was singing it wrong, and offered to  
show him how it was sang. I remember seeing Daddy's face, and his jaw drop open when I sang. He was flabbergasted. He said "I always thought that music coming from the basement was the radio. Oh my God, she can SING!" One of my proudest moments with him. (He never knew I was stoned out of my head on acid, pot and beer that night. I was seventeen.)

-He attended several Daytona 500 races, and loved NASCAR. He said he cried when Earnhardt died.

-He had a gorgeous tenor voice, and could play guitar and mandolin like a pro. My folks recorded several gospel records, and sang on radio before the war. Most family functions included sing-alongs in one way or another, and they still do, to this day.

-After all the kids were grown, but me, he bought a new car every two years like clockwork, first Pontiac Bonnevilles, then Cadillacs. His latter years he opted for small S-10 pickups, as they were easier to maneuver on those winding Kentucky roads.

-Myself feeling sick as a dog on a trip to California to see my sister, and throwing up in the backseat of his new Caddy. I remember asking, pleading, for him to pull over, as I was sick, and Mommy telling him I was just having "cramps". I recall feeling a bit justified as he had to wash out out the interior of his new car at a motel in New Mexico. 

- He was a hunter, and many meals of my youth involved rabbit, deer,and squirrel. 

- He used to make, and sell, solid steel "bootjacks" in the image of a naked woman.

- He loved auctions, and would often purchase the most gaudy items offered. Like naked lady lamps, or ceramic items with drinking slogans on them.

- Apparantly, he had a bawdy sense of humor, as did my Mom.

- Him, taking the distributer cap off my car to prevent me from driving to Toledo to watch my (much older) boyfriend in a hockey game, when I was 18. Then chasing me upstairs, with a hairbrush in hand, to "whoop my ass", for having the audacity to question him.

-Seeing him sitting in his car, as he was leaving for another workweek, sobbing. I was leaving the next day for Ca. for college. We never discussed why he was crying.  

- Seeing him laughing and having the time of his life, chasing crabs into an ice pool with a broom, during a trip to Maryland to see his sister.

- He never met a bottle of Jim Beam he didn't like. He collected their commemmorative decanturs for decades. He kept his personal bottle in the freezer.

-He left my Mother for another woman when I was nineteen, a year before cancer took Mommy. They were never divorced. I think this caused Mommy to just give up.

- After Mommy died, he married "Pat", the other woman. They divorced after two years. I never met her.

-After Pat, he married "Mae" a woman 26 years his junior. An exotic dancer, contortionist, with the photo albums to prove it. Skank! She died of breast cancer eight years after their marriage.

- He retired back home to Kentucky, and with the help of his brother, my brother and various cousins, built his home on a mountainside, all by himself. The only contracted work was the wiring. he was proud of that. It is the only home he ever owned.  
All other abodes were rented.

-Seeing his face light up and turn beet red, when he opened a Christmas package from the above mentioned friend, Billie, and discovering it contained a pair of red silk boxers emblazoned with hot peppers. (Yes, Viagra was just one of the pill bottles in his medicine cabinet.. God Bless his 84 year old heart )

- Him bawling like a baby at my husband's funeral, and Daddy dearly hated John. He was crying for me, and my grief, which, of course, made me cry even harder.

- He kept a fully loaded 45 pistol holstered to a coffee table leg in his front room, within easy reach, till the day he died.


There it is, in a nutshell, albeit a rather large nutshell.I wish he had been more open about his life. I think he was reluctant to talk of the war, as many veteran's are, to avoid reliving the horrors. As for the rest of his life, I am still confused. Clearly, he loved me, but we were never what anyone could construe as "close". I  truly regret that.