My Daddy, the man who raised me, loved me while he navigated a world that was rapidly spinning out of control. He’d survived his parents’ divorce, the death of his mother and sister, and a new home with his father’s sister – a gal named Ann who we all called Aunt Mike. Daddy serve in Korea in the Army and knew how to drive just about anything. He went to college for a year studying mechanical engineering, but left for a good job offer from the Shipyard in Newport News. Somewhere along the way, he met and married my 17-year-old mother. They could not have children and adopted 2 – my brother who is 2 1/2 years older, and me. I think we moved about 15 times between 1961 and 1973 – sometimes more than once in a year. Daddy worked in the Yard for 17 years and then left abruptly, going to work in Washington DC. We lived a year in Newport News alone before joining him there. That’s about the time that my memories began – about age 4. As for DC – we didn’t last long there between 1967 and 1970. The tremendous unrest of 1969 was enough to make both of them long for something more like home. And my mother was so sick there – so terribly unwell from longing for a baby of her own and the relentless disappointments month after month. I often think we kids became a personification of her perceived failure.
Daddy returned to his old employment, losing 17 years of seniority and retirement time in the process. We built a house in 1973 and we finally stayed put long enough for both my brother and me to graduate high school. My parents marriage deteriorated in the years when they stayed in that house. I coped by trying to be as good as possible; my brother, by exploring every known illicit substance of the 70s. They would live in that house until 1985 when they went to Florida (Punta Gorda and Daytona Beach) and finally moved all their things to Myrtle Beach SC literally days before Daddy’s death.
Daddy recognized that I was smarter than many, and encouraged arguments at the dinner table that left my mother angry most of the time as it undoubtledly made me braver than most argue a point. Everyone suffered because of it. I was not a sweet child.
In the end, Daddy was loyal to my mother and explained it to me plainly when I was 16 that he was married to her, and no matter how sick or how abusive she was, he would stand by her. I would have my own life, he said, and what I was dealing with would not last forever. I needed to focus on the good in people and forget the rest (harder to do than to say). I just needed to graduate and make it on to college. I took a shortcut there that would change my life’s course. The path I chose would take some 30 years from which to even begin to recover. Some of it still haunts me.
Random things about Daddy – he loved boats and fishing. To this day I do not easily speak when on a boat as the sound of the human voice is known to scare the fish away. He wanted to have a farm – a big one with animals and crops. He longed to see Australia, but didn’t have the requisite skills of the time to allow him to immigrate there. He was not a religious man, preferring Ayn Rand to Christianity. He was an adamant politial Independent and rarely missed 60 Minutes on Sunday evenings. He was meticulous in his work, and liked to have a plan, a backup plan and a backup plan for that, too. He instilled that in me. He struck me one time in his life, and that was likely deserved but he did it only because he’d been drinking. Alcohol was not his friend. He could bowl like a pro (210 average). He smoked 3 packs of unfiltered Camels a day and they would cause his early death. And he had a 5 o’clock shadow at 12n. I loved him, but I definitely screamed at him a lot when I was 13. He forgave me, I think.