My Family: A Tribute

This is the second in my continuing revelation of the people in my life. BTW, I’m not posting about these people in any particular order; just as the occasion arises.

My Dad was truly one of the greatest men I’ve ever known. Unfortunately I didn’t recognize that until it was almost too late. He was an army brat; born in Washington D.C. but moved around a lot. He had kind of a rough childhood, got hit a few times by his dad, one of which ruptured his ear drum so he could only hear in one ear for most of his life. In spite of this, and a bit of nun-abuse, he never hit me or my sister…at least never above the waist.

He left home when he was 16 and eventually made his way to Texas where he met my Mom when he was 18, settled down, and started going to church. But in the two years that he was on his own he collected some outstanding stories. I even used a couple of his stories in some creative writing assignments in high school and college.

I guess part of what made these stories so interesting to me was that my Dad was so devoutly religious. He had been for as long as I could remember, but when I was about 14 or 15 he started sharing some of his stories with me and it was hard to picture this solemn man; deacon in the church, served on the school board, county water board, and several other church and community committees, doing some of the things he told me. He grew up Catholic, although I suspect more in name than in practice, and even went to Catholic school. A few of his stories involved the nuns in the Catholic school, but most were after he left home.

One of my favorite is what we call the “Band-aid story”. One night after winning some money at a pool hall and using it to get drunk he and some friends were walking back to their apartment. This was somewhere in Virginia in the late 40’s. Back then most of the shops had plate glass display windows in the front. The details of how this happened were forever fuzzy in his young, liquor addled brain, but somehow one of his buddies fell through the store-front window of a drugstore. By some miracle he wasn’t hurt too badly, that is no major blood vessels were severed, but he had a thousand small cuts, some with pieces of glass embedded in them. Well my Dad and Friend #2 grabbed some boxes of bandaids from the drugstore (which was, of course, closed at the time) and helped their unconscious Friend #1 back to the apartment. Once there they stripped him down to his underwear and cover each wound with a band-aid, never bothering to remove any of the shards of glass. When F#1 woke the next morning, along with his hangover, he was cover in band-aids, blood, and little pieces of glass. What’s worse he had no memory of any of it.

I asked him why they didn’t try to take out some of the glass, or just take him to a hospital or something.
We were drunk 17 year old kids; I guess it just never occurred to us.

Despite that experience, and a dozen others like it, he was pretty conservative. He possessed the strictness and discipline that comes from growing up with a career military father and spending most of your formidable years with Nuns. But he also had a certain amount of savvy that came from spending time on the streets fending for himself. He was never homeless, as far as I know, but he did spend a lot of time in pool halls, dance halls, and bars.

When I was about 13 we found out that he had diabetes. This plagued him for the rest of his life. He had a hard time managing it. He tried to eat right, but even though changing your diet, along with exercise, was one of the things they suggested, it wasn’t taken as seriously as it is now. Soon he had to start taking insulin, and continued for the rest of his life. In 1995 we found out he had colon cancer. They say they didn’t really know what caused it, but I was convinced it was the two saccharin (does anyone remember saccharin?) he would put in almost everything he drank. This was before Sweet ‘n’ Low, Equal, or Splenda; and they didn’t know about the dangers of saccharin then. After we found out about the cancer I stopped putting sweetener in anything I drank, and I stopped drinking soft drinks altogether, (except for the occasional Jack and coke, for medicinal purposes only).

He had surgery to have part of his colon removed, and was on chemo and radiation for a year after that. Just after Thanksgiving in 1997 he started getting sick again. He went into the hospital in December and spent the next month in ICU. He came home in late January and we finally had Christmas (we were holding off until he came home). A few days later he went back into the hospital and never came home again.

My Dad died eight years ago today.

We had the typical Father-Son disagreements, usually spawned by my limited teenage rebelliosness (I was too afraid of him to be too much of a rebel). When I was about 20 he and I got into an arguement about something or another. Whatever it was I'm sure it wasn't all that important, but before it was over he started to open up to me about stuff that I had never thought about before. How hard it was to hold things together sometimes, work, family, community, etc. How much it meant to him to be a good father, but that he was pretty much just making it up as he went along and how much he feared dissappointing us. These were all things that I know now every man feels at some point, but at 20 you don't think about things like that. And you certainly don't think about those things in regards to your father. By the end of the arguement we were both crying and hugging. I saw him in a whole new light after that, and I'm pretty sure he saw me differently too. We never fought again after that. In fact that was the point where he became not only my Father but also my friend.

Vaya con Dios Dad.

I love and miss you every day.

Michael