Tomorrow, September 11, 2011, is the tenth anniversary of my father's last birthday. Ten years ago tomorrow, in the evening, I called him and wished him "a moderately happy birthday." He chuckled and told me how much it felt like a day 60 years before, Pearl Harbor day. He was 17. He joined the Army the next day and ended up a radio operator and machine gunner in bombers for the Army Air Corps. Shot down over Yugoslavia on Armistice Day, 1944, he spent 55 days with the Underground, and returned to active duty New Years' Day, 1945.
My grandmother, who died at the age of 97 in 1985, told me the war changed Daddy. How? I asked. She thought quietly for a long moment.
"He didn't smile as much after," she said quietly.
His oldest sister, my Aunt Ginny, who died in her early 90's a few months ago, told me Bill (my daddy) was "a pretty boy" and sickly, and his mother and his sisters all mothered him. Daddy said, growing up in The Great Depression, he never remembered going without anything. Aunt Ginny said he was petted and spoiled. Maybe so.
Aunt Ginny also said, when he first enlisted, Daddy would trade his beer rations for cigarettes. After the war, and intermittently until he died, Daddy was an alcoholic.
Children of alcoholics grow up with interesting personality traits, some of them less than desireable. But one thing we can learn, if we're observant, is to appreciate people for who they are.
Daddy was a genius. He was a hard-working man. We never owned more than one car, and often both my parents worked, often on separate shifts. When I was licensed to drive, I frequently had to deliver Daddy to his job, then pick Mom up at hers. I'd get Daddy at the end of his shift. Daddy was always early for work. Parked at the mill, with a clear view of the door the employees would take, I could see them lining up at the time clock ten minutes in advance to get a running start when the bell rang. If Daddy left five minutes late, that wis early for him. I would almost consider him psychotically honest.
Come to think of it, he had only one great character flaw: when pressure led him to feel forced to drink a beer, he'd keep drinking them until we had to hospitalize him for dehydration and malnutrition. He was only violent once, and then he only shoved my mother and me; he didn't hurt us. He was almost never angry when he drank. He'd be friendlier, more outgoing, sometimes weepy and self-pitying.
A couple of months after that last birthday, he started drinking again. We put him in the hospital relatively quickly in the process. And that's when they found the lung cancer. He was so weak from the drinking bout, they couldn't do chemotherapy. When they started radiation, they figured out it was doing damage to his good lung. So they couldn't torture him to death the way they do so many cancer victims. They sent him home to die. He was diagnosed just before Thanksgiving. He died May 21, 2002. It was a Tuesday.
Daddy lived his last years in the town where he met my mother, where I was born, Post, Texas. I have spent my adult life where I grew up--Georgia. So we flew out to see him after his diagnosis, just after Christmas, 2001. We spent a few days there. The night before we were to leave, just before we left for the motel, Daddy stood up and hugged me. He clutched my arms, stepped back, and looked into my eyes.
"Son, you're a good man," he said, his final benediction to me.
I thought a moment and said the last words I would say to him face-to-face before he would die. And I knew it would be my final words to him, my final benediction:
"YOU'RE a good man."
He was. I loved him, I miss him. I'm 55 now, and every day I hope to grow up to be as much like him as I can be.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
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