Dad

a tribute essay for my Dad

              

Dad

          As I have grown older, I have begun to realize that my father had the greatest and most lasting impact on the paths and patterns of my life. While both of my parents had strong personalities, a fairly consistent trait in my extended family, I feel that my father’s spirit, moral philosophy and integrity have guided the important steps of my life.  Since I was the eldest of three children, he somehow impressed upon me a sense of responsibility for my younger siblings when they later became part of our family.  The first three years of my life, I was the only child and so reaped the benefits of being Dad’s “project” in child development.

          I have no real memories of that period, but unprompted, relatives have shared their many recollections of Dad’s child-raising techniques with me.  I was always to be quiet and speak only when asked to speak.  I was to amuse myself and not require adult supervision. Crying was strictly forbidden, so it goes without saying that whining was also verboten.  My dad had a determination to uphold his family’s name and integrity, and that meant no public embarrassments perpetrated by bawling children.  This may sound relatively harsh to some, but I worked through it via 30 years of psychotherapy; that is written tongue-in-cheek, because I have come to realize that most parents do the very best job they can, and they do it with incalculable love and care.  How simple it is for the very young consciousness to misinterpret signals!  My dad’s almost constant admonition was to “be a BIG girl!”  It took many years of the aforementioned psychotherapy for me to realize that my life-long issue with fat was merely my attempt to do as Daddy said: be a BIG girl.  What a revelation!  I was NOT a failure; but I had, as I often do, gone over the top.  I am the queen of excess, the master of grandiose gestures, and this ironic realization does not plunge me into despair.  Rather, I want to laugh -- with gusto!  Luckily for Dad, I am nothing if not a compliant creature, the type of dutiful daughter Jane Austin wrote of sometimes in a sardonic tone, sometimes sadly.

          Circumstances, the timing of World War II and his lack of school past the sixth grade caused my Dad to choose the Navy as his career.  His childhood was instrumental in shaping his values and honing his sense of responsibility.    His father, a mercurial, volatile, hot-tempered thrice-married sharecropper in the boot heel country of southeast Missouri, sired five sons and two daughters in his third marriage.  Dad was the eldest son, and the same sense of sibling responsibility was drilled into him just as he taught me.  New Madrid County and Pemiscot County were the areas my grandfather worked with other sharecroppers, seeding, tilling, chopping and eventually picking cotton in those wide, dusty fields edged by rutted turning rows and levees that tried to keep the wide brown Mississippi from spilling over into the fields.  My grandfather had several brothers in the area who owned their own farms, but dark and sad family secrets kept their brotherly relations distant and cool.

          My grandfather had chosen the peripatetic life of an adventurer when he was very young, and it seems that decision made him the family black sheep.  He married twice in quick succession, never bringing his brides home to be introduced to his brothers.  Indeed, no one was ever really sure if he had fathered more children in those earlier marriages or if the marriages ended in divorce or death of the spouse.  My grandfather’s name was John David House; his ancestors had migrated to the eastern coast of Virginia from County Kent in England early in the 17^th century; most were farmers, one a vicar, a couple of blacksmiths and a tinker.  Interestingly enough, I have a copy of the last will and testament dated 1728 of one James House, patriarch of a large settlement of the House family in Isle of Wight County, Virginia.  The stern tone of the will, which divided assets and lands and delivered brusque admonishments to his offspring about their earlier failures, hints to me that the House temper was strong even then and dysfunctional families are not merely a modern day phenomenon.

          By the time Dad, named Robert, was born in 1926, his family was living near Portageville, New Madrid County, Missouri.  They were poor, the land was rich, and times always seemed to be hard.  The most interesting anecdote about my grandfather that clearly defines his volatile nature concerns one cold morning when he was milking the family cow; remember this is a destitute man with a large hungry family during the Depression.  On this particularly cold morning, the cow was evidently not her bland bovine self for as my grandfather prepared to milk her, she kicked him.  This incensed my grandfather to the point that he pulled the six-shooter he always wore tucked in his belt and shot the recalcitrant cow.  Dead.   I think this one incident speaks volumes about my father’s family life.

          In 1937 my grandfather caught pneumonia and died. As the eldest son, Dad had to quit school at the age of eleven to become the man of the house.  My grandmother was a fragile and petite Southern lady, bewildered and lost without her husband.  So early every morning, Dad set out in his overalls and thin-soled boots to try to find day work to support the family.  I am sure my grandmother tried to supplement his efforts by doing laundry and sewing for folks, but in the Depression, paying someone else for those services was a luxury, so she had little opportunity for income.  Dad did all the odd jobs he could find: hoed cotton or picked cotton, depending on the season, or mowed and baled hay all day.  I remember a story he told of walking home one dusty and muggy twilight, crying because he knew the few coins in his pocket would not even buy enough bacon and beans to feed his family. The crush of that responsibility must have been awesome. 

My dad carried the terrible burden of breadwinner for his family until his mother remarried in 1942.  Perhaps giddy from that release, he and some friends hitchhiked up to the great metropolis of Saint Louis, where they tried their hands as fry cooks at a White Castle Hamburger restaurant.  The adventure of that trip was not as exhilarating as they had hoped, so they returned to southeast Missouri where Dad persuaded his mother to claim his age as 18 so he could join the Navy, which he promptly did; that was probably the only lie my father ever told in his life.

After boot camp, the Navy quickly trained Dad as a field medic and transferred him to the Marine Corps and the Pacific Theater of Operations.  Dad huddled in amphibious craft lumbering and sloshing their way onto tiny unnamed beaches, pelted with machine gun fire, shrapnel and grenades.  My Dad was an empathetic soul, far too sensitive, I believe, to regard callously the carnage and tragedy he saw.  He rarely spoke of the experiences of working triage on Okinawa and other islands.

At the end of World War II, Dad was stationed in San Francisco; he had heard that Mom’s family had moved from Southeast Missouri in 1944 and settled in Monterey. Lonely for talk of home and that distinctive Southeastern Missouri twang, Dad made plans to visit Mom and her family.  Although Mom and Dad had been acquainted in the adolescent years, Mom considered him just one of those pesky tow-headed House boys who teased her unceasingly.  You see, that is the language of love for House males: they tease unmercifully the objects of their affections.  It makes House women want to beat them with a ball bat, but it is their way.

Luckily for Dad after the passage of a few years, he cleaned up real good.  He was, as we say nowadays, drop-dead gorgeous, a young Robert Redford, Brad ever-lovin’ Pitt gorgeous.  Dad hitchhiked in his Navy blues down to Monterey, and Mom’s estimation of Dad certainly changed.  The teasing never changed; it is genetic with House men.  Mom just developed high tolerance and a certain look that told Dad when the boundary had been crossed.  On May 1, 1946, they were the first couple married in the little white stucco Church of Christ on Lighthouse in Pacific Grove.  I was born on January 29, 1947, and so my life with Dad began.

We were not the average Navy family because in twenty years, Dad only spent nine months away from the family; those months were spent on a hospital ship called the Haven making a goodwill cruise around the world.  He brought back boxes and boxes of slides to share with us, introducing us to places like Tunisia, Gibraltar, the Suez Canal, Marseille, Arles and Avignon; for the first time I heard of the great Papal schism of the 14^th century, I saw ruins of Roman theaters and markets, I saw Roman aqueducts that supplied water from the Rhone River to the Papal palaces in Avignon.  When other kids were watching junk on TV, many evenings Dad was treating us to a round the world trip, describing exotic places, rich smells, beautiful landscapes, ancient ruins, and fascinating customs.  He opened the world like an oyster to us when we were young, and broadened our views of humankind.

So this was my Dad, the man who was honest to a fault, without guile.  In the 53 years I knew him, his integrity never faltered.  He would rather die than tell a lie.  He believed in working hard for an honest dollar, and he would not accept any part of a dishonest dollar.  His values began and ended with family.  Since Dad was not an officer, we lived on a strict budget, but I knew Mom and Dad made sacrifices so there would be a little bit of money to give the children a treat.  His regimen of discipline included spankings, groundings, loss of privileges, and the old reliable silent treatment.  He had the highest of expectations for his children, and I wish I had understood then that higher expectations did not mean that I was never good enough.  If I brought home a “B” on a report card, he would sternly warn me “I expect an A next time.”

Now so many years have passed, and I admire and appreciate my father so much more than I did in my younger days.  Isn’t it sad that our young know-it-all attitudes and hormonal rages keep us from understanding the wisdom and wit and worthiness of our parents?  My dad died in 1999 of lung cancer, and he had not smoked for 35 years; it was a cancer caused by exposure to asbestos during his Navy years.  All those years he had served his country; trained by the Navy as an optician, he had established his own optical business; he had worked hard to hand over that ready-made career to his son, who carelessly ran it into bankruptcy; he had defended his family’s name by never being involved in anything legally questionable.  But still he felt he was a failure.

When the diagnosis came, he was too tired to fight.  The cancer was the final blow, and he crumpled under it.  Since I was located in California at the time, I took the quickest opportunity I could to fly back to Kansas.  I needed to tell him that I loved and respected him; I needed to tell him he gave us a good, happy life.  I did get to say those things to him.  He died two days after I flew back to California, just a month short of his 73^rd birthday.

Grief is strange.  Some people collapse from its weight; some fight it and some shadow box with it.  I think that is how I have dealt with my dad’s death.  Rationally, I know he is gone, but as every year passes, I feel his presence in my life grow.  I have imagined his dangerous times as a young medic on the bloody beaches, his empathetic nature causing him as much pain as the victim he was attending.  He was a decent honest man committed to the amoral Mickey Mouse Navy, exposed to others’ immorality and the dishonesty of the government: cutting corners, breaking promises and sacrificing personnel as “acceptable collateral damage.”  How many times was he sworn to obey orders of men unfit for the positions they held?  Did that cause the deep river of unhappiness that we glimpsed within him occasionally?  I wish I knew.  I wish I could tell him now that I think him a giant, and I pray it was not I who made him unhappy.

As time passes after the death of a loved one, some say they tend to forget the faces of the departed, the sounds of their voices and laughter, how it felt to be in their arms.  I pity whoever says that.  I remember every line on my dad’s face, the texture of the skin on his hands, how his arms felt when I hugged him.  I remember the twinkle in his eye when he was gearing up the ol’ House teasing machine.  I will never let any of that fade.  He taught me to play chess; he taught me to love crossword puzzles and mysteries; he taught me how to pitch softball; he taught me the rules of football so that I became a life-long fan.

When I was tentative and uncertain about my future, wanting desperately to be a writer but petrified of going to college and failing, he found an IBM programming school where I would become immersed in the new world of computers.  I remember him showing me the ad and saying “You know, Annette, I think these computers are the future and you’d be smart to get in on the ground floor.”  His foresight set my career path for the next 35 years.  Dad knew I had a passion about writing, and I know he was proud of me when I had two articles published in Seventeen Magazine when I was 19.  But he wanted to see me in a secure field, so he felt it was unrealistic to encourage me to pursue what could only be a dream.

My father taught me to try my hardest every time; he taught me that dignity and courage are easier to wear than self-absorption and fear.  He taught me that a lie, no matter how lily-white it may seem, is only a weapon you create against yourself.  He did his very, very best, and I am what I am today because of his honesty, his strength, and his love.  I hope someday that someone can say that about me.

Reviews

[Pryde Foltz]

Annie, what a beautiful tribute to your dad. I think he is one of those lucky folks who can truly say he did his best. I shared a little of your grief when you wrote of his passing; that is a tribute to your story-telling. I do think you have the makings of a much longer story here, especially when It think of the laundromat tale. An amazing coherent, touching and interesting write.

[K. Louis]

Honesty is here. I can relate on so many levels.

And on Sabbath--you hit all the right places.

[annie lee]

Thank you so much. I think Sabbath is a good piece.

[Donald]

This is a very moving tale. I can feel the love you poured into it. You care for your father as no one else could. congratulations on a well written tale.

[annie lee]

Thank you very much.