I’ve been thinking about my father a lot lately. A couple of days ago a champagne-colored Honda Goldwing just like the one my Dad rode until he was nearly 80 turned the corner while I was walking the dog and for one split second I saw my father as I had seen him so many times. One day last week, just before I learned that I was to be thrown out with the trash (the very day before in fact) I woke up from a dream in tears. In my dream my family had all been together somewhere and suddenly everyone was leaving. My dad and I were left behind. As I watched them go I started to cry – and that is when I woke up. Dad, you see, died on the first day of spring last year. Yesterday would have been his 89th birthday. (see Dad’s Birthday Cake)
Dad, Mom & me.
Once upon a time I was the apple of Dad’s eye. He was a pilot who had served on the USS Wasp in WWII. Every Saturday morning until I was 7 or so we went flying in a two seater plane. In those days people still looked up to the sky when a plane flew overhead. We would fly up to my grandfather’s and wave down at him working in the garden, then turn and fly up to the farm and waggle our wings at the cousins a bit. Dad would fly up into the clouds where I would reach to catch a handful. He loved to do stunt flying, so sooner or later we would do a barrel roll or a loop-the-loop. (When I was a teen, the boys were always a bit perturbed that the most dreaded of rides at the fair couldn’t get the slightest squeal from me!) Eventually, of course, we would come back to earth.
During those years Friday and Saturday nights often found us at my grandparents’. Gram would serve up homemade pizza (no pizza parlor in the entire town back then!), and while the women visited in the kitchen or watched Lawrence Welk in the living room the men in the family sat on the back porch and told war stories. Uncle Percy had served in WWI & been gassed. Uncle John had been in the Army and had fought his way up the boot of Italy. The men talked about far places, strange sights, history being made before their eyes. Exciting things, some fascinating, others tragic. I loved to hang out under the table and listen. Every now and then my dad or one of my uncles would let me sneak a tiny sip of beer. I learned about ice bergs of the North Atlantic and the jungles of Panama. I was an eyewitness to the sinking of the Bismark and the air war over England. Why they told a little girl these things I will never know. Certainly today nobody would even consider allowing a child to listen even the smallest part of the tales I heard first hand. At least not without a thick coat of whitewash and a large helping of honey. That is, however, where I acquired my love of history. Dad and his stories.
Dad was a brilliant man, the sort who was more than competent at anything he set his hand to. His first real job had been working in a bakery, where he had learned to decorate cakes. It was Dad who made the cakes for my school parties. He could chop wood, build a house, lay a floor 25 different ways, tie every knot you’ve ever heard of as well as a good many that you haven’t, and change a tire by flashlight in the middle of the still-unpaved Alcan Highway, the only road to Alaska. He always whistled while he worked, often this
By the time I reached my teenage years dad and I had stopped flying. We weren’t very good friends anymore and didn’t get along most of the time. Mom used to say we were too much alike. Perhaps that is true. My father was a brilliant, generous man, the kind you either loved or hated. The last thing that he said to me was that he loved me. He knew that I had stopped believing him long before. Too much water over the dam. Too many hard words. Too much betrayal of trust. Too many things that could never be undone.
My daughters and I did not go to Dad’s funeral, held months after his death. One of my sisters insisted on a service he didn’t want, conducted by a minister who had never met him representing a church he didn’t believe in, complete with the military honor guard that he had decided against. Utterly meaningless. Instead, we drove along the back roads of New England one gorgeous fall day, thinking of Dad, speaking about how much he would have loved that single beautiful day. That was the last time of significance, I think, that we were together as a family.
Dad, I loved you too. Still do, wherever you are. Wish you were here.
May 11, 2010 at 07:45
Nice tribute to dad!
My father was a WWII vet. In the Navy and partcipated in DDay plus 1. He was a baker too. He lives, but has slipped away into another world.
You write well Granny
Think of submitting this story to a paper around Father’s Day.
May 11, 2010 at 08:08
Thanks for sharing this Granny! This is a wonderful tribute and memory to share.
May 11, 2010 at 08:35
Thanks Gina. I do love to write, though I suspect I might still be “iffy” about submitting it anywhere. When I went back to college the first time (mothers of the multitudes who waited too late and have little money sometimes take a while to get it done) I had an English professor who refused to give me back a single thing that I wrote for her after she found out that I mostly burned whatever I wrote. Too bad, because at least one of those essays even I think was close to brilliant. Topic: Why I want a husband/wife.
It is so sad to see the WWII generation passing. They witnessed so much. And too often said too little. My Dad was involved in a number of things that to this very day are still classified and others that have made the history books only very recently. I was very surprised when I went to live on the Navajo Reservation to learn that even that Navajo were just learning about the famous Code Talkers, without whom we might not have won the war in the Pacific. I had known of them all my life. My favorite story, though, is the tale of how my Dad became the first person from his home town to die in World War II.
The USS Wasp had been up at Scapa Flow, the big UK naval base up in the very north of Scotland. Down at the entrance to the Mediterranean the battle for Malta was heating up and the British needed planes, so a whole bunch of spare planes and flight crews crammed onto the Wasp and they headed down to Malta to deliver the planes. Meanwhile, the Germans were looking for them. In an effort to trick the US into releasing the whereabouts of the carrier, the Germans announced they had sunk the Wasp. And of course, the US government could not dispute that without giving the game away. Instead of returning to England, the Wasp headed back stateside, putting in up at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard instead of their home port down in Virginia.
Portsmouth Naval Shipyard is not too terribly far from my Dad’s hometown, so his skipper gave him a 48 hour pass and he hopped the train home, half sick with a stomach bug of some sort. (The food in England was pretty awful at the time – but that is another tale.) He didn’t understand why the cabbie kept giving him strange looks and was even more surprised to find the yard overflowing with people in the middle of the week when he arrived at “the folks”. Then he learned that his mother was prostrate in bed, his parents had been informed of his death and he had arrived at home smack dab in the middle of his own funeral! No wonder the poor cabbie was confused!
A while back he gave me the newspaper announcing his death. Perhaps I’ll come across it in trying to sort through stuff. I did get this story and others on tape though. Tried to get him to write a book for years, right up until the time he could not type anymore, and finally started deliberately getting him to tell his stories and taping them. Someday I’ll probably write them to disc and send them off to the Smithsonian, where they are making a big collection of oral history from the vets who served.
I’m sorry about your father.
May 11, 2010 at 10:21
She should have given you back your writing. It is yours to do with as you wish. Many famous writers burned their stuff, or had stiplulations in their will that unpublished material be burned. You are not alone.
Still, consider submitting this. It is published and read now.