My Dad's Birthday

Today my Dad would have been 72 years old. It seems like a lifetime already since he died this summer and than again it seems like it was only yesterday that we were all sitting in his hospital room with him. His last week he never gained consciousness but he was never left alone. He would have been surprised by all the people that spent time in that room visiting him. He was always the type of man that thought he didn't make much of an impression on others. His hospital room was literally packed with people, at one point I counted almost two dozen people in the room, wanting to say their goodbyes and offer any comfort they could. Aunts and cousins were spending the night, not wanting to go home. Friends drove up from Mississippi and New Orleans to see him. Nurses from the other part of the wing where had been transferred out of once it was evident he wasn't going to recover came by to visit with him. One nurse broke down in tears after seeing him and talking to him. He might have been surprised by all the people he touched, but I wasn't.

This month, next week actually, also marks the wedding anniversary of my parents. This would have been their 49th year together. In those 49 years I don't think they hardly ever spent any time apart, except for when my Dad was in the Navy and had to go out on his two weeks on a ship. But otherwise they were always together. No matter what they were always there for each other, even if it was just running down to the store and my Dad would sit in the car while my Mom went in to shop. Or when my Mom went to the Mall to do some shopping my Dad would take a book with him and sit on one of the benches while my Mom hit store after store. Don't get me wrong, they weren't all lightness and happiness, they could fight. Boy, do I remember the fights they had when I was growing up. Sometimes the simplest thing could set one of them off. I remember being at Six Flags on vacation and they got in a big fight in the middle of the park. But they always made up. I remember walking in on them kissing and hugging so many times when I was a kid.

My Dad never graduated high school. It was something he was always ashamed of, but at the times circumstances stood in his way. His Dad abused him, and it was after one of these beatings that my Dad left home to join the Navy. My Dad rarely talked about his problems he had at home and never when my brother and I were smaller. His parents lived in New Jersey and except for a little time when my brother was born up there we never lived up North, but he would bring us up there to visit our grandparents as often as possible. He let us know his Father as a nice old man who was our Grandfather and not as the person that drove him out of his own house with beatings. In later years I think my Dad forgave my Grandfather as much as you can for something like that.

My Dad accomplished what many in his situation cannot. Children that are abused have a strong tendency to grow up as abusers. It's all they know of love so for them it doesn't seem strange that they abuse their own kids. My Dad had a temper and my brother and I got our share of whippings, my parents were never the type to spare the rod, but we were never abused. We were never beat, a whipping on the butt is not abuse. I remember once my Dad went to smack me on the butt and somehow with me trying to move out of the way he accidentally hit me on the side of the face. His face turned white and he was immediately sorry, he would never have struck one of us on the face. He couldn't believe he had done it, even though it wasn't his fault, it was mine for trying to move out of his reach. My Dad broke the cycle of abuse. This was something we never realized as children but as adults when we knew the story we realized how important and hard this was.

As I said before my Dad never graduated high school and always thought he wasn't as smart as other people. My Dad was a self taught man. He loved to read. He was always reading a book. He was always trying to learn things. He made sure my brother and I knew how important it was to have an education. When I was a kid he enrolled me in a book club for kids, I don't think I was more than five or six at the time. Reading was always one of my greatest strengths. I remember being tested when I was in sixth grade for reading skills and I was already reading at college level. My Dad never tried to censor what we read. I never had to ask if I could check a certain book out of the library, it I could it read I was allowed to. I remember once when a babysitter, I was probably around 8 or 9 - my parents would get someone to watch us when they went out at night - and the babysitter, probably a high school girl saw a book I was reading and was surprised that my parents allowed me to read it. I don't remember the book, but I just remember her commenting that she wouldn't be allowed to read that book and she was a lot older than we were.

I learned tolerance from my Dad. I grew up in the sixties and seventies. When Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis we were stationed at the Naval Air Base in Memphis. My Dad had shore patrol the night of the murder. He spent that week in downtown Memphis patrolling the city. There were lots of changes going on during this time and a lot of white people were not happy with these changes. My Dad never used foul language or the N-word to describe black people. They were just people as far as he was concerned. You don't think about things like that, but years later you realize how much of an impression they make on a young mind and how they affect how you think about other people.

My parents shared the work load at home equally. I guess that's how I've come to my acceptation of an equality of the sexes. The last ten years or so while my Dad was in the Navy he would get home around three or four in the afternoon. My Mom normally didn't get off work till five or six. So by the time she got home dinner would be cooked and waiting for her arrival. My Dad found he loved to cook, so much so that my Mom ended up rarely cooking. My Mom recently made a comment when I was up there visiting that she had to learn to cook again, she hadn't needed to while my Dad was alive. But it went beyond cooking, my Dad would clean and vacuum, but that was always an iffy proposition with my Mom who's a neat freak cause no one cleaned like she expected. My Mom learned how to build things because that was what my Dad liked to do, so it wasn't unusual to see them both out putting up a fence or building a porch. They build the porch for my home and after it was completed someone offered them a job building porches for their company.

My Dad loved to build. He loved wood. As a child he build bunk beds for my brother and me. There wasn't much he wouldn't try his hand at building. He could spend hours in his shop building things. I don't think he was ever happier than he was when he had built something.

My Dad was a short man. It was always a joke with us. He would always say that dynamite came in small packages and I would respond with so did silly putty. Even though I always knew my Dad wasn't taller than 5'4" when I think of him I still imagine him towering over me, who's 6', and me looking up at him. For me my Dad will always be a giant among men.