My dad was born 26 May 1921, probably at home, in the
middle-of-nowhere in Itawamba County ,
Mississippi Memphis ,
TN to Waco ,
TX
When Dad was 16, his father died of pneumonia. At the time, it was deadly; nowadays, you go
to the doctor, get pills and go home.
His older brothers was already out of the house, so it fell to my dad to
provide for the family. In depression-era
rural Miss’ippi, that meant farming. No,
not farming, just picking. The only
farmland he ever owned was a thirty-by-fifty plot in our back yard. So he enlisted in the Army, making corporal
before being discharged with a low-percentage disability due to a training
accident. To my shame, that’s about all
I know about his early life. But he was
a veteran, at a time when being in the army ran the risk of the bone-numbing
cold of Bastogne ,
or the mosquito-infested tropics of the southeast Pacific. He came home, got a job, married my mom; and
bought a house, a car, and a Chihuahua .
At age 44, he and Mom adopted a roughly-six-month-old named
Steven. I don’t know what my original
middle name was, but he gave me his; Arnold.
I hated that name. I grew up in
the mid-seventies, with Green Acres on TV.
When I graduated high school, I refused to let them say my middle name,
calling me “Steven A.” He was there, in
the audience (Mom was too sick that day to go).
He never said anything, but I sometimes wonder if that hurt him.
They brought me home (I was already in the family, a
grand-nephew or some such) and the Chihuahua
was pissed! He’d been the baby until I
came along. Mom said he used to snuggle
up against me and growl. Mom had babysat
kids before, but they always left and I was staying. I’m sure he thought: “I don’t know who this thing belongs to, but they need to come get it.”
Dad worked at Schering-Plough for 13 years, running the machine
that made Di-Gel
tablets. In the days before OSHA, the room he worked in was a fog of
chemicals, scarring his lungs and plaguing him with breathing problems for the
rest of his life. I saw him gasping for
breath many times as a kid. He had a nebulizer before they were
cool. After he left Plough, he drove an
OTR truck hauling metal cabinets for SanduskyMetal Cabinets.
I never played catch with my dad. He didn’t know how to be a kid. He never got to be one himself. Not to say he ignored me. We fished, we camped, we watched
rasslin’. And he never had a problem
telling me he loved me, and I knew he did.
In my early 20s, when I finally hit teenaged angst, we had plenty of
arguments. He actually kicked me in the
butt, once. In hindsight, I wish I would
have tried harder to understand why he fought with me, maybe we wouldn’t have
argued so much (not that it was a lot, but for all practical purposes “Spencer”
= stubborn).
So why do I write a Memorial Day message about someone whose
death had nothing to do with his service to our country? Because his death had nothing to do with his
service to our country. Because he came
home. Everything I just wrote about us
was possible because he came home. How
many stories like this never happened because someone didn’t come home? Mine did.
In part, because theirs didn’t.
