[footfootfoot]

My dad was born in 1924 the second child of a family eventually comprising nine children.

Once, when he was about 6 or 7, his mom threw out an old mattress and he made it into an impromptu trampoline. While my dad was jumping up and down a ragpicker road up in his cart and asked if the mattress was being thrown out. My dad said yes, so the ragpicker asked him “would you watch this mattress while I go and get a bigger truck to carry it in?” My dad said sure.

After a bit some friends came along and my dad joined them in some game and they all ran off somewhere to play. When my dad came home he saw the ragpicker sitting on the stoop in tears because someone else had come along and taken the mattress.

I just learned this story form my aunt, who heard it from my dad forty years after the fact. He still wished he could go back and do something to help that ragpicker. This event seems to have shaped or defined a value in my father. He has always been not only generous, but also a man of his word, taking his promises very serioulsy. I don’t doubt it was his empathy at seeing that ragpicker in such distress that made him so responsible.

Being poor, growing up during the depression didn’t dampen the enthusiasm and charm of a boy who rarely got to go out and play. Although his mom was a strict and punishing disciplinarian, and the nuns at school who weren’t sadistic, were just plain cruel, he still developed a deep and cheerful sense of humor.

When he was seventeen, he came home and his sister warned him that the truant officer had been by to rat on him. Knowing what lay in store for him, he went directly to the Navy recruitment office and lied about his age and tried to sign up. They rejected him on account of a few bad teeth. He went home and pulled them out with a pair of pliers and then returned and this time enlisted with the marines, rather than face his mother’s wrath.

After boot camp, which he described as “practically a vacation” “I never met a drill sergeant who was even half as scary as my mother”, he was in the second division. During my own childhood when I was naturally curious of his time in the war, he always played it off as saying “he never saw any action”, “it was really boring, just sitting around playing cards all day”. When asked about his purple heart he said “Oh they were giving those things out like gum. Everybody got one. I was standing on a card table changing a light bulb, and I fell down and dislocated my elbow.” (He did have a very odd looking elbow) A few years ago I found out from my sister he’d been shot in the leg probably while he was “not seeing any action” on Saipan or Tinian. Later he was transferred to the fourth division to “mop up” on Okinawa. (Presumably this was after the original fourth division was wiped out.)

I had to piece this together from fragments of evidence from a man who was rather reticent about discussing his military experiences. At the height of my fascination with war, and WWII, my dad looked me in the eye and stated if I even thought about joining the service, he’d break both of my legs. My dad was the kind of guy who never threatened. He made promises and kept them. At the time I was very young, maybe twelve or thirteen, so I hadn’t really thought about joining up anyway, and I didn’t see what the big deal was afterall, if all you did was sit around and play cards. It sounded a lot like camp. His sister told me just this week that everyone idolized his so much, they wanted to be just like him. His older sister was a sergeant in the women’s marines in WWII, during the Korean war his younger brother turned down a scholarship at Annapolis because he wanted to be a Marine too. His youngest brother was a green beret in Viet Nam, and another sister also joined the Corps.

Probably seeing how many people joined up in order to be like him, he wanted to nip it in the bud.

I’m going to jump ahead about 50 years here.

He’s had more than his share of disappointments in his life, despite his sorrows, he never became bitter. When his grandson was finally born (the inchling) you could tell that the whole journey was worth it to him.

Last Monday, at 82, he walked the two miles to the dentist to get his “constitutional” in. In the last couple of years he’s still done his two miles a day, but has been a bit winded on the hilly sections. Tuesday evening he was feeling out of breath and drove himself to the hospital, parked his car, and checked in. The first time he’d seen a doctor since 1970.

“Not wanting to be a bother” he asked the hospital not to contact anyone. After looking at his EKG, and echocardiogram, the doctor was surprised that my dad was still alive. He thinks my dad had probably had a heart attack days or even weeks earlier. My dad complained of a bit of heartburn and trouble breathing. Other than that he was in no pain, “beyond the effects of the hospital food”, he joked. They were going to put a catheter in and run some more tests the next morning.

Just before lunch I got a call from the hospital telling me that my dad had died.
They were more subtle about it than that. When I met the doctor he told me how tough my dad was. We all knew that. Fer crissakes, he pulled his own friggin teeth out! We had a lot of other words for it: stubborn, willful, tenacious, hard headed, and sometimes just “Dad” would say it all.

He was a charmer, when you met him you felt that you were someone special, you knew where you stood. He saw people for who he knew they could be.

Despite knowing him my whole life, I feel like I don’t even know who he was.