Who I Remember and Give Thanks To on Memorial Day

This Memorial Day, I’d like to share a post I wrote for Memorial Day 2010. I’m grateful, and thankful, to all the men and women who have served our country.  And, I am especially proud and thankful to all those in my family who have served.

********

Though I was not an “Army Brat,” moving from base to base, state to state, country to country, I am a child of the Army. Much of my life has been shaped by the military, and by the people who’ve served our country. It would be thoughtless of me to let this Memorial Day go by without mentioning (and thanking) those special people.

My mom joined the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) on her 21st birthday. The year was 1944, and, at that time, for her to join, she had to be 21. She enlisted for “the duration of the war, plus 6-months.” At the time, no one knew how long the war was going to last. During the war, my mom worked on the bombing range, working with the surveyors, working to make the bombs more accurate in striking their targets. The war lasted less than a year after she enlisted. Perhaps, if she hadn’t met my father, she might have done more Active Duty time. Instead, she did 20 years as a Reserve Officer. Because my dad was the one who was Active Duty, my mom had to go from base to base, and, thus, her time in the Reserves was varied, taking whatever duty she could at the local post.

My father joined the Navy during WWII, though he eventually switched to the Army. You could say that my dad gave his life for his country, though not in the typical “on the field of battle” way. My dad was a medic, and was on one of the medial frigates during the testing of the Atomic Bomb, at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. At the time, it was assumed they were a safe distance from the site of the explosion, but, in later years, as more and more was learned about radiation and it’s effects, they were indeed in harm’s way. On my dad’s ship, they all stood on deck and watched the explosion, in just their uniforms; no special equipment protected them. As the years went by, more and more of the men on those ships died of cancer and other diseases which, it was later determined, were all caused by the exposure to the radiation. My dad died of brain cancer, in 1980, at the age of 55.

Both of my parents were done with their military service by the time I came around (my mom was 42, dad 41, when I was born) so I missed out on the life of a military child. Which, perhaps, might be a good thing. I was painfully shy as a kid, and had a tough enough time making friends living in the same place all my life. Moving around every few years might have been even worse, though, maybe it might have helped my shyness. I guess I’ll never know.

The military was an important part of both my parent’s families. My father was one of 5 boys, and my mom (who was an only child), grew up with her 4 cousins, and they all felt like they were brothers and sisters. Out of the 10 then, 9 were in the military. All 4 of my dad’s brothers served: two in the navy and two in the army (and my dad, who was in both branches.) On my mom’s side, of the 3 who served, they were all army. I’m quite proud of all of them.

There’s quite a history among them all. My mom was among the early number of women who were allowed to serve, helping to pave the way for women to serve in the capacities they do today. My dad, as I said, was at the Atomic Bomb testing. I have an uncle who was among those who landed on the beaches of Normandy, another landed at Iwo Jima. I have an uncle who served under General George Patton. I have an uncle who won two purple hearts. Two of my uncles were in the Infantry.

Of course, growing up with a military family, one becomes friends with other military families. My mom’s two best friends were military wives, one’s husband was in the 10th Mountain Division during WWII, and the other served two tours of duty in Vietnam. A non-family member (though he’s quite dear to me) was wounded on the landing at Iwo Jima. And, then there are the children and their children, and I know veterans of Korea, Vietnam, Desert Shield, Desert Storm.

My parents were never pushing for me to join the military. Of course, I was 14 when my father died, so I don’t think I was ever old enough for him to encourage to join. My mom, while never pressuring me, did like to mention that it was a good place to learn new skills, and find out who you are. There was a time when I had thought about it, though, being gay makes you think even more seriously about it (especially back in the 80s, before being gay was fashionable.) Then, of couse, there is my bad eye, with it’s blind spot and 20/200 vision which may have kept me out (or at least away from a gun) and, then, when I was 22 I found out that I was HIV+, and, in the early days of AIDS, we weren’t accepted most places. So, any thought I had about the military pretty much ended. I would like to have joined, to continue a family tradition, and to make my parents proud. She’s never actually said so, but, I think, mom’s a bit disappointed that I didn’t join (though, in her own way, she understands about my being gay and the HIV thing keeping me out.)

It was probably for the best that I didn’t join. I’m not sure I’m military material. I am, however, very proud, and very thankful to be surrounded by so many who have been in the military. I am humbled and honored to know so many people who have served in our country’s military. For those in my family, for those friends, and for those soldiers I don’t even know, on this Memorial Day, I offer my sincerest thanks for all that you do.

Death Of A Child, Birth Of An Adult

Close your eyes and try to remember what you were doing in 1980. Maybe you were celebrating the birth of a new decade, the election of a new presidential administration, the new things the eighties promised to bring. Maybe your life went on as usual, the newness of the decade not really meaning anything to you.  Maybe you were doing something uneventful.  Perhaps your life was changing.

In 1980 I became an adult.  My adolescence ended one year after it began.  For me, 1980 would be a disembarkment from child to adult.

On February 1, I celebrated my fourteenth birthday.  My day of celebration was spent in a hospital waiting room, waiting for news about my father.  I passed the day pacing the room, wondering what the future of the next few days would bring.  But, by their very nature, hospital waiting rooms provide no answers, only more questions.  That day, my birthday, was the beginning of the culmination of events that had begun almost a year earlier.

The Spring of 1979 was a time when my family (my mother, father, brother and I learned the lesson of living for the present, not waiting for tomorrow.  As the flowers were beginning to poke through the soil, we were dealing with the aftermath of the operation that removed the majority of a malignant grapefruit-sized tumor from my father’s brain.  While the leaves were beginning to populate the trees, we were helping my dad re-learn to walk, re-learn to write, re-learn to use his right hand.  As the April sun was conquering winter’s death, we were learning to accept the fact that my father had five to eleven months to live.

Spring melted into Summer. Summer ran into Fall. Fall rushed into Winter. Before we realized it, my father’s five to eleven months had dwindled down to the final two.

January 1980 brought with it a miracle: Dad’s cancer was in remission.  He could write again and had regained the full use of his right hand.  My dad walked with the vigor of a man half of his fifty-five years.  But the miracle was to be short lived.

Pages: 1 2

A Pair Of Silent P Stories, And The Krautbuger That Started It All

I knew mom’s recovery from her eyelid surgery was going well when she asked to go for a krautburger ,something she likes doing 2 or three times a week.

.

A krautburger (a.k.a. runza, bierock) is a yeast dough pocket stuffed with beef, onions & cabbage

.

.

While we were eating and chatting, I was looking at mom’s eyes, trying to remember the medical term for her (formerly) droopy eyelids.  Ptosis, she said.  That’s it.  That was the word.  Once it was introduced into conversation it seemed like a natural progression to talk of spelling.

Mom, former school teacher that she is, was reminded of a time when one of her students asked her how to spell something. Mom replied with the Standard Teacher Answer, “Look it up in the dictionary.”  The girl returned to her seat.  When mom glanced at her a few minutes later, she saw that the girl’s eyes were filled with tears.  At that moment mom realized that the Standard Teacher Answer is flawed — if one doesn’t know how to spell a word to begin with, the chances of finding said word are questionable.  Sure, certain words you can certain words you can find easily — is occasion spelled with one c or two? or is it two c’s and two s’s (I have to look this up all the time).  But ptosis? If you were unaware of the silent p you would never be able to find it in the pages of your Webster.

The conversation played in my mind as we were driving home, and I recalled that I had a pair of silent p stories.

.

Silent P, Story One: “A Brief Interlude.”

.

Mrs Campbell: intelligent, classy, wildly liberal, wickedly funny.  She was the 70-year old grandmother of my first lover, Will.  I met and fell in love with Will when I was 18.  The fact that he was twelve years older than me isn’t really relevant to the story other than to provide a glimpse into my 18 year old psyche — I was looking for someone to take care of me, maybe a surrogate father figure, and I was looking for a way to get away from home.  Will was just what I was looking for: a man with a job.  The fact that the probable reason I got involved with him was that we spent all of our free time having the most intensely amazing sex isn’t really relevant either as I suspect that when you are 18, any sex at all seems intensely amazing. I mention him only because the story is about his grandmother

Mrs Campbell was the most fabulous 70-year old woman I have ever known.  She enthralled me instantly, and I knew that I would do anything to be a part of her circle; there was a sort of “Pick me! Pick me!” feeling that she created within people, leaving behind broken hearts among those not lucky enough to be picked.  I’ve never been entirely sure if she didn’t pick me, or if Will just kept us apart because he was jealous — he was jealous of most anyone I came in contact with; he was even more jealous of all the imaginary people I was supposed to have come in contact with.  (As I write this, a thought I had not had before popped into my mind.  What does it say about a relationship when you mourn the loss of a lover’s grandmother more than you mourned the loss of the lover?)

One afternoon we were having lunch at Mrs Campbell’s house, when the phone rang (this was pre-callerID and pre-cellphone).  She answered the phone, and, from the sound of it, the call was some sort of business call. Toward the end of the conversation, she said the following: “Yes, that’s right. Campbell. No. Campbell with a p. The p is silent, as in swimming.” I very nearly became intimately acquainted with the silent p, as I was laughing so hard.  I heard her utter this witticism a few more times during the three-and-a-half years we were together — Will and I, not Mrs Campbell and I. Though I think that had it been Mrs C. and I, we’d still be together.  Of course, she’d be in her 90s by now.  I always laughed when I heard her talk about the silent p in swimming — and, I laughed hysterically at the people who had no idea what she meant.

.

Silent P, Story Two: “Longer Than An Interlude.”

.

Flashback: Seventh Grade English Class. We’d been instructed to write an essay of some sort, one of those “What I did this summer” types of assignments.  I do not recall what the actual assignment was, though there is a vague memory that I was writing something to do with my father.  What I remember is that I wanted to use the word pneumonia, but I had no idea of how to spell it.  This particular teacher was big on the Standard Teacher Answer, “Look it up in the dictionary.”   So I, being a diligent student (at least at that point in time), got up from my desk, made my way to the teacher’s desk, and grabbed the big Webster’s dictionary that she kept enshrined on the corner of her desk like some sort of religious reliquary.

Returning to my desk with the Holy Grail, I began my search for ‘pneumonia.” I spent at least ten minutes searching for the word. I tried new-monia, nu-monia, and na-monia first. No luck. So I tried looking under no-monia. Nope. Then I thought for a minute. Knew-monia seemed far fetched but worth a try. Yep. Far fetched. I reviewed my thoughts and wondered if it was the monia part where I was wrong. So I tried new-moania and new-moan-ya. That wasn’t it either.I tried the various monia spellings with all of the various new spellings I could think of, even going so far as to try moan-ja, and feeling rather pleased with my cleverness (even though it didn’t provide the correct spelling). Then, suddenly, the thought struck me! I flipped the pages of the dictionary, feeling sure that I had the correct spelling this time: gnu-moania! Not it. I was crushed and at a loss.

Frustrated, I brought the dictionary back to the teacher’s desk and asked, “How do you spell pneumonia?”  Instead of offering up the spelling, or even a hint, as she had watched me take the dictionary, she said simply, “Look it up in the dictionary.” I’m fairly certain my eyebrows went up, and the tone of my voice went right up with the eyebrows. “I’ve been trying, that’s why I took the dictionary, but I can’t find the word.” It’s been thirty years, but I can still recall the look of distaste she gave me, as if I had just farted in her face, the tone of her voice matching the look on her face,”Then I suggest you stick to writing about things you can spell.”  That was definitly not the proper response.  I walked back to my desk, shoved my things into my backpack, and slung it over my shoulder.  I grabbed the essay, walked back to her desk, and with a flouish threw my unfinished essay at her, saying in a very loud voice “You can take this essay and shove it so far up your tight ass that it’ll take an a big fucking enema to wash it out!”  As I turned to walk out, she stood up and grabbed my arm, which, quite frankly, is not something you should ever do to a person who is angrily walking away.  My hand involuntarily became a fist, and my arm came around in a swing as I spun around to face her, somehow finding control in the last few moments, a control that kept me from doing something I’d never done to anyone before. “Get your fucking hand off my arm.”  She looked at me, stunned, although her grip tightened on my arm. I knew I was trembling, and the control I’d found a moment earlier was starting to slip.  I’ve never wanted to hit someone so badly, as I did in that moment. “Take your fucking hand off of my arm.” We glared at each other in silence for a few long seconds. I had an awareness that every eye in the room was glued to the melodrama being played out before their eyes. I’m sure there wasn’t a sound in the room until, finally, I said in a small, deadly voice, “Take your fucking hand off of me you stupid bitch!” (Was that a gasp I heard from somewhere in the back of the room?)

She let go.

I stormed out of the classroom.

I remember having this even more irrational moment of anger when I realized that the doors had such hinge-control that I couldn’t slam the damn thing on my way out!

.

Interestingly, incidents like this have a way of reaching your parents before you can get home. My mother was none to happy with me. Memory says that I was grounded for two weeks.  Only when I was older did my mom discover that being grounded was not something I thought of as punishment.  Being grounded was supposed to mean that I couldn’t go anywhere, except with my family, which, considering I had no friends that I did anything with, was not an inconvenience for me.  Being grounded meant I could watch no television, and, I had to stay in my room — this was the best part of being grounded!  I’d go to my room when I got home from school, where I’d usually finish my homework before dinner.  After dinner and chores, I was to go to my room.  I spent the rest of the “being grounded” evening reading. As someone who has loved books since he learned how to read, being confined to my room with nothing to do but read…well, I am unable to think of anything that is less of a punishment than this.  There was, however, a punishment handed out that I did indeed consider punishment: I had to apologize to my teacher.  The apology was given, though, even now, it’s still not really meant.  Yes, I will admit to a quite dramatic overreaction, but, with as condescending as she was, I’m not sorry I called her a stupid bitch.  I am sorry for embarrassing my parents, for disappointing them, and for adding some unneeded stress to what was already a stressful time for us all.

My father was dying.

Lest you think I’m just a raging, violent man, an understanding of my life at this time is in order. This incident took place during a time in my life that can only be called A Very Bad Point. In the six months prior to my dramatic departure from English class, my father had gone from being the solid, dependable man he’d always been to being a man who was dying.

It began, as so many stories do, with a phone call in the middle of the night.  The voice on the phone told my mom that dad was in the ER.  My dad had left his day job, driven to his night job, parked the car in the employee parking lot that was a couple of blocks from the building he worked in.  While walking to the building, he developed serious chest pains and shortness of breath.  Thankfully, the building he worked in was a hospital building.  He didn’t have a heart attack, but the walk on a bitterly cold December night brought his heart problems to light.  A treadmill test later in the day confirmed it all, and within a few hours he was in surgery, a quadruple bypass.  This was in December 1978, back in a time when surgeries were bigger, and recovery times were longer.

By April of 1979, his recovery from the heart surgery was going better than expected.  His scar healed faster than expected, and his energy returned quickly.  He was the picture of a very healthy man.

Until that April morning when he had a seizure.

We knew there was going to be snow overnight, and, when the alarm clock woke us, my little brother came into my room, crawled into the bed with me, and we listened to my radio, and let out a whoop of delight when we heard that school had been cancelled.  Keep in mind, this is Denver, and we’re used to snow, so there needs to be a good deal of snow on the ground for schools to close.  We also heard that mom’s school was going to be closed.  We laid there for awhile, trying to decide if we wanted to sleep or get up, when all of a sudden mom literally threw the door to my bedroom open. “Get up. Get out and shovel the walks. Now.”

This was a surprise.

Yes, we knew we’d need to shovel, but, we’d never been made to go out so early.

“But mom,” I began, protesting.

“Go. Now.” She left.

David and I looked at each other.  Mom had said her few words in such a tone that there was no doubt that we needed to shovel. Now.

We shoveled down the walk, from the door to the street, and, just as we were starting on the sidewalk that ran parallel to the street, a fire truck and two ambulances pulled up to the house. I stood there, stunned, and watched as all these men got out of the vehicles, some with bags of gear, two others hauled out a stretcher, and headed up the walk to the house.  I thought for a moment there was a mistake, until I noticed that mom was standing at the door, holding it open for the men to enter our home.  I remember standing there, watching all the men go in the house, and watching the door close.  I remember looking at David.  We both stood there, not sure of what to do.  The moment passed, and we both dropped shovels and ran into the house.

“What’s going on?” I demanded of mom, who was standing in the doorway to their bedroom.  Behind her I could see the men all bent over my father, though I couldn’t see what exactly they were doing.

“Dad had a seizure. That’s all I know.”  She turned back to watch what they were doing to dad.

In a matter of minutes he was on a stretcher and being wheeled out of the house, and into the ambulance.  Mom told me to watch David, and she got into the ambulance.  David and I stood there and watched everyone get back into the emergency vehicles and drive off.

We didn’t know what to do, so we did the only thing we could think of: finish shoveling the sidewalks.

In the days to come, we learned that dad had a brain tumor; we sat for hours in a waiting room while they operated to remove the tumor;m and we learned the worst: it was cancer; it was serious; it meant he had five to eleven months to live (he was to make it to the tenth month).

My outburst in English class happened about a month after this, perhaps just before school was to let out for the summer, the summer that was probably to be the last summer I’d spend with my father.

I see you nodding, and hear you saying “Uh huh, anger displacement. The trivial event in class was really a reaction to a much larger problem.”

I see you nodding, and I hear you.  I’ll give you full credit, even though it’s an easy answer.

I’ll give you a hint too: if you need to look up displacement in the dictionary, you don’t need to worry about the p in swimming.