Remembering My Dad on Father's Day

You won't hear me often mention my parents, both dead before I fully reached adulthood.

But today, on Father's Day, I find myself thinking of my dad, who died when I was not quite five. Nicknamed "Bus" for reasons that completely escape me, my dad was a rebel and a jokester. He was also a decorated WWII hero whose mission was to go into detention camps and create enough commotion to distract the guards while as many prisoners were freed as possible. For years after his death, people I didn't know would come up to me and tell me about how my father freed either them or some loved one of theirs from a Japanese PoW camp.

My dad loved horses and loved riding. When the war ended - and he ventured into Nagasaki just days after we dropped the A bomb there - he participated in the first rodeo ever to be held in that country.

My dad developed a strong and lifelong admiration for the Japanese people as a result of his tour of duty there. Still under five, I was treated to stories about how the Japanese, in the moments after a bomb was dropped in a field, would already be back in the field cleaning away the fragments and trying to repair the damage. But throughout my childhood, I also had to sleep in a room where "the ceremonial sword he took off a dead Nip" was hanging in the closet.

Although injured in the war and left with bouts of malaria that continued right to his death just two days short of his 40th birthday, he tried his damnedest to enlist in the Korean War even though he had a houseful of kids at home, and three more yet to be born.

Losing a leg when a horse kicked the crap out of him, he was often at home when I was two or three, and my father taught me to read and write well ahead of where most kids that age could do so. He didn't tolerate fools well and I learned not to make too many mistakes, even at three.

He was also a real prankster, delighting in tying rattlesnakes up in burlap sacks and hanging them in low hanging branches to scare people. He also loved taking things from people and then selling those same items back to them after convincing them that he'd found the items elsewhere. Then, once he had the money, he would tell them the truth and hand back the money, delighting in the anger they showed.

He met my mother once he saw her, the new girl in town recently transplanted from the same section of Vermont where I now live, decided he "wanted her as his girl" and then proceeded to torture her by bouncing a basketball repeatedly off her head. They married when they were both 16, deciding that the way to be together was to get my mother "knocked up" so their parents would have to agree.

My dad - a farm boy - left school after 8th grade although his teachers said he was brilliant and could go far. He read voraciously, and was given a great dictionary by a teacher who said my dad always asked the smartest questions.

Dad was also an ardent "good ole boy" Republican, becoming so angered at my mother when she voted for Kennedy in 1960 that he told her he would never again take her to vote. He didn't, but perhaps because he was dead a year before Kennedy was assassinated, never again getting the chance to vote himself.

When I was born, Dad was so sure I would be a boy that he already had cowboy boots made up with the initials JWC Jr because I was to be named for him. He had also bet serious money to his friends in what seemed like a safe bet considering he had 6 sons and just one daughter already. He was so disappointed when I came out a girl that he refused to help name me. My mother caught his despair and eventually let a nurse at the hospital name me just so they could fill out the birth certificate.

My last memory of my dad was a few days after I started kindergarten. He awoke one morning with terrible confusion. When I went in to see him before school, my dad - whose memory of recent events had suddenly disappeared - pushed me away and ordered me out of his room. He had just one daughter, he said, referring to my much older sister. This was the first of three brain hemorrhages that would land him in the VA hospital until he died four months later, a few days shy of his birthday and Christmas. But I was too young to understand, and I threw myself into his arms, begging him to stop playing his game. I never saw him again although I used to cherish a letter he wrote home from the VA hospital telling Mom to "give Little Cusses" a hug and a kiss for him.

I was "Little Cusses" because I picked up the colorful language he used when referring to that [bleepity bleep] JFK.

This long winded recital - probably the first time since his death that I've sat down and thought about all of this, is actually my way of realizing how much who I am has been shaped by a man who died more than 40 years ago.

My love of writing and reading was a gift from my dad, who taught me to question everything.

My passion for practical jokes came from him (although you won't catch me tying up rattlesnakes).

Raised on stories of war, I became ardently opposed to the war.

Taught to shoot by him, I have come to hate guns.

Hearing the stories of the Japanese he admired, I've come to realize that people can bridge the distance in a war even when our leaders demand bloodshed, that it's just too easy to brand the other side the "enemy" and we should refrain from doing it if we want to be better humans.

I suspect, were my dad alive today, he would not be too happy with many of the choices I've made: I've sacrificed financially and career wise to "do the right thing". I'm not a Republican nor do I believe in voting a straight ticket just for party loyalty. He would not like my decision not to marry or have children and he would probably question my choice of writing for a vocation. And he'd absolutely hate my blog, I think.

But with all of that, I still love and admire a man I knew for just a very short time, and say thank you for all the gifts he gave me that helped me become the person I am today.