Father's Day

I've been listening to songs and stories about dads on NPR all day. My father died in 1983, and he was such a reserved man--at least around his kids--that I didn't really know him very well. When we would ask him what he wanted for Father's Day he would always say "Peace and quiet."

I suppose all little girls think their dads are the handsomest men ever, but my dad was really good-looking--tall, long-boned, high cheekbones, fine features, blue eyes, dark hair, fair skin so he burned every summer when he started working in the garden.

He was in the Marine Corps during WWII, and I'm trying to find out more about that. I know he was with the First Marines and fought at Guadalcanal, that he earned a sharp-shooters medal, and that he trained as a radio operator. I have a picture of him in his dress blues, and he's so young--just 18, I think, right out of high school--and so pretty. I have his uniform; I need to find out how to preserve it. I don't have the bits of brass that go on it--the Corps eagle and globe for the hat, for instance.

I didn't find out until after he died that he'd been a Boy Scout. An Eagle Scout, I think. We got a letter from one of his boyhood friends about a trip they'd taken down the river one summer, camping on islands, fishing and shooting game, and swimming. That was a revelation. My younger brother says he heard that Dad had been really outgoing with his friends at work and the kind of vocabulary you'd expect from a guy who'd been in the Marines; at home once in a while he'd tell these long, involved shaggy-dog stories. At home he never ever swore, and he didn't start drinking in front of us until we were all in our teens, and then it was just a beer or two on hot summer afternoons.

A couple of summers when I was maybe 11 or 12, he spent an hour every afternoon reading to us. One year it was the Mowgli part of Kipling's Jungle Books, and another it was Tom Sawyer. I always "hear" them in his voice when I read them--just like I always hear my mother reading James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times. I used to see him read Dickens' Pickwick Papers. I can't remember what else he read until toward the end of his life he got on a Civil War kick. I wonder if he'd have liked the Ken Burns documentary?

When I was growing up he used to smoke a pipe--like I guess every guy in the 40s and 50s did. I was sorry when he abandoned his pipes for cigarettes, which he'd taken up while he was in the Marines.

As far as I know he was completely unreligious. Except for literature, I don't think he had any interest in the arts at all. Music and dance and art left him cold. He could cook simple things--scrambled eggs, oatmeal--but only did that in emergencies, when my mom was sick. And of course like all dads he could barbecue. He loved it when my mom made home-made donuts and apple fritters, and he liked fruit pies. He liked ham and navy beans, with a fresh onion by his plate to cut up into it.

He loved gardening, and I got royally spoiled eating fresh veggies and fruits. To this day I can't eat supermarket vegetables--they just don't taste like his. He also grew roses, and the nicest present I ever got from him was a housewarming gift when I moved into my very favorite house ever in about 1975--a bagful of 3 different delicious kinds of apples, and a huge bunch of roses, every color you can imagine. It was very special--I can't remember getting anything like that from him any other time. I think there might have been a very deeply-hidden streak of the romantic in him--I remember once my mother was complaining about a white lilac bush growing by their bedroom window, and he said, "Don't you think it's kind of poetic, that smell drifting into the room all night?"

I never dated in high school, so he didn't have to go through that with me, but he hated every guy my sister ever brought home. I wonder what he would have thought of her husband?

He was too distant to be the kind of dad people write songs and tell stories about, but he was the best father he knew how to be--he came with me to help me pick out my first car, and he gave me money to buy a bed when I moved to Dallas with a pickup full of records and books but no furniture--and I never doubted that he loved me.