I find myself in a pensive mood today.  I’ve been thinking about my father lately.  Tomorrow will be the tenth anniversary of his passing, so I suppose it’s natural that he’d be on my mind.  My experience with my father is probably a bit different than that of others with their fathers.  He was 58 (my mother was 22) when I was born and he retired the summer between my first and second grade years.  I saw a lot more of him as I was growing up, especially during the summers, than those whose fathers were a lot younger.

My father was born on November 11, 1911 in East Texas to a family that made its living farming (mostly growing cotton). His father was an abusive alcoholic and a gambler, who lost the family farm in a card game. This forced them into sharecropping to survive, and my father and his brothers were put to work in the fields picking cotton at an early age. My father turned 18 in 1929, the year the Great Depression started. That was also the year that my grandfather chased my grandmother out of the house with a shotgun in a drunken rage. She took my father and his brothers to Ft. Worth, where they struggled to survive. My father managed to find a job as a bicycle messenger for Western Union to help support the family.

One of the things that I noticed as I was growing up was that his experience in the depression affected him for life. He was always concerned that we had enough to eat and that everything be fresh. I think this was because they had to make do with very little during that time. I recall one of his quirks was that he was obsessed with buying the freshest possible bread (this was a reaction to being forced to buy old, leftover bread since they couldn’t afford better). When I was growing up this was before they printed expiration dates on the bags of bread. But he somehow learned that they had color codes for the twist ties (which represented the day of the week it was made) and he also memorized the delivery schedules. I vividly remember being embarassed one day when he almost got into a fight with the bread delivery man because he was picking through the loaves looking for the ones with the newest color code (which were on the bottom, of course).

It was during that time in Ft. Worth that he managed to find work as an apprentice in heating and cooling. This would later become his career, and he would work his way up to the position of Chief Engineer by the time he retired (which means that he was responsible for the entire physical plant for a large building).

My mother was my father’s fourth marriage, and we were his second family. It’s strange to think that my father was 30 years old with a wife and baby when Pearl Harbor was bombed (I also have a half-sister who is in her 60’s now). He had vivid memories of that day, which I suspect that everyone who lived through that time had. At the time he was working in Washington, DC in one of the federal buildings. Because of his age and family status, he was deferred from being drafted. And because of the shortage of people caused by the war, he was hired by a chain of department stores to do maintenance throughout Texas (Dallas, Ft. Worth, San Antonio, Houston, etc) for the rest of the war.

One of his strongest qualities, though, was his work ethic. When he retired he definitely didn’t stop working. We left Houston and moved to East Texas and rented a house and 7 acres. He promptly bought a tractor and went to work, cultivating that land and growing corn, peas, sweet potatoes, watermelons, etc. I think he may have been trying to recapture something missing from his youth, but I also think that he didn’t know what to do with himself without work. When he wasn’t working in the fields, he was doing side jobs for people. He could do just about anything: plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, and of course heating/air/refrigeration. The downside, though, was that he would sometimes work too much, ignoring his health. He’d been diagnosed as a diabetic a couple of years before he retired. It was controllable through diet and medication, provided that he remembered to come in and eat and take the pills. Often he would go out in the morning and not come in until dark. Later, I think this habit caused the medication to stop, or perhaps it was just aging, be he was required to use insulin. This only made things worse, since he was still just as stubborn about not coming in until the last minute. One time his blood sugar level was around 40. We were surprised that he made it back in.

But some of my best memories of my father are when he would take me to work with him. From a very young age my father never talked down to me and he would answer my questions as best he could. He would also explain all of the equipment that he was working on, even though I was only five or six. I suspect that OSHA would have a cow today, thinking about a kid in the machine room of an office building. But my father trusted me and he knew that I wouldn’t touch anything. When we lived in Houston he worked for a property management company that handled a number of office buildings. He was one of their senior engineers so he was sometimes called to consult or in one case he was called in to set up the engineering department of a building that was just being finished. I remember being able to go up to the top floor of one of the Texaco buildings before it was finished (but the windows were in, so it wasn’t like we were just hanging off the side). I was amazed by the view. I also go to on the roof of another building he worked at. I think that it was this experience that allowed me to be comfortable working with technical information later on in life.

Unfortunately, I turned out to be just as stubborn and impatient as he was, which made for some rocky relations during my teen years. I don’t understand why I was so angry back then, it all seems silly now. When I left for college, we were somewhat strained, although not as bad as it had been. While I was in college his health started to decline (he was 77 when I started school). By my senior year in college, he was in really poor health, suffering from heart problems and diabetes. He also had what the doctors called ‘senile dementia’, which means that he would do or say strange and bizarre things for no apparent reason. But the biggest problem with diabetics at that age is that wounds don’t heal quickly, especially in the extremities. A stubbed toe becomes an infection, which leads to loss of the toe.

By the summer of 1992 the doctors were forced to amputate one of his legs due to an infection which was a complication of diabetes. And by the beginning of 1993 he lost his other leg for the same reason. During all of this I was finishing school and I started my first job, so I wasn’t around much, just on some weekends. I had a hard time seeing my father in that condition. I don’t know how my mother handled it, I just know that she’s amazingly strong to have cared for him as long as she did (with the help of my sister she cared for him at home until late in 1992).

My biggest regret is that by the time I could appreciate my father he was no longer himself. I wish now that I could have known him as an adult. I never got a chance to tell him that I loved him because he was gone too soon. And that’s a regret that’ll be with me for the rest of my life. For those of you who managed to read all of this, remember to tell your parents you love them. You never know if you’ll get the chance to do it later.