Written in writing group:<\/p>\n
When I was born my father was away at WWII.\u00a0 <\/span>I was three years old when he came home.\u00a0 <\/span>He came in the front door and I was in the hall.\u00a0 <\/span>Mother said \u201cThis is your daddy\u201d and I said \u201cThat\u2019s not my daddy, my daddy\u2019s upstairs.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>Not perhaps the best way to start a relationship with one\u2019s father, and I don\u2019t think it helped our relationship at all.\u00a0 <\/span>What neither parent understood was that I thought my \u201cDaddy\u201d was the frame with glass in it and a picture of a man behind the glass, but I had no idea that picture represented a real person.\u00a0 <\/span>This is something we have to learn, it doesn\u2019t come naturally.<\/p>\n Stories I suspected, but didn\u2019t know.\u00a0 <\/span>I don\u2019t remember what I was told about my father\u2019s war experience.\u00a0 <\/span>I know he never talked about it.\u00a0 <\/span>One story was that Mom had got pregnant hoping it would keep Daddy from being drafted, but it didn\u2019t.\u00a0 <\/span>I know she was resentful, and it\u2019s true it was hard being at home alone with a baby.\u00a0 <\/span>Another story was that as Dad\u2019s company of soldiers moved up through Italy, he left them and went looking to buy some liquor for them all.\u00a0 <\/span>But when he came back, his whole unit had been blown up.<\/p>\n My father was an alcoholic, I think he was medicating PTSD from the war.\u00a0 <\/span>I remember that I only saw him sloppy drunk a couple of times, talked to him sober once \u2014 after he\u2019d been operated on for colon cancer, and the rest of the time he was just drunk enough to dissociate but not drunk enough to be sloppy.<\/p>\n A few weeks after my father\u2019s 70th birthday, he was pretty sick.\u00a0 <\/span>My brother Jack called me and said Mom and got drunk, and Dad had called him and he had called an ambulance to take him to the hospital.\u00a0 <\/span>But now he wanted to come home and watch the tall ships sail up the Hudson on the 4th of July.\u00a0 <\/span>So, Jack said, one of us had to go home & make sure Dad\u2019s all right since Mom can\u2019t be trusted.\u00a0 <\/span>And I was chosen.\u00a0 <\/span>So I went home, Dad came home and was able to watch the tall ships on his own TV in his own house.\u00a0 <\/span>Then he was taken back to the hospital.\u00a0 <\/span>I remember I was standing on the stairs crying as they started wheeling him out to the ambulance.\u00a0 <\/span>Suddenly he looked at me and it was like his whole soul came into his eyes.\u00a0 <\/span>It was like he suddenly realized he would never see me again.\u00a0 <\/span>His last words to me were \u201cThank you!\u201d<\/p>\n The story of watching the Tall Ships on the Fourth of July is told in detail here<\/a>. \u00a0I don’t remember how I learned the stories I suspected, possibly from another member of the family.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Written in writing group: When I was born my father was away at WWII.\u00a0 I was three years old when he came home.\u00a0 He came in the front door and I was in the hall.\u00a0 Mother said \u201cThis is your … Continue reading