Twelve Years and a Lifetime Ago

I get a lot of mileage out of the fact that I was born an orphan – it gets me into most of the best parties – but I rarely mention the people who rescued me from a life of ignominy and despair.

Tonight marks the twelfth year since my father died. We don’t call him my adoptive father, never did. He was always just Dad, the same way mom is still just Mom.

The clip at the bottom of this post cannot be attributed by artist or song title or agents of the artist or his heirs (or his music publishers or somebody) will land on me like a ton of bricks, demanding that the clip be removed and shaking their lawyerly fists at me. At least that was what happened when I posted it to YouTube a little ways back. If you do a search for this regrettably nameless, lesser-known artist on YouTube, you won’t find anything. It’s as if he never existed. Now there’s keeping an eye on an artist’s legacy, and there’s consigning said artist to an obscurity which he doesn’t deserve – and the zeal with which someone is trying to keep his stuff offline definitely falls into the latter category. So please don’t mention him or his song by name in the Comments section or I shall be forced to delete it. If you’d like more info on him, email me and I’ll fill you in privately.

Anyhow, my dad, like the fellow described in the clip below, was also born early in the 20th century, surviving both the Great Depression and a stint in the U.S. armed services that spanned the length of WWII. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, my dad was already in the military – where else was the son of a man of modest means going to learn to fly in the first half of the last century?

And like most of his generation, the part that made it back from WWII in one piece anyway, he returned to the U.S. afterwards and got married, took a job and set about starting a family. Never did a get a straight answer out of him (or Mom) about who was shooting blanks, maybe they never even knew, but eventually the decision was made to adopt. They always just said that God didn’t want them to have kids of their own (in retrospect, I think maybe God just didn’t want my Mom to be raising any children personally).

Lucky for them American orphans were much easier to come by then than they apparently are now. They adopted my older brother and sister nine years and six years earlier than me; by the time they came and got me, Dad was already pushing 50, and that’s back in the 1960s, when 50 was pretty fucking old. I had my first kid at 43 and it damned near killed my ass, and they didn’t even stop with me; they picked up my little sister about six months after they took me home.

For that if nothing else, I take my hat off to the man. Kids are hard work, and the older you get, the harder the work is. He must have known that by the time they decided to give me a name.

I can’t really do his biography justice here. For one thing, he lived 80-some years and no blog post, no matter how brutally edited, can take the full measure of a man in such a short forum. More to the point, though, there was an unknowability about the man that seems to be specific to his generation; The Greatest Generation, to borrow a phrase. I think maybe a less hyperbolic description would be The Most Stoic Generation.

They didn’t come back from war and wear their PTSD on their sleeves, they rolled them up and got to work and rarely ever talked about their wartime experiences. My dad had one friend, a cousin, who loved to tell war stories. Everybody else pretty much just got behind the mule and plowed from sunup till sundown and in doing so, created what became the great American middle-class. A legacy I inherited and casually took for granted until I began to study world history in high school.

Well, my dad’s been gone for 12 years now, and I still regret not making better efforts to draw him out while I had the chance. All I have are flashes of his generosity (he brought cake and ice cream for my whole class on my birthday in third grade, and later when I was a dope-smoking hippie with no education and no prospects, he took me on as a partner in his hauling business, paying me my salary out of his own meager wages); his frustration and disappointment at raising two sons who ungratefully failed to be the athletes that any proper American man would want their son to be; and his miserable final years, spent fighting off various cancers and strokes in front of the TV in the living room, smoldering cigarette clenched firmly between middle- and forefinger. In fact, it wasn’t until the doctors took his cigarettes away that he finally gave up the ghost. He survived everything a tumultuous century could throw at him, everything but the indignity of not being allowed to smoke. There’s probably more people like him than we know about, people who smoking didn’t kill, but the lack of smoking did.

Anyhow, I miss him when I think of him. I probably give myself more credit than I deserve when I think that I could have drawn him out if I had tried harder, but the fact that I didn’t make the effort when I had the chance haunts me to this day.

I hope he’s at peace now. I hope he’s hanging out with Johnny Cash and Bing Crosby (his favorite crooner) and all his old war buddies; that they’re smoking unfiltered cigarettes and knocking back Canadian-Club-and-Cokes and not talking about the war at all.

This song’s for you, Daddy.