The Last of My Trilogy of Tributes: My Pop

Most people in my generation were lucky to have two sets of grandparents. But because my dad was a "caboose" his parents were older, born in the 1880s, and they were both gone before I was born or shortly after. Which left me with one, younger set of grandparents. Since Mother was a working mom, even way back in the Fifties, and since the idea of day care hadn't occurred to anybody yet, I stayed with my grandparents during the day while Mother worked. I adored them. They contributed greatly to my happy childhood.

My brother was the oldest of their grandchildren, and Pop was a name my brother could say at an early age, so Pop he became. Pop was a lay Baptist preacher. He told me he found his calling on watch on a Navy tender ship during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in World War II. The ship was the USS LaSalle, and Pop promised the Lord if He would get him through the battle, he would turn his life over to preaching the gospel. The Battle of Leyte Gulf was the first battle where the Japanese sent kamikaze pilots to commit suicide by divebombing their planes into the decks of US ships. I would imagine that after watching a few ships sink in this way, quite a few seamen said quite a few prayers and made many promises to God. Pop kept his promise.

A lay minister usually is adopted by the poorest churches, the ones who can't really pay much if anything at all to their preachers, so Pop also had a regular job during the week. When I was a child staying with them, he would come home every day for lunch, or dinner as they called it then. Supper was the evening meal. Pop's arrival mid-day was a big treat. When I heard his car pull into the driveway, I would race to hide behind the refrigerator--which we called the icebox back then--and when Pop came in the kitchen door, I would leap from behind the icebox with a loud "Boo!" Without fail he put on a big show, trembling all over and moaning like I had scared the dickens out of him. After we ate our dinner, I would sit on his lap and he would sing songs to me. I always thought he sounded like Tennessee Ernie Ford. Then he would go to the back room and lay down for a short nap. He called it "resting his eyes" but more often than not, we could hear him snoring clear up in the front room.

Unless he was sick, Pop always wore a white shirt and often a tie. On weekends if we stayed with them, my brother would also be there, and we slept on pallets in front of the black and white TV set. Pop never missed "Gunsmoke." He wanted all the lights in the room turned out, and we watched without speaking. I didn't know it then, but learned later in my life when I became a writer, that Pop was a great student of Western history. He knew all the stories of the outlaws, the marshals, the feuds, and the Indian tribes. In fact, he claimed to have Indian blood running in his veins, and he did have their jet black hair and dark eyes.

Pop could speak Spanish. He and my grandmother had eloped to Mexico and he told me once he wanted to be able to read their marriage license. He was self-taught. He also taught himself to play the harmonica, or mouth harp as he called it. He tried to teach me "You Are My Sunshine" but I never got the knack.  For a while he had a Sunday morning sermon broadcast on the local radio, which he recorded on a big reel-to-reel recorder on Saturday afternoons and took to the station for airing on Sunday. When I was about six, I sang on his radio program: "He's Got the Whole World In His Hands," complete with the arm and hand gestures. I didn't think about it being played on the radio where nobody could see me. My youngest aunt accompanied me on a little portable organ.

In church, Pop was a pound-the-podium style preacher, had a powerful voice, and his congregation adored him. They payed him with eggs and vegetables from their garden. I once helped my grandmother pluck a chicken a member of the church had given to them. That was really hard work. I remember telling her I never wanted to have to do that again, and I haven't!

After my grandmother died in the late 1980s, I moved back to Corpus Christi for a few years, and Pop and I got together several times for lunch. By then he was preaching in nursing homes once in a while. I enjoyed those lunch visits. We talked about old memories, but also about the Old West. I was astonished at how much obscure history he knew. We always seem to underestimate the people in our lives. He had a fierce intelligence and interest in life, past and present. We had our last lunch the week before he died on February 5, 1991, twenty-seven years ago today.

After Pop died, we had a big garage sale before their house was put on the market. My mom and all her siblings and in-laws were there. My aunt gave me one of Pop's Bibles, and an old antique Mr. Peanut desk tray I remembered on his desk when I was a kid. I still have both those things and cherish them. When the sale was over, as I headed to my car, I spotted a heavy old metal sprinkler lying by the side of the garage. I recalled playing in that sprinkler on hot summer days when I was little. I picked it up and put it into my trunk, afraid it would get thrown to the curb if I didn't take it. It's heavier than any sprinkler you can buy today, and puts out a big spray as it rattles around in a circle. Wayne, even though he came into my life long after Pop was gone, calls it Pop's sprinkler whenever he sets it up somewhere in our yard. I hope it never breaks.

Onward....

FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY

I can’t believe that it’s already been five years since Daddy died. The day before, we watched the Super Bowl together, until halftime. It was the most animated he had been since he’d gone into the nursing home 10 days before. I took Lulu up to see him. He really wanted to see Heidi, his own dog, the one in the picture, but she was not sociable enough to be around a lot of strangers. I knew Lulu would behave and she did. Daddy seemed to get a charge out of her visit, running his arthritic hands through her thick black coat. We went outside, him in the wheelchair, and he wanted to hold her leash while I pushed him all the way around the nursing home. We made the circuit twice, talked to people we saw. Daddy wanted to show them Lulu. She was always a good girl. Then Wayne took her home, and I stayed to watch some of the Super Bowl with Daddy.

He always loved football, spent his entire weekend watching one game after the other during football season. Except for the Cowboys. He would not watch the Cowboys. He rooted for the Manning boys, no matter what team they played for. This was because of their father, Archie Manning, who had played for the Saints when we all lived in Mississippi. This was back when the Saints were a dismal team, and Archie was sacked time after time. I think Daddy felt sorry for him, and so when Archie’s sons came up in the NFL, they were who he threw his allegiance behind. Seems like one of their teams was in the Super Bowl that year, but I can’t be certain.  Denver maybe. I don’t really watch football, but was there to be with Daddy. I had a feeling he was near his end.

The next morning I came up to the nursing home and learned that one of the physical therapists had pretty much ordered Daddy to go eat breakfast in the diningroom instead of in his private room. She stopped me out in the hall and told me he was doing better. I disagreed, and I told her about my fears that the last fall might have caused a hematoma. He had fallen backwards on his head and it had blackened both eyes. He couldn’t walk without assistance after that fall. She said I should speak to the nurse when she arrived. 

I went in to see Daddy. He was sitting in the wheelchair, and as soon as he saw me, he asked me to help him get back in the bed. He said, “I feel terrible.” Daddy was not a complainer, so I wanted to know in what way did he feel bad, and he couldn’t really explain. He finally said his back was hurting. I helped him into the bed, and rubbed his back for a bit, but it wasn’t comfortable for him to lie on his side, so that ended shortly, and he fell asleep.

The nursing home had good wifi so I had brought my laptop and sat there while Daddy slept, Googling hematoma, Googling everything I thought applied to his condition. As he slept, his breathing got ragged and gasping. He would snore, then wake himself up gasping. He laid there with his mouth open, with what I call a death pall on his face. I recognized it from when Mother died.

When the nurse got in, I went down to her office and talked to her. She said she was going to call Daddy’s doctor to order a cat-scan. I felt better about things after that. And then the plumber called my cell. Daddy’s backyard was flooded from a broken pipe and they were coming, they told me. Could I meet them there? I went back to Daddy’s room, shook his shoulder to rouse him, and told him I had to leave to let the plumber in. I promised I would be back as soon as possible. He smiled, nodded. I kissed his cheek. Almost as soon as I got to Daddy’s house, before the plumbers arrived, I got another call. This time it was the nursing home telling me Daddy had died. I could not believe it. I still can’t believe how quickly it happened after I left. Ten minutes before I had been with him, and he had heard me, nodded, smiled. They said his heart stopped beating so it was listed as a heart attack, but Daddy was almost 89, had lots of ailments including renal failure. It could have been a number of things, I suppose.

I still miss him every single day. It isn’t easy to lose all the people who have your history, who share old memories, who know you about as well as anybody on the planet knows you, those few people who need no explanation when it comes to your past. Daddy and me--we were simpatico. Oh, there were times when we aggravated each other, especially in his last years. I’m sure I hovered too much, probably bossed him more than he wanted me to, worried over him when he wouldn’t answer his phone. He was easy to know, fun to be around, a jokester--often the funniest when he didn’t intend it. He was open-hearted and accepting and not at all an old crotchety stick in the mud.

My earliest memory involves my dad. I was running away from a peacock, terrified, running over an uneven grassy lawn with that peacock coming up behind me fast. I tripped and fell head over heels, but before the peacock got to me, Daddy swooped in and lifted me in his arms. I once told him about this memory. He said it happened at Knotts Berry Farm in California, and that I was about two and a half. He was my savior then and I felt that way about him for the rest of his life. When he died a light went out for me, and stayed out for quite a while. I felt like I had lost my North Star.

When he first went into the nursing home, his dog was left alone at his house and she was nervous, knew something was wrong but didn’t understand it. Why was her old man gone? So to keep her company, and to fill the quiet house with noise, I decided to turn on the television. The television was always on when Daddy was there so I thought she would find it comforting. I searched for the remote, found it under some newspapers on his chairside table, punched the ON button, and as the picture took hold, I realized it was tuned to the Playboy Channel. That was Daddy. His body was old but his mind never was. He never gave in or gave up--until he did. That was February 4, 2013. Five years ago today.

Onward....

Twenty-Three Years Ago Today

 

On this day, twenty-three years ago, my mother died of lung cancer. She was 64, the same age as I am right now. It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around that--mostly, I feel pretty young still. And aside from some minor ailments, I feel pretty healthy, too. Certainly, I’m nowhere near ready to say goodbye. I know Mother wasn’t ready either.

At the end, once she got on hospice, I moved in with them. She had had a convulsion caused by radiation to her brain after the cancer moved there. She passed out on their hard tile floor, and cracked her head open, took 17 stitches to close the wound. Daddy pulled a hernia lifting her off the floor. So when he had his hernia surgery, I closed-up my house a hundred miles away, and moved in for the duration.

I miss Mother, but I am a clear-eyed realist and will never re-write history. She was complicated, and often difficult. Warm and fuzzy did not come naturally to her, but she did have her moments. She loved babies. With each of mine, she was a big help when they were born. They loved her but as they grew up they also recognized that she could be frosty and judgmental.

Her bugaboo was expectations. She wanted everyone around her to conform to her expectations. Friends, husband, children, grandchildren were all supposed to behave a certain way and when they didn’t, or couldn’t, she felt their failure as a personal affront. Everything with Mother was tit-for-tat. As example, at Christmas when she sent out cards, she made a list of all the people she mailed cards to and as their reciprocal cards came in the mail, she would put a check-mark by their name. At the end of the season, all those without a check-mark were purged from her Christmas card list for the next year. She was quick to notice a slight and it took her a long time to forgive. She often said she could forgive but she never forgot.

Truth is, this was a chink in her armor, a product of her longing to be loved. But it wasn’t enough to simply love her, you also had to cherish her and make her feel it. This was probably partly due to her being the product of her mother’s first failed marriage. The man who raised her from infancy was not her biological father but her stepfather, a fact she didn't learn until she was well grown. For some reason, this diminished her in her own mind. She always felt her mom and dad loved her less than they did the children they shared together.

But she did have a lighthearted side, too. She loved parties, and she adored playing games. It became a holiday tradition around our house to play games, a tradition that lives on to this day. She was a career woman before there were many career women, and fiercely independent. A civil servant, she rose so high and had so many outstanding performance citations and pay-grade increases that when she retired the Navy put on a grand ceremony for her, with a flag presentation and speeches. It made the local newspaper. She would have been honored by how many of her co-workers and supervisors came to pay respects at her funeral.

We are all complex. But for some reason, we sometimes forget our parents are just as complex as the rest of us. There’s so much history and emotional baggage attached. My relationship with Mother was often tempestuous. We had many times we went months without speaking. Too high of expectations on both sides, I suppose. But there were also times when we sought out each other’s company to shop for something special, or to go to a girlie movie together with banana splits afterwards. Mother loved a banana split. I once took her to a runway style show with high-fashion models and thought she would faint from excitement. For weeks she talked about it and  told everybody, bragged, I’m sure. It was one time I exceeded her expectations.

The last four weeks I spent with her were some of the sweetest. I have little memories of things we said, conversations we had before she became incoherent. I wanted the end to be peaceful for her but I cannot say that it was. She struggled and fought just like she did all her life. Her fight ended at 4:30 a.m. on February 2, 1995. I still have things I would like to tell her about, and things from her I want to know. I believe she would love Wayne,  and my grandson Jake. But she would not approve of this old house I’m living in. She never understood my affinity for old things. She was all about new, new, new. As time goes by memories begin to fade, but I still dream about her now and then, and I can still remember the way she sounded when she said my name a certain way.

Onward....