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A Tweedy Bird, A Father, A Water fight
I don't think the war had much to do with my parents divorce, except that it took my father away from the family for 3 years.
We could blame it on the fact that my mother was 16 when she had me. I figure Mom didn't want to get married in the first place, but it was shameful to be pregnant and not married, so she made sure she was married.
Mother kept the secret of her unmarried pregnancy from me her whole life. She couldn't hide that she was young, though.
When I was 7 or 8, on Mother's Day, we went to a protestant church for the first time, and she got the prize for the youngest mother. That made her only 23 or 24. She received a plant potted in a ceramic baby shoe as a prize, and there I was, a big kid standing beside her. I knew she was pregnant before she married my father, but I didn't say anything because I knew I wasn't supposed to know.
My father came to see me after the war—once. We went to the Carnaval, where he bribed a hawker for a little horse statue I wanted. I was 6 years old, and it was the last time I saw him until 38 years later.
I'm sure he didn't mean for me to see the bribe, but I knew. And I love him for it.
While growing up, I thought that the divorce hadn't affected me much and that I didn't need a father. (I had a stepdad.) During the war, my mother went to Texas, where she met my father on furlough and came home divorced. That was it. I wondered why I didn’t get to see him.
On the first Christmas after the war, Dad sent a box camera to me as a gift. After that, nothing.
For 38 years, I wondered if he cared about me. Why wasn't he in my life? Why didn't he contact me? Why had he never visited me?
Finally, I wrote my feelings on a page. I was furious. He abandoned me. He didn't care. I put positives and negatives on the page. I let er rip with complaining.
My Father lived in Chicago, Illinois, and we lived in San Diego, California. I had often said that if I was ever in Chicago, I would look him up. Within a couple of months after writing that complaining page—I didn't see this coming—my husband was sent from San Diego to Chicago to show an instrument at an Optics show. I decided to go along, and I did find my father, and we remained in touch until the end.
That taught me that, hey, "This stuff works."
What "stuff?"
The writing exercise I used to clear out the mind junk. After I wrote it, I put my ranting aside and almost forgot about it.
You know how the cycling mind works. It just keeps repeating its problems, concerns, and irritations. It's easy to repeat oneself when thinking or speaking, and it's easy for the mind to do its endless cycling. However, it is NOT EASY to write the same story over and over.
So, complain, whine, and write out your fears. Don't worry about positive thinking; this is for your eyes only, and your heart needs to express it. "I'm worried about paying my bills; I need to pay the rent; I hate Tom for standing me up. He's a bastard and a pain in the ass. My mom spent her life depressed, and my daddy was a drunk. I had a lousy childhood."
Write it, then put a period at the end of the last sentence.
Other people, teachers, and mentors can be facilitators and guides along our journey. Don't discount them. Neither discount the self-help avenues you venture into, for no matter what book you read, course you take, seminar, or workshop you attend, you will invariably find something of value in it. Be reasonable, though, question, and be a discerning person. Use input as motivation, not as gospel.
Here is one of my favorite quotes:
"They say that motivation doesn't last. Neither does bathing, that's why we do it daily."—Zig Zigler.
Before meeting my father, I carried with me remembrances of him. I remembered his "Can House," a workshop he built in our backyard. The cans weren't little soup cans. They were drums he had carried home from the shoe factory where he worked. He filled them with cement, so if anyone wanted to remove that house, he might have to blow it up.
We lived in Mt. Vernon, Illinois, with my grandmother—my mother, my father, my little dog Tiny, and me. Besides liking to draw, my dad was an amateur taxidermist; thus, he needed a workshop. Luckily, I didn't have to build my office out of cans.
I only saw stuffed squirrels and birds in his workshop, and Mom wasn't happy to see animal parts in the refrigerator.
The only time I know of that my dad captured a live animal was when he tried to chloroform a little owl. I don't know how he got it. He put the owl in a coffee can with a cotton ball filled with chloroform and closed the lid. A few minutes later, he opened the lid. The owl poked his head out, looking a little hung over. My father tried again with a fresh cotton ball and closed the lid.
Upon opening the lid, the owl looked as perky as ever, so Dad released the owl, who then went home reeking of chloroform and with his wife berating him. "What in the world have you been up to?"
Mom, Dad, and I went to a circus where I dropped peanuts into an elephant's awaiting trunk. I thought the elephant ate them with her trunk. I ate peanuts, too, and awakened at night, yelling, "Momma, there's something in my bed!" I had thrown up in the night.
Dad bought me a Tweety bird at the circus. It was a Paper Mache bird on a string attached to a stick. When I whirled the stick, the bird flew and tweeted. Dad wanted to know what made the bird tweet, so he performed abdominal surgery and took out its Twitter. He put the bird back together, but it never tweeted again.
One time, Mom was so mad at Dad that she threw whatever was handy—a precious item, my Bambi comic book. Bambi was the first movie I saw, and I loved the characters—the fawn Bambi, Thumper the bunny, and Flower, the skunk. ("You can call me Flower if you want to.”) However, killing Bambi's mother and watching that little fawn Bambi wandering around calling M-O-T-H-E-R impacted me such that if I see the beginning credits of that movie, I start to cry.
Dad put the comic book back together then, on stiff paper, drew Bambi as a grown-up stag and his mother a little dewy-eyed doe. He colored them and cut them out like paper dolls with little tabs at their feet so they would stand up. I wish I had them.
I vaguely remember sitting at the kitchen table drawing with him.
I had a Whooping Cough. I don't remember being sick, but I would cough until I threw up. So, when I began coughing, I would fly across the room—carried by some adult—and placed in front of a container. Once, not getting there fast enough, my dad caught the vomit in his hands. I marveled that he would do that and considered it a loving gesture.
Grandmother made a cough syrup for me that helped the whooping. First, she soaked a raw egg in vinegar overnight. In the morning, the shell had dissolved into the vinegar, leaving behind a round egg encased in its membrane. She added honey to the concoction, and it tasted good—it was a little scratchy going down through.
Around Halloween, I excitedly ran to greet my dad, who was coming in the front door. However, he was wearing a mask they had given him at the grocery store. I screamed bloody murder, and to this day, I do not like masks. I don't scream bloody murder when I see one, though. And then at Christmas time, a store Santa Claus wore a mask. We called them false faces. The mask told me that man was not the real Santa. There was no way I would ever sit on that man’s lap.
I heard that when I was a baby, my father would come home from work and wash my face with a washcloth, for he wanted me to be awake when he was home.
Often, I heard stories of the mentally challenged boy next door who liked my dad and loved it when Mom and Dad had a water fight. On hot summer days, they would throw a bucket into our open well, collect the water, and toss it on whoever they could catch. I do remember Mom squealing and running and Dad chasing her. The boy would egg Dad on, "Glenn, I'll draw the water, I'll draw the water."
One day, after we had been gone for the afternoon, we came home to find that the boy had drained the well.
My dad was thin and had stomach problems, so he got a nanny goat because he had heard that goat's milk was good for what ailed him. He would fashion a chain on the goat's collar and lock the chain to a stake. That way, he could move the goat around the neighborhood to graze.
However, no matter how strongly he drove in the stake, that kid could pull it up and drive the goat. She got so nervous that Dad gave her to someone who could give her some peace.
In Chicago, I called every Glenn Metcalf I could find in the phone book on Saturday and Sunday with no connection. On Sunday morning, I visited Johnny Colman's church. Coleman was a minister I had heard at Terry Cole Whittiker's Science of the Mind Church in San Diego. Coleman was a powerful speaker, booming out, "If you go into work one day and the boss says, 'You're fired!' You say,' Okay Great Master, you have something better in store for me.'"
"God gave you the first kidney, if you need a new one, say, 'Okay Great Master, I need a new kidney.'" As a young woman, Coleman had been cured of some disease said to be incurable and emerged a firm believer in the power of healing.
Monday morning, my father answered the phone.
"Hi, this is Joyce. I used to call you Daddy a long time ago."
"Where are you?!" he exclaimed and invited Neil and me to his house. He greeted me with a big hug, and his wife, Vi, was most gracious.
Upon entering his house, I was shocked to see a little stack of photos of me of various ages on his mantel. How did he get them? When he pulled out a picture of my young mother, I was doubly shocked, "Wasn't she beautiful." he said.
For 3 days, we spent the evenings at Dad's and Vi's house. We would bring in takeouts, fish, and chips, and such. I took Dad to the Conference Center to show Neil's Optical instrument. At lunch, I learned that he couldn't taste. He had had a head injury where he worked that took away his taste for most foods. He could taste beer, so he would have a little glass of beer in the evenings and slowly sip it.
The Conference Center had a photo booth in its lobby. I reminded him that we had a picture of us taken in one of those booths 38 years ago, so we climbed in and had our photo taken together again.
I wrote to him, and he didn't respond at first until I sent him a letter with checkboxes:
I died.
I don't remember this one.
I'm an ornery old cuss.
He checked that last one, and we continued our communications—sometimes he attached money—until I didn't hear from him and learned that he had passed away.
After I wrote this chapter, I was tempted to go back and clean up the typos I invariably made, the wrong words I invariably used, and the missing poetry because I stink at it. Instead, I looked into the pink dogwood and typed as my typing teacher yelled at us in high school: “Don’t look at the keyboard.”