It’s Memorial Day, and I’m still waking up, drinking my coffee with thoughts of my dad, thoughts of both my parents, really. They’ve been gone for 17 years, which seems weird. It seems like forever and not any time at all.
I think about my dad every Memorial Day. He was a WWII vet, and his birthday is May 31st, which sometimes falls on Memorial Day.
My dad was a pretty strange character. He had no friends. He didn’t want any. Growing up, he told me never to trust anyone but God. For me, God was just as hard to trust. I couldn’t trust my dad either. He was a lot like God in the way they were both full of it. Pretenders. I think my dad wanted to have good intentions, and for most of my life, I thought he did. But he was an angry person, like God—they both liked smiting and all that.
In any case, it’s not so nice to speak ill of the dead, especially on a holiday where we’re supposed to honor them. Don’t get me wrong, I do. War is a thing no one should have to go through. And most soldiers are just kids, after all. All that must have fucked him up beyond repair. That’s what war does. It blows up your friends into bits and pieces. No wonder he never wanted any friends after that.
Maybe I never came to forgive my parents. But I feel like I did one better by coming to fully understand them. My dad experienced no love in his life, so how could he love anyone else? Sometimes, I wonder the same about myself. How can I love others when I don’t even love myself and was hardly loved either? I mean, I had some, but it was so conditional.
Calvin, my dad, came from a large family. He was the youngest by far. Probably a “mistake.” He lost his mom when he was just six years old, when penicillin was still about 10 years away from being used to cure things like strep throat. He was left with his alcoholic, abusive father while his brother and sisters scattered about. His oldest sister married, and the couple raised my dad until he went off to war. His brother-in-law was like a tyrant. He was strict and beat him half to death, much of the time.
What a life.
My mom’s life was equally as sad. When I think about what her mother did to her, I realize how “good” I had it. Her grandmother was her saving grace, and I was lucky to have had that person in my early life as well. If it weren’t for Grandma, I wouldn’t have experienced a real, normal love. Not until Hannah, anyway.
My mother put a lot of conditions on my brother, too. But their dynamic was very different. For one thing, guilt didn’t really work on him the way it did on me. He didn’t feel the same human emotions that “normals” do. And my mom showered him with a twisted kind of love. It came in the form of both good and bad attention, which he seemed to control. They were another couple of odd birds.
I’ve come a long way from thinking about Memorial Day, haven’t I? I guess we have all suffered our own wars. Yeah. Only true war isn’t comparable, is it? Shame on me.
I really wanted to talk about going to school in the fall, but I didn’t do that. Oh well. But that’s where most of my thoughts have been since my show opened. I’m consumed with deciding on a part-time career while working toward an associate’s degree. If I live long enough to get a bachelor’s, it would be great to get it in social work, even though that wouldn’t get me a job that pays anything. I guess I wouldn’t be doing it for the big bucks, like art. A master’s in social work would take about 9 years, and by then, I will be close to 70. So, I’ve been wondering what else I can do before or until then. I’ll tell you, my timing really, truly sucks.