Today's Date.....

Today would have been my father's 86th birthday, if he hadn't died in 2002 from various ailments related to alcoholism. I wrote briefly about his death right after I started blogging in 2008.

Ironically, it would also have been my step-mother's birthday (the GOOD one, before he married the green witch from The Wizard of Oz), but she died in 1998. I have fonder memories of her than I do of my father. Anytime someone commented on the fact that they had the same birthday, my father would say, "Yeah, and it's funny, we've got the same anniversary too!" He was a scream like that. My step-mother had never married before, and she was 39 when she and my father married. She said she had waited for just the right one. I never could understand what she saw in him.

My parents divorced when I was very young, and the few memories I do have of my father aren't pleasant ones. Like the time he took my brother and me to Six Flags Over Georgia. I had no idea why my brother and I were left on our own so much and why our father kept going back to the car. Until he passed out, they put him on a golf cart, he came to and jumped off and ran, they caught him and strapped him down, and the day was pretty much downhill from there.

I don't remember much about my parents living together, but I have one very clear memory as they prepared to separate. I remember one morning that my father made up HIS side of the bed and left the other side unmade. That's just the kind of person he was.

When Mom remarried, my father sent her new husband (who was no prize either, as it turned out) a sympathy card. And signed it with his real name.

The summer I was eight years old, my father convinced me to come live with him and go to school in the county where he lived. He showed me his pillow and told me those were tear stains from crying over his children every night. He also promised me a pony, so I agreed to live with him. I changed my mind before school started, but I did stay the whole summer with him. During the day I had to stay with his older sister, the aunt who frightened me to death. She had no children of her own, and she was the meanest thing I had ever known. Someone told me the story when I was very young that she would have had a baby, but when it came time to be born, it was too big. They said the doctor told her husband to choose between saving the baby and saving her. I always thought they made a poor choice. Yes, I know how wrong that is, but she was MEAN! And I was only eight years old.

When I got married the first time, with the walk down the aisle and the hundred-pound bouquet and candles and everything, I felt obligated to include my real father, since my step-father (the good one) had died when I was a senior in high school. At the conclusion of the ceremony, when the pastor introduced us to the congregation as a couple, my father said just loud enough for EVERYONE to hear, "You've played hell now!" I never did know which one of us he was talking to.

When Sweet Girl graduated from high school, my father and WWW (Wicked Witch of the West) came to the ceremony. Because Sweet Girl's last name starts with a "B", she was one of the first names called. As soon as her name was read, my father and WWW squeezed past everyone else in the row and left. I guess that could be considered a good thing.

When I was about three years old, my father took me to someone's house where a mama dog had recently had puppies. He told me, "It's okay, you can pet her." She snapped at me, and he kicked that dog so hard she went spinning across the carport floor. Even at that young age, I was appalled that he had treated an animal that way. I still have the tiniest of scars under my eye where that dog bit me. Oddly enough, it wasn't the dog I resented. She was only doing what her instincts told her to do. It was the adult who behaved like a moron.

If Doris had lived, my father would never have started drinking again, and it's possible he might have lived this long as well. I miss Doris.

But He Isn't SUPPOSED to Talk.....

This post brought to you by the inspiration of my friend Maggie after she told about the time she saw a dead body.

I was about three or four years old when my grandfather on my father's side died. I don't remember a thing about him, except that I thought he was mean. That could be because the only memory I have of him is being on the front porch of his house, a screened-in porch, running the length of the porch and launching myself against the door. He yelled at me, and I cried, and I have always thought of him as mean. He probably died thinking I was a snot-nosed little brat who needed my butt beat, but I guess I'll never know.

I have vivid memories of being at the funeral home when he died. My father picked me up and made me look into the casket so I could see Paw-Paw. I was terrified of Paw-Paw alive, and I was pretty sure I couldn't trust him to be "not only merely dead, [he's] really most sincerely dead" (name that movie).

I wanted down, away from that dead man. But my father had other plans.

"Say goodbye to Paw-Paw," he insisted.

I had no intentions of doing any such thing.

"Say bye to Paw-Paw," my father repeated.

I distinctly remember shaking my head. And if you think a child can't remember something that happened when she was three or four years old, you have no idea how terrified I was at that moment.

"If you'll say goodbye to him, he'll say bye back to you," Daddy said.

Now I'm pretty sure I didn't know a lot at that age. I had not yet used the quadratic formula, did not know how to use litmus paper to test chemicals, didn't know that lightning causes thunder to occur, and I wasn't very good yet at balancing my checkbook. I did know, however, that dead people ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO TALK.

My father, being my father, would not relent. He forced me to speak to Paw-Paw.

Just as I suspected, he didn't say a damn word.

And that, friends, is why I am the way I am today. Or at least it's one of the reasons.

Another Biloxi Trip.....

I was all prepared to write a post about a one-legged golfer my hubby played with in Biloxi the last time we were there. I thought some of you (okay, maybe one) might be moved to tears to see how this man managed to teach himself to swing a golf club even after he lost a leg.

As I tried to come up with the proper words, I realized I'd heard those words before.

In my own blog post. Does anyone else have that problem? Coming up with a topic and realizing you've already written about it? Please tell me I'm not the only loser who does that.....

So instead of writing about THAT trip to Biloxi, I'll write about our FIRST one.

It was right after my step-mother died, not the queen-of-hell my father was married to when he died, but the one who was so sweet and kind and good that we never figured out just what the hell she was doing married to our father.

Daddy had kept saying he wanted to go to Biloxi, go to Biloxi, go to Biloxi, until I was pretty sick of hearing it. The only way to shut him up was to go, so we agreed to go down there for three nights. He wanted to buy the gas and do all the driving (he always did) in exchange for the washing machine we had given him. Whatever.

Daddy struggled with alcoholism all his life, I guess, and it eventually won. But as long as Doris was alive, he didn't drink. I think she reached her breaking point and threatened to leave him if he didn't quit drinking. She was apparently important enough to him (God knows no one ELSE was), and he quit drinking. So she stayed. For thirty-some-odd years.

I didn't realize at the time that she was his ONLY anchor to sobriety.

We agreed to go to Biloxi with Daddy, and since Sweet Girl was only 14 at the time, we couldn't leave her home alone. So we took her along, thinking ..... oh, I don't know ..... it might be FUN to stay in the hotel room alone while we went to the casinos. After all, they had a pool, and she loved to swim. Never mind the fact that she had the worst ear infection she had ever had in her ENTIRE LIFE. We still dragged her along on this ill-conceived trip. (Sweet Girl, I don't know if I've ever told you how sorry I am for THAT trip. Second only to the one to Jamaica.....)

We got to Biloxi sometime late in the evening. I had never been in a casino in my life, and I thought Daddy really liked gambling. He took several rolls of QUARTERS, and I don't think I ever saw him put more than a few dollars in a machine. He didn't play table games.

I was appalled at the elderly people pulling their oxygen tanks up to the slot machines. It was patently obvious that they couldn't afford to be there. I didn't like the smoky atmosphere. I wanted to go home.

There weren't many people in the casino that night. We walked up to the bar, and Daddy leaned on it and told the bartender, "I haven't had a drink in 11 years."

I was kind of proud of him for that.

Then he said, "Give me a double vodka."

How do you tell a 70-year-old man he can't have a drink? How do you tell a bartender that the 70-year-old man CAN'T have a drink?

That pretty much ruined the trip for me. I felt so powerless. Hubby felt guilty because he was drinking a beer. He said Daddy wouldn't have gotten a drink of liquor if he hadn't had a beer himself.

I think he's wrong. I think Daddy planned it that way all along.

At breakfast the next morning, I told Daddy we wanted to go home. He didn't want to, but he agreed, especially after he saw Hubby putting sugar on his grits.

We were there less than 24 hours. And it was way too long.

I felt like I had let Doris down.

My Father's Obituary

I was looking through an ancient Office Depot catalog today, trying to decide how to spend my "Sonny Money." I didn't realize how long that catalog had been on the shelf......it had "advance" calendars all the way up to 2003. Ha! Needless to say, I was not looking in it for prices, just ideas.

In the catalog I found my father's obituary, laminated as a courtesy by our local newspaper. I have no idea why it was in there.......it's not like you use a bookmark to keep the place where you left off reading in a catalog. Reading that obituary was the only way I knew when he died. I can remember the license plate numbers of people I went to high school with thirty years ago, birthdays of people I neither like nor associate with any longer, and my credit card numbers complete with the security code on the back, but I had no idea of the date my father died (it was October 21, 2002). I also had no idea how old he was, but I could have figured that out if I had remembered the year he died (he was 77).

I'm sure that if you asked him, he would say it wasn't the drinking that killed him; it was the sudden stopping. He had called me at school on a Saturday (working on the yearbook) and said he needed somebody to take him to the hospital.

"Why, what's wrong?"

"I'm drunk."

"Daddy, they don't put people in the hospital for being drunk."

I didn't go.

He went to the hospital on a Wednesday (I think) with what must have approached alcohol poisoning. He had a heart attack that Saturday and went into a coma, punctuated by frequent tremors and seizures, and we made the decision to remove him from life support the following Monday morning. My daughter, my sister, and I stood by his bed, along with a step-mother I didn't like (they had only been married a couple of years......Daddy was her fifth husband, I think) and a step-sister I didn't know, and waited. The hospital chaplain had either done that job a lot, or cheated and kept his (her? I can't remember) eyes open during the prayer. Because with the word "Amen," the line went flat.