They Turned into Pretty Cool Adults

I have two sons, born eight years apart. There’s a reason for that, of course. The first one was rather, uh, four-on-the-floor full-steam-head rocket man and at times it seemed we were hanging on to his vapor trail.

We were rather scholarly types, a couple who liked museums, art, the botanical garden, the symphony. Our firstborn liked baseball, football, hockey, soccer, basketball, golf – anything that involved the phrase “competitive sport.” I didn’t even try to teach him how to play sports. He just knew. And he was better than any of the adults in the neighborhood.

But we did eventually have a second one, also a son, which was not a surprise. My family is into sons big time. I have two brothers. My older brother has two boys and my younger brother has three boys. I do have a half-sister from my father’s first marriage. She has two boys. I have two boys. We’re besotted with boys.

Our second-born had colic for the first six months of his life. Bad colic. Really bad colic. I don’t think either of us slept for those six months. I know our son didn’t. He grew out of it, but he was almost the antithesis of his brother’s exuberance, rather shy and quiet, except he liked sports, too, especially basketball and soccer.

Their upbringings were not unusual. The regular childhood diseases. Little League games. Basketball games. School stuff. Church stuff. It wasn’t Leave-It-To-Beaver stereotyped but I can’t say it was radically off of that (except I didn’t wear a smoking jacket and tie at home, and I never saw my wife vacuuming in a dress and wearing pearls). There were times, of course, when they’d do things that if you disciplined them as they deserved you’d be arrested for homicide. But all kids have those moments.

Now I have two grown sons. The oldest is married and has produced, with some help from his wife, our grandson. The youngest graduated from college last year and is gainfully employed, trying to come to grips with the realities of the working world. Despite the eight years difference in their ages, they are close.

And I think about what they have taught me.

Once you become a father, you’re a father forever. You’re never not a father. How you’re a father changes; you have to bite your tongue a lot as your children get older, because you want to tell them what they should do or not do or how to raise the grandson or a dozen other things. But you bite your tongue because they’re adults now.

A lot of being a father is just being there. It’s not necessarily doing anything; it’s just being there. You sit through thousands of sports activities because you need to be there. They would die if you shouted something too loud during a game, but they need you to be there. Your presence tells them you think they’re important.

Being a father is a constant dose of humility. Your children, especially when they’re young, think you know everything and can do everything. And they’re wrong. But you're a kind of God figure, at least until they hit their teen years and you suddenly become stupid. And then they reach their 20s and you start to get smart again, but it’s a different kind of smart. They know you’re not infallible, but they’ve begun to figure out you’ve gone through a lot of what they’re going through.

Sometimes they call simply because they need to talk something out. You don’t have to say anything, or say much. You just need to listen.

We worried about both of our kids, and worried a lot. Now they’re grown, gainfully employed, started to create lives for themselves.

There were a lot of tense moments, and a lot of doubts, but my two sons have turned into pretty cool adults.


To see more posts on Father’s Day, please visit Bonnie Gray at Faith Barista.

Top photograph: Our oldest, Travis. Lower photograph: Our youngest, Andrew, holding his nephew Cameron.

If My Father Had Written This

Daughter, three sons, three
families jumbled, never
quite sewn or woven as if the
tailor needed to
practice first. Yet stitches held,
my fingerprints an impression,
my hands a touch, a shape.

With limited and partially
incoherent knowledge, I laid out
the paths for each. Four
predictions, failed. Four charted
courses, not taken. I was as wrong
as my father before me. They were
mists, slipping through my arms.

baby’s cry her mother’s leaving us first Sunday dress first day of school then Helen and her girl watching over mine because we were married and I had the war Navy Pacific kamikazes coming at us all the time every day Hawaii Phillipines Shanghai Okinawa Discharge Helen gone with someone else so to New Orleans and magazines on shrimp and boats and fish I hated fishing but it was a living she was sitting outside my office typing telling me about her son and her first marriage so we did my third her second a new baby boy

who didn’t talk like any of us no Southern no Nawlins accent and restless moved to Florida my dad died so back to New Orleans and the shrimp and fish and boats so I started my own business printing and mailing and I didn’t see the kids for weeks on end they became strangers I’d try but it didn’t work well she made me take him who shared my name to the French Quarter for his birthday I couldn’t help it it was five months late but we did it after she and I fought because I needed to go to work that Saturday

new son came late I was 45 when I finally had time they didn’t and were gone to school to college to Texas to Michigan to Missouri it all slips by and grandchildren strangers I didn’t know but I loved them and always work and work and back to work good provider always but the business never really turned a profit negative cash flow I’m just having my coffee and cigarette it’s Saturday morning and I have to go into work the pain shoots up my leg and arm and the very last thing I will ever say is call 9-1…

I had my three score and ten,
just a bit more, in fact, and it
was too soon and too late, too
soon to finish what needed
ending, too late to mend what
was torn. But it was sufficient.
It was enough.


Related:

Wishing All the Pins Had Held by Ann Kroeker for the High Callings Blogs.

The Hush Puppies Box - Part 3

The remaining memories my father placed in the Hush Puppies box date from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. Of note is a photo of a scene from the play “Bus Stop” by William Inge – a production at a little theater company in New Orleans, probably about 1957. Look closely at the actors, and you see the bus driver standing by the counter at the café.

The bus driver is my father. My father was an actor in a play. And this wasn’t the only one.

When I was young, I can remember my parents taking me to see plays at little theater companies. The last one was “The Music Man,” staged when I was 8. I remember it because I was in third grade and had accidentally taken home a textbook that was supposed to stay in the classroom. And I was horrified, certain I was to meet my doom when I arrived at school the next day. It hung over me all through the play.

That was the last play my parents attended. My younger brother was born two years later; my father was caught up in his printing business (we wouldn’t see him for days, sometimes; he’d be gone in the morning before I got up for school and home after I’d gone to bed at night). But there was a period in which my parents enjoyed theater.

The Hush Puppies box also contained a March 1955 copy of The Fisherman magazine. Before he started his printing business, my father worked as a ciculation manager for a publishing company in New Orleans that printed magazines like Work Boat and Shrimp Boat and Southern Bottler – trade publications for various industries and associations. He traveled (by train) to conventions and trade shows all over the country. There are a couple of photographs of my father at trade shows, and he looks so much like my younger brother that it’s startling.

A feature story in The Fisherman is about fishing for croakers. One of the four fishermen is my father. Another is a long-time friend of my father who died some years after he did; they worked together at the publishing company. A third is the man who with his wife founded the Bon Ton Restaurant, still on Magazine Street in downtown New Orleans (and still a where the locals like to eat; tourists rarely hear about it, like other well kept secrets in the city).

The interesting thing (to me) about this story is that my father hated to fish. Absolutely hated it. He was drawing upon some of his acting ability to get through that story, and probably had to do it because of the company he worked for.

But he liked going to trade shows. Once, and this is likely my earliest memory of my father, he came home from a trip to New York City with a jack-in-the-box for me. You turned the handle, and the box played Pop Goes the Weasel, a clown’s head popping out when the music reached the “Pop.” I remember sitting on the living room floor as he came in the front door. He was wearing an overcoat (so it must have been wintertime; he had worn it in New York and was still wearing it when he came home). If I have the time right, I would have been about 3 ½ years old, possibly a bit younger.

The shoebox contained little else. It’s as if the memories stopped sometime in the 1950s. Perhaps he got too busy. But he never placed anything else in the Hush Puppies shoebox.

I added a few things to the shoebox, things connected to my father, like a photo of me and my mother. I was about 2; she would have been 30. With her 1953 hair-do, she looks elegant. She always looked elegant in her photos, especially those from the 1950s. I also added my father’s business card for his printing business – Direct Mail Enterprises, Inc. My mother never called it Direct Mail or the office or even the business; she always, always referred to it by its current address – 424 Gravier, or 501 Baronne – streets in downtown New Orleans. “Where’s Dad?” I’d ask. “424 Gravier,” she’d reply. There was a lot packed into that short response, far more than a child, even a teenager, could understand.

And I added his driver’s license. His last one. The one he had in his wallet when he died of a massive stroke in 1987. Driver license photos are notoriously bad, but he doesn’t look well in the photo.

We weren’t close, my father and I. My childhood coincided with “424 Gravier” and a lot of time was lost, or never made. I remember spending part of a Saturday with him in New Orleans’ French Quarter and having my picture drawn in pastel. It’s dated February 1960; the artist’s name is Lee Stallings. It would have been near the time of "The Music Man" production. I remember it because time spent with my father was rare, and my parents had had a fight about it that morning – he needed to go to the office, yet he had promised to take me to the French Quarter. My mother won the argument. But we all lost.

I don’t doubt that he loved me, my brothers and my half-sister. It was difficult for him to show it, but it was something common across my parents’ generation. Surviving a depression, even if it killed your dreams; surviving a war; surviving two divorces before he met my mother – experiences like that can keep a lot of emotions permanently submerged.

Last year, I bought an archive-quality box with acid-free wrapping paper, and emptied the Hush Puppies box. There was a lot of sentimental value in the shoebox itself, but the contents needed better storage. The Young family Bible, dating from the 1840s, went into another archival box.

I’ve only added one thing since then. A Caravelle wrist watch, circa 1964. My first watch, a present from my parents. The band has a slight break, but the watch still works.

Like the memories.

The Hush Puppies Box -- Part 2

By far, the greatest number of items in my father’s Hush Puppies box came from World War II. He joined the Navy fairly late in the war – early 1944. He once explained the reason – his parents didn’t want him to go. They convinced him to use the “only son” deferral until he couldn’t stand it any longer. He enlisted and then told them.

He was eventually assigned to the USS Pondera as part of the original crew. The shoebox contained a “Plank Owner’s Certificate” identifying him as one of the originals. Seeing this as a child, I was more impressed by the topless mermaids framing the certificate and the drawing in the center of a city being bombed as ships stream toward it. The caption reads “Destination Tokyo!”

What I missed was the rank designation after his name – “S2c(RdM).” Radar Man, Second Class. He completed radar operating training at the Naval Training School in Point Loma (San Diego) on July 4, 1944. That certificate was in the shoebox, too, signed by Captain (Ret.) E.L. Vanderloot, along with the small New Testament of the Bible given to all servicemen. My father received his on April 30, 1944, from the chaplain at the Naval Training Center, M. DeWitt Safford.

Shortly after becoming a radar man, he was assigned to the Pondera and shipped out. There is a photo album entitled Shipmates. It contains several pictures of the first stop out from California – Hawaii. The photos are small, black and white shots that appear to be ones he bought and wrote captions for on the back. But there's also one of my father in his Navy uniform, standing against a backdrop of trees and bushes. He's smiling, and he's skinny. I never knew him to be skinny, yet there's the evidence.

The album also contains the names of five shipmates, written in my father’s fine handwriting: Michael Pania of Chicago, Ill.; Virgil Coon of Pennyton, Texas; James Orand of Marfa, Texas; Richard Weir of Fremont, Nebraska; and Harlan Haas of Victoria, Texas. These were the five he was closest to, the ones whose names and hometowns he wrote down, yet he never talked about them. The Greatest Generation was also the Silent Generation.

There is a one-page, typed “Radar Security Watch List” covering the dates from Nov. 26 to 29, 1944. It’s a schedule of who is on watch duty, typed by the radar officer, Ensign B.J. Chartier. The watches were to be secured when the ship left the dock, and they “are to be stood with loaded pistol.” My father’s name is listed for 0700-1200 on Nov. 27 and 2400 to 0700 on Nov. 29.

There were a gaggle of loose photos as well, showing other places the Pondera docked – Manila, Hong Kong and Shanghai. These photos as well look like commercial or tourist photos that one might buy.

Judging by number of photos and artifacts, the Philippines seemed to have made the greatest impression on him. Or it may have been the first international stop for the young man from Shreveport. There is a bracelet made of Philippine coins, a knife in its leather sheaf, a dried seahorse, and one item too large for the shoebox – a small carved chest, with a lock and key. The lock fell off at some point – I never saw it attached to the chest but always inside of it. The box now sits on my bookshelf, close to one other artifact my father bought in Shanghai – a three-legged, brass Chinese wedding cup.

There are other items: a membership card for the Order of the Golden Dragon, given for crossing the equator; an official discharge letter from Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, dated February 1946; and the Durham Duplex straight razor that he used to shave (portable and compact, with a folding handle).

For me, the most intriguing memory from the shoebox is a printed newsletter, The Attack. It’s the ship’s newsletter, Vol. 1, No. 1 (and possibly the only edition published; who would have time to do a newsletter once the ship moved into the war theater?). It announces the official commissioning of the Pondera and includes profiles of the captain, Lawrence J. Hasse, and the executive officer, L.M. Fabian. The back page lists the crew, and my father’s name is at the very end (the curse of alphabetical order). He’s listed on the masthead as the circulation manager – a nod to the job he left behind at the Shreveport Journal. But he also wrote one of the stories – about the ship being named for Pondera County, Montana, which was being honored for all the work done in war bond drives.

My father was a writer.

The Hush Puppies Box - Part 1

I always called it "The Hush Puppies Box," because that's what it was -- a shoebox with a photo of the iconic bassett hound on the top. But what was inside wasn't shoes. Instead, the box contained artifacts of a life, as if everything about a person could be contained in something the size of a shoebox. Artifacts of a life. My father's life. He kept treasures in this shoebox.

The Hush Puppies Box disappeared by design a year ago or so, replaced by a proper, archives-quality storage box. The jumble of articles has been replaced by each item being carefully wrapped in acid-free paper or, in one case (a knife in a sheath from the Philippines), a silversmith's cloth.

He was born in 1916 in Jena, Louisiana. He had three sisters, all also born in Jena. A fourth sister died in childhood -- a vastly more common occurrence then than it is now. His father had been a land surveyor, at a time when you didn't need much training to do that. He had landed in Jena with his surveying crew, and stayed at a boardinghouse owned by my tobacco-chewing great-grandmother. Her 16-year-old daughter worked there, too. My grandfather was 26 at the time. They would be married for almost 46 years.

My father had been nameless for three months after his birth, because my grandparents couldn't agree on a name. My grandmother finally came up with "Glynn," reflecting either some Welsh heritage or the name of the county in Georgia rumored to be where the family landed from England. "Landed" might be too gentrified a word. "Dumped with the rest of the inmates from the debtors prisons" might be more accurate, if less romantic.

After a few years in Jena, the family moved to Shreveport, where my grandfather operated a small grocery store. Shreveport in the 1920s and 1930s (and well beyond) was a highly structured class society. My father's family fell into the part of the structure that might be called "lower middle class," a group that nearly fell out of the structure with the Great Depression. My father started Byrd High School in Shreveport in 1929 and graduated in 1933, likely the darkest year of the Depression. That he stayed in high school was nothing short of a miracle. And a dream.

He clung to this dream in high school, even as economic conditions worsened. The dream was this: he wanted to be a doctor. And he took Latin, which was something aspiring doctors did back then. But at Byrd High School, Latin was a class for the wealthy kids -- and here was this boy from the wrong side of the tracks memorizing amo, amat, amare with the rest of his class.

For Thanksgiving one year, the Latin classes organized a food basket drive for poor families. The baskets were delivered to every house on the block where my father lived.

Including his.

I can't even imagine what he must have felt. But the memory remained with him for the rest of his life.

The Depression ended the dream of college and medical school. After high school, my father went to work in the only business hiring at the time -- the oil business in East Texas. It was a dirty and often dangerous business. And there was this wannabe doctor becoming a real-life roughneck.

From the oilfields, he got a slightly better but still potentially dangerous job with the Shreveport Fire Department, helped, no doubt, by one of his brothers-in-law who worked for the department and would eventually become Shreveport's assistant fire chief. He left the Fire Department and joined the circulation department of the Shreveport Journal. This was a time when radical career changes seemed to be the norm, at least for my father. He stayed with the Journal for several years, even through the early period of World War II. And then he joined the Navy.

From this early period of my father's life, the Hush Puppies box contained only three items.

One is a 1941 copy of his birth certificate from 1916. His parents' names were James Lafayette Young and Martha Ann Valentine.

The second item was a big metal souvenir penny from Galveston Beach, a remembrance of a family vacation from 1921 when my father was five. The self-described "Lucky Penny" is dark gray, with an Indian head on one side and the inscription "Souvenir Penny of Galveston, Tex." on the other. My grandfather bought this for my father, and he treasured it, as much for the souvenir value as for the fact his father had bought it for him. More than 40 years later, his own family would take the same vacation, a pilgrimage of sorts to one of the happiest memories he had as a child. Galveston Beach was a lot dirtier and in no way resembled the memory of that vacation in 1921, but my father loved it anyway. Nothing could take away the magic of the Lucky Penny.

The third item was my grandfather's pocket watch. The crystal is cracked; the watch stopped at 5:25. On the back is a flowered engraving surrounding a small shield. Inside the shield is a "Y" for Young. The one time I can remember my father showing me the watch, he said it was one of his earliest memories of his father -- pulling the watch out of his pants pocket to check the time.

It's hard for me to think of my father as a child. Except when I hold the Lucky Penny and look at the pocket watch.