Sunday, June 21, 2009

FOR MY DAD ON FATHER'S DAY



My dad was born right before World War I in 1914. He died in the morning on St. Patrick's Day in 2003, a few days before the war in Iraq began. He had a paper route as a boy during the Depression. He was the president of his high school class in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He moved to Los Angeles, California, in the late 1930's. At the end of World War II, he served in the Navy in payroll on Treasure Island on San Francisco Bay. His first career was in insurance. His second career was as a systems analyst for Standard Oil of California. He retired at 60 from the same oil company, which had changed its name to Chevron. After he retired, he and my mother lived in a little house on the bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Gualala, California, until my mother's unexpected death in 1994. He loved baseball, growing flowers and artichokes and raspberries and New Zealand spinach, carving, solitaire, God, ice cream, my mother's cooking. He wrote an autobiography in the last years of his life and dedicated it to his only grandchild, my nephew. He loved life. The last time we saw each other felt peaceful. It was his 89th birthday, about a month before he died. He is buried next to his parents and next to my mother in a cemetery in Minneapolis.

Thank you, Dad, for your encouragement and support. When I was a child, I thought of you as Babar, the wise and kind elephant father.

7 comments:

mum said...

"buy me some peanuts and cracker jacks, I don't care if I never get back...". Hadn't heard that in years and remembered all the words.

Your dad as Babar - that's sweet. Here's for you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk0wcn_4JV4&feature=fvw

Good Sunday to you.

am said...

mum -- Oooooh ... thanks so much for the link.

Good Sunday to you, too.

Dale said...

(o)

Zhoen said...

(o)

mandt said...

I never tire of Barbar---how wonderful those stories were/are---Also The Little Prince...peace MandT

am said...

Dale and Zhoen -- Thanks for leaving stones.

MandT -- Now that I think of it, Babar was read to me before I could read. For me, it was very much about the illustrations as was the The Little Prince, which I read as a much older child but with the same delight at seeing a different world come to life in the pages of a book.

ArtSparker said...

My father was in the Navy on Treasure Island at the same time. I wonder if they new each other? He eventually served as a radio repairman on a ship with "a skeleton crew", a phrase which startled a small boy when he was telling the story years later.