Today's guest blogger, Steve Spencer, is a trust administrator by day and a fiction writer by night. His blog can be found at http://spencersb.blogspot.com/.
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My dad was born 26 May 1921, probably at home, in
the middle-of-nowhere in Itawamba
County, Mississippi, second oldest in a family that would eventually be
eight. He may have had a
third grade education. I
never saw him read anything but a newspaper. He could write well enough to get by;
sign his name, keep his ICC (Interstate Commerce Commission) logbooks back when
they were books, multi-part carbons with line graphs and drivers could lie on
them to cover up the fact they drove all night from Memphis, TN to Waco, TX. As far as I know, the only fun things
he did that didn’t always involve me was grow peppers & tomatoes, and watch
a baseball game. I don’t
know his favorite team, but it was the South before cable got big, so it was
probably the Cardinals or the Braves.
When Dad was 16, his father died of
pneumonia. At the time, it
was deadly; nowadays,
you go to the doctor, get pills and go home. His older brother was already out of
the house, so it fell to my dad to provide for the family. In depression-era rural Miss’ippi,
that meant farming. No, not
farming, just picking. The
only farmland he ever owned was a thirty-by-fifty plot in our back yard. So he enlisted in the Army, making
corporal before being discharged with a low-percentage disability due to a
training accident. To my
shame, that’s about all I know about his early life. But he was a veteran, at a time when
being in the army ran the risk of the bone-numbing cold of Bastogne, or the mosquito-infested
tropics of the southeast Pacific. He
came home, got a job, married my mom; and bought a house, a car, and a Chihuahua.
At age 44, he and Mom adopted a
roughly-six-month-old named Steven. I
don’t know what my original middle name was, but he gave me his; Arnold. I hated that name. I grew up in the mid-seventies, with
Green Acres on TV. When I
graduated high school, I refused to let them say my middle name, calling me
“Steven A.” He was there,
in the audience (Mom was too sick that day to go). He never said anything, but I
sometimes wonder if that hurt him.
They brought me home (I was already in the
family, a grand-nephew or some such) and the Chihuahua was pissed! He’d been the baby until I came
along. Mom said he used to
snuggle up against me and growl. Mom
had babysat kids before, but they always left and I was staying. I’m sure he thought: “I don’t know who this thing
belongs to, but they need to come get it.”
Dad worked at Schering-Plough for 13 years,
running the machine that made Di-Gel tablets. In the days before OSHA,
the room he worked in was a fog of chemicals, scarring his lungs and plaguing
him with breathing problems for the rest of his life. I saw him gasping for breath many
times as a kid. He had a nebulizer before they were cool. After he left Plough, he drove an OTR
truck hauling metal cabinets for Sandusky Metal Cabinets.
I never played catch with my dad. He didn’t know how to be a kid. He never got to be one himself. Not to say he ignored me. We fished, we camped, we watched
rasslin’. And he never had
a problem telling me he loved me, and I knew he did. In my early 20s, when I finally hit
teenaged angst, we had plenty of arguments. He actually kicked me in the butt,
once. In hindsight, I wish
I would have tried harder to understand why he fought with me, maybe we
wouldn’t have argued so much (not that it was a lot, but for all practical
purposes “Spencer” = stubborn).
So why do I write a Memorial Day message about
someone whose death had nothing to do with his service to our country? Because his death had nothing to do
with his service to our country. Because
he came home. Everything I
just wrote about us was possible because he came home. How many stories like this never
happened because someone didn’t come home? Mine did. In part, because theirs didn’t.
