My feelings about my father are conflicted. Before he died, he was almost a saint in my eyes. After he died, I had the freedom to explore my true feelings. He achieved sainthood status by virtue of being my primary caregiver. As long as he was the only bit of stability in my life, I couldn’t question our relationship. As a child, he showed me endless patience. He taught me so much. He seemed to enjoy my company, and we would engage in a myriad of activities. We could talk, and he always respected what I had to say. Somehow, somewhere, that changed. His mantra became “I am a misogynist—women are no damned good.” That phrase is in my bones. After he died, I could see how this came into play in our relationship.
When I was young, Pop treated me like I was his son. During World War II in Charlotte, North Carolina, he managed to get me rides in both a locomotive and an airplane. There was virtually no commercial flight, so this was no mean feat. We scavenged for metal and built a wagon named “Carolyn II.” I have no idea what the “II” meant. Later, it was suggested to me that I was “Carolyn I.” In Wichita, we rummaged through old World War I and II planes. I found Monopoly money in one of them and thought I was rich. Our next move was to Wilmington, California. We spent our time roaming around the port. I don’t know that we were looking for anything, and I don’t remember finding anything. I became so familiar with the port area that years later I recognized everything immediately. As an adult, I was on the deck of a cruise ship when we docked. The feeling of déjà vu was overwhelming.
Life began to change when we moved to San Diego. My mother was drinking to the point of passing out. I stayed at home to take care of my brother. Much of the time I didn’t go to either the first or second grades. Not surprisingly, I didn’t learn much. When Pop realized how illiterate I was, he did his own version of home schooling. In very short order, he taught me to read, spell and memorize the multiplication tables. I learned to read by reading the newspaper. I learned to spell phonetically, starting with the word Constantinople. The rhyme was:
And a Contstanti
With a nople
And a pople A
and a Constantinople
He made flash cards for the multiplication tables. We would play games with checkers, dominoes and the world globe. To play the globe game, one of us had to pick the name of a place, and the other would find it. I stumped Pop with the Ross Sea.
Weekends, Pop and I visited the dump to reclaim pieces of hardwood, screws, nuts and bolts. The hardwood was used to make blocks for my brother. The screws, nuts and bolts were carefully sorted by size and put in small jars. He had those jars for forty years, until he died.
We would take family vacations. Usually they would be two weeks and would include a hydroelectric dam and a National Park. Pop was an engineer, and the dams fascinated him. We visited Hoover, Grand Coulee, Bonneville and Hungry Horse. We saw most of the National Parks in the West. Pop hated horses, but he would take me on day-long horseback trips. We went up Half Dome in Yosemite and the Great White Throne in Zion, saw buffalo in Yellowstone, and rode into the Sierras outside of Bishop, California.
When I was small, Pop would tell me bedtime stories about “riding the rails” in the 1930s. He would hop a train in Cambridge, Nebraska, and ride to Antioch College in Ohio. He would return the same way, or ride the train to his next co-op job. All the rides involved tales of interesting characters. When I visited Cambridge, his school friends remembered Pop waving to them from a freight car as he went through town. Every year, I would get a calendar with Chessie the Cat on it. Chessie was the symbol of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. That was my wall art.
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