Memories of a Father
I struggle to describe my relationship with my father. My parents divorced when I was six after he kicked open the locked door of the guest room where my mother was sleeping and attempted to strangle her.
She escaped to a neighbor’s house. Awakened by the crashing of the broken door, my cries led my father to carry me into their bedroom, which is where several neighbors and police officers found us. His story was that he was comforting me after a bad dream and that he had no idea of his wife’s whereabouts.
That is the story that my mother finally told me when I was in my teens. I only have her version. It’s not that I don’t believe her but I never had the opportunity to press my father for his. He stuck to his original story for as long as I knew him. By the time I felt bold enough to challenge him, he was nowhere to be found.
My father stayed in our house while my mother, sister and I lived in a series of rented apartments and houses around Baltimore. My sister and I continued to visit him on Sundays and for a week in the summer. No one appeared to be concerned that he would harm us.
I wasn’t afraid of him. He took good care of us when we were with him. I remember him making roast beef with mashed potatoes and gravy. Or taking us out for crab feasts. In the summer, he often took us on trips to Fort McHenry in Baltimore’s Harbor, Hershey Park in Pennsylvania, and the Luray Caverns in the Shenandoah Valley.
But we often argued, usually about my mother or about taking us back home when our visiting time was up. When my mother remarried, he started calling me by my stepfather’s last name. And frequently tossed the insult/compliment “you’re just like your mother”.
I felt exhausted by these arguments and began to resent having to visit him. When I was about 13, he suffered some type of mental breakdown. I never learned the details of what happened. He was hospitalized for a time and then, except for an opal ring that appeared on my 16th birthday and a savings account with several hundred dollars in it that appeared just before I entered college, he disappeared from my life.
In the late 1970s, I learned that after his release from the hospital, he stayed with his sister in New York for a while. At some point, he returned to Baltimore where he collapsed in the street in 1977. His death certificate states that he never married and had no children. He was 55 years old.
When people ask me about my father, I usually stick to the basics: he and my mother divorced when I was six and I was about 13 the last time I saw him. The roast beef dinners, crab feasts, and road trips rarely make the cut. Long-simmering anger and disappointment kept me from wanting to share more. But two memories surfaced recently (as buried memories are apt to do) that reminded me of two bright spots in our troubled relationship.
The first one happened when I was about eight or nine. We were watching the movie South Pacific together. My father served in the Navy and was stationed in the South Pacific during World War II. He really liked that movie. I guess it brought back some of the better memories of his war-time experiences. I do wonder if some of his problems stemmed from his time there. In the movie, two of the American service members, Joe Cable and Nelly Forbush, become romantically involved with island residents. Cable sings a song about the conflicts they feel called “You’ve Got to Be Taught”.
“You’ve got to be taught, before it’s too late. Before you are six or seven or eight. To hate all the people your relatives hate. You’ve got to be carefully taught.”
I was very confused by this song and asked my father about it. He said it was about prejudice, that it wasn’t something you were born with. Rather it was something that you learned, sometimes from your family, sometimes from the place where you grew up. He was emphatic that prejudice was wrong. It seemed very important to him that I understand that.
I usually attribute most of my social justice values to my mother. But I know now that my father also had an influence on my world view and I am grateful for that. It makes me wonder if that was one of shared ideals that brought my parents together.
The second memory occurred when I was ten and in the throes of Beatlemania. I had to have a large planters wart removed from the bottom of my left foot. The surgery was done in the hospital and I was there for a couple of days. My roommate was a girl my age who had her tonsils removed. We were both frequently sick from the anesthesia and the nurses were annoyed with us. My dad came to visit me, bringing a giant poster of John, Paul, George, and Ringo with him. The nurses weren’t too happy about it but my dad was handsome and could be very charming so they didn’t stop him from taping it on the wall above my bed. After he left, my roommate said “you have the coolest dad!”.
Although at the time, it was a relief when he disappeared. It was just too much for me to deal with at 12 or 13. But as I got older, I felt the void of not knowing him better. Of not knowing how cool a dad he might have been.
I struggle to describe my relationship with my father. My parents divorced when I was six after he kicked open the locked door of the guest room where my mother was sleeping and attempted to strangle her.
She escaped to a neighbor’s house. Awakened by the crashing of the broken door, my cries led my father to carry me into their bedroom, which is where several neighbors and police officers found us. His story was that he was comforting me after a bad dream and that he had no idea of his wife’s whereabouts.
That is the story that my mother finally told me when I was in my teens. I only have her version. It’s not that I don’t believe her but I never had the opportunity to press my father for his. He stuck to his original story for as long as I knew him. By the time I felt bold enough to challenge him, he was nowhere to be found.
My father stayed in our house while my mother, sister and I lived in a series of rented apartments and houses around Baltimore. My sister and I continued to visit him on Sundays and for a week in the summer. No one appeared to be concerned that he would harm us.
I wasn’t afraid of him. He took good care of us when we were with him. I remember him making roast beef with mashed potatoes and gravy. Or taking us out for crab feasts. In the summer, he often took us on trips to Fort McHenry in Baltimore’s Harbor, Hershey Park in Pennsylvania, and the Luray Caverns in the Shenandoah Valley.
But we often argued, usually about my mother or about taking us back home when our visiting time was up. When my mother remarried, he started calling me by my stepfather’s last name. And frequently tossed the insult/compliment “you’re just like your mother”.
I felt exhausted by these arguments and began to resent having to visit him. When I was about 13, he suffered some type of mental breakdown. I never learned the details of what happened. He was hospitalized for a time and then, except for an opal ring that appeared on my 16th birthday and a savings account with several hundred dollars in it that appeared just before I entered college, he disappeared from my life.
In the late 1970s, I learned that after his release from the hospital, he stayed with his sister in New York for a while. At some point, he returned to Baltimore where he collapsed in the street in 1977. His death certificate states that he never married and had no children. He was 55 years old.
When people ask me about my father, I usually stick to the basics: he and my mother divorced when I was six and I was about 13 the last time I saw him. The roast beef dinners, crab feasts, and road trips rarely make the cut. Long-simmering anger and disappointment kept me from wanting to share more. But two memories surfaced recently (as buried memories are apt to do) that reminded me of two bright spots in our troubled relationship.
The first one happened when I was about eight or nine. We were watching the movie South Pacific together. My father served in the Navy and was stationed in the South Pacific during World War II. He really liked that movie. I guess it brought back some of the better memories of his war-time experiences. I do wonder if some of his problems stemmed from his time there. In the movie, two of the American service members, Joe Cable and Nelly Forbush, become romantically involved with island residents. Cable sings a song about the conflicts they feel called “You’ve Got to Be Taught”.
“You’ve got to be taught, before it’s too late. Before you are six or seven or eight. To hate all the people your relatives hate. You’ve got to be carefully taught.”
I was very confused by this song and asked my father about it. He said it was about prejudice, that it wasn’t something you were born with. Rather it was something that you learned, sometimes from your family, sometimes from the place where you grew up. He was emphatic that prejudice was wrong. It seemed very important to him that I understand that.
I usually attribute most of my social justice values to my mother. But I know now that my father also had an influence on my world view and I am grateful for that. It makes me wonder if that was one of shared ideals that brought my parents together.
The second memory occurred when I was ten and in the throes of Beatlemania. I had to have a large planters wart removed from the bottom of my left foot. The surgery was done in the hospital and I was there for a couple of days. My roommate was a girl my age who had her tonsils removed. We were both frequently sick from the anesthesia and the nurses were annoyed with us. My dad came to visit me, bringing a giant poster of John, Paul, George, and Ringo with him. The nurses weren’t too happy about it but my dad was handsome and could be very charming so they didn’t stop him from taping it on the wall above my bed. After he left, my roommate said “you have the coolest dad!”.
Although at the time, it was a relief when he disappeared. It was just too much for me to deal with at 12 or 13. But as I got older, I felt the void of not knowing him better. Of not knowing how cool a dad he might have been.
The Girl Scout Cookie Chairman
It all begins with an idea.
Between 1963 and 1964, the year that I was a 10-year-old girl in Baltimore, President Kennedy was assassinated, the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, I had foot surgery, the World’s Fair returned to New York City, my mother volunteered to chair my Girl Scout troop’s cookie campaign.
My mother didn’t get involved in our school projects. She didn’t volunteer for the PTA or organize bake sales. She did belong to the League of Women Voters and on many a pre-dawn morning on election day, she would drag me and my four siblings to the local polling place to hand out flyers for Democratic candidates.
Juliet McLaren Carr wasn’t classically beautiful but she had style. Maybe a little too much style for my younger sister Jamie. Watching her come down the stairs dressed for parent-teacher conferences in a tight black skirt and stiletto heels, Jamie said “that’s what you’re wearing?”
I know now that the Girl Scout project was for my benefit. I was miserable and it wasn’t due to hobbling around on crutches for six weeks or adolescent hormones. My mother had remarried and I had a new stepfather, two new stepsisters, and a stepbrother. Dinner hour was a constant battle for supremacy and often ended in tears, usually mine. The Girl Scout meetings were quiet and orderly, a place that was all my own. Each week when I entered the church basement where we met, I could forget about the tension at home for the next two hours.
When the cartons of Thin Mints, Do-Si-Dos, Trefoils, and Peanut Butter Sandwich cookies were delivered, we stacked them up in the dining room. Each week, the girls of my troop would arrive to pick up cookies and drop off money. The girls loved my mother. She quickly learned all of their names and spent time talking with each of them, likely slipping in messages of female empowerment. She was even gracious with the parents, people she normally wouldn’t give the time of day. I watched in awe. Who was this woman?
Whatever the rest of the troop didn’t sell, I did. Over spring break, my stepfather came home from his job at the Social Security Administration just before the lunch hour to pick me up along with several cartons of cookies, a card table, and a folding chair. Set up outside the main entrance as scores of government employees left the building, I made a killing.
At the end of cookie sales season, our troop had sold more cookies than any other in Baltimore. Nobody was prouder than my mother. A perk of the top-selling honor was that our troop received a portion of the sales to spend on something fun. News about the upcoming World’s Fair in the Queens borough of New York was everywhere that year. My mother had been regaling me with stories of the 1939 New York World’s Fair that she attended as a child and our family already had plans to attend later that summer. We were excited to try the Picturephone, see Michelangelo’s Pieta, and eat something called Brussels waffles. It was, after all, a small world.
When my mother suggested that we use the cookie sale money for a one-day trip to the World’s Fair, everyone loved the idea. The adults sprang into action. My troop leaders collected permission slips and recruited parents to chaperone, including one who was a registered nurse. My mother hired a bus to pick us up early in the morning and bring us back that night.
All that was left was securing permission from the national Girl Scout council. They turned us down. “Too much liability,” they said. The troop was crushed but our disappointment was no match for my mother’s fury.
“Goddamned Girl Scouts! I knew I shouldn’t have gotten involved. Probably all Republicans!”
“it’s okay, Mom,” I said. “We still came in first. We can find something else to do with the money.”
She refused to be placated.
A few months later, the Girl Scout catalog arrived in the mail. On the front cover, four smiling Scouts, a Brownie, a Cadet, a Junior, and a Senior, stood arm-in-arm in front of the giant World’s Fair Unisphere.
My mother quit the Girl Scouts for good that day. I stayed for a few more years until teen center dances and boys lured me away. But the Girl Scout Cookie Chairman had hung up her sash.