So I will depart from my education blatherings for a bit.
My dad.
So we have my dad over for dinner once in a while, and occasionally make him meet us at our pub. He's 72...73? He has CPOD and refuses to go for walks or lose weight. Several years ago they thought he had congestive heart failure and he just shrugged. He's that guy.
Every time we meet with him, I use my Google Machine until my phone battery is dead trying to piece together whatever movie or actor he's trying to remember. He gets the first name but not the last name, mixes up the movies--it's actually a lot of fun. Once he kept insisting that Clint Eastwood was in Wagon's Ho or Wagon's West and that Lee Marvin was in it with him and, embarrassingly, I didn't have to look that one up. I just said "Dad, that's Paint Your Wagon." Poor kryssi, sad sad sad.
So last night at the pub was no different. But it's how we got there. We wound up talking about Hawaii, and the once in a lifetime trip we were able to take to Kauai in 2007, with my inheritance from grandma W. I was describing the water falls on Waimea and the zip line, and dad perked up and said "That sounds like where they shot Donovan's Reef".
"Dad, have you been to Kauai?"
"No but that waterfall sounds like just like he one he carried the gal up...what was her name?"
So we had to split the conversation between me looking up Donovan's Reef on my Google Machine and Jim and I both asking dad about when he was stationed at Pearl Harbor, at first trying to determine if he had gone over to Kauai and forgotten.
Turns out I'm not the only person my grandfather W neglected to tell that we had a relative on the Arizona. My dad, who was stationed there in 61/62, did not know, either.
Because why would Grandpa talk about a cousin from Nebraska he rarely saw, even if he was on the Arizona when it was bombed? He had cows to milk, and one cow and one pig to slaughter a year, and he lived in what my dad calls "the basement".
Basements have a structure above them. Grandma and Grandpa lived in a hole in the ground for years until they could save the money to buy a house that was then trucked over from Limon and set down. Literally, a hole. They had a piece of tarred wood they pulled over the opening.This was a step up from the sod house my grandma had been raised in, also on the property. And dad and Uncle Carlton used to strip the tar off of their "roof" and chew it. "It was like chewing gum" he says. (kryssi takes another long gulp of her amber.)
So there wasn't a lot of quiet, by the fire, pipe smoking book reading family time for him to chat up his kids.
Dad was at Pearl Harbor in 1961/62 before the memorial was done being built, so he did not see the name "R.L. Wyckoff" on the wall like I did in '83 and '07. He said they polished the brass and the dock walkway out to the ship. He said there were a few markers, but not the memorial I have stood on, twice.
I pulled up Donovan's Reef and exclaimed---as I was truly surprised---that it was shot on Kauai and in Waimea!
The man knew the waterfall without having seen it?
Dad took the opportunity to also explain that the one cow they slaughtered a year was shot in the head by Uncle Howard, who kept the head to make head cheese, which dad tried once but didn't like. (The head cheese he tried and did not like, not shooting the cow.)
If dad had remained in the service he would have been around when they finished the memorial, and also likely sent to Vietnam, but he was given an honorable medical discharge when he was diagnosed with bone cancer. It was in his elbow, and in 1962 what they did for that was remove your elbow. You can't be in the Navy any more if you are missing a joint, apparently. So he became a Mail Carrier, which is a career in which you need an elbow,and did just fine.
So now he's a retired Mail Carrier with two pensions--military and postal, something I suspect that doesn't exist any more---living in a tiny trailer, refusing to get a dog or go for walks, driving around his 20 year old Town Car, having brunch with these guys, bowling with those guys, meeting the other guys at the VFW and firing a rifle at military funerals at Ft. Logan. Except this Monday, when he's shooting at a memorial in Morrison, and occasionally Fridays when he meets his daughter and son in law at the pub. And a few Saturdays when he drives to Fredrick with his bestie Uncle Bob (Uncle Bob of "c'mere, I'll cut off your ears and make tacos out of them") and they sit in his other son in laws Barber Shop and guffaw and chuck and get their hairs cut.
And occasionally, while at the pub, he has to take a call. It takes him a few seconds to determine if his phone is ringing or if he's being texted. If it's a text, he takes thirty seconds to reply. He only replies "yes" or "no" to texts, so don't complicate your life by giving him too much to read. Sometimes it's a voicemail, and he has to remember how to retrieve that. He has a flip phone from 1990 and is just as delighted as a kid with a new flip phone in 1990 when he makes it work.
His incoming call last night was from the woman who sets his Firing Schedule (I dunno what it's called, that's what I call it), and she was confirming that he was going to be in Morrison on Monday, and adding an additional funeral tomorrow (today, Saturday). Without a calendar in front of him, and likely no calendar on his flip phone, he said loudly "I'll be there. I'll put it on my calendar."
Is that living the dream or what?
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