Your Opinion: Remembering my father

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October 18, 2012

Your Opinion: Remembering my father

Anonymous CNHI The Tifton Gazette Thu Oct 18, 2012, 10:02 PM EDT

Almost 20 years ago, I sent into the Gazette and had published the following tribute to my father:

"I don’t dream much anymore. I just don’t dream. So it was a surprise when the dream of my father crept into my mind in the middle of the night. The dream ran like a 1950’s 8mm film put on a modern day VCR’s fast forward. There was laughter and good times flying by with such speed that it was hard to remember the details. It ended suddenly when my dad collapsed and died in my arms. The sudden ending shocked me awake and upright. Why had I dreamed?

As I put my head back on the pillow, the moonlight showed through an upper corner of the window. I had forgotten to close the curtain and the 2 a.m. moonlight was shining directly into my face. Maybe this was the extraneous factor that triggered the dream. Suddenly, it dawned on me that this wasn’t all of it. Today would have been my Dad’s birthday.

He would have been 69; just short of his “three score and ten”. He died almost eleven years ago and not suddenly. A long painful bout with lung cancer finally brought him down at age 59.

He had been born shortly before the Depression, the baby boy of a large family. He was the brightest of the kids, but got lost in a large extended family trying to survive the Depression. He was married at age 16 to my mother who was only 15. The marriage ended for him with his death. It still survives for my mom. At age 18 he was a scared young man on a destroyer escort off the beaches of Normandy. He was never tested in battle and, like many of us from the Vietnam era, had mixed feelings of relief and guilt.

The military gave him a bigger battle. . . a lifelong battle with alcohol which ended only when “he and God worked it out”. He was prone to Irish melancholia and fatalism. Tested in the military with a high I.Q. and a natural artistic talent he never realized many of his dreams. This was partly because he may have spent too much time battling his own personal demons, but mainly because he knew he had to provide for his family. He had a talent for things mechanical and spent much of his working life doing hard physical work but constantly improved his skills until he became a plant manager a decade before he died. He never let his drinking problem keep him from providing for us. I saw him lose one day of work due to a broken arm and return to work using large pipe wrenches the next day. He bought me a baseball glove when we couldn’t afford it and spent hours pitching with me. I never had his mechanical aptitude or athletic ability, but we did share a love of reading. He wrote poetry and read voraciously.

By the time I was in college we weren’t agreeing on much. The draft board was a continuous presence in my life and Dad and I couldn’t agree on the politics of the war. One thing we did agree on was the space program. He was fascinated by the sheer complexity and physics of the task of getting a man to the moon. I was fascinated by the courage of the men. Men who competed to be the first to be allowed to be strapped to a gigantic firecracker and possibly blown to bits or lost in space. The space program was one of the few things that united my dad and me and, indeed, our nation in those days.

I remember we watched most of the night when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. We felt proud but humble. We walked out in the middle of the night to stare up at this same moon that shined through my window tonight. We were in awe of what these men and our nation had done. We had put a “fire on the moon”. We were even more in awe of the God who made it possible for mankind to do this and; indeed, who had hung the moon to give us something to shoot at.

This was a shared event for my dad and me. They blasted off for the moon on his birthday and splashed down back on earth on mine. We shot for the moon with his generation – they were the “can do” people. They survived the Depression, World War II and Korea and made life better for their kids and grandkids. We came back to Earth with my generation. Somewhere along the way we all became a nation of whiners, complainers, liars and cheats. We became more interested in “falling stars” like O.J., Madonna, and Roseanne and less in the “shooting stars” that race across our skies briefly to give us a moment of light. My dad was a shooting star, burning out too soon but being a hero in many ways while he lived. The astronauts, like my father, had weaknesses. But, they also were heroes. They let us see some of the better things our people were capable of if we used the abilities and resources we were given.

We don’t dream much anymore. We just don’t dream."

Now as we approach the most important Presidential election of my lifetime and I get closer to my 65th birthday, I urge all citizens who remember what it means to be a nation of achievers and a people striving for a better life for themselves and their children to get to the polls. America is a blessed land which gives people of all races and religions a land in which to dream and achieve. We do not want to become a nation of whiners who are dependent on the government to satisfy our every need, from food to phones. Especially if it requires us to become politically correct sheep willing to give up our God given rights and our dreams of a better world for ourselves and our kids. Like President Obama, my father and I had dreams from our fathers, too; but our dreams were of a different and, I think, better America. Vote to change it back.

Terry Taylor

Tifton

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