Losing Daddy: Chapter 1

Chapter 1: Daddy’s Little Girl

The man in the picture is my dad. He was 6'2”, had almost black hair and hazel eyes and a face that was simply amazing. He's wearing a suit and looks like he just stepped out of the cover of a men's fashion magazine. He’s reading to me. By the tilt of my left hand it looks like I have just turned a page. I’m about two.

I am pretty sure the book is The Three Little Kittens That Lost Their Mittens.  My mouth is open, my eyes riveted to the page. My daddy holds the book. I am enraptured. The world is as it should be. I am sheltered from the world, on my father’s lap.

I used to think my mother took this picture. This fit with my memory about my perfect childhood before the divorce. I was disappointed when my half-brother, Michael, told me Mom told him the pictures were taken at somebody else’s house, so someone else could have taken them.

Many years later I was sitting with Dad and Peggy on the couch in the house they lived in right before they both went into the nursing home. The picture window framed the tall grass prairie and sunlight filled the room.

 “Do you remember my mother?” I asked him.

“Vaguely,” he said. Later Peggy told me he said that for her benefit.

When I asked him how he met my mother, he said he could not really remember. Seems like there was a party for enlisted men, he said. My mother, on the other hand, seemed to remember everything about it. She remembered the number of his LST (which he frequently referred to as a “large stationary target”). She remembered that LST really stands for Landing Ship Tank. And she remembered the number of my dad’s LST was 506.

One day I showed my father a picture of him his wife Peggy had found somewhere in his things. It was a picture of him with my mother, my brother and me, standing outside the house on Seabrook in Topeka, Kansas, around 1957 of 1958. The wind is blowing my hair into a shape like the bottom of a “C.” My body is leaning slightly like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Everybody is smiling. It was the year before the divorce.

“Look at the family,” my father said.

When I talked to him and Peggy one day about Mom needing 24-hour-a-day care he began to stare across the room gripping his chin with his hand. I wish I could have read his thoughts.

“Is she disabled?” he asked.

I never talked to them about their relationship. I only know that once they were young and in love. Their relationship was theirs. It was between them. It was never mine to begin with, but I tried to own it.

In my reconciliation fantasy, Rogers and Hammerstein love songs would provide the background music for my stunningly beautiful movie-star gorgeous parents to stroll hand in hand on an English hillside, like Heathcliff and Katherine. Never mind that Heathcliff and Katherine are possibly the most tragic couple in all of world literature, second only, say, to Romeo and Juliet.

In my reconciliation fantasy, every few moments, they stop walking to talk and look adoringly into each other’s eyes. My dad’s soft hand caresses my mother’s wavy, brown hair as her head slips perfectly into the crevice of his shoulder. He puts his arm around her. Their marriage was made in heaven.

Flash forward.

“I don’t like to be caressed,” Mom tells my brother who lovingly strokes her brow as she lies in a nursing home hospital bed.

Mom had another story about how she met Dad. Apparently, Dad and one of his friends were taking a walk in the town square in Southampton, met her and one of her friends, also walking, and invited them to the party on the LST. That’s all I ever heard about it.

She was beautiful. He was handsome. They were both fascinating, gifted people. She was an artist and had worked as a draftsman at an aircraft factory during World War II. He was a U.S. naval officer who had been a leader from a young boy and would carve out a place for himself as a leader in his community.

He had served on active duty on the LST whose number was 506 at Normandy Beach on D-Day. When he was married to Peggy, she would report to me that Daddy had nightmares and would wake up screaming. But during my whole life he rarely mentioned the war. I personally think it might have been watching “Saving Private Ryan” that set off the nightmares.

I learned from my parents separately that they both loved Archy and Mehitabel. In the book published in 1916 by Don Marquis, a former reporter for a New York newspaper, Archy was a cockroach who had been a poet in a former life; Mehitabel was a cat who claimed to have been reincarnated from Cleopatra. Because Archy had to type one key at a time on the typewriter, he used no punctuation, yet you can make sense of the stories told in a kind of free verse format.

To this day, Archy and Mehitabel contains the only poems I readily understand or appreciate. My father left me Whitman, Longfellow and Tennyson, but I pick Archy and Mehitabel over all of them. Even now I think about things like whether they might have  read Archy and Mehitabel to each other when they were courting.

I believe Mom and Dad got married at the Church of The Ascension in Southampton, England, on May 1, 1945, and one of Dad’s buddies took a picture of them surrounded by all of his shipmates. Mom came over from England in February 1946. I was born nine months later.

When I was one month old my maternal grandparents, Thomas Luke George Hallewell and Elsie Rose Hall Hallewell (Nana and Granddad), and my Uncle John, 12, came over from England. It was in the paper. Two years after that, Mom had my brother David. Three years later Dad met the other woman. Such a relatively short space of time to bear so much significance in my life.

For a while after he left us, he shared an apartment with another divorcing, temporarily single male friend, Pat Murphy. The first thing I saw when I walked into his apartment was a picture of the new lady. I remember one day I stuck my tongue out at the picture while I thought my dad could not see me. Immediately he came back into the room.

I know that he caught me doing it and then I felt guilty and afraid of losing his approval. He probably gave me some kind of a look and he may have said something. I felt ashamed. But I was so mad. I stayed mad for a long time.

I was daddy’s little girl. I knew that was true because he sang it to me. A song came out with that title (“Daddy’s Little Girl,” by Bobby Burke and Horace Gerlach, 1949) and my daddy sang it to me.

Numerous people throughout his life have said that my dad could have had a career in Hollywood. The stepfather of a friend of mine said he was “the handsomest man in town.”

 Whoever you think is the handsomest man in the world, put his face there I don't want to prejudice you. But apart from what anybody else thought, to me he was the handsomest, the nicest, the funniest, the most wonderful man in the world. No movie star could hold a candle to him. He was more worthy of admiration than the president. In other words, he was perfect. He could do no wrong. I suppose I idolized him.

He always looked so nice. So handsome in his Navy uniform. So handsome in a suit. While attending law school he worked at Ray Beers, the finest men’s wear store in Topeka. He was so handsome with his almost black head of hair and hazel eyes. His hands were the softest hands of any man’s I ever touched.

Some said he was the youngest judge to sit on a bench in the United States when he was Judge, Court of Topeka from 1949 to 1951.

My mother used to say he was a “big fish in a little pond.” Now that I think about it, that was a pretty horrible thing to say, and in my mind somewhat clarifies what might have happened between them. But he was and always will be my hero. I think God made fathers to be their children’s heroes.

Flashback to when he was at Aldersgate (a Topeka nursing home).

He tells me he loves me when I go see him at the nursing home.

“You’re my baby,” he says.

“You’re my daddy,” I tell him.

I know he didn’t mean to ruin my life.

Everybody likes to say how resilient children are. I suppose it makes parents feel less guilty about breaking up their families. I, of course, felt guilty for many years for loving Irene because it felt like I was betraying my mother and at times my mother reinforced that feeling. But Irene was beautiful too. My daddy could pick beautiful women.

Principle #1 for Finding Your Sweet Spot: Be thankful for the gifts of your childhood. Remember them fondly. They will always be a part of you. Treasure them but use them to bless others. For example, if you enjoyed being read to as a child look for opportunities to give back by reading to children or sing songs with children!

Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Ephesians 5:19,20 (NIV)

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