My Dad was thirty-five years old when I was born, the third child of four. My brother was almost seven, and my sister was two. Mom was nearly twenty-six. Mom and Dad had been married eight and a half years. It was March 1943, and World War II affected everything, all the time. My younger sister would be born two and a half years later. To say “times were tough” does not begin to tell the story. I can only guess what my Mom and Dad felt the day I was born. I have only happy memories of the days my daughters were born, but things were so much different. I have no memories of worrying about how we would pay the bills or if we could give them a good and safe life. However, I believe the concerns and problems that my parents lived with in the early days of my life helped guide me through my life.
I have written about my memories of living in the Heights and about my illnesses and surgeries that affected my first and second grades in school. I know that made financial matters worse for my parents and the rest of my family; however, I have no memories of ever hearing comments from either my Mom or Dad about that, not then or any time. I remember Dad got up early to ride a bus to where he worked and came home later, tired, and Mom would have supper ready for all of us to eat together. There were no TVs, and the radio was hard to hear or understand, requiring us to be together in the small front room (we call the living room) with us kids sitting on the floor by the radio. That old radio had tubes that would get weak with age, and it was hard to locate a new tube in a store in the area if you had the money to buy it.
Most nights, the radio was only on to hear the news, and if there were major warnings, like weather. On weekend nights, there were serial programs that lasted 15 to 30 minutes that we could listen to. I only remember my brother working at two places when we lived in the Heights, but there may have been others. I know he worked at one of the grocery stores and at the pharmacy. He was sixteen when we moved to the Northside, so it is possible that he had other part-time jobs that I do not remember.
I remember some years, Dad would plant a garden on the land between the house and the railroad tracks to grow vegetables to help save on food costs. Mom and we kids would help with the picking and weeding. I remember one year, when Dad worked for the company that treated houses for termites, the owner invited his employees to a company picnic at his place in the country. There was a pecan orchard on the property, and families were permitted to collect and take home a large tote sack of pecans. That bag sat in the corner of the room until they were all gone. Mom made pecan pies for special occasions when she had the money for the other ingredients.
I have no memories of my Dad and my brother doing things one-on-one or of Dad and me together during those years. My brother would play catch with me and taught me how to hold a bat and swing it, but I was almost seven years younger and small for my age. Not sure how much fun it was for him, but good memories for me. I do remember a couple of times my Dad took my brother and me to Houston Buffs baseball games and rode the buses to get to the stadium, and we ate a bag of peanuts.
Dad had to change jobs due to his health problems. His years of smoking, working at the shipyard, and then in damp conditions under houses treating for termites, the doctor warned him about the condition of his lungs. He went to work again as a machinist at a company he would work at until he retired in 1973 at the age of sixty-five.
When we moved to the Northside, the nearest high school was Davis. It was not that much closer than Reagan, where he was attending when we lived in the Heights, but our area was zoned to Davis High School. Maurice was not happy with that change because it was still seven miles, and no school bus ran that far out. He bought an old motor scooter to ride to school. Part of the shortest route to get there included a gravel road. He was following a school bus when the bus stopped unexpectedly, and the scooter could not stop before slamming into the back of the bus. Maurice was in the hospital for about a week and unconscious for several hours.
In those days, there were no hospital or doctor insurance plans. If you could not pay the bill, a payment plan would be arranged to pay for the charges. We did not have family discussions about bills; Dad just took care of them in some way. If I wanted something that I did not get (and there were some), I blamed him. It was easy; we were never friends. It seemed like he only knew I was around when I did something to make him mad. I never considered that doing things that were expected was what was expected and not something to be rewarded or celebrated. I had not grasped the idea that bad behavior is a path that takes you to a life with few rewards. My Dad had quit school before graduation to live with his older brother to get a farm going. He never had classes to learn how to conduct group encouragement sessions.
As I got older and learned how to repair and maintain cars, my Dad realized I could do things that he paid others to do for him. He knew how to change the oil, but with me, he did not have to get under the car. We had a connection greater than me just mowing the yard. I worked part-time from an early age, working at grocery stores and service stations to earn spending money for things I wanted and to go places. I did not play on any school teams or join any school clubs due to those after-school jobs.
I realized much later that my Dad let me use the car to go on dates and to do school activities because he trusted me. We had a relationship that I did not understand at that time. I had viewed it as “what it did to me” and did not understand “what it did for me.” What I had learned was that meeting the minimum standards was not enough; you must keep expanding your “old best” to know what is possible for you to attain. The remarkable things going on in your life today are not guaranteed to be there tomorrow. Plan for storms that are hiding in the future, and you can control the size and period of that storm.
I was thirty-five when my Dad died, the same age he was when I was born. I cried at his funeral because I had learned to love the man that I had feared in my early years. When I became a father, I wanted to raise my children differently from my father, and I did things differently. I told my daughters I loved them when they were little. It was easy to buy things and do things to show them that love. So many things were different, and everyone had so much more that a real sacrifice was not necessary.
Looking back, the important things that I shared were the lessons I learned from my Dad. Not what he told me, but the things I learned from our relationship. Respect and trust are not free; you earn them. You first must respect those you want respect from, and then give them reasons to respect you. You must show you can be trusted in the little things to be worthy of trust in the big things.
For some people, it is easy for them to say I love you, and for others, you may have to find out by understanding their actions over a much longer period. I have written about things we did together after Dad retired and family trips together, even in his later years; however, I wanted to talk about what we don’t always see or understand when we are living “in the moment.”
Our relationship with God is no different. We do not always understand why certain things happen or do not happen, and may not accept the result as the best for us. We know our wants or even what we think are needs, but we cannot know what God knows. Faith in God without Trust in God is a place of confusion when you are living “in that moment.”
My Dad’s last several months were very difficult for him, and I hated what cancer was doing to him. However, I thank God for the time I was able to spend with him and the talks we had there alone in the hospital. If I had only known when I was young what I felt at that time, but that is not how life is. Our life is the sum of our experiences and the road we traveled. What is most important is how much we learned along the way. There are many ways to acquire knowledge, but wisdom, not so easy.
How much better to get wisdom than gold, to get insight rather than silver!
Proverbs 16:16 New International Version
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