My Dad and Donald Trump

My Dad was also a womanizer. Except he just wasn’t very good at it. He more of a “one-womanizer.” He fell in love with my mother in high school, where she was the Class Poet and he was the Class President. One summer before they were married they were separated because he was working in the hills of Tennessee tramping from one farm to another selling Bible concordances. He wrote letters harassing her. . I love you, I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you. Do you love me? This isn’t a bit clever. I’m tired: “My head aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk or emptied some dull opiate to the brain” Keats – Ode to a Nightingale. Cost Uncle Charles $126 for me to learn that, so why not use it? Please, please, don’t let anything in the world change your plans about coming home Sun. I’d much rather be talking to you now than writing. First, I’d tell you how crazy you are. Then I’d tell you how glad I am. Then my shy, boyish way how much I care.

 Too bad that he was stuck with this one woman, who stayed married to him until she died at age 87 after they’d been wed for 63 years. Sad. Loser.

My Dad also went bankrupt, though. Well, not quite. He lost a quarter million bucks in the Enron debacle. He was quite the whiner about it. He said once, really loud, “Sure wish I’d known those fellows were crooks!”

My Dad was pretty profane, too. When he hit his thumb with a hammer one time when I was a kid watching him work on a fence, he cursed, really loud, “DADDDD…. BLAST IT!!”

He was also known to grab women by… well, by the elbow, anyway, like when they were trying to negotiate stairs or were about to step off a high curb while wearing heels.

But he wasn’t much good at always turning the conversation back onto himself. Failed leadership. My mother always said he was a “good listener.” No wonder he was only President of his senior class and not of the USA.

My Dad got out of the draft, though. When WWII came around, he went to report in Chicago, but they told him his eyesight was so bad “We’re afraid you’ll shoot the wrong person!” He had to join the Texas Guard instead, a militia of fellows in the oil and gas industry down on the Gulf Coast who walked the beaches watching out for U-boats, so he didn’t score as high on the “getting out of military service to his country” meter.

I guess all in all, on the really important stuff like trying to not be noticed doing something he didn’t want people to learn about, my Dad was really up there with the best. The summer I was 12, my family went with another family to Garner State Park, where we spent the day picnicking and swimming on the Frio River. Lots of other folks, there, too, and this kid came running along the beach screaming, “My Daddy’s down there!” and pointing to the river. My Dad jumped into the water, dived down deep where the fellow had gotten caught in some rocks, and pulled him up. He carried him onto the bank and gave him artificial respiration in the old-fashioned way – the victim prone, you push on his back. The fellow coughed up water, gasped, sat up groggy but alive.

We left really fast when that happened. Later we heard on the local station that the authorities were looking for my Dad. I asked my mother why he wouldn’t turn himself in, and she said that he didn’t want anyone to know about what he’d done.