We'll Have to Muddle Through Somehow

Several people have asked me if my family was really in organized
crime (god forbid the 20 or so people I know who read this thing
ACTUALLY COMMENT on it). The short answer is no. I never said my
grandpa and great-uncle were in the mob. But anyone who's seen The
Sopranos knows that you rarely come out unscathed if you do business
with them. And I think dead counts as scathed.

Actually, I should tie up a couple of loose ends left hanging by several recent posts. One is this mob thing, the other is that I don't blame my dad for how things have turned out between us. I have always given him a free pass when it came to fatherhood and considered myself lucky to have a father at all, given the circumstances. My dad grew up out in western Oklahoma. He was born just before World War II and my grandpa then abandoned his family, as he was abandoned by his father, and left my grandma there to run the family farm and raise the boys. This was at the end of the Dust Bowl and it was still tough farming and she tried a couple of years, but just couldn't do it alone. So she left the boys with their father's aunt and headed to Wichita to build B-29s as a Rosie the Riveter. She got remarried there and came back for the boys after the war. Meanwhile the aunt had been telling the boys their parents hated them and weren't coming back. She had also gone to the local judge and had the boys declared abandoned so she could get legal custody of them. So when my dad's mom showed up one day in 1945 to get the boys they were scared of her. The aunt told my grandma, "You're not taking Older Boy. You can have Younger Boy, but I'm keeping this one." Not quite Sophie's Choice, but my grandma didn't want the boys to grow up not knowing each other, so she gave them up and - sound familiar - started a whole new family a couple states away.

My grandpa, of course, knew none of this and he shows up one day when my dad was in high school. He walked into the classic 50's malt shop place in town where all the teens were - and you have to know my dad was a pretty cool looking, James Dean type - and my grandpa 'called him out' in the street and embarassed him in front of all his friends. Then he disappeared again for about 25 years. My sister was getting married and somehow he heard about it and he showed up the day before the wedding. I mean you can just imagine the emotions in our house. My poor dad. Marrying off his daughter is hard enough, but to have your long lost dad show up, too. And my folks. I have to tell you, it was like the prodigal son story. The minute he came in my mom - who had spewed bile against this guy for 25 years - gets up, gives him a hug and says, "What would you like for dinner? I'll make your favorite meal!" While it's cooking she goes into their bedroom and cleans it, changes the bedding, and gives him the best room in the house. Then he pulls out this huge wad of cash and tells my sister to get in the car, "We're going shopping. I'll buy you anything you want for your wedding."

A week later, we get one of those calls at 3:00 am. It's the New Mexico Highway Patrol. My grandpa had died in a car wreck. So my dad flies down to El Paso to settle the estate. He said it was like a detective movie because he had no idea what his father's life was like. Grandpa had had at least three wives - all very much younger than he - and several kids. Some bank accounts had been emptied. The local police wouldn't talk about him. The bank where he worked as a repo man wouldn't talk about him. Finally, my dad drove out to this lonely stretch of I-10 in New Mexico and tracked down the patrolman who found the crash. He told my dad it was a strange scene. It was quite clear, he said, that the car had been expertly pushed off the road by another car. My grandpa and his female companion had been thrown from the car and killed, but an infant strapped in a car seat was sitting in the shade of the wreck with two bottles at hand. A briefcase my grandpa was known to carry was missing (and never found), but his wallet with several hundred dollars was still there and the woman's purse was untouched so there was no banditry. The police matter-of-factly told my dad it was, "probably the Mexican mob". We'll never know. I do know I inherited a private eye's license and a .25 caliber automatic pistol that would fit in a closed fist. Very cool for a 13 year-old. I know less about my dad's uncle, just rumors - a politician, in Nevada, mysterious car crash.

One day a few years ago I asked my dad if he ever thought about leaving us and he said, yeah, he had. "Why didn't you then?" I asked. He said, "I didn't want you to make excuses for me your whole life." Somehow, despite all of this, he stuck with us. He loved us. He smiled and laughed with us. He hugged us and made us feel secure. And he felt his way through the dark the whole way.