A Long Time Ago - Daddy, part 1

So many people who've heard my "story" tell me I should write a book. So maybe this is the beginning of that project. It'll probably be all kinds of out-of-order but I have to write it down as things come to me.

My daddy is an emotionally unavailable selfish lost soul. He was raised by his single mother with his 2 half-sisters, with no male roll-model in his life. He told me stories of his childhood...things like sleeping on the playground in the summer, then stealing milk from people's milk boxes (way back when they still did home delivery). He joined the Air Force as an aircraft electrician. He was ORDERED to write a letter to my grandma after she contacted his first sgt. complaining that she'd not heard a peep from him since he enlisted. He wrote "Dear Mom. I am fine. Signed, Ken" or something to that effect.

When he came home from the Air Force, he met and married my mom. She got pregnant with my brother, Kenny, within a year or so of being married. My brother died at the age of 6 weeks from viral pneumonia. Personally I think my dad checked out, emotionally, from our family at his death. After 2 more years of trying, I was born, then my sister about 2 yrs later. At least daddy made some sort of a feeble attempt to be my dad. He didn't even try with my sister.

He was a milkman (ironic, huh?). The running joke was always that we are the milkman's kids. He would get up and go to work around 3 am, come home and sleep til supper, eat, then go up to the firehouse, where he was a volunteer fireman, and hang out. Sometime after we'd be in bed, he'd come home and sleep again til it was time for work. Saturday's were our best bet of seeing him, but most of the time, he was working a parttime job, or helping some buddy, or hanging at the fire house. Sunday's were reserved strictly for golfing.

The only real emotion I ever saw from my daddy was when my maternal grandmother died in 1974. He picked us up from school on our way home for lunch and his voice cracked when he told us the news that she'd died in her sleep.

In 1978, he left us for another woman... Barbara. I tried to like her, really I did. It's just not possible!

Time to go! more on Daddy next time....