My dad no longer knows me

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Saturday January 24, 2009 · 6:27 PM PST

2009/01/24 · 18:27

My father was a 90s father in the 60s. Way back then, we lived on an Air Force Base. I was the oldest of what would turn out to be nine children. For my entire young life, I lived on air force bases -- in Japan, Okinawa and Tampa. I was extraordinarily lucky to be on one air force base -- MacDill in Tampa -- for much of my young life. Largely because my father, who was just a mechanic, knew a general who kept him from being moved to, oh, Grand Rapids, Michigan, where we were supposed to go when he came back from Viet Nam.

The story of my father continues.

I grew up on MacDill AFB in Tampa. I was born -- as was my sister -- on Turner AFB in Albany, Ga. My brother was born in Japan; my sister in Okinawa. Two brothers and two sisters were born in Tampa. Then, after his retirement, another sister was born in Atlanta.

Here's what I remember:

When I was young, my father was my hero. He would rescue baby birds that had fallen out of their nests, and he taught us to treasure all of God's creatures. I remember him going down to Tampa Bay during an oil spill or red tide, I don't remember which, to rescue a pelican which he brought home and cared for until it was healthy enough to release.

Every afternoon, he would come home and we would eat dinner at 5 pm. Then, he would gather all of us kids in the station wagon and drive us to the beach on MacDill -- a small beach where he would pick up horseshoe crabs and tell us that they were ancient beings and that we should leave them alone.

We would drive home and he would make sure everyone got his/her baths. And then, he would sit in the hall outside our bedrooms, and he would read poetry (Poe, Shakespeare, Kipling) and sing songs (Lindy Lou, Go Tell Aunt Rhodie, On the Road to Mandalay...) until we all went to sleep.

He bought a cheap telescope when he knew that men were going to land on the moon. And he made sure that we were up so we could go out and look through that telescope to see the moon, where, he assured us, men were walking.

He taught me that the Pleiades were followed by Taurus, which was followed by Orion and then, the Hunter's faithful dog, Sirius. He had no education, just curiosity.

Now, he doesn't know who I am. He doesn't know who my sisters are. And most times, he doesn't know who my mother is.

Mostly, at the end of times, my father and I did not agree on politics. But his best friends were always black people (his best friend in the Air Force was a black guy who was killed saving a planeload of white guys, and the couple who basically were his godparents were black and I like to think he would have been good with an Obama presidency.

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