Sterling
In 1930, Terre Haute, Indiana had a population of about 63,000, down from about 66,000. According to Wikipedia, it currently has about 58,000 people.
I thought it was likely smaller in the past. Dad was born in the 1920s and grew up somewhere near Terre Haute, probably not actually IN Terre Haute because he grew up on a farm.
I have this idea, perhaps a stupid idea given that the internet doesn't back it up, that Natives have a sense of community more than most White people and that Christianity is this extremely broken attempt to try to tell people to treat other people like human beings in spite of most people no longer living in communities of 150 people or fewer.
That's the magic number for how many people you can have in a community and have most human brains follow all the interwoven relationships.
My dad was more Christian than most Christians. I like to imagine it's because he was part Cherokee but I don't actually know why.
Dad wasn't real share-y about his past. He talked a lot. He was a raconteur -- a storyteller -- and superficially gregarious but didn't really say much about himself.
As best I understand, he met my mother while getting divorced for the third time. All divorces were scandals at that time and he said ONCE that he and his first wife took turns divorcing each other.
They never had children. My homozygous recessive genetic disorder predisposes people to fertility problems and dad had no children prior to getting with my mother, though she's his third wife, fourth marriage.
He likely felt like a bad person in his youth. He fought in the front lines of World War II in his teens and fought in the front lines of Vietnam in his forties. He's a two-time decorated veteran, having gotten decorated in both those wars.
If you are familiar with modern history, you may be noticing that Korea is missing from that list.
He never served in Korea.
Like a lot of people from his era, dad was a high school drop out. The Army invented the GED to let men like my father get credit for proving they knew enough to qualify for a high school diploma.
Dad routinely corrected the grammar, spelling, punctuation and other assorted errors in notes sent home by public school teachers who had Master's degrees. He did the crossword and cryptoquote every morning in the local paper. He was one of the smartest people I ever knew.
Instead of serving in the Korean conflict, he taught college courses. He was packed to go to Korea and scheduled to ship out the next day when he got a phone call telling him to unpack.
Out of the entire battalion, about a thousand people, he was the ONLY guy who had all the military schools they required to teach college ROTC. So he got held back and some officer got held back and my dad was bitter about the officer getting out of going to the war when he didn't really qualify. He felt the guy "got over" due to his rank.
Dad had a chip on his shoulder a mile wide about "upper class" people with formal education and officers typically have a college degree. He liked to go out of his way to prove how stupid they were and I inherited that chip and did the same thing for many years until I began to realize I was gradually accumulating enough college credits to make me something of a hypocrite, so I began to try to stop that bad habit.
Before that, one of my hobbies was making people with Phds on the internet look like the FOOLS they really were. I have zero respect for people who hide behind their alphabet soup of credentials but can't actually get shit done.
Anyway, I imagine dad was probably between marriage number two and marriage number three -- or wife one and wife two -- because he was single at this time. He was single and he was apparently a haunted man.
He didn't do therapy with a counselor. That wasn't common back then. Instead, he apparently worked out his personal demons by going hunting.
Alone.
The quiet of nature likely gave him time to think and deal with whatever thoughts and feelings were plaguing him. And he hunted a LOT.
During squirrel season, he killed his quota EVERY SINGLE WEEKEND.
As a single childless man who didn't know how to cook, he had no use for all that meat. He gave it all to a guy he knew who had six kids.
"Waste not, want not" as my dad would say.
I imagine most likely he did that because he felt like a bad person. He was twice divorced. He was childless. He had fought in World War II. He left the military as an E-6 after only a couple of years thanks to field promotions and went home to Terre Haute, then decided to go back in the army and START OVER from E-1 and climb the ranks SLOWLY in peace time.
And yet here he was, a high school drop out, twice divorced terrible person that he was, teaching college instead of being shot at in Korea. The phone call was like an eleventh hour reprieve.
Presumably he put his baggage down and felt it would be okay to remarry. And then she had some other man's child, a child of mixed race who looked nothing like my father and they got divorced over that.
He paid child support until that kid was like five or six. And when he met my mother, his single-parent sister's name was on his savings account.
He was in Germany. This was the 1950s. Nothing was instant back then. If he died while single, he wanted his sister and her son to get the money without going through probate.
They had an agreement that she could "dip in" to the money "for emergencies" and after he got with my mother, he learned she had been dipping in so regularly that the equivalent of a YEAR of his well-paid salary was gone.
He said not one word to her. He quietly closed the account to prevent her from stealing more from him and never discussed it with her ever. And didn't carry a grudge.
He met my mother and, I dunno, maybe moved soon after. Moved within Germany, but was no longer near her.
Again, this was the 1950s. No PayPal. No wire transfers. Etc.
He asked her to come see him -- come live with him -- and he sent her money three times in the mail -- cash -- to pay her way. She never received the first two. It was likely stolen but for all he knew she was lying to him and pocketing the money.
My very, very, very reserved mother shocked me when I called her to tell her I was pregnant with my first child. She shocked me by left-handedly admitting to HAVING SEX WITH MY DAD.
I lost like twenty pounds to morning sickness before learning I was pregnant and after getting out of the hospital I called her to let her know I was expecting and she -- LE GASP -- said to me "I always knew what I had done the night before because I was throwing up the next morning."
So dad has mom move to where he lives and he's got a house set up and he convinces her he will marry her and the paperwork will take six weeks. So she moves in with him and they start sleeping together and she is pregnant in the first two weeks.
She went to get "plan B" -- medication to abort the baby. She figured he would assume she was LYING to him and "showed up that way" -- pregnant with another man's baby.
Dad desperately wanted kids and really was crazy about my mother. He begged her to keep the baby and made some undisclosed list of promises to her, including "I will RETIRE in Germany if you marry me." Because when he met her she said to him initially "Go date someone else. I'm NOT moving to America."
So she has the baby but the expectation that the paperwork would take six weeks is not how it went. It took more like two years and they had a pile of paperwork two feet high to get it approved and my sister was born out of wedlock because of it.
He moved my mom and sister two or three times at his expense out of pocket because they weren't married, so the military wasn't covering it, and he kept getting relocated at different duty stations around Germany.
He finally went back to the states and got assigned to a different unit or something on the theory that his commander was preventing their marriage and after that the paperwork finally went through. Meanwhile, my mother figured she would never see him again while he was in the states.
They were married at least fifty years when he finally died. After his death, going through old papers, my mother found a piece of paper saying about my sister in essence "This baby is LEGITIMATE. You evil fuckers fucked up. This couple was MARRIED, by god, when this baby was born."
I got married at age nineteen as my only means to get the hell out of Dodge. I would have joined the army if I could but I knew my health was too frail. I would have accepted my scholarship to UGA if I could have but I knew my health was too frail. Getting hitched was my only viable path out.
No man will ever live up to my father. They all disappoint me.
I imagine I will be alone for the rest of my life.
I thought it was likely smaller in the past. Dad was born in the 1920s and grew up somewhere near Terre Haute, probably not actually IN Terre Haute because he grew up on a farm.
I have this idea, perhaps a stupid idea given that the internet doesn't back it up, that Natives have a sense of community more than most White people and that Christianity is this extremely broken attempt to try to tell people to treat other people like human beings in spite of most people no longer living in communities of 150 people or fewer.
That's the magic number for how many people you can have in a community and have most human brains follow all the interwoven relationships.
My dad was more Christian than most Christians. I like to imagine it's because he was part Cherokee but I don't actually know why.
Dad wasn't real share-y about his past. He talked a lot. He was a raconteur -- a storyteller -- and superficially gregarious but didn't really say much about himself.
As best I understand, he met my mother while getting divorced for the third time. All divorces were scandals at that time and he said ONCE that he and his first wife took turns divorcing each other.
They never had children. My homozygous recessive genetic disorder predisposes people to fertility problems and dad had no children prior to getting with my mother, though she's his third wife, fourth marriage.
He likely felt like a bad person in his youth. He fought in the front lines of World War II in his teens and fought in the front lines of Vietnam in his forties. He's a two-time decorated veteran, having gotten decorated in both those wars.
If you are familiar with modern history, you may be noticing that Korea is missing from that list.
He never served in Korea.
Like a lot of people from his era, dad was a high school drop out. The Army invented the GED to let men like my father get credit for proving they knew enough to qualify for a high school diploma.
Dad routinely corrected the grammar, spelling, punctuation and other assorted errors in notes sent home by public school teachers who had Master's degrees. He did the crossword and cryptoquote every morning in the local paper. He was one of the smartest people I ever knew.
Instead of serving in the Korean conflict, he taught college courses. He was packed to go to Korea and scheduled to ship out the next day when he got a phone call telling him to unpack.
Out of the entire battalion, about a thousand people, he was the ONLY guy who had all the military schools they required to teach college ROTC. So he got held back and some officer got held back and my dad was bitter about the officer getting out of going to the war when he didn't really qualify. He felt the guy "got over" due to his rank.
Dad had a chip on his shoulder a mile wide about "upper class" people with formal education and officers typically have a college degree. He liked to go out of his way to prove how stupid they were and I inherited that chip and did the same thing for many years until I began to realize I was gradually accumulating enough college credits to make me something of a hypocrite, so I began to try to stop that bad habit.
Before that, one of my hobbies was making people with Phds on the internet look like the FOOLS they really were. I have zero respect for people who hide behind their alphabet soup of credentials but can't actually get shit done.
Anyway, I imagine dad was probably between marriage number two and marriage number three -- or wife one and wife two -- because he was single at this time. He was single and he was apparently a haunted man.
He didn't do therapy with a counselor. That wasn't common back then. Instead, he apparently worked out his personal demons by going hunting.
Alone.
The quiet of nature likely gave him time to think and deal with whatever thoughts and feelings were plaguing him. And he hunted a LOT.
During squirrel season, he killed his quota EVERY SINGLE WEEKEND.
As a single childless man who didn't know how to cook, he had no use for all that meat. He gave it all to a guy he knew who had six kids.
"Waste not, want not" as my dad would say.
I imagine most likely he did that because he felt like a bad person. He was twice divorced. He was childless. He had fought in World War II. He left the military as an E-6 after only a couple of years thanks to field promotions and went home to Terre Haute, then decided to go back in the army and START OVER from E-1 and climb the ranks SLOWLY in peace time.
And yet here he was, a high school drop out, twice divorced terrible person that he was, teaching college instead of being shot at in Korea. The phone call was like an eleventh hour reprieve.
Presumably he put his baggage down and felt it would be okay to remarry. And then she had some other man's child, a child of mixed race who looked nothing like my father and they got divorced over that.
He paid child support until that kid was like five or six. And when he met my mother, his single-parent sister's name was on his savings account.
He was in Germany. This was the 1950s. Nothing was instant back then. If he died while single, he wanted his sister and her son to get the money without going through probate.
They had an agreement that she could "dip in" to the money "for emergencies" and after he got with my mother, he learned she had been dipping in so regularly that the equivalent of a YEAR of his well-paid salary was gone.
He said not one word to her. He quietly closed the account to prevent her from stealing more from him and never discussed it with her ever. And didn't carry a grudge.
He met my mother and, I dunno, maybe moved soon after. Moved within Germany, but was no longer near her.
Again, this was the 1950s. No PayPal. No wire transfers. Etc.
He asked her to come see him -- come live with him -- and he sent her money three times in the mail -- cash -- to pay her way. She never received the first two. It was likely stolen but for all he knew she was lying to him and pocketing the money.
My very, very, very reserved mother shocked me when I called her to tell her I was pregnant with my first child. She shocked me by left-handedly admitting to HAVING SEX WITH MY DAD.
I lost like twenty pounds to morning sickness before learning I was pregnant and after getting out of the hospital I called her to let her know I was expecting and she -- LE GASP -- said to me "I always knew what I had done the night before because I was throwing up the next morning."
So dad has mom move to where he lives and he's got a house set up and he convinces her he will marry her and the paperwork will take six weeks. So she moves in with him and they start sleeping together and she is pregnant in the first two weeks.
She went to get "plan B" -- medication to abort the baby. She figured he would assume she was LYING to him and "showed up that way" -- pregnant with another man's baby.
Dad desperately wanted kids and really was crazy about my mother. He begged her to keep the baby and made some undisclosed list of promises to her, including "I will RETIRE in Germany if you marry me." Because when he met her she said to him initially "Go date someone else. I'm NOT moving to America."
So she has the baby but the expectation that the paperwork would take six weeks is not how it went. It took more like two years and they had a pile of paperwork two feet high to get it approved and my sister was born out of wedlock because of it.
He moved my mom and sister two or three times at his expense out of pocket because they weren't married, so the military wasn't covering it, and he kept getting relocated at different duty stations around Germany.
He finally went back to the states and got assigned to a different unit or something on the theory that his commander was preventing their marriage and after that the paperwork finally went through. Meanwhile, my mother figured she would never see him again while he was in the states.
They were married at least fifty years when he finally died. After his death, going through old papers, my mother found a piece of paper saying about my sister in essence "This baby is LEGITIMATE. You evil fuckers fucked up. This couple was MARRIED, by god, when this baby was born."
I got married at age nineteen as my only means to get the hell out of Dodge. I would have joined the army if I could but I knew my health was too frail. I would have accepted my scholarship to UGA if I could have but I knew my health was too frail. Getting hitched was my only viable path out.
No man will ever live up to my father. They all disappoint me.
I imagine I will be alone for the rest of my life.