My Daddy

(09/25/1932-09/31/1957) 

Today, my father would have been 72 years old.  I wish I could make this picture bigger so you could see his Clark Gable mustache, a very popular mustache in his day. And yes, my father was a babe, very popular with the ladies, not only because he was so handsome with curly jet black hair, his fair skin, and green eyes, but also because of his outgoing personality, his ingenuity, and his desire to always better himself. I didnt get your green eyes, daddy, but my grandaughter Bella did!

My father had two brothers and two sisters. His mother ran away with another man and my grandfather was left alone with five children to raise. My grandfather hired a Mexican maid to help, and he married her after she gave birth to the second of her three children. We do not know if the two older children were my grandfather's because my grandfather was paralyzed from the waist down, but we do know that the youngest was not his. Nonetheless, they carry my grandfather's last name.

My father was a sergeant in the United States Army and a veteran of the Korean war. This picture was taken in Korea. Like me, he liked to sketch, he tried his hand at guitar, and he loved old cars. Never afraid to try something new, his profession varied. He played in a band, he was a bartender, he was a barber, he built the house we lived in all by himself, and he did odd jobs. In a world where people never finished high school, he attended college in Brownsville, Texas.

My father died of leukemia at the Veteran's hospital in Houston, Texas. He was 25 years old. My father's death was the first traumatic event in my life. I was three years old. When I was a little girl, I slept on the floor because I didnt have a bed. I remember hearing a man's footsteps walking around me in the night. I knew they were a man's footsteps because of the sounds of the shoes. At first, the sound of the footsteps used to frighten me, but as time passed, I would tell myself that it was just my daddy watching over me.

I used to have this reoccurring dream. I saw myself as a child, wearing a pretty white dress, skipping and smiling, and then stopping short, shocked at seeing a woman dressed inblack. The woman was crying, but I never saw her face because she covered her face with both hands. The last time I had that dream was when I was 25 years old when I separated from my children's father. It was then that the woman lifted her head. It was my mother. It was my father's funeral. It is odd that the dream should stop when I turned 25, the same age that my father was when he died.

Sometimes, I wonder what my life would have been like if he had lived. I will go and take him flowers and visit with him today.