Dad...

My Dad by all accounts was a very eccentric fellow.  Very very intelligent...like Mensa smart!!!  I really liked this about him.  Unless we played Trivial Pursuit with him.  Then you were hosed.  Partly cause he was read more, but also cause he was off the charts smart.

My parents bought the family home from a doctor surgeon who had the home customized for his needs.  The living room was originally designed as a formal living room and a dining room on the other end, but I don't believe there was a wall separating the two.  We had kept the chandelier hanging where the dining space was for many of the early years, but instead of dining room furniture, we had our family TV and chairs at that end.  

My favorite memory of the early years was when Dad would play with us kids.  He'd prop us on his shoulders, hold our hands and walk quickly through out the living run, end to end.  It was was fun and garnered a lot of laughs, except the one day that he forgot where the chandelier was and I was pulled head first right into that thing.  I don't remember being angry at Dad for that, just upset it hurt so bad. 

Dad played board games with us when we got a little older.  Sometimes we'd play as a family, all five of us together, sometimes it was just Dad and us kids.  We'd play Parcheesi, Sorry, and Monopoly.  I don't remember if he played card games with us, that was more Mom's type of games to play.  

Dad suffered a nervous breakdown in 1979 after I graduated from the 6th grade.  He had to stop working for a long time.  Those were some of the roughest years I ever remember our entire family going through.  Mom had to deal with the brunt of things, as she had to deal with the doctors, the ambulance workers, the psychiatrists, and all the bills that were piling up from his care.  Since we kids were 12 and under, we weren't burdened with all the medical bill details.  We just knew our Dad wasn't right and he was getting help, away from the home.   

He was never the same personality when he finally got home.  He was more guarded, avoided hanging with us kids, and stayed more to himself in his own room.  Mom and him had moved to separate rooms before his breakdown, but now he was not able to function as he once did.  It would be several years, throughout all my junior and senior high school years, that he'd be walled away in the house before getting more relational with others.  

When he first got sick I used to worry about him a lot and sat with him when he came out of his room to put a record on the player.  Normally he play some classical music.  I learned to appreciate many of the great pieces of classical music because of this time with him.  I didn't know how to knit or crochet, but I did know a simple knotting sequence with yarn, and I made him colorful bookmarks with this technique out of yarn.  He seemed to like them and use them.   This is when I know he became an avid bookworm.   

I don't know what my siblings thought about my Dad and is Bipolar disease.  He frightened all of us a few times when I was in high school.  Hallucinating and seeing animals talking to him, and seeing me in a room when I wasn't really there.   I didn't want friends over at the house when all this started happening.  I became afraid of him and avoided interacting with him at this time.  He would get angry at the slightest noise, didn't want any talking going on when he was watching Jeopardy on TV and just became a person I didn't know how to be around.   I am ashamed that I didn't get to know him better then, and fight through my fear and see if I could find the man I knew and loved as a small child.  

Somewhere during the first couple years after he got sick, he lost over 100 lbs, and quit smoking his pipe AND joined the Catholic Church.  All the reading he did to prepare added to the scary moments when you could tell he was about to have an episode and need his meds fixed.  He'd sit us kids down and wouldn't allow us to do anything unless we answered his faith questions.  One time he scared me because none of us kids really knew what the 7 virtues and vices were and we had to sit at the kitchen table until Mom got home from work.  She had to deal with Dad's mental problem on her own and really didn't explain to us that I recall what was truly going on. 

Finally when I was out of high school, he started working.   He worked at McDonald's as a biscuit maker.  Far removed from his bookkeeping talents.  He just wasn't comfortable getting into the numbers and messing up the books.  But his boss loved him.  He was a good and dependable worker.   After some time though some things started bothering him with that job and he quit, He went to go work for their competition, and again everyone there loved him.   But one day I think the story goes he came in and saw someone doing his station work and he got pissed and quit.   He then went on to work at the grocery store next to the McDonald's he used to work at.  I work for this grocery chain and was actually proud he belonged to the same company.  He was in the union, I was not.  EVERYONE loved my dad there.   

                        ..... when life takes a sudden turn to the unknown and the frightful side of    
                              things, we can become confused and disorented and lose our way.  
                             Stay tuned for more on this saga. 

  

Our Family Photo circa 1972

 

 

Mom and Dad