A True Memorial Day Memory

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Sixty years ago today, my parents were married in Concord, N.H. The ceremony was held on Memorial Day — back when that solemn holiday was celebrated on May 30 and not bounced around the fourth Monday in May to create a three-day weekend. My father was dressed in Navy blues; he met my mother while his destroyer, the U.S.S. Norris was docked at the Boston shipyard for repairs. She was a nursing student at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. They met on a blind date.

My mother wore a traditional white wedding gown with a waist-length veil anchored by a lace headband. In a wedding photo saved on my computer screen, she is feeding my father a piece of the wedding cake. Both are young, skinny, handsome and happy.

My father graduated from Willow Springs High School in Missouri, but lived mainly in Illinois and Wyoming, the son of a peripatetic father who worked as an insurance salesman, policeman, and Boy Scout executive — just to name a few of his jobs. I guess I inherited that restlessness from him, though my father remained steady in his career until the end. My mother was born in Boston but raised in Concord, which is where my parents settled after they married. My father was discharged from the Navy and entered community college under the G.I. Bill, after serving his stint in the Korean War as a radar man. He didn’t see much combat, but his destroyer took some damage in the Pacific, which is how it ended up in the Boston Shipyard.

A few weeks ago, my middle daughter Mere and I were going through some of my parents’ possessions, what remains in a small storage unit. My brothers and I have already divided up the photos and mementoes into ever-smaller piles, so we were going through the albums and such to be split between her and Kasey, her older sister. Kasey will be here on Father’s Day to go through the same poignant ritual. There are far too many photo albums, prints of my father’s artwork and other remembrances, for us to keep. Once Kasey is done, what is left will have to be dispersed in some other way. I will have to figure that out, but not now.

Mere laid claim to my parent’s original wedding album,  promising to scan in the photos for anyone who wanted copies. She is reliable, probably more so than the rest of us. We flipped through the photos of my impossibly young parents, married two years before I was born. It is still a bit of a shell-shock to wake up some days realizing they are gone. At least five days a week, I drive by the nursing home where they both died. I didn’t hear the phone call in the wee hours that said my father was passing. He died before I could get there, I’m sorry to say. But Mere, my brother Gregg and I were at my mother’s bedside when she died two years ago, just after Mother’s Day and about 10 days before this 60^th anniversary. I like to think we were blessed to be there to make her passing a bit easier. I’m not fooling myself into thinking dying is easy. It isn’t.

During that same trip to the storage unit with Mere, I came across my father’s boxing gloves. He once told me that he had a pair signed by Jack Dempsey, the famed pugilist. I have a signed photo and card from Dempsey to my dad, plus some clippings from when Dempsey visited Casper, Wyoming in 1940 to referee a wrestling match. My dad was eight-years-old. The gloves are about the right size, but I can’t find any autographs. Perhaps the ink has faded. Or perhaps I found a different set of boxing gloves.

I also found my grandfather’s police sergeant’s badge from when he served on the Casper police force. He was forced to kill a man during a domestic disturbance. Later he married the widow. She thus became my father’s stepmother some years after his birth mother died in a train-pedestrian mishap on his third birthday.  When I was in my mid-40s, my mother whispered to me that this woman, who died a quarter-century before I was born, likely committed suicide. Really, I said. Who steps out in front of a train in the middle of Wyoming by accident? The way families try to protect their secrets…

I’m sure my parents had secrets. I’m not interested in discovering them, frankly. It was a prickly marriage at times, at least from my perspective as a teenager who left home as quickly as I could. But when my dad became disabled far too young, my mother took care of him full-time for nearly two decades. Not without complaint, of course. But she did it, until it wore her out as well. That is her legacy — that and raising three boys who turned out, well, at least none of us have any felony convictions.

At least not yet.

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