Humility Unborn
Early in the Day
Humility
is something people thought my dad had developed.
In fact, however, he was quite arrogant. People thought he spoke softly, carried himself in a manner that suggested humility, and preached peace and gentleness. He was trying to be like his father. His mother had been an abuser; his father, not so. There was another side to my father, one that manifested behind closed doors, in the confines of our family.
When I was young, I saw my dad as sometimes kind, gentle, caring. But not always.
There were moments of dread when he lashed out in anger and irrationality. And then there were times when he was drunk,
and he didn’t get there by sipping wine or even beer. He was into the hard stuff. He was a mean drunk.
Terrifying
Dad had things to hide – from himself, then others. He had done some things in life he wasn’t proud of. He had been through some awful traumas. He grew up on a southeastern Colorado ranch during the Dust Bowl. Those dust storms rose high into the sky, rolling along, suffocating everything in their path. When the dust storm passed, the young lad my dad was back then was still quaking in terror as he went out with his dad to clean up the mess left behind. On one of those post-storm forays he found his pet calf buried in the dust, dead from suffocation. His family was poor. They lived in a dugout. They had no money to build a barn.
There were other things he tried to forget --- his mama yelling a him, smacking him and his younger siblings. And then there were the itinerant preachers who preached damnation, hellfire and brimstone and made people act weird while the preacher drew the devil out them. These things scared him, traumatized him as a young child. One day he got up the courage to stop his mother’s abuse. He threw his sixteen year old body up against hers, pinned her to the wall, and told her to never hit him again. She never did.
But the scars remained.
War
There was a war on. My dad joined the army when he was still sixteen, pretending to be older. A colonel took a liking to my dad, took him under his wing, figuring out he was young but smart, and eventually got him into the army corps of engineers. He was in engineering school when he met my mother. He married her and off they went to his next assignment somewhere in the southeast.
But the next move for my dad was on to England, leaving behind the love of his life. England nearly took his life. In the English cold and damp, my father ended up in the hospital again and again with pneumonia. It’s a scary thing to have repeated bouts of pneumonia, far from the ones you love.
Thank God penicillin had just been developed. Dad got well enough to be shipped to France to build bridges to ferry the Allied troops across the Rhine. He and his platoon were frequently strafed by bullets from German planes, while they were building the bridges. He couldn’t think about the danger to his life right then – there was a job to do.
When his platoon reached Marseilles, they found the place boobytrapped by the Germans. One of his buddies was killed. Then came the time when a German got a hold of my dad and tried to strangle him, and my dad tried to strangle him back in hand to hand combat. Another buddy found them struggling and shot the German. My dad and his remaining buddies had to find their way back to headquarters, without Army support, hiding in the forests of France. My dad had hardly a sober moment from Marseilles back to headquarters.
A Grief So Heavy
But the traumas weren’t over. When the war was over, he and my mother settled down in a new suburban community and started a family. But in the summer of 1954, my mother – the love of Dad’s life – contracted all three kinds of polio and was dead in four days, leaving him at the age of 31 with two tiny girls and a grief so heavy it nearly took his life.
That fall, he met Mom, my stepmother, and by February he had garnered a new mother for his daughters. But the new marriage proved to be a nightmare, and a year after their wedding, he realized he’d made a terrible mistake, that he had married someone quite like his mother. Six days before he died at 86, he was still trying to figure out how to divorce her.
So how did they get through so many years of marriage? They fought. They had shared goals and dreams and values. But they used libations of alcohol to both soothe and accelerate the fight. Neither one could give in. Often neither one could give an inch. There were no compromises, just a fifty some odd year fight. Alcohol and fights are a nasty combination. And so it was with them.
Alcohol leaves humility unborn.
If you can cover over the anger and sadness, the bitterness – the fight – with alcohol, why bother with humility. Why bother to admit you were wrong? Why bother to come up with a compromise? Why bother to admit an imperfection – or that the imperfection was hurtful to the other? Why bother to sink down into the grit and the nitty gritty inside and face those old demons for yourself? If you cannot admit to yourself the nature of your secrets and get honest with yourself, secrets drowned in booze, then why bother to seek out a moment of humility? Arrogance, fear, shame, self-loathing kept my dad tippling away, often in secret, often with Mom, leaving humility unborn.
Eventually my dad had to stop drinking. Cancer could not be improved with alcohol, but clean living and eating and positive thinking might help. So he pursued these with all his might, beating back not one cancer but two. Traces of humility occasioned by the threat of death, but mostly a keen desire to survive spurred him forward to live six more years without the alcohol. I suspect Dad left humility mostly unborn because he was – to the last day of his life – fighting for his life with all his might.
Growth