Years ago, before my father died of Parkinson’s disease, I interviewed him about his life as a young man and wrote what I now see as an oral history. Twenty years after his death, I have revisited that piece and tightened it. And I have revisited and tightened a revision of it I did that went beyond oral history into personal essay territory where I learned what my father’s young life story came to mean for me in my own life story.

The lesson as always is just because you write something one way, doesn’t mean you can’t write it another way. Our writing is our writing and different venues are looking for different kinds of writing.

I am happy to have written both, the first as a testimonial to my father and the second not only a testimonial to him but as a personal essay about what he gave me in an action that spoke to his integrity, his love for me, and his desire for me to be who I am in this life. I offer both versions for you this month in the hopes that you will be inspired to work on older work you’d like to finish and in the hopes that you have oral histories, too, that can become personal essays moving into insight and discovery from the same material.

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An Inland Navy
by Sheila Bender

My father was 17 when he had graduated Boys High in Brooklyn, mid-year, and started college at the University of Richmond because a doctor he admired had gone to school there.  The draft loomed large as he was soon to be of age in l944 to register for it, and the war was still on.  When it had started, my folks were 12. Despite the red cardboard ration stamps in their homes that metered the amount of sugar, butter, and meat they could buy and the eventual part-time jobs they acquired as teens in the ration centers, they somehow didn’t think they would ever catch up with the war.  At 17 and 1/2, though, along with Ronnie, his buddy from Boys High, my dad carrying his father’s signature for permission, enlisted in the US Navy, wanting to avoid being drafted into the army where sleeping was done in holes in the ground.  A bunk on an aircraft carrier seemed more civilized to be sure.  (To this day I remember my grandmother with her hands thrown up in the air exclaiming when I said I was going camping, “Who, tell me who, likes to go sleep on the ground?”)

Even with the likely involuntary draft of my father imminent, his grandfather, a Polish veteran of the Czar’s army, wept at his decision and the possibility of losing a grandson to war. His mother and grandmother moaned and cried out that “a boy like him should even think to enlist before his time.” My father didn’t experience their outcries as empathetic. At home he was often made to carry bitter messages between his divorced parents, and he was eager to leave.  The way he sees it, his grandmother and mother wanted to hold onto him, a witness to their constant anger at his father for leaving and a male substitute in the family. For years, they made him clean the house alone every Friday.  He’d do the Venetian blinds and scrub the floors among other chores before he could join his friends for football.

My father, as it turns out, was a young man with a plan and that was to marry my mother as soon as possible. They’d been an item since they were 11 and their parents were not happy. While my mother graduated from Commercial High and went to work as a bookkeeper in Manhattan, my father entered boot camp in Memphis, TN.  He hated it, as much as he hated home. What was carrying rocks from one end of a field to the other and back again but the repeated chores he was made to do in his childhood before he could get out?

Passing the abandon ship exercises in a swimming pool (if you swam the side stroke you didn’t have to stay and take swimming lessons) he went on to training in Norman, OK to be an aircrewman first class in aerial gunnery and an aviation machinist mate.  Handling shotguns and then 50 caliber machine guns was exciting to him as was the work on airplane engines, but most exciting was the day he convinced my mother to take off from her job, get on a train and come visit him.  He arranged for a judge to marry them, a hotel to stay in, and a celebration dinner at Daisy Mae’s Cafe. My mother stayed on in a rooming house, and my father joined her there whenever he was on leave, before word arrived a month later that my grandmother was having a nervous breakdown over the lack of a religious marriage ceremony. So back my mother went by train to calm her mother and stand before a military board begging for my father to be granted a 5-day leave to come home and have a religious ceremony.

I have opened the family photo album many times to the black and white photograph of my 18-year-old parents on their second wedding day. My mother stands very straight in a lace wedding dress, train swirled at her feet on the large Persian rug in my grandmother’s living room, my father beside her in his Navy blues.  They look happy. My father is skinnier than I’d ever seen him until 52 years later when he’d lost weight after a prolonged illness and an operation. “It’s okay,” he’d tell us all, “I’m just back to my Navy weight.”

In another wedding day photo, my grandparents line up on either side of my parents, somber expressions lending dignity, if not pleasure, to a marriage they didn’t want to see happen. A couple of days and two nights at the Taft Hotel later, my mother returned to her bookkeeping job in Manhattan and my father was transferred to the Great Lakes Naval Station in Chicago. The war ended and he was sent to Lido Beach on Long Island where he and Ronnie swabbed the floors of Quonset huts now used as classrooms for sailors about to be discharged.  By this time, my father was hitchhiking every morning from Brooklyn to report for duty.  He was cleaning again, but this time he was close to getting out and into the life he wanted.

Upon discharge, the GI Bill would pay tuition for two years of higher education.  My father returned to the University of Richmond with my mother, and soon after I was born. My dad struck a deal with the Dean of his college–as long as he made the Dean’s list, he was allowed to double up on credits so he could graduate in the two years for which his tuition was paid.  He worked as a biology lab instructor and a paper grader for professors, and he played cards during breaks in his classes winning 25 cents a game regularly enough to buy extra food for his wife and new baby.  He never doubted he would win those quarters.  He’d jumped the ship of his family’s support by enlisting and marrying my mother, and now he swam hard over the swells, feeding me my last bottle at night while studying so my mother could sleep and rise early for the first bottle after he’d left for school.

“The biggest body of water I crossed while in the Navy,” my dad says noting the irony, “was the Mississippi by train.” When he gets up from his chair, it is with difficulty because his Parkinson’s medication has worn off and his muscles are “frozen.” He makes two or three starts before he is actually out of the chair and many tiny steps later, he is at the door to the den. There were moments neither my father nor I thought he would recall the details in which to tell me his story.  He used words like “discipline” and “obedience” when I asked what boot camp was about for him.  When I asked what he thought and felt during the time he believed he’d go off in an aircraft carrier that could have been buzzed and bombed by German or Japanese aircraft, he said, “I didn’t think about it.”

This had been the survival tool my father has used all of his life. He has thought about the things he felt he could do something about. With Parkinson’s, he thought not about the course of the disease, but about medications and doses, times of day it is best to take the pills.  Though it was often very hard, he exercised a great deal so his muscles would stay as unstiff as possible. He was what he called in others “highly motivated.”

I think often of the young man he described to me–the enormous engine of that man’s desire crossing the divide between an embattled youth and the manhood he wanted to seize for himself.

My grandchildren are now around the age my dad was when he enlisted. Their energies about leaving home are entwined with college and soon graduate studies.  I don’t know if they have felt like they’ve carried some symbolic rock from one end of a field to another to get there. I kind of doubt that they do.  Things have been easier for the generations further removed from the immigrant experience of my parents’ parents who did not want their children to leave the “shetl.”  Joining the Navy, finding a marrying judge, fathering me, finishing school–these were big bodies of water to cross in those days, in those times.

My father was too late to see action in the war. But the Navy was just on time to carry him from one part of his life to the next, though he was swimming all the way.

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My first reader of this essay felt that a lot of the information I was using was not my own way of saying things, but words gleaned from family stories, long passed down, hence the idea that this was an oral history.

He wanted to know from the start that this was a visit home and that my dad was ill. He didn’t like the surprise of finding out mid-essay.

He wanted me to include more information about the dysfunction in my father’s house so readers would understand why he was so driven to start his own marriage and home.  He wanted the writing to show that the speaker was seeing something new and making connections not only to her own life, but to the way her father’s goal-driven behavior affected her.

Well, I dove back into the process, and here’s a tightened version of the essay I wrote 20 years ago after a few more drafts.

An Inland Navy
by Sheila Bender

“The biggest body of water I crossed while in the Navy,” my dad says, noting the irony, “was the Mississippi by train.”  We’d been talking about this time in his life for an article I wanted to write about what fathers tell their daughters about WWII military experience. Telling me the story of his enlistment and boot camp, he uses words like “discipline” and “obedience.” When I ask what he thought and felt during the time he believed he’d go off in an aircraft carrier that could have been buzzed and bombed by German or Japanese aircraft, he says, “I didn’t think about it.”

I recognize this as the survival tool my father used all of his life. He thinks about the things he feels he can do something about.  He keeps to his plans. With Parkinson’s, a disease he has lived with for over ten years, he thinks not about the course of the disease, but about medications and doses, the times of day it is best to take the pills.  Though it is often very hard, he exercises a great deal so his muscles will remain as limber as possible. He is what he praises in others, especially the sales forces he created and maintained, “highly motivated.”

Well into retirement at this point, my father is now highly motivated to keep us all from worrying about him.  He is skinnier than my sister and I have ever seen him. “It’s okay,” he says, “I’m just back to my Navy weight.” I think of him in his uniform in the black and white photographs of my 18-year-old parents on their wedding day. My father had convinced my mother to take off from her job, get on a train and come visit him where he was stationed in Oklahoma.  He had arranged for a judge to marry them, a hotel to stay in, and a celebration dinner at Daisy Mae’s Cafe.  My mother stayed on in a rooming house, and my father joined her there whenever he was off duty, before word arrived a month later that my grandmother was having a nervous breakdown over the lack of a religious marriage ceremony. Feeling guilty, he tells me, my mother went by train to calm her mother. She also stood before a military board begging for my father to be granted a five-day leave to come home and have a religious marriage ceremony.  If the two were married, my grandmother felt, it would have to be in God’s eyes.

In another wedding photo, I have often looked at, my mother stands very straight in a lace wedding dress, train swirled at her feet on the large Persian rug in my grandmother’s living room, my father beside her in his Navy blues. My grandparents line up on either side of my parents, their somber expressions lending dignity, if not pleasure, to a marriage they didn’t want to happen.

How, I ask my dad, had he gotten to Oklahoma when he was in the Navy? It seems so odd to me that he wasn’t in a port city, I tell him.  And how, I ask, before he can answer the first question, did he get into the Navy in the first place?  His left hand trembles and his left leg jumps from the ground many times from his tremors as he tells me the details of the decision to join the Navy.  He was 17 when he graduated from Boys High in Brooklyn in 1944.  He had had a mid-year graduation and entered the University of Richmond in Virginia the second semester, his choice in schools inspired by a doctor he knew who had studied there.  He wanted to study pre-med, marry my mother whom he had known since they were 11 and then go onto medical school.  Despite the red cardboard ration stamps that had been in everyone’s home for years metering the amount of sugar, butter, and meat a family could buy and the eventual part-time jobs my father had as a teen in ration centers, he still somehow didn’t think as he entered college that he would “catch up with the war.”  But after one semester and with his 18th birthday nearing, he decided to enlist in the Navy along with his friend Ronnie.  This way, the two of them thought, at least they could bunk in berths rather than burrow in the ground as soldiers had to. As I listened to my father report their thinking, I remembered my grandmother talking to me with her hands thrown up in the air.  I had told her I was going camping, and she exclaimed, “Who, tell me who, likes to go sleep on the ground?”

Even with the involuntary draft of my father likely, his grandfather, a Polish veteran of the Czar’s army in WWI, wept at his decision to enlist and the possibility of losing a grandson to war. My father’s mother was no happier with his decision to enlist than his decision to be away from home at college. A divorcee, she had made my dad, the oldest of her three children, into a combination husband figure and house slave. My father told stories about the way he had to clean the floors and Venetian blinds to her satisfaction every Friday night before he could go out and play football with his friends and the way she made him carry her bitter messages to his father. For my father, getting away to college had been a welcome relief from the tensions of home, and entering the Navy would be so as well.  Carrying one of his mother’s notes, he also went to his father for the signature he needed for underage enlistment.

So, as my mother graduated high school and went to work as a bookkeeper in Manhattan, my father entered boot camp in Memphis, TN.  He remembers only that he hated it as much as he hated living at home.  He says he was made to carry rocks from one end of a field to the other and back again, and as he describes this chore, I think how much he must have longed to start his life, rather than live in a holding pattern between growing up and being on his own.

After surviving boot camp and passing abandon-ship exercises in a swimming pool, he went on to training in Norman, Oklahoma to be an aircrewman first class in aerial gunnery as well as an aviation machinist mate.  There, far from the sea, my father learned to handle rifles and .50 caliber machine guns as well as fix airplane engines.  He married my mother and returned to New York for the religious wedding ceremony his mother-in-law demanded. My parents honeymooned at the Taft Hotel in Manhattan for two nights, and then my mother returned to her bookkeeping job in Manhattan and lived at home while my father continued his naval duties in Oklahoma and then at the Great Lakes Naval Station in Chicago.  When the war ended not long after his transfer, he was sent to Lido Beach on Long Island where he and his friend Ronnie swabbed the floors of Quonset huts now used as classrooms for sailors about to be discharged.  To report for duty, my father hitchhiked with Ronnie every morning from Brooklyn where he lived with my mother in her parents’ house. I smile at the thought of my father, a newly wed, leaving every morning with his unmarried high school buddy.  I wonder if my father took a ribbing for marrying so young and not being free.

At 19, he was discharged.  For the length of time he had enlisted, the GI Bill would cover his college tuition for two years, and he returned to the University of Richmond, this time with my mother.  Their parents were still not happy with the marriage, and although my father never spoke of it, my mother has told me that my dad’s mother offered to pay for his medical school tuition if he left his wife and returned home after college.  Not long after he returned to school, my mother was pregnant with me.  She says I was a planned pregnancy, and knowing what I know about their financial hardship–my mother was working at a low paying job in the South and my parents were not receiving help from their parents–I have long believed they wanted a baby to strengthen their family unit in their parents’ eyes.

To finish school and get to work as soon as possible, my dad struck a deal with the Dean of his college–as long as he made the Dean’s list, the Dean would let him double up on credits so he could graduate in two years instead of four.  My mother has described the way he added to the family finances while he studied; he worked as a biology lab instructor and a paper grader for professors and played cards during breaks in his classes winning 25 cents a game regularly enough to buy extra food for her and me.  She says that he told her he never doubted he would win those quarters. As he talks to me about the Navy, I imagine him at 20, having jumped the ship of his first family’s support by enlisting and marrying. My mother has told me about his insistence that he feed me my last bottle at night while studying so my mother could get to sleep and be rested for the first bottle when I awoke after he was out the door to school. After my sister’s birth, 18 months following mine and not planned for, my father gave up medical school studies to work as a chemist and support his growing family. He stayed afloat by swimming hard over life’s swells.

While we have been talking, my father and I have been intermittently gazing at the news on TV, which he watches every night from his brown leather chair in the den, the chair he spends most of his days in now.  My mother has retired to bed and to watching programs she likes in the bedroom.  I have been sitting this evening beside my dad in my mother’s matching leather chair.  Most afternoons my folks are in the den together reading and watching TV with cold drinks on the bright orange coffee table in front of them. After 60 years, they know their life together is coming to an end, but they hope there will be more time than the doctors predict.

The news ends and my father clicks the TV off, ready to retire on his nightly schedule. He makes two or three starts before he can get out of the chair and begin taking many tiny steps to the doorway of the den. It is all with difficulty because his Parkinson’s medication has already worn off and his muscles are “frozen.” I watch my father, just twenty years older than me, and think of the young man he has described to me.  I have known most of these facts of his early adulthood for a very long time, but tonight, I somehow deeply realize the commitment and will power it took to join the Navy as an underage enlistee, talk my mother into eloping, become a father, and finish college in the three years that most kids only begin to figure out what they want in life.

He is almost to his bedroom door when he says goodnight to me. His voice is affected by the stiffness of his muscles, and he speaks quietly, now, is soft-spoken. This is quite a contrast to the thunder of his temper when my sister and I were young and not always doing things his way.  Still, quiet as his voice is now, I hear the tone that made him sound so definitive. I know that his temper and his sternness resulted from his intense drive for success and desperate need not to fail himself or his young family.  He had to prove to himself that he could make it on his own by working hard, something he was incredibly good at, and he succeeded in the career he finally adopted in pharmaceutical sales.

During my own college years and beyond, I had to figure out how I could discover the artistic sides of myself that I didn’t dare develop under my father’s watchful eye. I had felt parts of myself become extinguished by his strong goal setting. I had wanted to leave college for a couple of years to find out more about what I really wanted to do in life.  He’d been saving to send me to college since I was in first grade, and his desire to fulfill his promise to me outweighed my desires, though machine guns and soldiers were deployed to the campus where I studied making me wonder about my future, and, for weeks, city police attacked students with their Billy clubs and broke into their apartments by smashing windows.

After the 11 o’clock news those tumultuous years, my father regularly phoned me at the University of Wisconsin, which was one hour earlier and constantly in the news.  When he asked what had happened on my campus, it was hard for him to believe me as I told him that the trouble was often not incited by students as the news reported, but by the police. My father liked the world to operate in an orderly manner and this information defied his understanding of the order of things.  Ten years later, when desperate for my inner life, I announced that I was going to divorce and become a poet, he was very upset because he saw no way I could support myself as a single mother by being a poet.  Yet, two years (and many concurrent teaching jobs on my end) later, when a tiny press announced it would publish a chapbook of my poems, he contributed heavily to the book’s publication by preordering two dozen copies that he would later give them to family and friends. I don’t believe that my dad understood poetry, let alone my poems about the way his demands that I always toe the line squashed the artistic side of me.

*

When I heard my parents’ bedroom door click shut the night I talked with my father, I sat in the empty den, looking at the dark screen of the television set, and saw my father without tremors holding me with my baby bottle, holding a hand of cards to win quarters, and then so many years later writing out a check to a small publisher for copies of my first book. Now I see, that once I made my desire clear and succeeded by writing my poems, he did for me what he had wished his family could have done for him–he accepted who I was and what I wanted. “How could he give out those books with poems that are about his causing you such distress?” some relatives and friends asked.  I didn’t know the answer then.  Today, I realize that my father’s pleasure at reaching his innermost goals despite his family’s disapproval extended to me upon reaching mine.  I’d created a book from crossing the divide between his world and my world of poetry, just as he had created his own life when he crossed the divide from his family to join the Navy and marry. Supporting me in the world I’d put my feet into, meant a lot to him as well as to me.

My father’s journey to selfhood started when he crossed the Mississippi by train, and in the years that followed, it seemed he met all of his goals.  But perhaps one was still unknown to him–to one day get pleasure out of doing for his daughter what his parents had never done for him–to recognize that she was in charge of her own life and support her in making it real.

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Here is a writing idea you may enjoy: Try to find an older piece of writing about a family member with whom you have had a complicated relationship. Re-read it and think about how and why your life was impacted by the events of that person’s life.  Is there something in the writing you think still needs to be explored?

It is important to us as writers to pay attention when someone we trust lets us know they are missing something in our writing or feel distanced in any way.  We may bristle not wanting to hear that, but it will mostly cause us to find a path to truer reflection.