On Your Birthday, Dad

My father would have turned 72 today. While going through his and my mother's papers a few weeks ago, I found this birthday card given to him by his father. Fifteen dollars sat inside with the words "Love, Dad" below the rhyming sentiment. He would have received the card on some year between 1969 (the series year for both bills) and 1985 (the last birthday my dad would have celebrated with grandpa).

Wendy and I found a similar birthday card, years ago, from her great-grandmother to her grandfather with cash sitting inside. Both discoveries have bewildered me.

I wonder why they didn't spend the money to buy themselves a gift. Maybe they didn't want to put the money in their wallet for fear of using it accidentally to buy some necessity. I imagine they planned to go out someday and get something nice for themselves. Someday exists after the work day is over, and after the commute; after the family time, after the yardwork, after the errands and after the nap.

Eventually, this valuable little gift is shuffled among other papers and forgotten until it is discovered, years later, after all the somedays are all used up.

I'm going to spend this money today, dad, and think of you. Happy birthday, wherever you are.

Happy Valentine's Day, Mom and Dad

Strangers in the Night

My parents met each other on St. Valentine's day, 1962. They met at a bar in the San Fernando Valley. My mom was there to meet a date. She was then a 34-year-old divorced mother of four who lived with her kids at her parents' house.

Parents don't like to talk to their kids about the people they dated before they met their final mate. It's as though they would rather not show their work in solving an algebra problem. My mom was a little more forthcoming about her pre-marriage experiences than my father was. I know she dated Johnny Grant, the recently deceased "mayor of Hollywood," who she described as "all hands." Hearing that ended my line of questioning for the day.

Still, I was the kind of kid who wanted to get to the very root of my origins, the point at which chance comes into play: that night, a bar, the San Fernando valley.

My dad was 26 at the time -- eight years younger than she. He was working for the L.A. school district as a custodian (janitor) and going to night school to get a degree in geography. He was living with his parents at the time -- he had moved to the area eight years previously from North Dakota -- and he was soon to buy a house on the same street, just a few houses down.

I picture them both, in this bar, in a semi-rural suburb of Los Angeles, orange trees and tract houses, chatting with each other while she waits for her date to arrive. My father, probably post-break-up and my mother, post-divorce. They're drinking martinis or scotch-and-sodas. The guy my mother is waiting for, whoever he is, calls and asks for her. He's running late, he says. He wants to meet somewhere else.

No, she says. No. She's not going somewhere else. She's waited for him this long, and she's talking to another guy at the bar anyway and, well, he can just take a long walk off a short pier.

And that's it. The future starts. My father gets her phone number, one that strangely starts with a word, like TOrrington 7-5309. That night starts a chain reaction of step-children, marriage, my sister, myself, looking after ailing and dying parents, a move, retirement, another move to a new state, and death -- all of it over 40 years.

A flat tire, a newspaper article, even a head cold could have made it all happen differently. They're both gone now, which is the trouble of being born to older parents. The advantage of being born to older parents, though, is that they're wiser and less likely to fly off the handle. My life has been made easy by older siblings who smoothed out the rough edges new parents always start with.

I miss them both very much. Whether they're together in the afterlife or together in oblivion, I know they are together.

photo credit: Cocktails 4 Two by gwENvision

I've Fallen Into the Cellar

Today, this week, I've been in the grips of a monstrous depression that I can't shake, no matter how hard I try. The weather has been, for the most part, fantastic, but that's not enough to pull me out of this nose dive. I've tried everything I can think of. Just now, I was engaging in some online retail therapy, looking for an American DVD release of Zabriskie Point (no such luck), when I thought maybe what I need to do--maybe what's been wrong with me--is that I haven't been blogging.

I've tried to write again, but it just hasn't gone through. What's left to say after mom's death? Part of me thought that this blog started as a reaction to my father's death, so maybe it should end.

I miss my mom and my dad. Most of all, though, I miss my wife. We announced the first winner of the Wendy Jackson Hall Memorial Scholarship this week. I thought it would make me happy and give me a sense of completion. It doesn't. It's just one more rung on the ladder. I'm holding on to the ladder.

You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)

Mackinac Island (1814) by William Dashwood

My first name is Porter, as was my father's and grandfather's. My great grandfather, though, was named George. As a kid, I used to ask my dad how grandpa got to be named Porter. What I remember of the story is that he was named after a hero in the War of 1812, Porter Hanks, to whom we were somehow related. Also, there was something about him being shot in the chest once, but the bullet lodged in his pocket watch. Hanks later disassembled the watch and had a ring made from it. This lucky ring would somehow, someday come to me.

I was thinking about this today and decided to put "Porter Hanks" into a Google search box. I learned a lot about the man.

Some count Porter Hanks as the first British prisoner of the war. He was a lieutenant in the American army and commander of Fort Mackinac, on Mackinac island in Lake Huron. He was in charge of 60 poorly trained and out-of-shape artillarymen at what was then America's most distant outpost.

News had not yet arrived to him that America had declared war. In the early morning of July 17, 1812, the fort was surprised by an overwhelming force of British soldiers, Canadian fur traders, and Indians. Commander Hanks surrendered without firing a shot.

On August 16, while being court-martialed at a fort in Detroit for cowardice, the British attacked. He was "cut in two" by a canon ball.