Well there’s more to this story then my dad, which hopefully I’ll be able to get out there too. But…yeah…I was aware when I decided to finally tell the story of my growing up that this was going to be the thing that got people’s attention.<\/p>\n
Here’s the thing…I’ve been more reluctant to tell people this then that I’m gay. It’s that Sins Of The Fathers thing. You get afraid of what people will think of you. It still worries me and it shouldn’t. Mom was the one who raised me, not dad, and in any case I am not my father. Both my brother and I (he’s my half brother actually) were raised by good mothers and we’ve both lived by the values they set. He’s got a good home improvement business going for himself and I’ve been working in IT for almost twenty years now. Our police records are cleaner then your kitchen floor. We are not our father. But then…nobody is. Turn it around. If dad was a saint that wouldn’t automatically make me one either.<\/p>\n
But I think it is true that the home you’re raised in makes a difference. The problem is these days we can’t have a discussion about home and values and what it does to a kid because we’re in the middle of a culture war and that means a lot of basically good homes have to get attacked and a lot of basically good parents and good kids have to suffer. It’s reminding me of how my own mother was treated back in the late 1950s and early 60s because she was a single divorced mother. And myself. Back then I didn’t need people to know dad was a crook to get placed in the problem child box, just that my mom was divorced and still didn’t have a man in the house.<\/p>\n
I wouldn’t be telling this story if I didn’t think there was a point here I’d like people to get. I am not that narcissistic. You hear a lot of talk from the religious right about morals and values and what great champions of these they are and it’s all bullshit. They’re a bunch of tribalistic runts thumping their drums and screaming at anyone who isn’t of the tribe. It’s time the other tribes started thumping back because actually the moral high ground isn’t theirs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
That’s the story I’m telling here. \u00a0 So to continue…and here I am reposting some of what I’ve written previously about mom’s first boyfriend…<\/p>\n
There’s a reason my generation are called the baby boomers. We are the generation born to the ones who fought that war, came home, and all at once<\/em> returned to what would have been normal lives were it not for the war…which for heterosexuals (and homosexuals, because the closet was not an option but a necessary means of survival in those days…) meant getting married and having kids. \u00a0 All at once. \u00a0 It was literally a baby boom<\/em>. \u00a0 Housing was scarce for the new families for years. \u00a0 Suburban Levittowns sprang up all over America. \u00a0 Schools had to be built, many schools, many, Many<\/em> schools, to handle the load…only to later be decommissioned as my old high school eventually was, after the last of the boom had graduated. We are a massive bulge in the population, and that is because there was a war. \u00a0 A very big, catastrophic, savage and bloody war…that changed so much…so very very much…<\/p>\n Mom told me often about the sailor she dated during WWII. When she got started, I could see that look of remembrance of first love in her eyes, hear it in her voice, still, so many years later. \u00a0 So many little things about him she remembered vividly. \u00a0 So many stories about the times they had together…about waiting patiently for his letters from overseas during the war…about how her father disliked Jews, but came to see them as fellow neighbors in life by coming to know the Jewish man she loved. \u00a0 She loved him, probably to her dying day.<\/p>\n When I asked her once why she married Dad instead, she said her sailor was on a ship that was ordered into Nagasaki harbor after the war ended, and that his ship became trapped in the harbor briefly due to all the bodies floating in it. \u00a0 She said the sight of it had driven him mad. \u00a0 And for years I wondered, never doubting that he’d gone mad as mom had said, if that bodies trapping a big U.S. navy ship part of the story could possibly be true. \u00a0 Really? \u00a0 Perhaps he’d seen lots of bodies certainly…but so many they trapped a huge Navy ship? \u00a0 Madness if it will strike, strikes young men around the age he was, so perhaps it would have happened to him anyway. \u00a0 But I saw a post Conor Friedersdorf made in which he linked to an Atlantic article about World War II…The Real War.<\/em><\/a> In it was related the experiences of a two soldiers, Neil McCallum and his friend “S.” who came upon the body of a man after a shell had landed at his feet…<\/p>\n “Good God,” said S., shocked, “here’s one of his fingers.” S. stubbed with his toe at the ground some feet from the corpse. There is more horror in a severed digit than in a man dying: it savors of mutilation. “Christ,” went on S. in a very low voice, “look, it’s not his finger.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n …and I got part way though the Atlantic article, when this passage struck me…<\/p>\n In the great war Wilfred Owen was driven very near to madness by having to remain for some time next to the scattered body pieces of one of his friends. He had numerous counterparts in the Second World War. At the botched assault on Tarawa Atoll, one coxswain at the helm of a landing vessel went quite mad, perhaps at the shock of steering through all the severed heads and limbs near the shore. One Marine battalion commander, badly wounded, climbed above the rising tide onto a pile of American bodies. Next afternoon he was found there, mad.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n …and I realized then how I knew that war had been sanitized greatly by the mainstream press at the time so as not to damage homefront moral. \u00a0 So I saw it then that yes, it could have been just as Morris told mom. Just imagine the aftermath of the first plutonium bomb, small as they say that one was, compared to what nuclear weapons can do nowadays. \u00a0 Reading this Atlantic article I could see how it probably was exactly as mom had said.<\/p>\n So her sailor boyfriend became lost in madness.<\/p>\n Mom told me his family eventually had him committed to a mental hospital. \u00a0 Mom was heartbroken. \u00a0 Then her father had his stroke, or series of really bad ones. \u00a0 He lingered, back in a time when medical care could do precious little for stroke victims. \u00a0 When he passed away, mom was devastated. \u00a0 Ruth probably was too. \u00a0 Growing up I sometimes wondered if Ruth’s bitter view of life was in part because the only man she ever loved was gone. \u00a0 Sometimes I feel like I need to cut her memory a break. \u00a0 Sometimes.<\/p>\n In any event, Ruth sold their house, and apparently everything else my maternal grandfather Albert owned, including his business making and selling radios back in a time when radio was the high tech of its age. \u00a0 I’ve written elsewhere about my doubts about the totality of this story. \u00a0 But that isn’t what I want to go into here. \u00a0 Mom would always tell me when I was growing up and exhibited an interest in electric gizmos, how much like her father I was. \u00a0 At a very young age I would bring old junked radios I found in the dump and got them working again. \u00a0 It wasn’t a lot of effort…back then radios were mostly vacuum tube contraptions and getting them back in shape was mostly a matter of taking the tubes to the local drugstore and running them on the tube testers that were ubiquitous then.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/mom_and_morris.jpg\")
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