I used to wonder why my father “did the right thing” and married my mother. It would have been easy to retreat to the navy base and pretend I wasn’t happening. Maybe her family appealed to the base commander and he forced the issue. Maybe there really was a shotgun involved. What I do know is that there could not have been one iota of love between my parents. If there was they had a very strange way of not showing it. In those days, to be fair about it, you rarely saw any public display of affection in any family and certainly not in mine, except of course for grandma.
My father tried to “farm” but he was evidently a total loser in that effort, and he ended up on a low-paying job working for the state as a night watchman. They rented most of our place out to neighboring farmers. It was never enough, so my mother had to work “outside the home”. I am not sure what she did before I went into elementary school but I suspect I was dropped at grandma’s house while she did some menial job somewhere.
Money was evidently always a problem, or more the lack of money. The cycle of near-poverty continues that way, generation after generation it seems. After awhile it seems the players just must assume it is their role in life and on it goes. My parents struggled, and perhaps that is what was behind the reminders of how lucky I was to have food and shelter. I certainly do not remember ever starving, but I clearly remember many months where the money ran out before the month ran out, and it was slim pickings. As a kid you don’t think much about the problems of the adult world, unless you get hungry and there is no food. Or I guess these days, if you end up homeless and hungry.
I do not recall overhearing my parents arguing or fighting about anything but I’ll bet they did. My poor mother must have felt so isolated and alone, probably scared too. A husband who, at best, was indifferent to her, underemployed, working nights, leaving her to deal with working as much as she could during the day, to deal with me, to cope. I’m sure at first when we moved home she was petrified and missed her own large family back on Guam. As the years passed, and the grind of daily life took its toll, she lost that exotic allure that had attracted my father, and she became bitter and resentful. She also stood out like a sore thumb in our county where the darkest skin you ever saw was when someone got a nice tan, and except for the transient farm workers who swept in every summer, no one talked with any sort of accent or looked any different than anyone else. And no one was a Catholic. There was no Catholic place of worship anywhere nearby. On top of everything else, my mother’s faith was suppressed, then evaporated.
My father tried to “farm” but he was evidently a total loser in that effort, and he ended up on a low-paying job working for the state as a night watchman. They rented most of our place out to neighboring farmers. It was never enough, so my mother had to work “outside the home”. I am not sure what she did before I went into elementary school but I suspect I was dropped at grandma’s house while she did some menial job somewhere.
Money was evidently always a problem, or more the lack of money. The cycle of near-poverty continues that way, generation after generation it seems. After awhile it seems the players just must assume it is their role in life and on it goes. My parents struggled, and perhaps that is what was behind the reminders of how lucky I was to have food and shelter. I certainly do not remember ever starving, but I clearly remember many months where the money ran out before the month ran out, and it was slim pickings. As a kid you don’t think much about the problems of the adult world, unless you get hungry and there is no food. Or I guess these days, if you end up homeless and hungry.
I do not recall overhearing my parents arguing or fighting about anything but I’ll bet they did. My poor mother must have felt so isolated and alone, probably scared too. A husband who, at best, was indifferent to her, underemployed, working nights, leaving her to deal with working as much as she could during the day, to deal with me, to cope. I’m sure at first when we moved home she was petrified and missed her own large family back on Guam. As the years passed, and the grind of daily life took its toll, she lost that exotic allure that had attracted my father, and she became bitter and resentful. She also stood out like a sore thumb in our county where the darkest skin you ever saw was when someone got a nice tan, and except for the transient farm workers who swept in every summer, no one talked with any sort of accent or looked any different than anyone else. And no one was a Catholic. There was no Catholic place of worship anywhere nearby. On top of everything else, my mother’s faith was suppressed, then evaporated.
