PAUL

If one can find the 1942 Avalon High School Yearbook of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and turn to the beginning of the sports section, there is someone’s image superimposed over the entire page, like some kind of god. That’s my dad, Paul Milton Goodwin.

He was a sort of god, in the sports sense. He was six-five, he was movie star handsome, and he was an incredible physical specimen. He commanded every sport he tried.

Paul was the youngest of six children, born to Thomas and Bertha Goodwin, when Bertha was well into her forties. His siblings were Clyde, Zelda, Jim, Emelia and Martha.

I never met my dad’s parents; they died before I was born. I didn’t meet Clyde or Zelda either. Clyde was killed while building a bridge. I always liked to say he was squashed, but I don’t know if that was something I heard or made up. Zelda died of tuberculosis.

They grew up in Pittsburgh, and my dad didn’t tell me much about how the Great Depression affected his family. I know that his father was a train engineer. I imagine that with six kids, times were tough. I know that my dad was always careful with his money and his possessions.

He told me that as kids, they made skis out of barrel staves. That sounds poor to me, but maybe it was just a practical thing to do in those days.

After Paul excelled at every sport and graduated high school, he enlisted in the Navy. He was a frogman in the Pacific Theater during World War II. He was a member of the Underwater Demolition Team, an elite group of men who were superior swimmers and in superb physical condition. They made sure it was safe for our forces to land and do their thing.

My dad was badass.

After the war, he enrolled in the University of Pittsburgh, joined a fraternity and continued to excel in sports. He got his degree in Geoligical Petroleum Engineering, and did graduate work in New York City, at Columbia.

During his senior year, or possibly junior, his life took a massive U-turn. He was engaged, and I don’t know any of the details of who she was, or their plans. I often wonder how his life would have turned out if he’d never met my mom and married this woman instead. I’ll bet a million bucks he often wondered that, too.

He was at a fraternity party, and he was playing the piano. Paul was self-taught and could play jazz and blues like James Booker. He was a catch. The poor fiancée was studying at some other college in another town. I hope her life turned out well.

My mother, Shirley, took one look at my dad playing the piano, turned to her friend, pointed at him and announced, “That is the man I am going to marry.”

Poor guy didn’t stand a chance. My mom was a looker. I inherited my dad’s looks, which aren’t so great on a girl. Oh well.

My guess is that she walked over to that piano and started staring at him all googly-eyed, swaying to the rhythm, with a fetching smile on her face. By the end of the evening, his fate was sealed. He wrote to the fiancée and asked her to send back the engagement ring, which practical Paul gave to my mom.

I’m not sure what my mom expected from marriage, but it wasn’t what she got. She was the spoiled, snotty, youngest child of Homer and Gertrude Ochsenhirt. I don’t think the Depression years hurt them much.

Anyway, Paul and Shirley got married in a civil ceremony in July of 1947. I never learned why there wasn’t a formal wedding. Maybe there was family disapproval from one side, or both.

I wonder about the jilted fiancée, if that was a cosmically wrong boo-boo on the part of my dad, and he was condemned to two-and-a-half plus decades of marital hell because of it. My mother was a handful.

After the wedding, and Paul finishing his postgraduate work, they headed West, where the oil was. All through my childhood years, I heard my mother’s chronic lament that Paul just wasn’t capable of hanging on to a good job. She said that in the early years of their marriage, they would just get settled in, and then whoops, he had a different job, and they were moving again.

I do know that they must have moved a lot, in the four years between my two oldest sisters’ births in 1948 and 1950, and my brother’s and my births in 1954 and 1956. My sisters were born in Lander, Wyoming, and my brother and I were born in Worland, Wyoming.

In the four years between the two sets of births, 1950 to 1954, my dad re-enlisted and went to Korea for a while. I don’t know how long he was gone. My mother and two sisters went to live with relatives back East while he was away.

Before my brother Jeffry and I were born, the family lived in Oklahoma and Texas for a time before returning to Wyoming. So, yes, Shirley, that is a lot of moving in a short time. Mother, you seem to have a legitimate complaint.

I know that my dad wasn’t a slacker, by any means. He went to work, every single day, except for a couple of months in the late sixties when he had cancer. He was a gentle, steadfast man who was true to his calling.

If something was way out of wack in the grand scheme of things, Paul had no problem calling it out, to whoever needed to hear it. He didn’t mince words, or trip over them so he didn’t hurt someone’s feelings. He said what needed to be said. He didn’t do it often; most of the time he was quiet and unassuming. But maybe this direct approach was off-putting to a boss or two, and that was the problem.

Or maybe it was just the way things were. Oil exploration and drilling was a fairly new industry in the mid-20th century, and business was booming. Possibly my dad just found a better job. I don’t know.

But my mother made it sound as if they were living out The Grapes of Wrath over and over, with their household belongings strapped to the roof of their car.

To me, moving is one of the top five things in life to hate with steaming, toxic piles of loathing. I am tempted, the next time I move, to just strike a match to the place, make it look like an accident, collect the insurance and start over fresh. So, I get my mom.

Moving now is different than the moving of my parents in the 1950s. I’m not saying it was fun. Yes, they had to pack up the stuff, but then the moving guys came along and took over. They loaded all the boxes into the Mayflower truck, and it wasn’t seen again until the Goodwins reached their new destination. Then the moving guys unloaded it.

I missed out on that part of their marriage. We moved once, when I was three, from Worland, Wyoming, to Great Bend, Kansas. I have some memories of that move, and to me it seemed like a great adventure.

In Worland, the winters were freezing, cold enough that my dad made an ice-skating rink in the backyard for him and my sisters. My oldest sister told me that they spent hours on that rink, and that they all were quite good.

We all went ice-skating in Kansas too, except my mom. She had ice skates; she just didn’t want to go. She probably preferred the peace of a totally quiet house to ice skating.

There was a pond in town where we did some skating, but if the weather stayed below freezing long enough, my dad preferred a section of the Arkansas River. It was probably a little dangerous; you could see the cold, rushing water flowing under the thin sections of ice, and a short distance away from where we skated there was some kind of small waterfall-type thing that never seemed to freeze. The water was deep and flowed fast.

We were instructed to stay away from that area, but there was plenty of room to skate where the ice was solid. It wasn’t smooth ice, the way a rink was. There were uneven patches and places where the snow made crusty obstacles, which a good skater could slice right through.

Everyone was good at skating, except me. I had extremely weak ankles, and I just sort of wobbled around. The rest of the family skittered around the ice in frozen exuberance, while I worked on not falling down.

My dad, however, did not skitter. He flew. He twirled, he whirled. He could spin in place so fast and so long, that he didn’t even look human. He skated along on one leg, the other extended behind him, doing figure eights and such for what seemed like miles. He flew through the air doing multiple spins.

The man was a shameless show-off. Or he was just having great fun. I think it was a bit of both. He was fun to watch; I’ll give him that.

Paul was a man who aimed to stay in shape. And so, we would find him in the backyard in Kansas, where he carefully nurtured a patch of blue grass, I believe just for his exercises. Though he was extremely tall and powerfully built, he was light on his feet. He would do a series of forward flips, and then back flips, along the length of the blue grass lawn. He could do hands free flips, forward and back.

As a small child, playing on his feet was one of my favorite things to do. He was the only member of the family who kept his shoes on inside until bedtime. I don’t know what that was about, but the rest of us embraced our hillbilly bare feet.

Playing on his shoes was like having my own indoor playground. He would be sitting in his chair, almost always reading some book or magazine. My playground never had closing hours. I would sit on his shod feet, and he would lift me up in the air like a teeter-totter. Or I would just sit on his giant feet and play with a toy or hug his legs.

Back then, I had no fear of him whatever. I loved when he came home from work. He was fun to follow around because he always did the coolest things, like building something in his garage workshop, or walking around the two plus acres, checking on the trees he had planted. The fear would come later, and it was from nothing that he did.

Speaking of fear, the bugs in Kansas grew to horrifying sizes, and sometimes they made their way into the house. They terrified me. I could fetch a family member to get rid of them, but they all wanted to kill them.

Except for my dad. I would tell him about the bug or spider in the bathtub, or on the wall, wherever. I would beg him to please just put it outside and not kill it. The poor insects, many of them extremely beautiful, didn’t deserve to die just because I was a wimp.

He would sigh; usually he had just gotten settled into his chair with the newspaper, after arriving home from work and spending an hour or so outside. I had been waiting for him. He would stand, and I would show him the suspect bug. Usually, he would just cup it in his hand, but some of them he would corral with the newspaper, and then take them outside.

My mother always wanted more money, and she wanted to work so she could have her own money. When we lived in Worland, she worked for the local newspaper. We only had one car then, so she would take her stories to the newspaper office on her bicycle to meet her deadline.

In Kansas, a few years passed before she started to work. I remember when she wasn’t working that she hosted bridge club once a month or so. She participated in a lot of activities at St. John’s Episcopal Church, which she had joined right after we moved there. She had friends, she threw parties, all that social stuff.

My father was not a socialite. He went to the Episcopal church one time, and I don’t know what happened, but he never went again. My mother despised him for that. He mostly hid when she had dinner guests over, though he did his best to be polite.

He had his own stuff. He belonged to a bowling league. He was a member of the Petroleum Club, and he dressed up and ate there several times a month, as well as the VFW. He golfed, a lot.

The thing is, after working, he preferred to just be home, with his family nearby. He spent a lot of time after work in the gigantic yard, planting trees, mowing the grass, gardening and other stuff.

Our house and yard were pristine. Never did the house appear to need a fresh coat of paint. And he was the one who did it. He could fix anything, and he never had to call the guy to do any kind of repairs. Oops, that’s not quite true. There was the time some glass guys came to repair the giant picture window that was destroyed in a storm, and my oldest sister ran off with one of them. But that’s a whole story for another time.

Anyway, he preferred a quiet evening reading to a lot of activities. As we waited for hours for my mother to call us to dinner, he would play games with me. He taught me how to play chess and cribbage. We sat at the piano, where I played keyboard as he strummed his ukulele. We did jigsaw puzzles together. A lot of times I would ask him to take me to the store for whatever. He grumbled a bit, but he always did it.

He had hobbies that were strictly his own. He built model airplanes. They were made of balsa wood and covered with tissue paper. Most of them were World War I versions, because he like the biplanes.

He painted, I believe mostly with acrylics. He graphed out Van Gogh’s Cafe Terrace at Night and Degas’ Absinthe, on the back of old, large political posters from a 1964 campaign and painted them, sort of like paint by number, but with tiny squares. They looked like the real thing, except for a flaw in the Van Gogh, where his youngest daughter tried to paint a little along the path. He tried his best to cover it up, but it is still obvious if one knows where to look. He never yelled at me; he thought it was funny, but he told me not to do it again.

Those paintings hung on each side of the mantle of our house for a decade, over the bookcases. I have them now. Cafe Terrace is not aging well and needs some attention. I am thinking about trying to get it restored, if possible, now that I am no longer putting all of my spare change into slot machines. I love those paintings. The Van Gogh is a copy of my all-time favorite painting. I hope they can be restored.

There was one guest, a friend of my mom’s, whom my father loved to see. His name was Pete, of Pete and Amber, an elderly brother and sister who attended our church. Pete was an affable man who was a former chess master, and he and my father would spend the evening with my father’s handmade chess board and hand-carved chess pieces.

Chess was one of Paul’s passions. He spent many evenings reading chess books. I guess if you want to be good at chess, you have to actually study it, unless you are some sort of savant. I tried reading one of his chess books, but after several paragraphs I just wanted to read a Nancy Drew mystery.

So, my father wasn’t an antisocial hermit, but he clearly wasn’t in the same league as my mom. She belonged to the church choir and went to practice one evening a week. She belonged to the Great Bend Community Theatre, and when there was a production going on, that involved many nights out a week. Great Bend had a community concert series with some excellent offerings, five or six times a year, and she and we kids went to all of them. My dad wasn’t into that stuff.

He was more into things like kites. The Kansas wind in the spring makes for a wonderful time to fly a kite. But he wasn’t having those foo-foo, cheap kites that were sold in the stores. He built his own. He made the standard diamond-shaped kite, as well as box kites, and a few experimental shapes.

Those kites were engineering marvels. They didn’t break apart in the harsh winds like the cheapo, store-bought kites. The only thing wrong with them was that he made them out of paper grocery bags, and so they were just brown. I told him I wanted colorful kites, and one year he indulged me and painted one of the box kites. I don’t remember the exact design on it, just that it was a festival of colors that made it the best kite ever made.

That would be the kite that got away early one evening. Box kites have a strong pull when they get high into the sky, and the string snapped on the colorful kite. It embraced its freedom south of us, over a wheat field, little knowing that it was about to suffer a horrific fate, tumbling to the ground and probably blowing into a row of gigantic tumble weeds, their eager little spiky fingers anxious to tear into the beautiful kite and rip it to shreds.

My dad got in his car and took off to retrieve that kite, driving across the wheat field to find it. He came back with it.

So, we did have good times in that big house in Kansas. But things deteriorated through the years, so much that a palpable anger resided there, lurking just out of one’s field of vision, like a giant, ever-present shadow.

I don’t want to paint a picture of my mother as a horrible person, because she wasn’t. She was for the most part, a very good mother, if a bit emotionally absent a lot of the time. She cooked excellent meals, we had decent clothes, and she made the holidays so wonderfully memorable. Best of all, she absolutely loved animals. There were always lots of pets.

But she didn’t do right by my dad, and I don’t really know how much blame lies where. I was just in the battlefield, not understanding the war, and getting wounded in the skirmishes, like the rest of my siblings.

Most of the bad times were in the sixties. By the seventies, my sisters had fled, and there was just my brother and I. Jeff and Steph.

We boomers have seen a lot of change. The sixties were the beginning of the free love revolution, and though it’s been done before—nothing new under the sun—this time, with television and then all the other gadgets that followed, it really messed with the social conventions and sent society into an upheaval which is still unravelling. The feminist movement was taking off in high gear, birth control pills were newly available, and no-fault divorce became the law in most states. It was becoming easy to leave a marriage.

I don’t know if a divorce would have benefitted our family. It’s hard to say. I would have had to choose sides in the household war, and that would have been awful. I was the one who tried to get along with everyone.

The biggest scar I took away from my childhood were the role models I lived with. My mother was, simply put, a miserable drunk. I don’t know how many scotch and waters she consumed each night as she cooked dinner, after coming home from work, but it was plenty.

Her contempt for my dad was obvious in everything she did and said. If she had to talk about him to us kids, she said “your father,” as if the words were poison in her mouth, and she might as well have spit in the floor when she said it.

But for some reason, I tended to take her side. She was the one I went to get my report card signed, write a check for piano lessons or get permission to go on a field trip, all that stuff.

It never occurred to me to ask my father for any of those things, even though he would have gladly done any of them. It just seemed as if my mom was the one who was in charge. My father’s role in our home just seemed to diminish with each passing month.

He was still there, we still played chess, and sat at the piano together. It just felt as if in some way, I was betraying my mom, which was a crazy way to feel. But I was too young to know any better.

At night, sometime after I was tucked into bed with my prayers and menagerie of stuffed animals, the screaming would start. Every time, it was my mother who started it. She would get so damned drunk. After so much haranguing, my father would dish it out too. Whichever children were asleep upstairs were ejected from that peaceful slumber, and we knew that we had to endure the insufferable screaming for thirty minutes? An hour, more? It was hard to tell.

What peace there was in that house had fled. It was so hard to get back to sleep.

It happened a lot. Several times a week, at least; it was probably more.

It never escalated to physical blows; all credit to my father. He could have punched her just once with his massive fist and ended it all, but that is not who he was. It’s a miracle that he didn’t, because she was horrible during those scream fests.

He tried his best to be a good father to us. He saw the gift my brother, Jeffry, had playing basketball, but the school wouldn’t let him play, because he wouldn’t cut his hair. My father went to the school to plead Jeffry’s case, saying that he knew Jeffry had a gift and would be a great asset to the team, and wasn’t hair just hair? But those were the years that schools were drawing a hard line, and they said no.

He would talk to each of us, when necessary, when we were going a bit astray. It was a tall order. My older siblings were each massively messed up with differing issues. I was too, but I kept it hidden under a veneer of the perfect child, trying to atone for the heartache my brother and sisters caused my parents.

I think of my father when I hear Dan Fogelberg’s “Leader of the Band,” especially the lines, “He earned his love through discipline, a thundering velvet hand. His gentle means of sculpting souls took me years to understand.”

Years went by in our house with the shouting and the undercurrent of utter loathing between my parents ever present. I don’t know if my father stopped loving my mother, but he probably did.

He hated her drinking and spending. He wasn’t a stingy man; every one of us had what we needed, and usually whatever we wanted, within reason. But my mother collected credit cards as a hobby and had credit at every store in town.

She dressed stylishly, with scores of matching purses and shoes, hats and gloves, and a dozen nice coats. Scarves, jewelry, the best makeup and lotions, she had it all. This was Kansas, not New York City. Her excessive wardrobe was unnecessary. But she always looked nice. I don’t think my father begrudged her that; he just didn’t think she needed so much.

He liked to have bills paid in full every month. The way he lived, and on his salary, it was easily done, even with a few packages coming every month from Sears, Spiegel or Wiley’s.

But my mom liked to buy stuff; it was just who she was. Her scotch and weekend beer habits weren’t free, either. She created debt, and my father hated it.

As the years passed, and my brother and I went on into junior high and then high school, a sort of detente was reached. I think they were both past the point of caring. It made for a more peaceful house to live in, but the damage had been done.

I suppose many would fault my dad for not asserting himself, saying he was passive. He did seem to just fade into the background, just standing by. Some would see him as weak and indifferent. But my mother was as fierce as a tornado, relentless in having things her way.

Maybe he could have done something, but I don’t know what it would have been. He could have left, but I think he stayed because he wanted to make sure that his children were alright.

We weren’t.

My oldest sister tried to tell me that our dad was a normal man. She could tell that my opinion of him had been poisoned by years of strife and my mother’s attitude. I couldn’t comprehend it. I loved him so much, but he seemed so distant to me, admirable yet unapproachable. And he was so often withdrawn in that miserable home.

He was almost otherworldly, so big and strong, like a carved statue. He had so many interests and hobbies, and he excelled at them all. I tried to do sports, but I was never good at them. I played the piano, but I was classically trained, when all I wanted to do was pound the keys boogie-woogie style the way he did it. But I didn’t have his gift.

I felt as if I was a big disappointment to him.

In the last semester of my senior year, I came home from an overnight speech competition to my mother telling me that my father had lost his job.

It didn’t take him long to find something else. I don’t know what happened at the office where he spent fifteen years. It had to be humiliating to him. They gave him several months’ notice to keep working while he found something else. The new job he found was in Casper, Wyoming.

I always tell people I know that if they didn’t get a job they were longing for, it was meant to be. There is something better waiting for them. The same goes for getting fired. There might be some rough times, but usually in retrospect, life is better.

As for my mom, this was what she had been waiting for, being free of Paul. She was going to divorce him, she was going to get everything she could out of him, and then she was going to leave Kansas, a state she said she hated. Ironically, she moved to Casper too early the next year.

And there I was, left in Kansas, attending Kansas University with no home, no family, no dog. It was a weird and lonely place to be.

But I did get letters, and the best ones were from my dad.

The death knell of the pleasure of receiving a letter in the mail and seeing that the handwriting is from someone you love, is one of the worst fallouts of the digital era. Texts and emails just aren’t the same. I just wish I’d had the sense to save every letter, especially the ones I received from my father.

The first part of each letter—he couldn’t help himself—would be a tender discourse on proper handwriting, several paragraphs, at least, and sometimes a whole page.

My father’s handwriting was beautiful, the best in the family. The written lines were razor straight, and his cursive flowed in sleek lines and fluttered in loops on the page like a ballet. It wasn’t girly, it was masculine. He took his handwriting and letter writing seriously.

I, on the other hand, have the handwriting of a serial killer, which is probably offensive to serial killers. I could win or get honorable mention in any bad handwriting contest.

I tried my whole life in grammar and high school to get the pretty, curvy and round penmanship of a proper girl. I spent every August diligently practicing my letters before school started, so desperate to be in the in-crowd of those with lovely handwriting. It never stuck, and my father was kind enough to notice.

But I didn’t care about his handwriting lecture, because after getting enough letters from him, I knew that the best was yet to come.

I always thought that I had gotten my desire to write from my mother, but I found that I was blessed with two parents who write. My father’s letters were better than a hundred Sundays of dessert and ask anyone, I like my dessert.

He injected gentle, subtle humor into everything, including my handwriting lessons. He wrote about everything, from his job to drives he took in the mountains around Casper. I liked it best when he described the scenes of natural beauty from his drives—on a simple Sunday drive to the weeks-long odysseys he took after he retired. He described the trees, the terrain, clouds in the sky and breathtaking sunsets in the words of a poet.

He enclosed photos a lot, and I forgot to even mention his photography avocation, and his camera collection, but this is already getting so long. Moving on…

Grave mistreatment has a way of teaming up with justice down the road, if one is patient. That is what happened to my father. One night, shortly after moving to Casper, he was having a drink in a bar, and he met Miriam. Long story short, they hit it off, and they got married as soon as Paul was legally free to do so. They spent the next nineteen years having the time of their lives driving through mostly the western states, hunting for rocks.

When my mother found out about Miriam, she was furious. Why? She had cast him away, years ago. I guess she didn’t think any ending was good enough for my dad but perpetual loneliness and misery.

Fortunately, my mom also met someone in Casper, and my parents each had nice lives after being married to each other.

My dad and Miriam visited me as often as they could when they were travelling. He was the father I remembered from my early childhood: the man with the goofy sense of humor, who loved to have fun. Miriam was so good for him.

I’m pretty sure that Miriam thought her kids were a step or two better than Paul’s kids, though she never said it out loud. She was probably correct. I met the four of them, and they were alright. They turned out well.

Miriam was the panacea for my father’s horrible years with my mother, and I was grateful for her.

Unfortunately, she had a series of heart attacks and died in June of 1993. A few years before her death, when they were visiting, she told me that my father was starting to have memory lapses which were concerning. I refused to believe it.

In 1994, I moved from Reno to Casper to be near my father and help him out. I had my three daughters with me, and my husband joined us later.

My daughters and I stayed with my father for a few months before I found a house to rent. I was looking forward to helping my dad out, by cooking for him and whatever he needed. I pictured happy days of reminiscing, chess games, and playing his electronic piano together. I also wanted to grow some flowers and a garden in part of his huge yard, because we had moved there in the late spring.

But we stepped into a sort of horror movie. My father was closing in on advancing stages of dementia. None of us had been aware, except, of course, for the fact the Miriam had told me. But I had a knack for avoiding reality.

One evening, he would be beloved Dad, the kind man with funny stories to tell, working on jigsaw puzzles, or down in his basement building something in his workshop. He spent a lot of time outside, walking the grounds and making sure everything was neat and orderly.

I didn’t have a job at first, so I didn’t have any money. My husband would wire money to us, and I spent it all on groceries.

We thought we were going to be happy, and being with Grandpa was going to be great. My two oldest daughters knew him from previous visits and were fond of him.

His yard was beautiful, of course, and it was even larger than the one in Kansas. He had several areas where he had built lovely rock gardens, accented with cacti and perennials. There was room for some annual flowers, and I knew that I could make them look good. I asked my dad if I could plant some annuals.

He said no. It wasn’t the answer I was expecting, so I asked why. I don’t remember what he said, perhaps it was connected to the dementia. I just recall that I was pissed off, because there was plenty of room for me to grow stuff. I hadn’t been able to have a garden for six years, and my farmer heart was hurting in a bad way.

It was the first etching of resentment on the glass, and the glass was just beginning to fill.

Looking back, how I wish I had taken Miriam seriously when she told me about my father’s fading memory, and that I had acted like an adult and done some research.

Yet even if I had, I don’t know if I could have helped him. He was one stubborn man. But I could have been so much more understanding, instead of the brat daughter I had always been.

Things got ugly fast. I had put the two oldest girls in the spare bedroom upstairs, and the baby and I were downstairs.

The confusion caused by my dad’s diminishing memory cause bursts of irrational anger, and he would snap at us, and often shout. There was no reasoning with him, and trying to only made him angrier.

When he got angry, he scared us all. I am no small thing. I am six feet tall, or at least I was then. But he had a towering, imposing presence that was intimidating and frightening. And he made things personal. During his angry, shouting tirades, he told me I bought too many toys for my kids, things like that.

He was still in superb physical condition. One time when we still lived with him, the water pump went out. He knew where the pump was located, because he had bought the property and had the house custom built for it. And so he dug down to the pump, which was more than six feet deep.

I stood there by him as he dug, in case I could help. I was worried, because he was 70 years old. But he didn’t even miss a beat. He dug and dug until he reached the pump and found the broken part. When he needed to get out of that deep hole, he just pushed up on his arms and bounded out. He never even broke a sweat. I sweated just watching him. The brain was failing him, but his body was intact.

When he was angry, his words stung, and living there began to really suck. The older girls were afraid of him and didn’t want to stay in the bedroom across from him, so they joined me and the baby in the basement. We would go down there shortly after dinner, wanting to get away from him and any outbursts he might have.

The kids quickly fell asleep, while I tossed and turned, and watched Conan O’Brien until I fell into a restless sleep. I was usually awake when my father went out to the driveway around three in the morning to get his newspaper. He was still able to do the crossword puzzle and other games on the comics page, which was why he was there waiting for the paper guy. That was the dad whom I loved.

He got incredibly fearful about not having any money, which was crazy. He retired when he was 59, and money was not a problem. But his mind was poisoned by the dementia.

I had been there about a month when I finally told him that I needed help with the groceries. I was buying all the food, and I was cooking big meals. He didn’t seem to notice that I was spending a lot of money, and I was trying to save money so we could get into our own house.

He would give me money, grudgingly. He had never been that way.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I used to call him often and ask for money. He would always tell me he didn’t have any, and then we would talk awhile. As the conversation wound down, he would get around to asking me how much I needed, and a check would come in the mail. I never paid him back, and he never expected it.

As I got older and tried to be more of an adult, I rarely borrowed money from him, and when I did, I always paid him back. I usually wrote the checks to Miriam, because she did most of the banking.

But when we were in Casper with him, he had it fixed in his mind that one time when I borrowed money, years earlier, I had never paid him back. I told him that I had, indeed, paid it back, and I had written the checks to Miriam. But he didn’t believe it.

We did have some good times. He would take us on drives around the mountains, and point out interesting, historical tidbits that he knew about the area. He showed us the ruts left by the old Conestoga wagons that travelled through that region, that were part of the Oregon Trail.

The kids and I collected Goofy figurines from McDonald’s or somewhere similar. My Dad posed them in funny, whimsical poses along a high shelving that ran around his family room.

He told me how hard it was to write letters, so he knew something was wrong. He couldn't remember his words. He sat for hours at his desk with a dictionary, trying to recall the word he wanted, trying to get it all right. This was a man who had sat and composed the best letters ever, whose words once flowed effortlessly from his pen. It broke my heart.

Three or four months after we got to Casper, we were able to rent our own house. I thought this would make things better for all of us, and we could re-establish our relationship.

Shortly after we moved, my husband moved there to be with us. He’s a big guy, and my dad did not intimidate him. He became the emissary who dealt with him. They got along well.

Whenever I went out to visit my dad, I never knew what to expect. Sometimes he was my good old dad, and other times he would lash out at me and yell, and I couldn’t come to grips with it. This was not the father I had known. This was a stranger who had taken over his body.

I called and invited him over for Thanksgiving. He answered, “Do I have to?” The words stung and burned their way into my heart. I think that was the day when something broke inside me, and I started to see him less and less.

I tried. I offered to get him to his doctor to see if there was some kind of medication that could help his memory. That did not turn out well. He was in denial as much as I had been.

My husband wasn’t able to make a decent living in Casper, and he returned to Reno after about two years. We planned to join him after the end of the school year. Casper wasn’t working out.

Before he left, my husband tried for hours to get my father to agree to come with us, but he didn’t want to leave his beloved home. No amount of reasoning would convince him.

I would tell myself that I needed to go out to see my dad. But I would put it off for another day, another week. I was afraid of him. It was just so easy to postpone a visit.

He was starting to be unable to find his car in parking lots when he went to the store. One night, a policeman called and said that they had my dad, and he’d gotten lost and was very confused, and they wondered if I could come and get him. I was just leaving for work, and I told them I wasn’t able to. They asked if they could bring him to my house. I told them that my children were afraid of him, and I was afraid to leave them with him while I worked. It was true, but I felt like the biggest heel who ever lived.

The last time I ever saw him, one of his friends had brought him by, and I was just leaving for work. Always, always, I let my stupid job take precedence over taking care of my father. Why didn’t I call my job and tell them I had an emergency?

I told him as I was getting into my car that I would get out to see him soon. Most of the time I went out to see him, he either was gone or didn’t answer the door. I couldn’t tell if his car was gone because I couldn’t see into the garage.

The time we went out to say goodbye when we moved, he wasn’t there either. We just disappeared. I just ditched my father and left him alone. He had done his part to push me away, but it wasn’t his fault. If only he would have agreed to come to Reno with us. But he was so damned stubborn.

Shortly after we moved away in the summer of 1997, my oldest sister had to get conservatorship and put our father in a residential care home. He was getting lost more often, he was confused, and he just wasn’t able to live alone any longer.

Unknown to him, my sister had sold his property, because he would never be able to live there alone again, and she put all his assets into a trust or whatever.

At first, he seemed to be happy in the home. He liked the attention he was getting. They must have given him some medication that helped his symptoms. But that didn’t last.

He started to ask to go home. He at least wanted to go out and see his property. When he was finally told that it had been sold, he went into a deep depression. And the anger came back. He was combative with the nursing home personnel, and sometimes they had to restrain him. He was big and strong, and the staff must have been terrified of him.

He quit eating and communicating. My sister called one evening in late September of 1998 to tell them to let him drink something nutritious from some kind of soda bottle that she knew he liked, and they told her that he had just died.

I found out the next morning, when I was just getting ready to go to work. It was too late to call in, so I went to work even though I’d been told of his death. I felt as if I was standing outside of my body, watching myself work. I put reality into a little box to be opened and dealt with later.

I went through the fall season numb and dumb. I managed to stop gambling for several months, in part to honor the solid, practical and prudent man who had been my father.

So, it was an undignified, lonely death for a man who deserved so much more, who lived his life in quiet humility, loving what was pure and good and beautiful.

My mother was kind enough to have a service for him at their church. They played the “Eternal Father,” the Navy Hymn, for him.

I know deep in my heart that my father forgives me for how I failed him. I also know that God has forgiven me for my shortcomings in how I dealt with my dad, because I have begged him over and over for absolution. I am still, all these years later, having a lot of trouble figuring out how to fully forgive myself.

Above any flower, my father loved California Poppies the most, with their brilliant orange and gold petals gracing the highways and byways of the West in abundance during the late spring and early summer. Every time I see them, I think of Paul Milton Goodwin, and it seems that in the gentle breeze, he is waving at me through those flowers, telling me everything is okay, that he’s alright now, and I should get on with life and let the past go.

I’m working on it.

His hundredth birthday was May 28, this year. Happy birthday, Daddy. I’m sorry this is late. It was really hard to write.

Paul Milton Goodwin, May 28, 1924, to September 26, 1998.