Seventy-six years ago, my father came into this world in a small West Texas town north of Abilene. His was a depression-era birth; a child born into a life of hardship, on the cusp of war. There was a certain hard-eyed practicality to his people for their duty was a stern master. Survival was paramount and you did what was necessary to survive. Joy was a luxury for another time. In most circumstances, life in this time was a challenge. For my father, it was complicated when he became disabled at the age of three. A fall from a tree and a broken hip lead to the diagnosis of a bone disease which required the removal of the entire hip joint. Yet another stern duty making demands on the family.
Shortly thereafter, they relocated further west to Crane, Texas, his father taking a job for Gulf Oil. Adaptive technologies being what they were at the time, his father built him a steel wagon that he used to push himself around the oil field camp. His life was as typical as it could be for a disabled child in the 40’s and 50’s, a constant struggle for acceptance and an overachieving spirit to gain it. He was a fighter because his survival demanded it of him. At the age of 18, a surgical procedure that should have given him greater mobility went terribly wrong and left him suffering from a bacterial infection, his allergy to penicillin preventing a cure. For 20+ years and 23 major surgeries and numerous brushes with death, he suffered the indignities of “medical hope.” Eventually, synthetic penicillin eradicated the infection, but the damage was done, his body was left broken.
But not his will. Before the cure and after, he worked. He was a rancher and he worked in the oil field. His was a constant life of struggle with the uncooperative elements of West Texas and an equally uncooperative body. Pulling windmills to provide water to the cattle, working cattle, building fence, fixing oil leaks, gauging tanks, maintaining oil wells; blazing heat or blowing snow, he was there, getting the job done. Eventually, it became clear he couldn’t keep that up. So, he turned his will and his attention to public service. He was elected to the Crane County Commissioner’s Court as the Commissioner for Precinct 2 in 1980, a position he held until his retirement in 1992.
There are many threads in the tapestry telling the story of fathers and sons. The complexities of my relationship with my father are no different. My father struggled his whole life to combat the prejudice others hold against disabled individuals. The toughest battles were against the prejudices he had internalized. When he grew up, the disabled were invalid and I watched him see past expectations to the value he had in the world. In that struggle to become more than an object of pity, to affirm himself in the world through his work and his family, I learned that I am more than the sum of my circumstances, that the will to transcend fate is at the core of the man he taught me to be.
Even when the man he taught me to be became someone he had difficulty understanding, he trusted that his choices had made something good in the world. His example to go beyond expectations and become someone more than circumstances dictated opened the world of choices to me. And choice is key here. Men and women choose to have children every day and accept the children who are born to them. But my Dad was not my biological father. He chose my mother, my sister and me. He chose to make us a family. That choice was a world-making event.
Two weeks from tonight, we will mark ten years since he passed from us. Ten years that have seen more loss than I care to think on. As I age, my hindsight gets sharper and things about my father I didn’t understand then, I find I understand now. He wasn’t a perfect man, by any stretch of the imagination. He was just a man, not less for his disability, not more for overcoming it. But in my memory, a giant of a man steadies my toddling steps, cheers as I play football, waves to me as I graduate college, but above all, chooses to be my father and love me as his son.
Happy Birthday, Dad. I miss you.
Love,
Your Son