Second Chances
Dad's teenage turnaround - and a life of gratitude
Dad will often start talking at the end of breakfast or dinner, when we’re all sitting around the table. A story begins. Usually, it’s one we’ve heard some version of before. But if he is relaxed and we are patient and curious, details will trickle out that weren’t necessarily part of the whitewashed version of the story we remember.
In the last few years, I’ve noticed Dad has revealed more and more about particular incidents in his difficult childhood.
This morning Dad started to talk about some trouble he got into in school, and I went and grabbed my laptop to roughly transcribe whatever he was going to say.
For background, I should tell you he was the fourth of six boys, they moved around a lot, and they watched their father – a bright engineer, a Naval Academy graduate, and naval officer – descend into alcoholism and die an early death. Sometimes they had money, sometimes they did not. When Dad was 12, his beloved oldest brother, Jack, who was in the merchant marine, was lost at sea when the tanker he was on sunk in the North Atlantic.
