For their honeymoon they bought a used car and took a road trip across the country.  They both came from extremely repressive and controlling families with a number of social and domestic duties to uphold; so simply getting married and settling down was far too accepting for the other parties concerned; so, they eloped and departed for parts of the Americas unknown to those who would rather see them suffer. 

I'm going to jump ahead ten years to give you a bit of history. One of the stories I recall mom telling me, was when in 1950, they bought a brand new Nash Airflyte, one of the slickest, heaviest, most modern automobiles of the time, and left on a three month road trip together. She said it was the happiest times of their lives. Freedom.  Another trip I recall her telling me of, was when they, and their two Doberman Pincers departed for Canada to visit daddy's twin brother. 

Mom said that his brother, who was the spittin' image of daddy, but nowhere near the personality or intelligence tried more than few times to get her into the barn, and that if she would have as much as hinted of daddy of the incident, his brother would be dead and I would surely have never been born. This is how jealous daddy was of any other man's interest in my mother; which for the record;  at five-foot, one-hundred and five pounds, was a hottie even by today's standards. In other words, he would have murdered his brother, no questions asked. Taking another person's life was not beyond him. Mom had said this before.

            Upon the return from their honeymoon in 1940, they took up residency in Santa Barbara, California where they purchased their first and only home together for $800.  Santa Barbara was where daddy was to meet the doctor he would apprentice under to be a board certified surgeon.  The way one became a surgeon then, was just a tad different than one does now, and I'll get to this.  By 1945, daddy had only a short time to go before he could perform surgical procedures on his own without supervision.  It may seem unorthodox, but from what I understand about the required standards of the time, the apprenticeship program for becoming a licensed surgeon was long and intense. Mind you, it was not mandatory to be a medical doctor to be a surgeon. Like Hell! I said to mom when I first heard the story;  but sure enough, one could be a surgeon without having to be a medical doctor. Don't ask me how, but he found a program, and it was indeed authentic.  

I recall mom telling me, just prior to him completing of the program that he would be called in at any hour, on any day of the week by a variety of surgeons on staff at the hospital.  He would be called in at three in the morning to deliver babies; he'd be called in on a Friday for an appendectomy because the on-duty surgeon wanted to play golf;   he'd get called in on a Sunday for prostates, gall stones, lungs, hysterectomies, even amputations; whatever the hierarchy wanted him to remove. I say remove because surgical removal was much more popular and profitable at the time than anything as crazy sounding as prevention or even a second opinion.  The only surgical procedures he was not allowed to perform were those inside the brain; this was an additional course of study. He was bright, promising and one talented cat with a scalpel.  He was, for intention and purpose; a general surgeon by the age of forty-five. 

It was hard for me to believe these stories growing up when mom told them to me.  All I ever knew my daddy to be was a roofer; a man who looked old before his time who did odd jobs.  When it finally sank in; when I was old enough to understand that he actually  did what mom said he did, it was difficult for me needless-to-say, when I tried to figure out why he wasn't doing it now.  It was truly sad what I learned years later.

            After almost ten years in total; of training and studying, and cutting; somewhere around 1945, my daddy did the unthinkable.  He did the one thing that would seal his fate from ever becoming the one thing he, his family and his friends had dreamed of; becoming a board certified surgeon in the United States of America; he got himself arrested.  He got himself arrested by putting the one thing into his body he would violently reject: alcohol. 

Mom said, he knew he couldn't drink.  He knew it better than anyone.  Not even a tiny bit could he tolerate without becoming intensely violent.  Why he took a drink with less than six months to complete his apprenticeship, not even my mother knows for sure, but he did. Unfortunately the certification program called for a squeaky clean record “no exceptions, especially for foreign Nationalists."

In 1959, at the age of fifty four, when I was four years old, my daddy died.  He passed over from this life to the next via a combination of situations and circumstances induced by self pity and a hatred for those and everything around him:  his family for disinheriting him; his friends and superiors for turning their backs on him; and the authorities who saw to it that his dream was never to be realized in this life time. Everyone, except mom and me; so she says.

            Mom nursed him for those ten years until his death. She was an angel.  Smoking was a huge contributor. He was sucking up three packs of Lucky Strikes a day. He was so consumed by the hatred for those he felt responsible for crushing out his American dream, that just about every kind of cancer under the sun ate him alive.  In the final two years of his life he had seven surgeries performed.  He had gall and kidney stones removed. He had his spleen removed along with a portion from one of his lungs.  Mom would say that when he was practicing, he would come home and laugh after he'd removed some poor man's prostate; joking about how the poor devil would never have an erection again.  Then, he had to have his prostate removed - cancer, you know.

            Mom raised me alone until she remarried again in 1978. I was twenty-three.  To this day I am grateful I was not raised under the same roof with my daddy.  And I'm all right with the fact that he passed when he did.  I've always felt no matter, when a child is born onto the planet, it arrives equipped to handle the problems of the day. I've often thought that my daddy packed a little light for the trip.

             It's been forty-eight years since his death.  I was told I took it hard.  I believe it.