Introduction to Dad

On Sunday, I met up with my dad again.  This time, I brought my husband Eric, our younger son David and his pregnant wife Brooke, and Tim, one of our grandsons.  Dad set up targets at the edge of his woods, and he taught me how to shoot a gun.  Now, my veteran friends can no longer tease me about never having shot one.  And, of the three of us who shot those guns off my dad’s back deck, I actually hit the target first.  (See Margie polish her nails upon her chest.) On the way home, Eric asked if I felt like I could defend my family now.  “Nope,” I said, “I don’t own a gun.”  Maybe sometime I will.

Dad didn’t tell us a lot of stories, growing up. Mom told us stories.  So most of what I have known of Dad was not gleaned through careful research or private investigation.  It’s stories from Mom, plus my personal observation, and more recently, from asking questions now that Dad’s in his 80s..

I did get to talk with him this weekend about many things that had never been said, stored-up secrets from many years past.  I felt as if our hearts have finally been fully unlocked to one another.  And I felt like many years had been wasted because we had not done that sooner.

When I announced that we had to leave, he said, “Why?”  It would be a long trip, and we wouldn’t be home till midnight.  And I had to work tomorrow.  That’s the practical, down-to-earth answer.  But, I knew the question clearly meant more than that.

My dad grew up on the other side of the North American continent, and led a very different life than my mom.  I mean, what are the chances that these two would ever meet, let alone get married and be my parents?  It’s just that, with God, nothing is as random as it seems to be.

Dad was born in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY.  This neighborhood is also called “Little Poland” because of the number of immigrants, and Dad says they called Greenpoint: “the end of the pickle,” probably related to the color green and the neighborhood’s roundish shape.

He grew up with an older brother, an older sister, and a younger brother.  They all had Bible names -- Maria, Samuel, Daniel, and Israel -- and they went to a Spanish Pentecostal church.  I went there once when I was very young.  Mom told me I heard the music inside the building and began dancing outside. Unfortunately, that was very much frowned upon because this church didn’t believe in dancing.

They did, however, believe in speaking in tongues all at once, and that made for a noisy service and a long one.  A little later, when I was still young but not very young, I remember being there again.  We had to walk under the elevated train (the “El”) to get to the church building, which was quite an experience at the time!  And then, because the service was long and I understood nary a word of it, like a typical child, I got a little cranky.  Also, I had a stomach ache.  We had to leave early because I needed to throw up the meal we’d had at the Chinese restaurant before the evening service. That didn’t impress my grandmother.

Dad learned to skate at a local rink until he became quite good at it.  He acquired a brand new pair of roller skates when he won a contest, rather like Hans Brinker, but when he brought the skates home, they were confiscated by his father, who didn’t believe children should play with toys.  Dad wasn’t unhappy, though.  He was just happy he’d won the contest.

Dad and his cousins also had their own street gang of sorts.  There were enough of them that they could hang out together and look out for one another, like in West Side Story.  (Maybe that’s where Dad learned to dance?)  I only know a few of the cousins’ names, like Uncle Raulie with the thick black-framed glasses, and Uncle Iggy. (Yes, his name was Ignacio Atanasio, and his son was Ignacio Atanasio JUNIOR.)

After attending high school at The New York School of Printing, a trade school, Dad enlisted in the United States Air Force in 1952.  It was still a very new branch of the service then.  He considered whether he would rather be in a ship during a war, with bombs falling on him, or on the ground shooting at the enemy, or flying overhead dropping the bombs … and the Air Force won out.  Not that he was ever a pilot, but it sounded logical.

It was during his enlistment that the spelling of his name changed.  All his family spelled their names “Atanasio.”  But when Dad enlisted, it was determined that the name on his birth certificate was definitely spelled “Atanacio.”  So that’s what he became for the rest of his life, and then that’s what my siblings and I were, when we were born. I had to teach Siri how to pronounce that recently, but I could spell it very early in life because my mom always had to repeat it to everybody, two letters at a time:  “A-T … A-N … A-C … I-O.”

At age 17, my mom wanted a name change from Ware to Atanacio. Her family life had been very bad and she took everything she could scrape together to buy a bus ticket and leave her past behind. Her way of doing it was to suddenly show up on the doorstep of Dad’s family’s apartment in Brooklyn with two garbage bags full of her clothes (since she had no suitcase), and stay with them through Christmas and New Year’s Eve of 1955, before Dad’s next assignment at Strategic Air Command, Andrews AFB, in Maryland.  

My Spanish-speaking grandma took her in because she had nowhere else to go. By the end of January, 1956, with little fanfare, Mom and Dad were married by the Justice of the Peace in Washington, D.C.

I was born October 1, 1956.  After we moved to Travis AFB, California when I was only 9 months old, my sister was born in December of ‘57, and my brother was born in February of ‘60.  We lived at the Travis AFB Trailer Court.

Dad was a “20-year man,” serving in the military till the end of 1972.  He had many different assignments, both TDY (temporary duty) and PCS (permanent change of station).  Our family lived in several locations Stateside, as well as the Philippines, but Dad also was stationed in Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and Vietnam.  He was in Civil Engineering, where he did jobs like inspecting for termites in the Philippines and building revetments (walls around the barracks for protection) in Vietnam.

When Dad was gone for several months at a time, Mom did the best she could, but a military "widow" is not a fun thing to be.  We had (of course) no cell phones or internet back then, so no Skype or Facebook, and we couldn’t call overseas without a great deal of trouble. Once or twice we were able to talk using a shortwave service called MARS (Military Auxiliary Radio System). The way it worked is that each base had a shortwave radio station manned by servicemen who had their ham radio license. They would connect with hams stateside who would call us on the telephone and set up a phone patch so we could talk to dad for a few precious minutes – minutes that were far too precious to waste on things like flat tires or broken air conditioners. Those Mom had to take care of herself.  

Sometimes Dad had a chance to write home, and he always included a separate letter for each of us kids, carefully folded in a very cool way to make a little packet that looked like an envelope.  He would start from one corner and fold diagonally several times towards the opposite corner.  Then, the two protruding edges tucked into each other to “seal” the letter.  Finally, our names were written on the outside of the letter in Dad’s own handwriting, so they became our personal treasure, and treasure them I did.  They made it much easier to handle the times of separation.  I wish I still had them.

Once when Dad was in Thailand, he sent me a silver child’s bracelet and it fit me all my life because my wrists were small. He sent Mom some Thai silk. Eventually, that became mine too, because apparently Mom didn’t know what to do with it, and I finally turned it into a long dress for me and a matching Hawaiian shirt (white with a silk collar and cuffs) for my husband.  (We outgrew both of them.)

But as you might expect, there were some problems with those times of separation.  One was that Mom made frozen strawberry daiquiris on Saturdays with some other military wife friends.  We kids thought the drinks looked delicious, and we wanted some too, so Mom made us some without the rum. But it wasn’t ideal that Mom was drinking during my dad’s absence.

The other is while Mom was making daiquiris, Dad was making friends.  When he was in the Philippines for six months lining up housing for all of us, his idea was to take dance lessons so that when he and Mom were together again, they could dance at the Silver Wings Service Club on base.  But Mom didn’t like it that Dad had been dancing with the instructor in close proximity.  Though I didn’t really know about any of this while it was happening, it was probably the first time she accused Dad of infidelity.  And things didn’t really get better.  Dad also suspected Mom of some extracurricular relationships during his absences.

Was it accidental (coincidental) or predictable that these two problems seemed to be carryovers from my mother’s childhood? Why would Mom drink, when she had been brought up in a family that suffered from their parents’ alcoholism? Did she project infidelity into her own marriage because that’s the kind of life she had always known? What happened to the fresh start, the new and happy life? Some call such behavior a “generational curse.” Are we doomed to repeat our past? Or do most people only fall into such patterns because the familiar is more comfortable to them?

I have much to say about this subject, so stay tuned for that.  For now, I will just say I am glad my parents were able to get together.  Else, where would I be?  God allowed some strange circumstances in the lives of my parents, and they ended up with a daughter.  

And human nature (sin) being what it is, my parents were far from perfect.  But unlike the disaffected youth of 2020, I will not disown my imperfect parents, because the Lord in His wisdom has taught me to honor my father and my mother, to forgive the faults of others, and ...

“Therefore, let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.” ~I Corinthians 10:12

Introduction to Mom

What is “good stock” as it pertains to a human being?  And how much does our upbringing contribute towards who we are as a person?  If we are, as many uppity scientists proclaim, only a mass of differentiated cells, then our genes have everything to do with the results.  In that case, all children of rape are likely destined to be rapists.  If we are only a “product of our environment,” then there is nothing I can do to better my life. Those theories may contribute towards the final product, but they do not figure in God.  Our lives are precious in His sight, and our circumstances are not random.  He doesn’t leave things to chance. 

I had a hard time figuring out Mom when I was a kid.  One minute, she could be really happy and fun and we would be singing songs and playing together, and the next minute, she was a roaring tiger you didn’t want to be around.  We kids didn’t really understand what she was saying when she was mad at us.  She would look like she was going to smack us and then stop and say, “Yeah, I’d duck if I were you.”  But we thought she said, “Yeah, I duck-afire you.”  We went around wishing a fiery duck to each other because it sounded so funny.

She was 5 ft. 2, eyes of blue.  Dad would call her his “Rubia,” because she had beautiful red hair and some light freckles.  He said, “Isn’t your mother beautiful?” and I would smile and certainly agree.  They danced together and taught us to appreciate both of them.  I was named after her, but she didn’t really like her name, Margaret Lee, very much.  She was named after one of her dad’s old girlfriends and her middle name, Lee, was his.  Grandpa had filled out the birth certificate without asking Grandma.

My dad was adamant that I should be named after Mom.  So I was “Margie Linda Atanacio” -- “pretty Margie.”  If you say the first two names together with a Spanish accent, like "Margilinda," it has a nice ring to it.  You just have to roll that "r" right!  I always liked “Linda” because I loved making a cursive “L.”  I liked the fact that I have an “M” on each of the palms of my hands.  But I wasn’t really fond of “Margie” by itself.  It sounded like a nickname and I always wanted a real name -- just not “Margaret.”

Mom taught us some very basic Spanish because Dad wouldn’t.  He thought it would be better to leave his former culture behind and just speak English, but Mom thought we should be able to communicate with our grandparents in Brooklyn. So we learned the first ten numbers and how to say "Do you want some coffee?" "Open the window," and "My name is Margie" in Spanish.  I know we learned "I am five years old," but I've already forgotten that one.  Mom found it very useful to know "Yo no sé," or "I don't know," when she first found herself in Brooklyn with no knowledge of Spanish to speak of, though Dad's relatives found that amusing.

Mom grew up mostly with her mother Audentia and her step-father.  His name was Harry, but everybody called him Johnny because Audentia didn’t like his name.  He was a migrant steel worker and they lived in a small trailer with Mom and her four younger half-siblings, who all slept in one bed.  I know that nowadays people call those living quarters "mobile homes," but back then that designation sounded a little too highfalutin for what they had.  

Here’s a picture of the trailer, and this is the family after Mom left home.

One of Johnny’s jobs was building houses for atomic bomb testing, out in the Nevada desert.  After the bomb had destroyed the house, he would go in with the crew and clean up the mess.  His wife washed his clothes with those of the rest of the family, and sometimes he would bring home a special treat from the last test house -- a doll for the kids!  Nobody connected the dots at the time, but the two youngest kids were born mentally challenged.  Later on, Tommy came to our house and Mom tried to teach him the Boy Scout Law, but even though I learned it when I was five and can still say it today, Tommy never got the hang of it, so he never got to be a Boy Scout.

Meanwhile, at school, Mom and all her classmates had “rad badges” on their clothes to monitor their radiation levels.  Nobody knew what radiation would do to children, but they thought they should keep track of it anyway.  In some government experiments back then, children were actually fed cereal with a little radiation sprinkled on top like sugar sprinkles.

And sometimes the residents of Las Vegas were invited to come out to the desert and sit in bleachers to watch an atomic bomb explosion.It was quite exciting, but they all wore some kind of eye protection because the blast was, in fact, pretty bright.  Nobody really thought much about future health issues -- who knew?

Audentia and Johnny drank far too much alcohol, and Audentia had “boyfriends” that came home with her from time to time.  Some of them were also a little too friendly with Mom, and since the trailer was small, it was easy to know what Audentia was doing, so Mom tried to protect the little ones as well as she could. Some of the children were beaten, too, and later, after Mom was gone, the littlest sister, Nancy, would take her own life.

The situation was not good, but Mom only wished she could have lived with her father, Lee Roy Ware Jr., instead.  He was rich and important and lived in a nice house with a pool!  He was the first mayor of Hawaiian Gardens, California, an upstanding Christian, and an elder and Sunday School teacher in his church.  Mom would often tell me how sad she was, growing up, because she knew her father loved her, but her stepmother, Pearl, didn’t want her there.  Pearl had her own daughter, who came with the deal when Lee re-married. 

Mom told me that her stepmother was a prude who didn’t let Grandpa make love to her.  It made me sad to hear that, but I’m not sure why she told me, or how she even knew!  Of course, in my playbook, Grandma Pearl shouldn’t be there.  Grandpa Ware was supposed to still be married to Grandma Audentia.  Then the world would be right, for Grandpa Ware was golden ...

Mom was very smart, though, and even though she moved around from school to school, she kept up with her studies, graduating at the top of her class from Las Vegas High School in 1955 at the age of 17. Her mother and Johnny didn’t usually attend her spelling bees, choir concerts, graduation ceremonies, and such.  The day she graduated, she got home to find the trailer missing.  Her family had moved to a new job and left her a note saying they’d come back for her later. 

From the time Mom was eight years old, Grandpa Ware had put money for her higher education in a special fund.  So Mom, now graduated, was ready to head off to nursing school.  Unfortunately, to her dismay, she found out that the money was gone.  It could have gone to bills, meals, or gas to get from one job to the next, but Mom said her mother “drank it” and that was plausible, too.

She wouldn’t be 18 till February of 1956, but Mom was desperate to get out, so she formulated a plan.  She picked a fight with her mother until she said the magic words, “JUST GET OUT!”  With all the money she had, Mom bought a bus ticket to Brooklyn, NY, to try to find a certain handsome young airman she’d met in church while he was stationed at Nellis AFB, in Nevada. She knew from his letters that he was back in the States after a tour in Saudi Arabia. 

Her half-siblings felt abandoned, but Mom was ready for a new adventure, and a new and better life. Yes, Mom was impulsive, and if that sounds like a long shot, remember she was from Las Vegas.  But since she met my future dad in church, she was depending on God to work this out for good. 

Personally, I am amazed at my mother's "leap of faith." And I have to say, if she hadn't gambled on God and His promises -- a "sure bet" -- well, I would never have been unleashed upon the world. Here are a few of those promises of God:

Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence?

If I ascend into heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.

If I take the wings of the morning, And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

Even there Your hand shall lead me, And Your right hand shall hold me.

If I say, "Surely the darkness shall fall on me," Even the night shall be light about me;

Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You, But the night shines as the day; The darkness and the light are both alike to You.

    ~Psalm 139:7-12 (NKJV)

And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.

    ~Romans 8:28 (NKJV)

The Epidermis of Me

   

 

  “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ 
     “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” ~Genesis 1:26-27

     “But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why have you made me like this?’" ~Romans 9:20

Who has not spent a lot of time in front of a mirror, analyzing their reflection, and then doing something to clean up their image?  I doubt I’m the only one. It is time to collect my thoughts about my skin, a very timely topic.

I have often wondered how people looked in antediluvian times:  that is, before the worldwide flood of Noah.  This colossal supernatural super-disaster claimed the lives of billions of people and left only eight measly individuals standing, along with an assortment of animals that were carefully selected and collected to live beyond the disaster.  The gene pool was significantly reduced for humanity, to say the least.  There could have been people with purple hair among Adam and Eve’s descendants, who didn’t have it from applying some sort of hair coloring -- they were born that way!  But all the people with purple hair, or the gene that caused it, would have been wiped out in the flood.

Hair is a part of the largest organ of the body -- our skin.  For the most part, people do not see our other organs.  If we’re fortunate, our hearts, kidneys, livers, lungs, and most of our bones are not available for viewing.  Even our fat, while making us bulky, is still covered with our skin.

Our epidermis makes us recognizable to other humans, and it is our first line of defense from foreign agents that would harm us.  Without our skin, we would look pretty ghastly!  You might have the most beautiful eyes ever, but if we saw them turning freely in a skeletal socket, we would not recognize you at all.

When I was born, my hair was sparse and fine, and well, baby soft.  In my 20’s and 30’s, my hair was long and brown, and it had a bit of a wave to it.  It was still soft and fine, like my Spanish grandmother’s.  Now I have less of it again, but it is still soft and fine.  It turned gray, like my Greek grandfather’s hair, so that it sparkles in the light.  Unfortunately, we have hard water where we live, and everything turns rusty very quickly.  So when my hair turned gray, the rusty water began to change the color of my hair and now it’s a lighter brown with orange highlights.  Whether or not that is desirable, you might recognize me by that description.

You might also recognize me by my skin conditions. While I’m not in the same boat as Job,  I have at least four skin conditions that drive me crazy, including psoriasis, which, I’m told, is hereditary. During the ten years that my legs were covered with open, bleeding sores and scaly skin, if I ever wore shorts or capris, some poor honest child would sympathetically cry out, “What did you do to your leg!”  Now, I have a wonderful dermatologist, from Africa, by the way, who has worked out an effective treatment for that stubborn psoriasis for me, and I am no longer plagued by the constant itching.  Praise God!

You might recognize my fingernails.  They have always been weak and thin, and because of my underlying psoriasis, they are ridged.  I’ve always, always, always bitten off my fingernails, and I have often bitten off skin too.  (Sound gross?)  But I do, because I detest hangnails.

You may recognize me by the saggy skin under my chin, and the stuff under my arms that looks like an upside-down biceps.  One of the first things that disappointed me about the aging process was the saggy elbows.  My mom had that, but I always thought I could keep the great tight skin at my elbows.  Not to mention that my skin doesn’t look great in the belly area anymore.  After eight kids, there are some permanent stretch marks … but I generally don’t like swimming, so you won’t see them.

But then there are the other wrinkles on my forehead and at the ends of my eyes.  Some of these happened because we practiced heightening our facial expressions for Drama Classes every day at our house.  It was rather habitual, though, whether or not there was a play in the works -- smiling sweetly, laughing uproariously, and frowning sternly just happened and the accumulated family facial communications produced desirable lines that you could accent when it was time to apply stage make-up.

For identification purposes, if something tragic should ever happen and my body is found in a ravine, be sure to look for a certain red mole that my husband knows about.  I also have other various spots too numerous to mention, from the “J” scar on my left index finger to various small sores that never heal quickly. My toenails are orange from the same rusty water.  I have no tattoos, but I have two former earring holes that haven’t been used in many years so they have grown closed.  I don’t know much about my back.  You’ll have to ask my husband about that.

Okay, so you want to know, perhaps, what color my skin is?  You’ve been in suspense the whole time trying to figure that out?  That’s a good question!  I am green. That is, I have an “olive complexion.” And in the words of Kermit the Frog, “It’s not easy being green!”   

In the 1970s, in USAF Basic Military Training (BMT), women recruits did not have to shoot the M-16, but they did have to wash and iron their own uniforms, and they had to take a make-up class.  I have never liked the feeling of makeup on my skin, so this was definitely not my favorite part of BMT.  Being short, I really thought I could just sink down in my chair and remain unnoticed by that instructor as she scanned the class looking for a guinea pig with greenish tones to their skin.  But it did not work -- she spied me and I was required to sit quietly while she put orange stuff on my green skin to counteract the green and make my skin more neutral. It was a little pointless because none of my other classmates were green and able to learn how to do their makeup from my example.  And I couldn’t see what she was doing.

Relieved when she told us we were not required to wear make-up in the military, I totally put that behind me, and I’ve only had a few close brushes with cosmetics since then.

The color green is in none of the songs about skin color, such as “Red and yellow, black and white, They are precious in His sight.”  I could only categorize myself with the color white.  Even more modern versions of “Jesus Loves the Little Children” have brown, and still have white, but no green.  But that’s okay because my green is a pretty light hue. And who has ever found the true color of their skin in a box of crayons?  Peach just isn’t right.

All I can say is, like King David says in Psalm 139, “I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”  My skin is not perfect, but it is carefully crafted.  The same genes that give me dry and itchy skin as an adult also spared me from the wonders of acne as a teenager. I did have a bout of psoriasis on my face for a while that gave me a taste of what it would have felt like, though.  And my itchy skin gives me a kinship with Job.  In reading his lament in the Bible, I could fully identify with him, but on a smaller scale, and I just know I would have been nicer to him than his friends, who judged him as a sinner just because he was covered with painful boils from the top of his head to the bottoms of his feet. I’m sure I would’ve whined a bit too.

In the end, my epidermis is so much more than its basic color!  Under our skin and hair, the organs in our bodies are all the same colors, and our blood is consistently red.  If I told you my height and my current weight now, you should be able to pick me out in a crowd. 

In 2020, we Americans were required to fill out census forms, and there’s always a question these days about race.  Here’s my answer:  according to Genesis, I belong to the race of Man, created on the sixth day.  There is no other.  But I have a Maker, a Divine Potter, who put the finishing touches on me, His project, by adding color to my skin, and I like it!  As with all of Mankind, I am made to be like Him, and that thought is simply awesome!

     “This is the book of the genealogy of Adam. In the day that God created man, He made him in the likeness of God.  He created them male and female, and blessed them and called them Mankind in the day they were created.” ~Genesis 5:1-2