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.
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
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