Forgive the sentimentality for a moment.
Today would have been my mother's 90th birthday, had she lived three more years. Her name was Patty. Or Pat. Not Patricia. Patty. There is no middle name on her birth certificate. She was born to good-stock Hendricksons from Minnesota and from Norway before that, who moved to Berkeley, Calif., shortly after she was born.
Mom taught me to read, and read to me aloud before I could. I guess that's what a Phi Beta Kappa with a major in geography from the University of California in 1947 was supposed to do.
You can't pass a date like this without a little weepiness. She died a couple of Octobers ago and I had to pull the plug out. It's one thing to get a phone call. It's quite another to be there, and tell the docs to go ahead.
My father, Richard, turns 90 in late April, and God willing and the tide quits rising, I'll be up in Anchorage with him to celebrate. He is the same crusty old Marine and engineer he's always been, and whenever I get lucky enough to see him in Alaska, his smile at seeing me sets the room on fire. He maintains a belly-laugh that could set off a Claymore, and most days sports a baseball hat or the Akubra Stetson I got him as they wheel him into the dining room. After dinner, nice young girls change his diapers.
By birth I am related to neither of them. I have no idea who my biological parents are. I was probably a mistake, in a time before abortion was convenient. But here I was, and there they were, my adoptive Mom and Dad, and they wanted a baby, and I became their first-born.
(Two thoroughly rotten little brothers ensued, conceived by conventional means. One became a lawyer, and the other, a petroleum engineer. I chose a life of poverty and went to work writing for rich men who own newspapers. What less can one say on the subject of adoption?)
Whatever, I and my two rotten little brothers grew up in an environment absolutely devoid of hate. Our home town was spelt Nanaimo. Eeeny-meeny-miney-mo, catch a nigger by the toe, was the way some of the neighborhood kids learned to spell that complicated word. First time I used the “nigger” word, Dick and Patty sat me down and asked, “Do you know what 'nigger' means?”
A six-year-old does not understand these things, so I honestly said, “No.”
My mother, the geography geek, and my dad, the Marine engineer said, in near unison: “That is a terribly hurtful word about some people you don't even know. You will not use that word in this house or outside of this house. If you must use the rhyme, try saying 'catch a tiger by the toe.'”
Being both Berkeley grads, Mom and Dad took my brothers and me to U of C alumni party camp in northern California (Strawberry Lake, Camp Gold, if you want to google the specifics). They had a great trout pond there, and a great swimming pond, and a dining hall where they rung a cowbell when food was ready.
I made fast friends with a guy named Tony; he was a spot-on fisherman and we could tie each other on laps in the pool. He had a great laugh (remember, we were kids, but I knew a good guffaw when I heard one) and when we weren't swimming together or killing fish, we just talked.
“Did your parents know my parents at Berkeley?” I asked him. “Nah,” he answered, “my mom cooks in the dining hall. That's how I'm here.”
The long story of this short story is that I didn't know that Tony was black, Negro, African-American, or whatever, or that ahead of LBJ's cruel and patronizing affirmative action he would become a physician. I just thought he was people, like me. I wish that guy in the White House right now would give little kids like Tony and me the same break and quit messing up their heads about race.
We are just Americans. Some get lucky, some get luckier. I flew with black men and white men and we judged each other on our competence and saluted the salad on our covers and shoulders. Bosses and grunts, all in this together.
I've never disliked a black man with any kind of passion in my life, until now, and he is our President. He inflames racial hatred. He invokes class warfare with the simple words, from Stalin and Hitler, that all should have equal outcomes from unequal births. You and I, and our babies, are born Americans. We should be able to take it from there, regardless of our parents.
Sorry to have to be from Idaho to say this, but I don't respect this guy in the White House. I wouldn't want him as my wingman, and I wouldn't want him in the right-hand or left-hand seat of my cockpit or, God forbid, to ride behind him with the pax. I don't trust him. And I don't think Mom would mind my saying so.
