I find it very bittersweet coming back here. The last time I was here was for the birth of one of my grandchildren about 7 years ago here in San Diego County. But, the house we are staying in is only about a mile or two from where my parents lived here too. While I was living there and going to college I met my first wife in Long Beach and eventually we got married there too and had a son in 1974. I was 26 at the time.
I was very surprised at how differently people treated me for the better when I got married and starting supporting my wife and son. At least then in the 1970s this was a very big deal. It was as if young men were expendable mostly until they married and had children. It's possible that some places are still like this today worldwide
I have always thought that the reason many young men join the army to die worldwide is because the love of their lives married someone else. And I think this sort of thing has been going on for thousands of years already and likely will be true on into the future.
Luckily this was not my experience (in this lifetime at least).
My father and mother were very good people. They met in Seattle where they both mostly grew up. My father's father bought a house there in Lake Forest Park in 1927 when my father was 11 years old and so he grew up on the 2 1/2 acres of apple and Black Cherry Trees and Raspberries and Boysenberries that grew there.
One of my first memories as a 2 or a 3 year old was walking out out apartment under the Garage and picking Raspberries. They have always been my favorite fruit ever since. When I moved to Hilo Hawaii in 1974 Mangoes were added to my favorite fruit list as well.
My father didn't want to have children because he had been abused some as a child growing up like most children around the world in the 1920s in that era. Children were still to be seen and not heard when I grew up as well and so getting knocked around the room for saying anything or making any noise at all as a child was pretty normal still in the 1950s.
However, my parents weren't like this. My father had been valedictorian of his High School Class and I would classify my mother as an intuitive genius type of person. But, she never went to college and couldn't even drive a car until I was 6 years old in Los Angeles. I can remember her hitting a mailbox and since I was in the front seat my face hit the windshield then. But, in the 1950s often children were in pain from one thing or another so this was normal too. Eventually she was a really good driver. But, she was learning on my father's 1941 Blue Century Buick which was a very fast an powerful car with a 3 speed column shifter. I think the main reason my mother hit the mailbox is she was having trouble mastering the clutch on the car with the 3 speed column shifter. A 3 speed column shifter was standard in cars then. The lever looked a lot like the levers to the left governing windshield wipers on a car except it was to the right. The shift patter was usually a reverse small h. and I think above the first gear directly was reverse if I remember this correctly. My 2nd car was a VW bug for college and it had a four speed floor shifter with a 5th notch for reverse. I think the clutches on a VW Bug back then were the hardest to get used to because they were so sensitive but the smaller Fiats were difficult to learn to drive with their clutches too.
My mother had been born in Omaha, Nebraska and her parents finished their growing up near Glascow, Scotland. My Mother's Father was from Ayr, Scotland and my mother's mother was from Clydebank Scotland.
And Both my mother's father and mother had been born in the U.S. and so had U.S. Citizenship before my Grandfather's father died getting him medicine when he was sick and my grandmother's family's house in Philadelphia burned down. They each had to return to Scotland with their families because of these tragedies. But, they returned as a married couple from Scotland at first to Nebraska where many of the brothers and sisters had already gotten jobs at the newspaper there. I think this was around 1910 when they both returned to the U.S. for the first time since they were children.
My Great Grandfather was a Captain in the northern Army of the Civil War from Kansas and after he survived the war he started a pharmacy in Kansas which he ran until 1925 when he sold it. So, he was born in the 1840s and died during world war II during the 1940s. But I think he stayed in Kansas on the family farm and land with his wife until he passed away during World War II.
His Wife, my Great Grandmother lived to be 105 years old until 1952 in Kansas by the way.
It's very painful to lose your parents if you haven't already done this. Surviving those closest to you is a very difficult thing and often if people are single they don't survive this either physically or mentally or both.
If you have a spouse and children you find a way to live on for them. Otherwise often people die along with their parents sooner or later if they are taking care of them by themselves.
My father died in 1985 in August and my mother died in October of 2008. She was never the same after my father died and it was in many ways like losing both of them when my father died that year of 1985.
My mother sort of reverted to the person she was before she met and married my father at age 27 and had me at age 29. But, losing both of them was very hard on me in 1985 and after in this sense.
My father completely defined my mother's life while he was alive. He was a larger than life figure who was always irreplaceable to both my mother and I. And because he was such an exceptional person in so many ways his death was like a shotgun blast through the midsection of both my mother and myself.
I tried to fill in for my father in advising my mother financially and otherwise at least. But, this didn't work at all for her so I found I had to step back from my mother so she could find her own way, right or wrong.
IN 2001 my mother developed Senile Dementia which was the very worst experience of my life trying to cope with this change in my mother. When she almost burned down her apartment by placing a plastic tupperware dish on an electric stove and then praying while watching the plastic run down the stove for 24 hours we realized she had become a danger to herself and others and we were forced to place her in an old folks home that dealt with these issues ongoing.
However, her experience of this was that she regressed to being 4 years old slowly and in her wheelchair by then she literally (ran around using her legs thinking she was the 4 year old girls she had once been.
I brought my son who was around 30 then and married to see her one day and when I said, "Mom! This is your grandson!" She made a farting sound with her mouth in response like she didn't believe me.
This was really hard for my son and I to deal with. She passed away in 2008. She first went into a Death rattle which is a comatose state and stayed like this for about one month before she passed away.
At the time I was dealing with my wife's father's death and we were transporting his ashes to St. Louis, Missouri and I got the call from the old folks home that my mother had died. I told them the mortuary to send her too and they put her on ice until we returned from St. Louis taking my wife's father's ashes there.
I kissed her forehead before I pushed her into the Gas ovens to cremate her and then stepped outside because it was so loud and watched her smoke go up the 1 foot wide smokestack there above the cremation oven.
I thought to myself that she would like the idea of going up in smoke into the air to be with the clouds. She was a very spiritual person like myself and his would have made her happy.
My father passed in 1985 at a home my father and I built between 1968 and 1980 when they retired there above Yucca Valley part way to Landers on 2 1/2 acres there. I drove south from the San Francisco Area where i lived then with my wife and children there to supervise the cremation of my father there. I kissed my father on the forehead before I pushed him into the crematorium fire to be burned up to ashes. The hardest thing about this was that it was the desert and his steel blue eyes were flat instead of round from the dehydration of the desert lack of humidity for me.
It's amazing what you go through with your parents while you are alive and even after they pass away. I had been trained as a minister in my church growing up and so had my mother and so we both gave his funeral in Yucca Valley there. My mother couldn't get through it without crying and so I took over for her since I had been trained to do this kind of thing as a child and young adult already.
Losing my father was awful and the way I lost my mother was horrific. But, by the time she died I considered it a blessing for her and for everyone else in the family too. Dealing with my mother with senile dementia almost killed me at the time because it was an impossible task for me.
However, I learned "Life is for the living" and someone with Senile Dementia has an always fatal disease. I had to prioritize my wife and children because they were still alive.
By God's Grace
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