Category Archives: Memoirs

The Man Who Would Be Dad

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Like many others of my generation, I grew up without a dad. I ended up being of that household that was lumped into “Unwed mother”, which often gave the impression that it was the fault of the mother that the father never stuck around. But that’s obviously for another article.

Not having a dad made things interesting in that earlier days in school were often spent explaining why there was no dad around. So, I used to invent all sorts of reasons why my dad was never around. As I grew up in the late 60s, early 70s, one of my earlier fantasies was that my father was missing in action from Vietnam, and that one day he would return. As years went by and he never returned, that fantasy switched from MIA to killed in Vietnam, because no one wants to have to wait forever. And then the fantasy sort of faded into some obscure belief that he must have been a veteran that may or may not have gone to Vietnam, and then it no longer really seemed to matter.

The fact is: My dad left when I was about one or two years old. He started by shouldering his responsibilities, and then he just disappeared, the common joke of “went out for smokes and never came back.” For years, I was convinced that it must have been something I did. Then it was a condemnation of my mom. And then, finally an acceptance that neither one of these possibilities were the case. I came to the realization that my dad was an asshole. He had responsibilities, and he decided he didn’t want anything to do with them.

For years, I was convinced that he would come back, because all sons want to think that their dad would care enough to come back. But he never did. Unlike other great stories of child abandonment, there’s usually that poignant story of how the dad showed up one day, did some magnanimous thing and then left again. But that never happened. He never came back. He never cared.

A friend of the family told me that she had seen him in town, kind of ran into him at a supermarket and said hi. He looked all embarrassed, responded quickly and then slinked away into the shadows, never to be seen again. Years later, I realized how very much like him that probably was.

Even more years later, I became a counterintelligence agent, which is only important to this story because becoming something like that means that I had at my fingertips the ability to find pretty much anyone I wanted to. Lumped with the skills that also come with that ability, I knew for the longest time that if I really wanted to know where he was I could find him. But I chose not to. At the time, I often told myself that it was because I wouldn’t like what I found, and another part of me believed he was probably already dead.

After I left government service, I decided, on a whim, to find him. So I went back to my mad skills of finding people and found him. Well, I didn’t exactly find him. I found his gravestone. He died in 1985, twenty years after I had been born.

For years, I had always imagined that he was secretly watching me, observing my accomplishments as I checked off a list of important moments in my life, like attending West Point, my military career, my education, my published novels, my victory in the struggle over whether to choose paper or plastic in the checkout line, etc., but he died before any of that ever happened. So he never would have known.

So I made a pilgrimage to his grave site, even if to complete some symmetry of the whole thing. And that’s when I saw it.

Kenneth Duane Gundrum

Loving Father

You’ll Be Missed

Storms, power outages, and putting it all into some kind of perspective

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Last night, I was sitting down to watch the season finale of Warehouse 13. It’s a quirky show that I’ve learned to like, and I was looking forward to see how they handled the final character arc they were playing out. Ten minutes into it, the cable provider’s satellite message appeared instead of the signal and indicated that it was having trouble connecting. Ten minutes after that, the message changed to “Acquiring Signal” and then suddenly all of the power went out.

So I sat in my apartment for fifteen minutes, thinking the power would eventually pop back on, but it never did. I found a flashlight to help me maneuver around the very dark apartment, and then figuring it was late enough, I went to bed.

The next morning, the power still was not on. Now, in the past I might have panicked and started thinking about all of the stuff in my fridge melting and going bad. But instead, I thought I get paid on Friday, and so what if I end up having to rebuy all of my groceries on that day. It’s not that big a deal.

Today’s a work day, so I got dressed in the pitch dark blackness and then went out to start my car. Well, I discovered a new problem: My garage door does not open without actual electricty. My garage is not attached to the apartment, so there was absolutely no way to get into it. My housing complex never bothered to include a key to the garage, so I realized I was not getting into my car. The housing complex’s manager’s office was also completely empty; apparently someone figured that with the power being off, it wasn’t a good deal to come into work on time. I guess they figured NO ONE would be interested in talking to the manager’s staff on a day when the entire complex was out of power. But oh well.

So I walked to the bus and took it to work. Haven’t done that in over a year, and it’s a very long walk to the bus, but I did it.

But all during this time I was walking, I examined the ramifications of the downed power grid. For about twenty minutes of walking, there was absolutely no power at all, although I did hear a generator working on one of the buildings. And then suddenly there were lights at about the twenty minute mark from where I lived. This area was not hit by the loss of power, or at least they had their power restored since it happened.

And this got me thinking about how little prepared so many people are for simple little hardships like this. I had a few flashlights in my apartment, so I was at least able to see. One of them burned out really fast, which told me that I had bought a pretty crappy flashlight. The others worked better, but it’s no fun finding out your flashlight is a cheap piece of crap when you need it most. It reminded me of some of those horror movies where someone’s in the dark, turns on her flashlight, and then a few seconds later it goes out. Makes the scene even scarier than if she never had light in the first place. But I digress.

What was interesting to me is that I’ve been through a few power outages over the years, including a few earthquakes that took place in California. And each one of those events caused me to prepare a little bit more for the next time. Each new scenario I came across made me feel a little bit more prepared for the next time, and that always felt good.

This time, I didn’t feel like I was really lacking all that much, and there was very little reason to panic. I did, however, hear quite a few muffled fights going on between couples and families in my apartment complex. This new entrance of events did not bode well for quite a few of them. And I wondered if this would cause them to be more prepared next time, or would it just cause them to complain a lot until things came back under normal, and then they’d be unprepared for next time as well. I don’t really know how they’ll handle it.

And that leaves me wondering about how well people are prepared for handling bad situations that they might come across. I know people have a tendency to go off like poffy hairdressers every time something doesn’t work out the way they planned, but what if something happens that occurs over a length of time? How do people handle that, and can they? I’ve been watching this BBC show “Survivors”, which is about a fictitious disaster that happens, leaving a small segment of the British population alive. It took place in the 1970s, but it was interesting how poignant those events were and how relevant they could be for today. If something happened that took away our sense of normalcy, how well would we handle ourselves? Would we live long and prosper (sorry, bad Vulcan humor) or would we end up panicking until we wasted away or died?

Unfortunately, I don’t have the answers to that. I’d like to think we’d never have to find out, but I fear that the answers aren’t ones I’d really like to hear.

Adventures in Volunteering…the good and the bad

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One of the more difficult hurdles I discovered when trying to volunteer was actually finding some place where I could volunteer. Figuring that there were many agencies and groups that would be jumping up and down just waiting for a willing work pool, I started to inquire, only to discover the world of disfunctionality that exists within the volunteer corps themselves.

First, I thought it would be fun to build housing for the poor and struggling. Having seen the articles and stories on Jimmy Carter’s involvement with Habitat for Humanity, I decided to volunteer with them. Having skills in carpentry, I figured I’d be able to offer lots of assistance in this field, but when I showed up at the interview, I discovered a very interesting dynamic that existed there. The woman who interviewed me kept asking me “why” I was volunteering. She kept looking into the “crime” I must have committed to be referred to their group, and even though I kept saying I found their name in the phone book and wasn’t in trouble in any way, she kept treating me like I was some prisoner who was getting a furlough to work off a debt to society. But I tried to ignore that and eventually got to go to a site where I could work.

Well, I discovered this to be a very interesting situation in that the person in charge of that site had two modes: “Leave me alone” and “You are all scum who are working for me so get your asses in gear, or you’ll pay dearly for crossing me.” It took me a short bit to realize that the majority of the people who were part of this project were all working off some debt to society, and that most were court-ordered placed on this job. I tried to work in this environment, but I kept feeling that I was now cast in a bad adaptation of Cool Hand Luke, so that when my day was done, I decided this was not the kind of volunteering I wanted to do.

So, I looked for something else. And what I found in that search process was how much dysfunctionality there is in the volunteer search process. The people were generally nice, but finding an actual assignment was really difficult. I should point out that I wasn’t interested in working with kids, mainly because I was paranoid about the tendency of agencies to accuse anyone around kids of improper behavior, even if all you did was show up to work. I had a friend of mine who was working with kids for some years, and she was accused of all sorts of atrocities, only to finally discover that the woman accusing her was a certified looney, who the agency discovered after my friend was almost railroaded through the criminal justice system. I decided I didn’t want anything to do with that.

So, I found myself hooked up with an agency called Lighthouse for the Blind, which is a service to volunteer with blind people. The first meeting was what sold me on this group because there was a young woman who was recently afflicted with blindness, who was tasked with speaking to the volunteers who attended the first orientation. Her motivational speech about how helpful the agency was seemed insightful and interesting, but to be honest, it was when I was walking home from the first meeting when I was sold. The girl was walking down the street towards her destination, and she was taking forever to get down the street. The visuals we were offered during the orientation showed blind people making their way pretty well, but this poor girl was having the most difficult time walking down the street alone, and I was immediately sold on the need to see what I could do to help someone like this so that a journey should never take as long as that one was taking her that day.

When I volunteered, they set me up with an old guy named Frank. He was one of those cranky, “I can do everything on my own” kind of guys who really just needed help reading his mail, folding his money and getting him to and from the store every now and then. I volunteered with him for a few months, showing up a couple of times a week and pretty much being his eyes for such little tasks.

Of course, after a few months, he started opening up and felt a lot more comfortable talking to me about things. That’s when I discovered there was a hidden side to Frank that you’d never know from any previous conversation. The conversation that made me realize it went something like:

Me: You have a letter here from the AARP (the retired people organization).

Frank: Just throw it away.

Me: Are you sure?

Frank: Those people piss me off. They have too many agendas. Like the Coloreds.

Then he started referring to ethnicities and races in extremely derogatory terms. I guess he felt really comfortable with me by then, so he just opened up and, and I discovered I was volunteering to help one of the most racist people I’d ever encountered. And it never escaped me the fact that he was blind, which should have made a difference (at least to me, it seemed like it would), but no, he was dogmatic about his beliefs and he would waste no amount of time getting to how much he hated “those people”.

Finally, I realized I couldn’t continue working with this guy. I realized he needed my help, but whenever I actually tried talking about such subjects, he would pretty much shut me down and talk about issues in ways that were extremely demeaning. He pretty much hated everyone, including African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and the Irish. By this time, my girlfriend was constantly coming over with me, spending quality time with me and Frank. Bless her heart, but not once did she ever reveal to him that she was Chinese, even when he took the opportunity to refer to Asians in some horrible fashion.

So I stopped showing up and told the Lighthouse I had to discontinue this volunteer opportunity. I could have chosen to work with someone else, but by then I was completely burnt out, and my girlfriend no longer wanted me to work with them any more. I mean, there was only so much she could take, and I didn’t blame her either. She wanted to share such time with me, and there’s only so much you can ask from another person.

So I stopped volunteering. Every now and then I think about taking up another opportunity again, but I find it hard to take the next first step.

The Girl From Yesterday

Memoirs

Once in everyone’s lifetime a critical moment is reached with a significance that has a life-impacting effect.  For some, it is a bush with death that brings about this feeling; for others, it is the realization of something previously unknown; for me, it was the moment I asked out the girl of my dreams.

For over six years Anne and I worked in separate departments of the same hotel, yet we always seemed to share lunch or dinner together in the hotel’s employee cafeteria.  During these meal breaks, we shared intimacies with each other few other people had ever shared with either of us.  Many times, these breaks went over their allotted times because we were too deep into the conversation of that time.  Whenever I left her, I went back to my job wishing I could have spent just one more moment, even one instant, with her before having to part from her company.

Over those six years, I agonized over the realization that I could never garner up the courage that was required for me to ask her out.  Over the years I made simple, yet believable, excuses that served to convince myself that the timing had in fact been wrong each time I let an opportune moment pass me by.  Sometimes I told myself that she wasn’t really interested in me; other times I told myself that there had to be someone else involved with her because she was way too beautiful to be going home alone each and every night; and then there were times when I convinced myself that she was worth waiting for just the right moment.

But that moment never came.  We continued to have long, interesting conversations where I found myself fascinated by anything she had to say, even if she was reading to me from the phone book.  For those six, long years, I never made a move or said the words that reflected how I truly felt.

It was at the end of this waiting period, at this nexus of false hopes, that I realized why I could never truly ask her out.  I was so scared of being turned down by her, of discovering she truly didn’t want to become involved with me.  I was living in this make-believe world where my fantasy woman was waiting for me to say the words that would bring us together forever.  Calling her on my fantasy just might show me how little I really meant to her.  Then I would not only lose our intimate conversations, but my fantasy would die right along with them.  I would be left with nothing but a shattered, six-year dream.

However, after six years, I told myself I could wait no longer.  I was only fooling myself with this illusion, and it needed to be fleshed out or dissolved once and for all.  So, in one of our friendly conversations, I took the big step and asked her out.

There’s no denying the fact that this was the most difficult thing I had ever done.  I was a military veteran who had stared death in the eye on more than one occasion, but I would have gladly gone back to those moments rather than to have been there staring into those beautiful eyes as they looked deeply into my own as I asked the question.

My palms were sweating, my stomach was turning, and I could barely form coherent sentences.  She appeared so natural before me as I came to believe I was talking to her from another planet through a tunnel that seemed to stretch forever.  Even when I said the words I had to say, I couldn’t be sure I was saying them in the right language.

But at that moment, I fulfilled a destiny that I had been considering for over six years, a destiny that would have haunted me the rest of my life if I had not taken that simple, yet brave step.  I had asked out the girl of my dreams, and no matter what happened, I would never live to regret the fact that I had let the opportunity of my life get away from me, that I had wimped out where I needed to be strong, even if I didn’t feel that way when I accomplished the task.  Planets could form or die, but the mission of my life was completed; I had done the one thing I might never have attempted, and my future could only be an easier task for it.

In the end, Anne never did go out with me.  She told me she would get back to me with an answer, even sounding positive as she said it.  But in essence, she never did get back to me, and we did grow further and further apart after that moment.  The one thing I did fear might happen, that she would turn away from me and I would lose our precious moments together, actually did happen.  However, this didn’t bother me as much as I thought it might.  When I first considered this possibility, I still believed that there was a chance between us, the fantasy still going strong in my mind.  Yet, when she didn’t respond positively, I no longer craved those moments together; our precious time no longer seemed precious to me.

On that fatal day, a large part of my life died.  For six years, I had dreamed and faltered, always hoping for the opportunity to make my dream come true.  However, my only regret was not that I had asked her out and lost her companionship for the rest of my future but the fact that it had taken me so long to ask her and bury a dream that had no substance in reality.  Even as I still see those beautiful eyes in my memories, I can look to the future and the belief that there is someone else out there who will find me the suitable choice.  I can only imagine the tragedy of having waited another six years only to discover much later that I was waiting for a dream that wasn’t going to happen.