My parents were married in 1939. Dad was in the Army, which became the Army Air Corp and then the U.S. Air Force, I am proud to say. My brother and I were born in the midst of WWII. Daddy helped open up basic training bases in the southwest and some in Texas. They moved 27 times in 23 years, most of it during the war when they were transferred every three months. Mom was packing to move or unpacking after a move for every one of my first five birthdays
We lived in MA and TX, mostly and daddy retired to our hometown in the fifties. My parents got along well at first but were too different in temperament to really make it work.
They married, divorced, remarried and divorced again. Mom remarried and my step-father was different from daddy, but had many of his characteristics. He loved her, but once he had a bad heart, it was really stressful. Mom, as a widow, was an primitive oil painter who, with the right marketing, could have sold her paintings for amounts in the upper hundreds. She was prolific until she lost too much of her sight and dedicated herself to taking care of the children of her church.
Daddy was a reporter, writer, photographer and would have been able to reach more of his potential in those areas had he not been abused nor become an abusive alcoholic. My dad was an artist with words and a camera. He wrote poetry until shortly before he died and was still revising one piece. My mom was a farm girl and he was born in a city in PA. She was raised as a boy and knew how to fix machinery, cars. Daddy wanted a wife who was creative in cooking and mostly he just didn't want to be around my mother or us. When we visited Mom's relatives, we had very little in common with them and the men made fun of my father. So, it's no surprise things didn't work out for them. It's ironic, to me, how little my parents and we knew about who we really were nor how little we knew about each other for so many decades; we all had a great deal in common.
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