377 Days - Blog #6, A conversation with my dad
I’ve told this story before.
But we tell stories again and again to our listeners. As we age, we pull back some of the veneer of
showmanship. Or we reveal a little more
of the truth as the distance of time makes the telling a little less painful.
I went to visit my sister and her kids today. I took my dad, which meant we had an hour
there and… well two hours back thanks to the glorious Sunday evening traffic on
the Pike. This is, I suspect, one of
those evenings I will remember even though it wasn’t anything significant and
yet very much so.
My dad is recovering from surgery. So it was good to get him out to Western Mass
to see the silly teeth baring grin of my niece as she chewed her pizza
crust. Or the dance party to Stevie
Wonder before we all left. One of those
perfect, blink if you miss the opportunity evenings in an ordinary August.
Traffic, like I said, was a bit of a bore on the Pike. I missed my opportunity for back road
aversion, but it left time to talk of my frustrations with Oakham politics,
things about my week that were cool and not so cool, television shows from the
60’s and 80’s… which led me to give my impressions of watching China Beach
again through Netflix… which in a roundabout way got me to talking about
another 80’s movie about the 60’s, provoked by a moment in history that any
frequent blog reader should understand is on my mind because of it happened 50 years ago tomorrow.
Then my dad asked me if he ever told me how he heard about
the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
I answered, well, I know you were in Alabama and it motivated you to opt
for Vietnam over Alabama… but no, I don’t recollect the specific details.
So he told me. I will
relate the specifics, but if you know my dad, this is a poor reconstruction of
his deft storytelling. If one can call a
story such as this deft.
My dad was an MP in the army. Maybe some day I’ll reveal more about
that. Maybe, indeed, someday I’ll learn
more about that – beyond a letter I of which I once stole a glance. But it is a separate story. Anyway, he was stationed in April 1968 at
Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville Alabama. That
evening of April 4th he was on guard duty at a gate. A truck came swerving down the road. He pulled over the driver, realizing they
were not army, not to mention driving to endanger. He peered inside
and saw the bottle of Jack between the legs of the driver and made some comment
about it being rather early to be so inebriated. And the guy responded gleefully that they
were celebrating that – okay I can’t write the word – but it was an exultation
that they shot the fuckin ____. The slur
was too much for my father to comprehend, so he asked again and the passenger
repeated the phrase with the name King.
In shock, he let them go. He let
them go and was alone with the news until his shift was relieved by a man from
Tennessee who thought it was sad, but not earth shattering. It rattled my father. It rattled him so much – and this part I know
– that three days later he requested to be sent to Vietnam.
He was 19 years old.
I also know the irony to this (and I relate it in another
blog someplace here) is that within five hours of his arrival, one of his first
duties was to break up a race riot. A
riot that broke out over mashed potatoes.
We talked some more of his army experience in the south that
hot-blooded year of 1968. Other
encounters he had that revealed the cruelty – no, inhumanity of racial
segregation. How it humbled him. How, even after all the other horrors of that
war that he also shares in bits in pieces, they stay with him as something that
should not be tolerated or lived with.
I told my dad as we finally left the Pike and rounded the
curves of 290, that this is something that makes me very proud of him. And proud that he has told the pieces of
these stories to shape how I understand race and the deep roots of its legacy
in our country.
I consider myself very lucky to be the daughter of Jerry
Olson. He taught me how to tell a good
story. But more important than that, he
taught me how to see this world and take every opportunity to be brave enough to stand up and make it better.
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