Father’s Day

The following is reprinted from August 5, 2008’s “Esther’s Petition,” in honor of Father’s Day and my own father, Harold W. Motte, Sr.
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Betty and daddy in his Army Air Force uniform, 1944

Who’s your daddy

When I was two years old, I knew my daddy… in some ways. I didn’t know him as a WW II veteran of the US Army Air Force. I didn’t know him as an airplane pilot or airplane mechanic, small engine repairman or insurance salesman.

I didn’t know him as a brother, uncle or son, or as a husband, son-in-law or brother-in-law. I didn’t know him as a house painter, screen door fixer, lawn mower, or light-bulb replacer. Or as a banjo player / barbershop quartet singer, neighbor, friend, or as a ballroom dancer. Yet he was all those things, to other people.

To two-year-old me he was just a marvelous big creature who loved me. He was a smiler. A carrier-on-the-shoulder. A hugger and tickler who got down on the floor and played baby dolls with me, or wound up the wobbly spinning top for me, over, and over, and over.

He let me climb up in his lap when he was trying to read the newspaper, and read the funnies out loud to me. He was a food taster who offered me little bites of his grown-up meals. He was a goofy “mareseatoats” song singer and a “once upon a time” story reader.

Sometimes he pointed a square box at me and called, “Smile,” which I probably did most of the time. I still have the black and white prints to prove it.

I didn’t really understand the definition of father yet but I knew the word daddy. And I knew my daddy, in all the facets of my two-year-old personal relationship with him, limited though they were.

A few years later I knew my daddy as mama’s best friend, who would dress up in a fancy suit and necktie and go somewhere with her, who herself was dressed up in a frilly dress and high heels. Off they’d go to some place I couldn’t go. Baby sitter time.

He was the chauffeur to any places we went as a family, the bill-payer when we went to the movies or out to eat, the final declarer of the absolutely perfectly decorated Christmas tree, the slow present opener who (like so many other gentleman of his era) used his pocket knife to carefully unstick the scotch tape and avoid tearing or wrinkling up the wrapping paper.

I also knew daddy as occasional nay-sayer and occasional deep thinker. Can I, daddy, can I have that? might result in long moments of deep thought before daddy’s well-meditated “no” answer was forthcoming, complete with reasonable, logical explanation. Only in cases of youngster temper-tantrum threats did he resort to “because I said so,” but if daddy said so, it was so.

In my pre-teen years I got to know daddy as a good tic-tac-toe player, chinese checker player, and monopoly player. I got to hear him play his banjo and sing four-part harmony.

I also discovered that mama and daddy weren’t always in perfect agreement – sometimes they had slightly loud discussions, at least that’s what they called them. Not yelling, not arguing, not fighting, but discussing points of view that sometimes clashed. I never listened and therefore I have no clear idea what those differences were all about. It’s probably just as well.

In my early teens, I began to know daddy as the family bread-winner who sometimes couldn’t work, who was suffering from service-related heart disease, caused by rheumatic fever contracted during WWII. He died of a heart attack when I was 16 years old.

I never got the chance to know daddy in all the many-faceted adult roles that other people knew. A few people have shared with me over the years about daddy as their friend. He was a valued friend to many. My mother never really recovered from losing her best friend, lover and husband, and I never really recovered from losing my daddy.

Over the years I have come to realize that daddy was a multi-faceted person, including a multi-faceted father to my brother and me. I knew him, but not as well as I would have liked, and the opportunity to know him better ended for me in 1960.
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If your dad is still living, appreciate him a little more today, and find a way to let him know you love him.

Happy Father’s Day, all you dads out there. Bette Motte Cox

Distractions

The North Korean ship Kang Nam is being monitored by the UN and US Navy, specifically the USS John McCain destroyer. As I write this, the destroyer is being positioned to interdict the N. Korean ship if necessary.

The reason? The weaponry cargo that ship may be carrying, cargo the UN says North Korea cannot ship / sell / transfer to other parties. Nuclear components, or biologicals, or chemicals.

Meanwhile, intelligence sources around the world and especially those of Israel are monitoring the volatile situation in Iran, where the current hard-line extremist President has supposedly won “reelection” and is supported and endorsed by the supreme leader.

Protests by the opposition, even though he is another hard-line extremist, are being met with violence by government forces. And the everyday citizens of Iran are getting fed up with the religious fanaticism that actually runs the country, and more and more voices are being raised in favor of actual reform.

Back here in the USA, the steady march proceeds toward government take-over of banking, housing, automative manufacturing and health care, while the unemployment rate has continued to rise to record heights despite the mega-gazillion dollar stimulus that was going to prevent that.

(Of course, those gazillion dollars had to be borrowed from China and elsewhere, since the US is broke. What was put up as collateral, do you suppose?)

And then there’s the unprecedented natural phenomena, disasters and diseases.

So, which of the foregoing is the distraction from what is going on, really? Any of them? None of them?

I think all of them are distractions from the fact that planet earth and its population are undergoing major stresses that soon will reach the point of no return.

I’ve been reading John Hagee’s book titled “Jerusalem Countdown.” It is five years old now but it might have been written yesterday. John Hagee and Joel Rosenberg (author of “Epicenter”) specialize in end-time events and their books are well worth reading. Studying, underlining and praying through.

Politics is not for faint of heart

Misunderstandings. Hurt feelings. Jealousy. Malicious gossip. Dirty dealing. Innuendos. Lies.

“Desperate Housewives?”

No, politics as usual. President Obama et al are quite good at instigating those, right down to the local level. But the opposition has always done that, nothing new there.

What is sad is when political brothers (or sisters) behave that way against each other, as has been happening recently on the national – and even on the local – scene.

Unfortunately, when you choose to work in the public arena, you paint a target on your back, like it or not.

Here’s a thought: whether in family, career, or politics, an invaluable asset is a strong jaw – one able to keep its mouth shut when provoked. It takes two to make a fight.

President Truman’s career was thoroughly and continually marked by controversy and criticism, yet his accomplishments – notably getting us out of WWII and helping Israel become a nation after the war – outweigh the negatives, I think.

Not afraid to make tough decisions (no matter what his enemies and sometimes his friends said about it), he summed it up this way:

“If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

Good advice to all of us these days.