Carol H Tucker Passionate about knowledge management and organizational development, expert in loan servicing, virtual world denizen and community facilitator, and a DISNEY fan
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beladona Memorial Be warned:in this very rich environment where you can immerse yourself so completely, your emotions will become engaged -- and not everyone is cognizant of that. Among the many excellent features of SL, there is no auto-return on hearts, so be wary of where your's wanders...
One of the sounds that I associate with autumn is the honking of geese – I never fail to stop and scan the skies, watching them fly away, and this is when I think of my father.
Jerry Hughes won’t come up on any google searches, even though he led a colorful life and actually brought home a gold medal from the Olympics once for ping-pong [AKA table tennis if you want to be precise] that I still have tucked away in my memorabilia along with his naval uniform, a couple of china pieces from Occupied Japan and a wooden dragon ship [all souvenirs from the time he was in the US Navy during WWII in the Pacific]. I don’t know a lot about the man when you come right down to it – wry and athletic, personable and popular, he didn’t have much in common with his bookish daughter – just bits and pieces that I remember before he blew out of my life back in the 8th grade. ((doesn’t everyone tell time by what year of school they were in? Let’s see, I must’ve been around 14 or so)).
Dad was a colorful character. Highly competitive, he whipsawed between golf and tennis every other year. It was a cycle, he would play golf until he was extremely good, then someone would challenge him to a tennis match and beat him and bam! The golf clubs were thrown in the close and he played tennis until he was extremely good, then someone would challenge him to a golf game….. He was also what I have come to realize is a sociopathic liar – he convinced himself that his stories were true and thus convinced others. My favorite is still that he went overseas and worked as a mercenary for a couple of years, amassed a fortune which he stashed in a secret Swiss account and that someday I will be on Easy Street. Ah, easy street! That is where he always wanted to be, not working for a living. He would scrub his hands until they were almost raw to get rid of the grime acquired working as a machinist at the Point, determined to be a gentleman. He was insanely jealous of his older brother’s engineering degree and subsequent career, but hated schooling with a passion. Married at a relatively young age, he never quite settled down and I often thought of him as having been born under a wandering star. Grandpop Hughes, who bummed around a lot for a long time before marrying Grandmom, always thought of him as being much like himself. He wasn’t around the house much – he was either working or out playing. When he left us he headed to Alaska and worked on the pipeline – it was almost three years before we found out where he had gone, before he got back in touch with his parents.
I was often compared to my father when I was younger. I was told that I looked just like him. I don’t – I resemble my mother and her mother strongly – but what we shared was mobility of expression, how emotions play across our faces. My kids both inherited this, and even though they both strongly resemble their fathers, folks often tell us that we three look alike when we are together. I do have his restlessness, the impulsiveness, and like him, I am definitely a thunderstorm when angry.
Jerry Hughes died of lung cancer 32 years ago in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho. I was not there, but Uncle Harry was. My role was to stay by the phone for three days at the end and turn away care – the hospital wouldn’t accept the POA my uncle had or my father’s living will. Every four hours, my uncle would call me and I would tell them “no”. This was before the advent of cell phones, so I had to stay home and by the phone to do this. Dad had wanted to be cremated, and when the ashes were sent to my Aunt by the mail, we dug a hole around the tombstone for Grandmom and Grandpop and put him to rest – all but a handful that I took to the lake and scattered around the flock of geese.
You see, my father’s favorite song through the years was The Cry of the Wild Goose. That song would well him up every time, and it was the only thing I ever heard him sing. And every fall, I think of him as the geese start to migrate and hope his heart is at rest at last.
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