April 18, 2006 – A Life in Words

April 18, 2006 – A Life in Words

I mentioned in my previous entry that my mother had once told me that she was going to write the story of her life. Part of the responsibility I felt during the days leading up to her funeral was to attempt to put in words some sense of her life. She had told me of her childhood, of how she met my father and of how I was born. Over time the story, particularly details of her meeting my father, changed as my siblings and I got older. The basic element remained the same, however. On a visit at the end of April last year, I asked them both about their early life together. My father began by describing his arrival in the Philippines as part of the U.S. invasion force General Douglas MacArthur led to retake the Philippines by defeating the Japanese occupation force. My father’s company, part of the 32nd Division came ashore at White Beach near the town of San Fabian in January 1945. It was the same beach General Masaharu Homma and the Japanese Imperial Army forces came ashore in 1941.

My father’s company ran the motor pool—the troop transport vehicles—including gasoline and ammunition. When the company set up camp, a city of tents some distance inland from the beach, Dad’s tent, nearby the fuel and ammunition stores, was set off from the rest of the encampment by a considerable distance. “If anything hit the fuel or ammunition, I would be the only one blown up,” Dad said with a grin. By happenstance, Dad’s tent was also adjacent to a well-worn path used by San Fabian townspeople. It was on this path that my mother happened upon this blond-haired, blue-eyed, Aryan-looking young soldier. She asked him for a drink of water and he offered her a cup from his canteen. She thanked him, left, and returned the next day offering to sell him her watch for $500 pesos. He purchased the watch—he returned it to her some time later—and thus began their love affair in that time of madness.

Their daily life was one of my father being ordered to different areas of conflict and returning to San Fabian. Shortly after they began seeing each other regularly, his outfit was sent to Grace Park on the outskirts of Manila but saw no action. His company was then ordered to Baguio. There my father describes a conflagration of Napalm explosions his company helped engineer. It was the last days of the battle for the hilltop, summer capital. Baguio is 155 miles north of Manila in the Cordillera mountain region, 4,900 feet above sea level. It is one of the few places in the Philippines blessed with a cool climate. That time, though, it became a place of incredible carnage for Japanese and Filipinos alike. In the aftermath, Dad’s company returned to San Fabian where it remained for a few months before being ordered to Damortes a town north and west of San Fabian. Both towns are on the eastern edge of the U-shaped inlet on the western side of Luzon west of the city of Baguio. There Dad purchased a house for 500 pesos and my mother and father lived there until August 1945. Then, my father’s company was ordered aboard ship for the invasion of Japan, made unnecessary by the formal Japanese surrender on board the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945. Nevertheless, those leaving the Philippines bound en route to Japan were months away from discharge from active duty in the military.

When my father left, he gave Mom the deed to the house he had purchased for them and promised that he would return to bring her back to the U.S. She sold the house, collected her mother-in-law, SY and her other two charges and returned to Manila. The war was over. She was seven months pregnant with me and she needed to prepare for another mouth to feed, not to mention provide for those already dependent upon her. She managed somehow, receiving money from my father and working to make what else was needed. After I was born I was given to the care of a nanny and Mom got a job as a secretary working eight hours a day at the department of transportation in Manila. She never told me whether she believed my father would return, though the countless women who had been abandoned by U.S. servicemen returning to the U.S. must have argued strongly that he wouldn’t. The two of them carried on a correspondence and perhaps the letters gave her hope that he would be true to his word.

Then, two years to the day my father left the Philippines, Mom received a message from the Red Cross informing her Dad had returned. Mom was being courted by another man at the time. She had to choose between remaining among friends and relatives that she knew well in Manila or to travel to a completely strange land and start life all over again. It was a choice made easy by the prevailing view among most Filipinos of my mother’s generation that America was the land of plenty. She did have one very heart wrenching decision and that was to leave her daughter SY behind. Mom's first husband had made her promise that she not take SY away from his mother as long as his mother was alive. It would take Mom ten years after arriving in America before she would acquire her U.S. citizenship and another five years before she was reunited with SY, by then a grown woman eager to make her way in the land of opportunity.

During those first fifteen years and the forty odd years that followed, my mother left her mark on the world. Besides raising her children, she helped many other souls along the way as a nurse’s aid at Hotel Dieu Hospital in El Paso. I often wonder how many patients she helped during her years of service there. I wonder also how many neighbors and friends my parents encountered during their sixty years together that my mother offered kindness and comfort to. She had always been a devout woman who found solace in the Catholic Church. The church did not reciprocate, however. Since she had not been married in the church, her vows were not recognized. And my father’s reluctance to embrace the Catholic religion left her torn and anguished. In later years, my father relented and converted to Catholicism. She was married in the church and was once again embraced by the faith.

How would I put her life into an obituary that would do justice to what she accomplished during her days on the face of the earth? I began much as I’ve done in these blog entries recounting her accomplishments and detailing her progeny, her three generations of children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. I described the young woman who had taken it into her mind to marry my father, her tumultuous life as part of a mixed race couple in the deep south during the late 1940s and early 1950s. I described her great joy becoming a citizen of the U.S. in the late 1950s in San Juan, Puerto Rico of all places—a three year tour of duty had found us there through 1958. When she returned to the U.S. the world was beginning to change. The Republican Administration of Dwight Eisenhower was giving way to the Democratic Administration of John Kennedy and the struggle for civil rights was about to begin in earnest. In a short few years as the decade of the 1960s began, her job as a mom was largely done and she began working at Hotel Dieu. In another few years, I had gone to join the Navy. My father retired from the Military after two more moves: a couple of years in Fort Lewis, Washington and another couple of years at Ft. Benning, Georgia. By then, mom was ready to return to her home in El Paso and begin enjoying the life she had struggled to build over all those earlier years.

In the last thirty years of the 20th Century, she and my father enjoyed their life together, traveling the highways of America; their comfortable Airstream in tow with its “Mac & Neda” license plate cover, letting fellow travelers know who they were. How many family get-togethers at Christmas Thanksgiving, and other times of year for births, baptisms, graduations, and weddings, I’ve lost count. How many times IM, the kids, and I would be leaving El Paso, our station wagon burdened with gifts and the food my mother insisted we take with us on our homeward journey to California or Dallas, she would begin weeping as if we wouldn’t be coming back, despite all our protestations to the contrary. Now, she had left us despite all our protestations to the contrary.

My sisters and one of her granddaughters helped write the final draft of the obit. I added at the end some lines from the Edna St. Vincent Millay Sonnet #8, that I’ve always liked. It begins “And you as well must die, belovèd dust, And all your beauty stand you in no stead;… and ends with six lines that summed up all our feelings so perfectly.

“…Nor shall my love avail you in your hour.
In spite of all my love, you will arise
Upon that day and wander down the air
Obscurely as the unattended flower,
It mattering not how beautiful you were,
Or how belovèd above all else that dies.”