November 2, 2008 - Conversation with Dad

I called Dad today and learned that he was not well, having come down with a cold recently and was just getting over it. The subject of our conversations typically revolves around his health. He went to William Beaumont Army Medical Center to have his lungs checked. They were clear. The hospital has been caring for him and my mother until her death in January 2006. In fact, the hospital has given care to my father since the 1950s, when he convalesced there after a car accident in Germany almost left him paralyzed. The hospital gave him antibiotics in case what he had was bacterial and sent him home. The fever broke yesterday and he was now over the worst and planning to have his flu shot on Tuesday—the ounce of prevention his fragile lungs requires.

For a man three years shy of ninety, he’s in remarkable shape, considering all the insults his lungs has suffered. He started smoking when he joined the Army at the outbreak of World War II. He was twenty. He gave it up, cold turkey, forty years later when he was turning sixty. He worked around asbestos and other hazardous materials during his twenty-three years in the military and during the twenty some years afterwards working at the ASARCO copper smelting plant in El Paso—you see its tall smokestack heading into El Paso from Las Cruces on Interstate 10. You can’t miss it on your right.

He is still able to get around and is clear-headed, though a bit hard of hearing. I tend to speak softly, a complaint that goes back to my speech class in high school. When we converse by phone, I yell into the mouthpiece to make myself heard. He drives himself about town—to the hospital, to Ft Bliss Army Base, and to most places around El Paso. He tells me he’s voted at Northgate Shopping Center last week—first time for him to vote a straight ticket along a single party line. I won’t divulge which party.

We talk about the Filipino community where he still belongs. Father Benito, the retired priest that my father credits with bringing him to the Catholic faith continues to proper in the care of one of his parishioners—a widow who befriended him during his time at Our Lady of Assumption Church on Byron Street and took him in rather than have him live out his life in the care facility provided by the Catholic Diocese of El Paso. The wife of one of my high school friends, a Filipina who came to El Paso as a nurse, is now in poor health. The daughter of my mother’s closest friend, who passed away recently, had a stroke and is being cared for in a city health facility. Thus, goes the small dramas that beset the community I left forty years ago.

Finally, he tells me he’s received some literature from the Veterans Administration informing him he’s eligible for a low-cost loan for home improvement or to purchase a home. He’s thinking of building a new place on property he owns nearby. His lifelong friend Charles Upton willed the property to him a few years back. It has a small one-room house on it and Dad is thinking about expanding the building or raising it and putting up a new house. He’s 87 and still thinking about building, a pretty optimistic statement. It’s the sort of guy he is.

We’ve been on the phone for an hour and he’s getting hungry so we ring off.