Charlie: A Good Man Done Wrong

And stay home and do what he was told, he did. Let us rewind:

My father, an unusually good man, was born at home in rural Arkansas north of Little Rock on a Tuesday the 13th in 1931, the fifth of eleven children, two of whom did not survive early childhood. They were farmers, working very hard with few perks in a family of reliably fine people that continued to breed reliably fine people.

Never have I heard Dad say one negative thing about any of them.

After high school, he worked on the farm for a year or so, then enlisted in the Air Force, greatly enjoying his service atop a mountain in Washington. Afterward, he went to trade schools to learn diesel mechanics, then got involved with cotton gins. He added more training in electrical engineering and soon was traveling the world practicing his trade.

The Clock Strikes Kook-Thirty
Stints in Nicaragua and Spain were very successful, then came his fateful trip to Turkey in October, 1964 where, working for associates of Aydin's, he met Mom and her children John and Neila. Amid a series of truly impressive coincidences set in motion by Mom making Dad a jewelry smuggling mule, they hit it off and were wed six months later.

Dad went to Turkey to make a living and came back with a parade of kooks hanging on him like baby possums. Soon, Mom, John, Neila, Grandpa, Mutchie, and even Aydin would, to various and shifting quantitative and qualitative degrees, control Dad's life.

Several years after I was born, Mom stunned Dad by pretty much unilaterally buying an apartment complex, setting in motion a ~23 year adventure in Old East Dallas inner-city multi-family culture. Some of it was pretty cool, much of it was anything but, and toward the end, Dad had most certainly had enough and his pleasent demeanor had become a bit tainted by landlord grouchiness.

A Brief Retirement
He retired in 1995 at age 64 when they unloaded the last two complexes. Even though Mom remained a sickly, chain-smoking, shut-in kook who cast aside essentially all aspects of being a good wife, Dad at least got to semi-enjoy a few years of retirement after working his ass off since his earliest memories.

I had a pretty nice boat and, for the first time, we actually got out in the world and had fun together in a focused, recurring way. I took him to many lakes in northeast Texas and we loved simply moving across the land and water just looking at things and talking about it. Places many would find boring piqued our interests in a variety of ways, making the miles go by pleasantly briskly.

Then, it started.

Dysfunction Is Even Harder Work
John got a divorce and shifted from regular bum into overbum. Mutchie declined, Dad making and shuttling food to her daily, then died in a staggeringly-poorly executed dance with The Reaper that crushed Mom's heart. John threw his new wife out on Xmas. Ryan started his disintegration. Neila caught lawsuit fever. Claudia entered the scene. Aydin's marbles started to bail. Reagan's dad died in a most sudden and disturbing manner.

The Incident between John and Neila escalated as Neila's camp cared for and exploited Aydin, Lisa got badly hurt in a car wreck, Neila started what would be an amazingly long delinquency on her home loan, Reagan's mother expired, setting off yet another legal battle in Neila's world, and Ryan got busted on serious felony charges.

That's just for starters.

As all that drama unfolded, Dad's cholesterol was high, so he was put on robust doses of early statin drugs that were later shown to have zero benefit in extending life. Those drugs acted on lipids (fats). Our nervous system depends on a delicate balance of lipids. As a result Dad got bad statin peripheral neuropathy at all four corners.

That was treated with more drugs by the same company that didn't seem to help much with his discomfort while destroying his palate and making falls much more likely. The beautiful flavors of good food and drink, among the final pleasures open to him, became badly compromised.

Running alongside that so-called health care was his steadily going blind with ARMD and glaucoma and suffering over five years of INSIDIOUS, medically invalid drugging on benzodiazepine tranquilizers as "The Incident" took over and destroyed his life. He emphatically cited getting mixed up in Neila and John's war as his biggest regret.

The Parade of Kooks Is Your Family
As often mentioned here, Dad was cut off from his large, wonderful family. Even his brother's camp, in the same side of the city as we were, was rarely engaged socially.

On the rare times he made a pathetically-harried shot to Arkansas, Mom made him pay. If they came and stayed with us, she made him pay.

Only when Dad's mother died in 1984 was he allowed to journey home free of retribution. Or, at least I think it was free of retribution.

Dad was and I remain unsure of exactly why this happened. He never discussed it with Mom and when I brought it up, she either flatly denied it or blew her top. I know that on at least one very early occasion in Arkansas, Mom claimed she and the kids were treated less than graciously by one of Dad's sisters - I recall the offense was they were not offered refreshments quickly enough.

Given how pleasant refreshments can be, that's indeed a damn shame, but far from cause to marginalize Dad and his family, including me, for much of the next 50 years.

I tried to impress upon Mom that Dad, nearing age 30, bringing a foreign secular divorcee and her two weird-ass kids into the fold was a very gutsy move for a former altar boy from a devout clan of Catholic farmers and one must expect some bumps in that road. My advice was have been to simply out-goodness them and make herself impossible not to love, if nothing else for her husband's sake. That didn't hang with her.

The funny thing is that she loved Dad's father and really dug speaking German with him. Her opinion of Dad's mother was very high. She had regard for Dad brother, Father Joe, a priest (in case ya didn't figger dat out two seconds ago) and was especially fond of my Aunt Betty, Dad's oldest sibling Leo's wife and our othropedist's nurse.

Why Mom smothered Dad like that after so objecting to how Aydin smothered her will remain a mystery. She definitely preferred Dad to be at her side watching TV every night. I once wondered if she was afraid to stay home alone, but we lived in a good neighborhood next door to the District Attorney and always had a scary police dog fit for a mule saddle, so that's probably not it.

I just don't get it.

The Parade of Kooks Is Your Friends
It wasn't just family - Dad had no friends. I couldn't name one. After we moved to the new house, he hit it off with Ed, a neighbor, but Mom disliked him because he loved Ronald Reagan and quickly pounded a wedge between them.

The list of basic things Dad was deprived of encompasses most of a proper life for a man. FlozWorld tragically seems to be a place where, too often, male dignity and contentment limp to die and rot. When I compare my quality of life with Lisa with what I've seen and heard with Dad, Reagan, and Langdon, I heave a huge sigh of relief and gratitude.

Maddeningly, Mom would often quote literature and poetry at polar opposition with her deeds. She loved and would often cite an augmented version of the wedding standby poem The Prophet we saw on the greatest TV show in history, All in the Family:

...the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow, for if one tree tries to overshadow the other, then that one will wither and die

I found Mom's daring to invoke that quote utterly surreal. Sure, people are often silly and foolish, but such a level of hypocrisy is like Tiger Woods railing about the folly of hitting a little white ball with a fancy metal stick.

Interestingly, not once did I call her out on that. It would have made too much trouble, and, in her eyes, the trouble would be a malicious attack from clean out of the blue. That was one hot tamale I just wasn't willing to chew. The thought of her calling Dad into the room so she could put him on the spot to confirm one of our sides over a question with a painfully obvious, undeniable answer made me nauseous. No thanks.

After Mom died, the second thing he did, after trying to right some serous wrongs I and Lisa had suffered, was to reestablish ties with his family.

The Man That Didn't Quite Exist
Dad was a great man and a fine father with serious flaws ALL caused by The Flozberk Way. He was fun-loving, yet sensible and a badass who could get things done.

Mom (and her unmerry band of kooks) stripped Dad's sense of self to just about zero, whittling it away, bit by bit, right up to the last days of his life.

That blocked him from making some critical fatherly stands, forever marring his legacy. What a damn shame. I understand, though - If he couldn't stand up for himself, how could he stand up for others? When he showed free will, Mom made him pay.

When, safe from Mom, he finally got a chance to flex his muscle and tried to make amends for years and years of flabbergasting disparities, Neila made him pay.

Parity? NO! That's UNFAIR!
After his beloved wife of just over 50 years died, he took the helm and set some important things right in what he considered the most important acts of his long life.

The Flozberk Way finds parity intolerable and Neila, desperate on a sinking ship, responded by underhandedly seizing control of his life and laying a beast of a hatchet job campaign on me, offending Dad horribly and ruining the last year of his already-Flozberk-trashed life.

A especially spurty geyser of bad behavior and clumsy scheming by The Flozzies late in 2018 spurred Dad to legally break their hold on him. Within hours after starting that, he was felled by a blow to the head and died soon after, on his 88th birthday, the day before he was to sign a new will putting me (his son) and Neila (Aydin's daughter) on equal terms.

Now Neila is trying to take around 3/4 of my childhood home in a gluttony- and wrath-fueled travesty that would have Dad spinning in his urn, a final slap in the face in a long list of shameful acts disrespecting Dad spanning years.

Read more about Dad in the Appendices
Watch his music video "Like a Broom" HERE:
- includes video from his funeral

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