My friend offered to pay me for each article, but she and her Pastor husband had adopted four brothers and sisters to keep them from being split up, to join their two kids. I told her to save that money for the children. She kept talking about putting together a collection of the stories for a book. "Then you can pay me..." I would tell her laughing. She had started to get serious about the collection... when she became ill. Six months later, we lost her.
Here is the story... enjoy.
Dances with my Daughter
By Grandpa Grumpy
Pain. It’s the curse of both old age and the disabled veteran. It makes it hard to sleep at night. I often find myself sitting up in the dark when the rest of the house is sleeping. When this happens, you have plenty of time for memories. You can’t watch tv and you can’t play the radio. You don’t want to wake the wife or the dog. So you sit quietly and watch the old movies in your mind. Maybe it’s not such a curse after all.
Not so many nights ago, I was taking that trip down memory lane, and I remembered dancing with my oldest daughter. She is now thirty years old, married with children. Back then she was eighteen months old and she was still Daddy’s Girl. I was a young Marine Sergeant and about to deploy aboard a carrier with a Marine Helicopter Squadron again. Our nightly routine at that time was that I would come home and take off my uniform blouse, my cover (hat for you civilians,) and while the last bit of preparations took place for dinner, she and I would dance slowly around the living room while the radio played the evenings selections. While I held her small hands gently in mine, and her sock covered feet perched on my spit shined combat boots, we would spin around the carpet in the living room until her mother called us to dinner. I still remember the joy in her eyes and her head thrown back in laughter. Every night until the squadron flew out to the carrier for what would be a seven month combat deployment, she met me at the door with her hands held up and said, “Dance, Daddy, Dance!” So every single night for that half hour or so, I danced with my daughter.
This took place in the mid-eighties. No email, no cell phones, no free long distance. Communications between families when dads were deployed were a bit old fashioned, and difficult. We wrote letters. I wrote over one hundred and thirty during the seven months I was deployed. Long letters home so my family knew how my days and weeks went. The letters home were held on the ship and flown off when the ship got close enough to a land mass for the aircraft to reach it. Mom would read the letters to them when they came in, numbered on the envelopes since mail would come to them in bunches.
Phone calls home were an event, and an exercise in frustration. Thousands from the ship hit port and you all went to a bar, a call center, or a USO with a bank of phones along a wall. You got in line, taking a number and giving your information to the overseas operator to place the call. Hours later they would call your name or number and your ten minutes of contact was available, IF there was someone home to take the call. You crowded into the small booth and held the phone to your ear, and tried to cram as much “home” into ten minutes as you could. When the time was up, they disconnected the call, they warned you at eight, nine, and nine and a half minutes and then your family was gone until the next call home.
My first call home took place from the transition port in the med, about six weeks after we left port in Norfolk, VA. When I finally got through to my family, it was nearly one in the morning in Rota Spain and I was thrilled to chat with the gang. During that call, I asked my wife if she was dancing with my daughter every night like she promised, keeping my tradition alive. She hesitated, but when I pushed, she told me that she had tried, but my girl had refused the first night, and every night thereafter, saying only one thing. “Only Daddy.”
When the operator cut off my call, I didn’t feel like going out into the port city to meet my friends as promised. I started back to the carrier. During the walk back to the ship, the cold wind must have really been cutting, because I found my eyes were watering. There had been No Dancing, “Only Daddy,” my baby had said. Nothing I could do to change that, we still had months before turnaround. It had to be the cutting wind that made my eyes water. Marines don’t cry. How do you explain to a child less than two why Daddy isn't there to dance with her each night?
It was a pain I never forgot. Thirty years later as I sit and type this story, the screen still blurs as I put the words to paper. It’s funny. You can’t re-live your past, it never seem to work out the same way if you try. But you can revisit your memories at will. Often late at night, sitting in the dark, I’ll be dancing with my daughter. Her stocking feet standing on spit shined combat boots, head thrown back and laughing in pure joy as only a child can. I can hear the music; I can feel the pressure on the toes of my combat boots and feel whisper of the carpet under my feet. Dancing with my daughter, we glide around that room once again.
Author’s Note:
The author is a Grumpy Ol’ Marine and a disabled vet. You’ll often find him nodding in his recliner, lost in his memories. It’s really best not to wake him. There is a reason they call him Grumpy.
I hope you enjoyed the story... most of my writings, even the fiction, has a kernel of truth. This one, all true. Even the Grumpy part.
