Make love not war. A story about one man.. my dad.

Make Love Not War.  A story about one man.. my Dad

There are hidden treasures buried all over Europe stripped from captured German soldiers’ personal items. Look in fields and ditches and wherever the Allies took and kept German prisoners of war. I know this only because my dad told me. He never talked about the war with me, but I was sharing with him my desire to travel to Italy and explore other countries.

This little fact about World War Two intrigued me.  I had never heard this before, but apparently, it was not all that uncommon. He wondered if he ever went over there again (Italy) would he be able to recognize any of the places where he and his buddies fought?  They buried their stashes confiscated all those years ago.

I was a little taken aback at what he shared with me.  He also went on to say that the Nazis troops, who captured our men/bo, mostly marched them into fields and shot them in the back of the head!  They were not fond of taking prisoners. Which group of soldiers would you want to be with?

I think war changes people forever. The ones that come home from battle have scars we can only guess at. When quizzing my dad once, the closest he came to confiding in me was this  “You don’t ever want to know or see what we went through, baby girl, nobody should ever have to experience that.” He said this with such a deep sadness and finality that I never brought it up again.

Growing up with my dad, his favorite phrase was “I’m a lover, not a fighter.” He certainly was a lover, getting my mom pregnant every year with another child. In the twelve years they were together she gave life to six of us, one born stillborn and also a couple of miscarriages. We were Catholic, need I say more?

My dad was a dreamer and a charmer and he loved to make people laugh. He was not beneath using me as a prop to get the laughs.. “she was so ugly as a child we had to tie a pork chop around her neck so the dogs would play with her.” I didn’t mind his jokes, I knew he loved me best and maybe I liked being the center of his attention. Make love not war, was another of his sayings and he had a repertoire of them. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the best provider, he had a gambling addiction and if he had a poker game going after work, he could lose his whole paycheck.

He was scouted for the NHL after he came home from the war and was sent to a hockey training camp in Toronto. Seems that he got sidetracked on the way.  The train stopped in Winnipeg and he and a bunch of his buddies were inebriated and got off the train to go find a poker game. That was the end of any NHL dreams he may have had.

He loved hockey and was good at it, another of his favorite sayings was “Gordie Howe used to carry my hockey skates.” They lived in the same area of Saskatoon. He played for the armed forces while in England  (he was with the Canadian Princess Pats division from Saskatchewan) waiting to be shipped into battle. He and his three brothers… farm boys from Saskatoon Saskatchewan, enlisted into different divisions of the armed forces. They all made it back alive thank goodness.

He went on to marry my mom when they found out she was a few months pregnant with me. He was fond of telling the story of when she was a huge eight months pregnant with me. Playing hockey for the Vancouver Canucks in BC, in a game against Seattle, my dad got hurt on the ice. My mom actually climbed over the boards to make sure he was okay, I guess it was quite a sight,  They had to escort her back to her seat.

His gambling addiction was the reason they fought all the time, he had visions of hitting it big. It must have been hell for my mom, her being pregnant all the time and worrying about how to pay the bills.  We were living in B.C. when she finally left him for good after he came home once more without a paycheck, which he had gambled away yet again.  This was a month before Christmas.  We moved back to Saskatoon without him. I was twelve years old and the oldest of six.

My dad was not a bad person, he wasn’t a drunk nor was he mean. I can still picture him walking down the road from his day job.  (he worked nights as well) We all ran out joyfully to greet him, he had the biggest grin on his face, and he loved each of us (me the best of course) it’s just unfortunate that he was a lousy provider.

This addiction to gambling was maybe his ‘drug’ to forget what he had experienced while fighting a war overseas, far from home. I know he had to shoot people and witness his mates dying in battle. How many of us could go through what they did and come back unscathed?  We don’t know what goes on in someone’s mind.  I’m sure that war left its mark on everyone who eagerly signed up for this and did not have a clue of the horrors that lay ahead for them.

He received medals, some say everyone got medals, but I don’t know if this is true. He claimed he got them for being first in line for chow every day, which always got laughs. Of the shrapnel wound in his backside, he would joke that he got shot running from the enemy. I don’t know the real story, and I suppose I never will. He was wounded in the butt but he never shared the story with us. He finally received a small pension for that, but it was decades later, and only after someone informed him of this ‘perk’.

He was a fun dad and I missed him terribly when my mom left him for good, I was 12 years old. He was not cruel or mean, I’m sure he thought my mom’s well-off parents would look after us. They did and didn’t, we eventually found ourselves on welfare.

We missed out on having a dad for our formative years, but to write him off as a deadbeat dad would be doing him a grave disservice. With age comes wisdom. These young men went off to fight a war in another part of the world far from their homes and families.  Farm boys, city boys, and just boys, eager to fight an evil enemy so we could live in a free world. They were on a mission that changed our world forever. That war also changed many of them forever, as well.

Dad, I always think of you with love in my heart. Thank you for your service and I am so grateful you are my dad. You and all your brothers and so many young men couldn’t have known about the horrors that awaited. You fought a war for the freedoms we enjoy today.. you are my hero.

#mythirdlifeblog #lmbl

Copyright November 11th 2019