Since today is Memorial Day, I'd like to take some time to remember my parents.  Like all memories, these are not completely trustworthy, and since I don't have any siblings, there's no one to check them; over the years they've hardened into their own stable form.  I think sometimes that I'm unfair to my father and feel bad about that.  My dad (Howard, Sr., so I was called Johnny till I was 12 or 13) died of lymphoma on my birthday 30 years ago this July at the age of 68.  My mom, Ruth, died on my friend and colleague Virginia's birthday 27 years ago at the age of 76.  She died of pancreatic cancer three weeks after the diagnosis.  It has been a long tradition to take Virginia out for dinner on her birthday.  My partner and I had taken a break from the hospital vigil to take Virginia to Steak and Ale (a lot of good memories at that defunct restaurant).  When we returned home, the hospital called to tell us to come immediately.  My mother hadn't been in a lot of pain until the last 24 hours, but I watched her lose a little more strength each day.  During those last hours, she had a morphine drip as the pain had dramatically increased.  Her poignant last words were "Kill me before I die."

My mother was seven years older than my father.  She didn't marry until she was 35 and had always worked in banks, first in Ames, then in Story City.  She loved fancy clothes, and I have many pictures of her and her best friend all gussied up, ready to take a trip to Chicago or Minneapolis.  My father drove a milk truck in Ames after spending two years in the Air Force.  He was always extremely nervous and impatient with others, so he had a hard time keeping a job.  For most of my childhood, he sold parts at automobile dealerships in Ames and Story City, moving from one to another in what seemed like an unending circle.  One year, much to my discomfort, he was a janitor at my school.  He wasn't great with kids, and that year was not a happy one for either him or me. 

For the first thirteen years of my life, we lived on the second floor of a big, old white frame house with my mother's parents living downstairs.  My grandparents doted on me, and my grandma would slip me milky coffee in the morning and quiz me from the World Almanac.  She got dressed up in heels and jewelry at least once a day to play bridge with other women her age.  We lived on a huge double lot with two gardens, three grape arbors, and tons of room to play.  I remember many evenings of playing Capture the Flag (I have no idea now how the game was played).  Story City had a movie house that showed two different movies a week (admission ten cents for children) and a public library where I spent hours.  In the summer, we rode our bicycles (without helmets, of course) a couple of miles out of town to a Lutheran camp where we could go swimming. 

Depression-era products, my parents never took vacations and rarely ate out.  They built a house of their own (cost $13,000) in 1958, just before I entered high school and only when they could pay for it in cash.  It was just a block away from where I'd lived before.  I remember how impatient I'd get with them when they talked about Depression hardships and prices, and it was only much later that I understood they were talking about history only twenty years earlier, as if now I reminisced about 1992.  My father didn't want my mother to work, and although she agreed, after her years having her own money, she chafed.  Finally, he allowed her to work at home, so once a week, she and a couple of other women, drove to Nevada, the county seat, and picked up 5,000 envelopes (ten boxes of 500 each), which she addressed using an old black manual typewriter.  There couldn't be more than a 1% spoilage rate and no errors.  Most of the time, they were for Father Flanigan's Boys Town--5,000 pale blue envelopes every week.  When it was time for her to cook, I'd take over.  I learned to insert one envelope while I rolled the other one out.  She typed from voter and motor registration rolls, and we compiled a long list of funny names.  My favorite has always been someone who was named Fartney Blast. 

Everyone loved my mother, a tiny and funny woman, who had mysterious ailments that prevented her from eating fresh fruits and vegetables, but not desserts.  There were always freshly baked cakes and pies and cookies at my house, which made it a popular place after school.  My father was somewhat more difficult but later in life found a secure job selling parts at the local Chevy dealership and discovered golf, which seemed to relax him.  I came out to my parents in 1967.  I had been called for the Vietnam war, and I had "checked the box," as we said then.  And then I had to explain to my parents why I had gone from 1-A to 4-F overnight.  Much to my surprise, my father was less upset than my mother (though I think they had suspected that I was gay).  But after a short time, everyone adjusted to the new reality.  I spent the 1970s with one man, whom my parents loved, as his parents did me. 

They were good people, and I remember the seventeen years in Story City with enormous affection.  We weren't a demonstrative family and we certainly didn't have much money, but I had everything I needed, everything I wanted.  It's hard to believe how long it's been since my parents died.  They would hardly recognize the America of 2012.  But I know that they would still love their son as much as they always did in their very different ways, and so it's fitting that I remember them and honor them on this day of commemoration and gratitude.