My father had what is now known as bipolar disorder, his moods would swing from high to low. He was a small brown man with curly dark hair a quick grin that showed white teeth with a gap between the two incisors. People called him “Hap” because when he was happy he was very happy and he made joyous those around him, except my mother. He had a tendency to buy red Cadillac when he had no money. He would somehow talk the dealer into letting him have the car with no down payment and no credit. My mother would then find herself with a huge bill for a red Cadillac. Collectors quickly learned our name and address and just as quickly, we would move to another city. The longest we stayed in one town was six months. This rapid departure was caused by two things—no money to pay for red cavallas and my father’s tendency to become bored with his job. He was a pipe fitter for Dow Chemical. For a short time, he drove a candy truck. He worked in bee yards and on pipelines. He was a roustabout on oilrigs and wharfs. He loaded lumber, hauled lumber, and a plainer of logs into lumber. Any thing that didn’t require schooling he could do—at least for six months. When my father wasn’t moving from job to job he was moving from hospital to hospital. He was a patient in every VA hospital in Texas. He was treated there for depression and combat stress. He was a tail gunner in the US Air Force during WW II. He was never treated for mania. I remember looking in on him in the hospital. I stood on a chair up to a small windowpane in a door and looked into a small room. He was sitting hunched over on an army cot, sobbing uncontrolably.
My mother sobbed a lot too. About a week before Christmas, my father wasn’t at home. He wasn’t at home a great deal of the time. Where he was no one said. Indeed he was gone so much of the time that to have him home was unusual. That Christmas season I was already in bed when I heard a loud knock on the door. My mother answered. There was a loud and insistent man outside, yelling at my mother. She began crying. A lay in bed puzzled, not knowing what to do. After awhile the man left. Many years later, I realized the man was a bill collector. That must be a terrible job, making young women cry at Christmas time.
When I was nine years old, my mother could stand it no more. She divorced him. It was sometime in the late afternoon when he came in the house crying. He hugged me and said he was going to miss me. I thought this was strange because I was always missing him. I never saw him again.
My grandfather and grandmother had abandoned my mother when she became pregnant with me and was not married. My mother always felt neglected by her family. She was the middle child of five. Her three brothers and one sister were just as smart as she was and she was very smart. She graduated from college when she was nineteen and immediately began teaching school. She complained that her mother and father failed to attend her college graduation. They attended everyone else’s graduation, but not hers.
Because my mother felt neglected—she was aloof and quiet. The rest of the family was rambunctious and gregarious. When you are quite in a family of eccentrics, you begin to develop an inferiority complex and you become a wallflower. When my mother met a GI bound for England, she no longer felt neglected. He paid attention to her. He was uneducated, but fun. They got together and made me. He left for England and she was sent to Amarillo 750 miles from her home to have me. She stayed with a distant cousin who didn’t like her and made her leave as soon I was born. My grandparents, ashamed of my mother’s dalliance refused to ever see my mother again. They never saw me. When my mother was killed in an automobile accident, I became an orphan when I was eleven.
When you are eleven years old and an orphan no one wants you. Every Christmas time infertile couples would come by the orphanage to choose a child. I guess they decided to get a child instead of a puppy for Christmas. They always choose the infants and the cute toddlers. They ignored me.
I was surprised when Dr. Coleman picked me. I was sixteen. He seemed to like me. His wife tolerated me. He would play catch with me in the back yard. He was the only surgeon in a small town. He let me be his first assistant. He would take out gall bladders and stomachs that were riddled with ulcers. He would repair abdominal aneurisms. He world repair hips, do mastectomies, drill holes in the head to remove blood clots on the brain. I was his first assistant. I was happy and then he died from a heart attack just after he had let me sew up a man whose hernia he had repaired. He came out of the operating room bragging on me, telling me I had the hands of a surgeon and one day I would go to medical school and then come back to help him do surgery when I got my MD. He was talking and then he wasn’t. After he died, I returned to the orphanage.
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