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Due to a lot of stressful financial matters, I forgot my father's birthday this year and forgot to send him a card. He turned 87 in late October. When I realized that I had forgotten, I gave him a call. His response to my apology was, "Well, when you get this old, you don't want too many reminders of it."
When I was born in July of 1945, my father was just 20 years old. He was a First Lieutenant in the USAAF, and piloted B-17s. He was based in North Africa, at Port Lyautey in Morocco at the time. I was conceived during a leave before he was sent overseas. He came into WWII fairly late, and first flew out of a base in Italy, the name of which I can't remember. He participated in a number of raids over Europe. As the war wound down, his B-17 was converted to passenger service, and as part of the Green Project, he and his crew ferried military personnel on their way home. Finally, three months after I was born, he got to fly that B-17 home to the US himself, a flight that took him down the coast of Africa, across the Atlantic to Brazil, and then hops northward until they got to the US. The B-17's range was somewhat limited, so it was quite a journey.
Once my dad and I got past the belated birthday greetings, we shifted the discussion to Iraq and Afghanistan, led there by some discussion of his time in Morocco. My father is nothing if not a very pragmatic man, one who seeks a reasonable path to things. His opinion about Iraq and Afghanistan is that the US should never have meddled in Middle Eastern affairs. A long-time Republican, he switched his vote in 2004, in protest to Bush's stupidity in going into a war that was irrelevant to anything. He's been voting for Democrats ever since, something that gives me even more respect for him, although I had tons of it in any case. What he said is correct. We screw up everything we touch in the Middle East, because we don't understand that region. We appear to want it to be something it will never be, and don't learn our lessons and the lessons of history.
I haven't seen him and my mom since Christmas of 2010, so I'm eagerly looking forward to our trip to California for Thanksgiving. Who knows how many more times I'll have a chance to sit around and swap stories with him? Both of my parents are in pretty good health, for being 87 years old. My father still runs the tractor around their little citrus and avocado farm, spraying weeds and doing other chores, although he's contracted out most of the work now.
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