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MEYER: Daughter's worst enemy |
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Saturday, 23 August 2008 |
The aura of invincibility that I once waved like a Roman battle standard in my younger and more determined days is rather muted and impotent following the passing of our daughter. Much of what I thought so terribly important is no longer.
My father was, by the slimmest margins, a parent; that is being kind and stretching a point. My brother and I were raised by grandparents.
At some point, one looks about and finds he has in fact become an extension of his predecessors, because they were the most influential in our arrested development. When faced with a decision, we found ourselves subconsciously asking what our forebearers would do in such a situation.
When it came to children, we were thrust into the role of parents through no fault of our own; our youth saw only the good of the sweet smelling babies and our hope for their future (and maybe ours). The real question of worth in this world came fairly regularly, and we responded with memory. Oh, we tried teaching them honesty, fair play, religion and attributes we deemed necessary, more often than not unsuccessfully.
We had three children — boy, girl, boy. None of the three shared anything except genes. They were competitors, not siblings. The one common thread was a developed sense of humor. The oldest often bullied the two younger children.
One day I came into the house and started downstairs to the bedrooms when the youngest was hightailing it up to the second floor with a rifle. I grabbed the .22 and asked him what this was all about. He told me matter of factly, “I’m going to kill him. He has picked on us for the last time!” He had a pocket of shells and fully intended to do just that. The rifle never saw its bolt again; I hid it.
We always ate together. The wife prepared three meals a day, a rarity these days. The round of jokes was always present, usually at the expense of one or more of those present. Parents were not excluded.
Kelly was always our “problem” child. When she wanted something, she didn’t give up until she warted the living daylights out of us for her desired end. A big problem was back to school. Kelly had an eye for the expensive. The wife would explain to her how we had only so much money and that it had to cover everybody. One day, Kelly told the wife that the Courier had a big printing press, so why didn’t Daddy just go down and print more money?
It was nigh on Christmas time and the wife asked the elder son and Kelly to write a letter to Santa to tell him what they wanted. She knew Kelly couldn’t write, but thought she would scribble a page of swirls and then they would discuss it. The li’l daughter got a Sears catalog, cut pictures from it and pasted them on sheets of notebook paper. We didn’t have to ask.
I made a bad mistake: I bought the eldest son a used car for his 16th birthday, a 1966 Mustang. Two years later, Kelly was approaching the due date and began to belabor the point that she also expected a car. Each day when I came home from work, she had torn out the classified pages from the state newspaper and highlighted the cars appealing to her. “Kelly, there will be no convertibles, no Thunderbirds, no Cadillacs, no muscle cars!”
One day, I had had it and told her to go get in the family car, that we were going to go get her some wheels and earn her mother and me some peace even if it was a 1952 DeSoto four-door.
We looked and looked at old cars that afternoon and ended up buying a 1966 Mustang in El Paso, Ark., in the dead of night.
It was a nice Mustang — bronze with Pony interiors, 289 V-8, air, power steering and brakes, mag wheels. She didn’t like it. After all, it was the same as her brother’s, but I explained it was the ’Tang or nothing. She decided she would reluctantly take it. She later sold it and I saw not one dime of the proceeds.
She bought a Volkswagen, later putting it into bed with a lady after she had become airborne and traveled through her wall. I called her insurance agent, Arnold Wright. “Was she drinking?” Yep.
In junior high, she would drink only Dr Peppers. The wife would buy 2-litre bottles of various drinks and Kelly would throw one of her usual fits. “What’s the big deal about Dr Peppers?” I asked.
She began to get more than a little pudgy and underwent a gastric bypass, losing more than 100 pounds.
She had gone to school and had taken a job with Saline Memorial Hospital. I breathed a sigh of relief that she was finally on the right track. A few weeks later, I was at the hospital and decided I would look her up and see what her environs were like. “I’m looking for Kelly Meyer,” I told one of the girls.
“Oh, Kelly doesn’t work here anymore,” she said.
“She what?”
“She only stayed a week and quit,” the young lady said.
I went by her house. “What the hell is this? You quit?”
“I had to, Daddy,” she said. “They brought me these old people to die. I just loved them and then when they passed, I cried and cried!”
We gave the elder son a trip to Europe for his high school graduation present. Kelly didn’t want to go to Europe; she wanted to go skiing in Colorado. “If you give me that trip, I’ll join the Navy when I get back,” she said. She went skiing, she did not join the Navy and, yes, her mother and I paid.
Amanda Haley lived across Conway Street from Kelly and they became fast friends. Amanda sent us a letter about Kelly.
“From the time I met Kelly, I automatically loved her. I liked her, too, but she was so real, I felt as though I was seeing an old friend after a long absence. Kelly and I never ran around together, but we spent a lot of time talking in the middle of Conway Street when I lived in the Clary House. Over the years, we would run into each other. I was always so overjoyed to see her that I would go home and proudly announce to Tom that ‘I saw Kelly.’”
She was an all-star softball player and played on a team that we later learned had a drug problem. Kelly took the coach aside one night and complained about the white lines down the baselines. “Martha June will get a straw and suck up every inch of those lines through her nose.”
Everybody loved Kelly, but she had one formidable enemy she could not handle — herself. Kelly was an alcoholic.
Ron Meyer is cartoonist, columnist and former general manager of the Courier. His column appears Friday. Any opinions are those of the writer.
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