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Army Private First Class Lawrence J. Curtin
at Fort
Eustis,
Va., in October 1941.
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“You’re making a big mistake,” my father said
20 years ago when I told him I was not going to renew my teaching certificate.
He was angry, and he let me know it. We argued for days about my not wanting
something I would never use. I was in my 40s and a long time out of college.
And yet he was furious that I would toss away something he had paid for and in
which he took great pride.
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I
was his daughter, “the teacher,” you see, never mind that I had taught school,
fourth grade, for only one year way back in 1968, and never mind that I had
been writing for two decades. In my father’s eyes I was and always would be a
teacher, first. The way I was and always would be his daughter first, not my
husband’s wife, not my children’s mother.
After
my father died, his wife gave me two binders she found tucked away in his desk
drawer. One is red and labeled: “World War, 1942/1945, European Campaign,
General Eisenhower,” and is full of pictures of people and places he never
talked about. “French girl, Jeannie.” “Dog named Lucky.” “Phil Hamp, GI.”
“North Africa.” “Algeria.” “Sardinia.” “Tunisia.” Black-and-white photos dated
and pasted on thick white paper.
The
second binder is thicker and must have surprised me when I first saw it. But it
mustn’t have touched me, the way it does now, because if it had, it would be
dog-eared, too. It’s black and is labeled (because my father labeled
everything) “BEVERLY BECKHAM” in all caps. And inside are dozens of columns I
wrote, columns my father printed and saved.
Last
week, at the library, I picked up “Every Father’s Daughter,” a collection of
essays by 24 women writers about their fathers. In the foreword, which broke my
heart a little, the author writes that books were a language she and her father
spoke, that they learned everything they knew about each other because of the
books they read, that it was because of her father’s admiration for writers
that the author became a serious writer, and that even as her father lay dying,
she read to him and books continued to connect them.
And
I thought, my father and I never had that. I never read to him. We never talked
about books. We never had deep conversations based on theory.
And
then I remembered.
I
gave him “DON’T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF ... and it’s all small stuff,” a book by
Richard Carlson, right around the time we were arguing about the teaching
certificate. And he read it. Then he read it again. He read it so many times,
over the years, that it fell apart.
He
quoted from it for the rest of his life. “One hundred years from now, all new
people.” “Don’t interrupt others or finish their sentences.” “Let others be
right most of the time.”
Maybe
he was letting me be right when he stopped talking about the teaching
certificate. Maybe that book was our special language.
I
continue to try to piece together my father’s life. He took me to the movies,
to Paragon Park, to the doctor for my polio shots, because he never cared that
I cried. He taught me how to ride a bike, drive a car, change a tire.
He
gave me gift certificates to Barnes & Noble every year on my birthday
because he knew I loved books. He did this even though he didn’t like gift
certificates. They reminded him of his childhood, he said. They reminded him of
waiting in line for food.
He
was on leave for seven days in Mannheim, Germany, in 1944. He was 21. I never
knew. He never told me. But he showed me in the pictures he left behind.
And
in the big black binder that bears my name, he shows me what I see so clearly
now: not my father and me arguing, but his quiet, constant love.
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Army Private First Class Lawrence J. Curtin (bottom row,
last on right) at Fort Eustis, Va., in October 1941.
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Beverly Beckham’s column appears every two weeks. She can be reached at bevbeckham@gmail.com.
