happy birthday, Belovedy!

March 12, 1972. Memories, there are memories, memories stir! Maybe I'll ramble a bit and reminisce. 

March 1972: the previous summer, I had completed a sea duty tour, we had PCS'd from San Diego and were living on Naiche Road in Columbus, Ohio, where I was stationed as a Navy commander. Ohio was California by NO means! For One, a mild jolt of going from a land of beautiful, healthy trim Californians to a land of plump Yankee Germans, Oktoberfest, and total obsession with hunting season! Deer season, every section in our huge office complex had a desk with covered dishes of steaming hot venison specialties for everyone to wander through and sample. Yankees everywhere, but I no longer had to be uneasy about tarantulas in the garage.

For Another, the weather! Except for the wild-fires that we watched zipping up and down the sides of the mountains just east of our Chula Vista neighborhood, wildfires that drifted burning ash onto the wooden shingles of our roof, San Diego weather was pleasant year-round. It was before climate change and those sky rivers that lately have been dumping snow blizzards on Southern California. The Ohio winter took us back to our Navy tours in Newport, Rhode Island and Ann Arbor, Michigan, dealing with biting wind, ice, and digging cars out of snowdrifts. 

For Another, the landscape. We'd found Southern California almost barren of trees; Ohio was filled with leafy greenery: running out our back yard was a stand of tall trees that had once marked the boundary between two pastures, the barbed wire fence separating them was still there. Beyond our Ohio backyard was a thick bramble of blackberry bushes where immediately upon arriving late summer 1971, I had wandered sweaty in shorts and shirtless, unaware that the three-leaf bushes I was rubbing against was all poison ivy. Within two days I was broken out in rash from head to toe, itching and scratching and getting up in the middle of the night to take scalding hot showers to ease the incredible, stinging itch. 

But we were home in America's midwest, no more saluting Permission to come aboard? No more I have permission to leave the ship. No more Underway, Shift Colors, no more WestPac deployments, no more DING DING DING DING NOW THIS IS A DRILL, THIS IS A DRILL, GENERAL QUARTERS, GENERAL QUARTERS, ALL HANDS MAN YOUR BATTLE STATIONS DING DING DING at all hours. 

Now home in Whitehall out on the east side of Columbus, in a new neighborhood on old Ohio pasture and farmland, within sight of a Jewish temple, near tree-shaded Big Walnut Creek, wonderful things were destined for us: Linda was pregnant. 

!!! Pregnant!!! A baby: my favorite creatures! We had found out while visiting Linda's mother when we'd stopped in Scottsdale, Arizona on leave between duty stations. Total surprise. Linda was 35, I was 36. Malinda, who is now 65, was coming up on 14. Joe, just turned 63, had just turned 11. Tiger, our fluffy yellow cat that we'd brought from Japan, was with us, and Brucie our collie-like Shetland sheepdog who could never keep still or quiet. From upstairs, Malinda's stereo that I'd brought her from the Marine Corps Exchange in Okinawa, poured throughout the house, the sounds of Jim Croce singing "If I had Time in a bottle" and "Bad, bad LeRoy Brown." Jody, now Joe, had his usual flock of new friends. 

At our new Ohio house, in the garage with no tarantulas, were the exotic and elegant Ford Thunderbird sedan with suicide doors that we'd acquired in Newport RI, and the old early model, fading green Volkswagen bug that I'd bought totally reconditioned for $695 from H B Lantzsch Volkswagen in Fairfax, Virginia for my daily commute from Annandale down to the Navy Annex. 

Saturday evening the 1972 weekend of March 11, 12 we were to attend a cocktail party at the home of one of the officers at our new duty station. But as we started out the door, Linda's water broke. We telephoned the party host and said we were heading for the hospital instead. On the road to the hospital, the Thunderbird slipped and slid on black streets of sheet ice. At the hospital the baby's foot had already emerged and the doctor hooked up a heart monitor and put me in charge of watching lest the cord be pinched and he had to do a Caesarian for the footling breech birth that was unfolding. I watched the "ticker tape" carefuily over the next couple hours. I still have the tape, labled "Cathy's Heartbeat"

This was in the Time before anyone knew whether the baby would be girl or boy. We had two names picked out, I don't remember the boy's name. In the wee hours of Sunday morning, March 12, 1972, Cathlyn Marie Lucile Weller was born. Marie for Marie Louise, a lifelong family friend. "Lucile" with one "l" because she's named for Linda's mother Lucile, who was named for her mother Lucile. Cathlyn for a dear family friend Catherine and Linda's cousin Lynn. I think the Lucile got left off her birth certificate, we meant to have it corrected later, maybe we did.

Sunday evening, March 12, 1972, after visiting the hospital, I took Malinda and Joe to a drive-in restaurant for supper, hamburgers. When we got ready to leave, the Thunderbird wouldn't start, the return of a problem that we'd had a couple of Times. I called a taxi, we got a ride home, and the next morning I had the T-Bird towed to a shop for repair. The next day I drove to the airport in the reliable old VW to meet my mother, who flew up to help us for a few days.  

A baby girl! I was smitten, totally bowled over smitten. I couldn't wait to get home from work every day. When I was home I didn't let anyone fool with her, hold her, rock her, hum to her, change her diapers, put her down in her crib, pick her up, but me. The only thing I couldn't do was feed her, because she was breast fed. At one point, watching me with her in the rocking chair as I snuggled her on my shoulder and cheek to cheek, whispering in her ear, Malinda commented to her mom, "Dad really loves her, doesn't he?!." Linda said "He's not treating her any different from how he treated you and Joe." I'm a baby person. I learned it taking care of my first cousins the Malone girls when I was coming into my teens, whom I grew up thinking they were mine! In fact, Carol Malone is named for me!

Wandering, reminiscing. Just one more thing. Cathlyn Marie Lucile Weller, we called her Cathy. Or Cathy Marie. Or Khaki Marie. When she started talking and referring to herself she'd say, "Mom, look at Her!" Unable to say the "k" sound or the "th" sound she called herself Tassy. It stuck. She's Tassy, or Tass. Sometimes, T-Marie, which her namesake Marie Louise Hagler loved.

Everything about her life has shown me how much parents' loving a child so deeply and totally can affect her. I've loved doing things for her. For me, maybe mostly buying her cars: an old Lincoln, a Mercedes, another Lincoln. an Acura, an Explorer, .... . When she went away to college in Virginia I literally thought I was going to die, but we were able to visit her lots of Times while she was there, and I made it and learned that I could do it when later Kristen went to college in Atlanta! 

Tass does all things well. I won't list things. Well, maybe salutatorian, Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, vice president of a corporation, perfect mom. To her dismay, I used to say that she's perfect and any minor flaws only add to her perfection. All her growing up years, I worried about her obsessively, sometimes driving her to distraction. If she reads this morning's blogpost, she's not going to like hearing all this again, but it's all my truth. 

Her given name Cathlyn, Cathy evaporated as from about age two, she grew up Tassy, Tass, sometimes to me, Tassa, sometimes TassaRee. IDK why, sometimes her mom called her TassaRee McGillicutty. Some people are the light of another's life. Today is her birthday. She turned 52 this morning. She's still and always her daddy's baby. Belovedy I've called her all her life. She's brought so much happiness into my life, so many happy memories. I should shut up now.

RSF&PTL

T88&c