My Dad, Sterling W. Camden III, always cultivated a reputation for being a bad-ass, even when he was a 125-pound nineteen-year-old Airman Third Class stationed in Germany.  He got into so many fights that his commanding officer decided to teach him a lesson by making him room with Walter Dale Goss – a hulking six-foot four-inch Cherokee who hardly spoke to anyone and spent most of his spare time lying on his bunk staring at the ceiling.

Airman Camden discovered Goss in that pose when he burst through the door, dropped his duffel bag, and took out a piece of chalk.  He drew a line across the floor between their bunks, up the wall, across the ceiling, and down the opposite wall.

“All right, you big mother-fucking Indian,” says Camden.  “You cross that line and I’ll kill your ass.”

Goss turned his gaze from the point on the ceiling towards the scrawny but vehement form that stared death and destruction back in his direction.  He laughed.  “C’mon, I’ll buy you a beer,” Goss said.  And therewith began a lifelong friendship.  Camden found his new giant friend extremely useful, and Goss was happy to have a companion who believed that he possessed “potential.”  They became blood brothers, Camden making much of the fact that he, too, could claim Native American ancestry.

Goss was pretty disappointed to lose his roommate when Camden married my future mother while on leave in the States.   Not long afterwards, Goss left the Air Force to join the Hells Angels, vowing to my father that “you’ll never see me again.”

One evening a couple of years later, Dad was outside our student housing at Syracuse (where the Air Force had him taking Intermediate Russian).  My playpen had been left outside and Dad was struggling to disassemble it in the deepening darkness.  Suddenly a blinding light engulfed him, and behind the flashlight he could just make out a looming figure, from whom boomed a deep but familiar voice: “What the hell are you doing with a playpen, you idiot.”  It was Goss.  He had re-enlisted, and the Air Force had sent him to Syracuse in the Intermediate Russian class right behind Dad’s.

Ever afterwards he became the roving member of our family.  We called him Wally, though he was variously known by others as “Walt” or “Dale”.  He’d visit once a year or so, always with some new adventure under his belt.  Once he had driven to Alaska and back in his Austin-Healey convertible.  His idea of trip-planning was to draw a line across the map from his point of departure to his destination, using a ruler, and then follow it as closely as possible.  The Healey was covered with mud, and Dad asked, “Don’t you ever wash that thing?”  Wally replied, “I let God wash it.”

Dad wanted to drive the Austin-Healey.  Wally got in the passenger seat, and they took off down the Pittsville Road.  When they neared the sharp left curve at Jack Mason’s Garage, Dad glanced down at the speedometer: 80.  He cut to the inside of the turn just as a ‘57 Ford popped into view from the other direction.  Dad cut back to the outside, sliding through the gravel of Jack’s parking lot (sending Jack running for cover).  He skidded back onto the road and continued as if nothing had happened, except for the adrenalin shakes that kicked in along the next straightaway.  And for as long as Wally owned the Healey, it bore the imprint of Wally’s ten fingers in the passenger side of its padded dashboard.

When I was five, Wally visited on leave from the Viet Nam War.  He brought us gifts from Thailand.  Mine was a real Siamese sword with a blade almost two feet long.  Wally handed it to me and said, “Here, kid – go get your sister.”  So I unsheathed it and ran after Roanna, who screamed through the house while Dad and Wally lay on the ground laughing as hard as they could.  My mother finally stopped me.  I still have that sword.  I keep it in my office in case of Ninja attack.

My sister Roanna, who was four, had a crush on Wally.  She informed him that she would marry him one day.  “Forget it, kid.” he replied.  “By the time you’re grown, I’ll be old, fat, and bald.”  “But Wally,” said my sister, “you’re already old, fat, and bald” — at which point my father spewed his beer across the room.

One Thanksgiving, Wally arrived with a huge turkey.  Naturally, Dad made all the appropriate wisecracks about the Indian joining us pale-faces for Thanksgiving.  We had a huge feast, and for dessert Mom offered pie.  “Is it homemade?” asked Wally enthusiastically.  “Why, Yes!” responded Mom, as she began to cut a large slice for him.  “Oh, I don’t want any then” said Wally.  We all laughed, but Mom made sure that he didn’t get any.

I believe Wally was there the Christmas that Dad shot Santa.  Wally introduced me to Heinlein, his motorcycle, and his .357 magnum.  Dad always said there were two things about Wally that were never adequately explained: why the Air Force had always allowed him to carry that .357, and why they allowed him to fly while wearing contact lenses when he was legally blind in a number of states.

Dad and I drove to Texas to visit Wally when he became an officer.  It was a trip I’ll never forget.

Wally met his second wife in Crete – Geraldine Andrews, who is full-blooded Irish from Dublin.  She instantly became another member of our family.  She accompanied my mother and us kids to church once –Geraldine had never been to a Methodist church before (she being Catholic, of course), but she was warmly greeted by a congregation that was about 80% Andrews – many of their ancestors having emigrated from Scotland and Ireland centuries before.

I lost contact with Wally and Geraldine when I went to college, and didn’t see Wally again until my father died.  The next day, as my sister Roanna and I drove to the airport to pick up my sons for the funeral, Roanna suddenly asked me if I maybe thought that…

“.. that Wally helped Dad out?” I interrupted.

“Yes!” said Roanna.  “He didn’t tell me so, but you know that the agency trained them how to do it so you couldn’t tell.’”

“Last night Wally told me that he had come close to killing Dad back in 1972” (That was when Dad had set himself down to drink himself to death).  “I wondered at the time why he volunteered that information.  Well, if he did it, then I’m thankful.”

I never asked Wally about that.  We’ve corresponded by email over the years, but I’ve never seen him in person again since Dad’s funeral – and I never will.  I received a message this morning that Wally passed away.  He went peacefully, I heard – and for that, I’m thankful.

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Today is September 10, 2008 and the LHC has not destroyed the solar system.  Yet.  Maybe some other time.

Today my father would have been 71.  Had he lived, he would have wanted the folks at CERN to fire up the LHC — no matter if the chance of creating a black hole in our part of the galaxy were 50% or even more.  He was adventuresome that way.  “What the hell,” he would have said, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!“  That was one of his favorite quotations, because it matched the way he lived his life.

That’s him on the left, when he was a twenty year old airman in the USAF, stationed in Germany in the late 1950s and working for NSA.  For this picture, though, he was working on a bottle of the local wine with his buddies.  I believe he said it was Berg Bergweg, 1956.  Newly bottled, it cost only one mark — which was about 25 cents US at that time.  The GIs therefore drank it like water.

One day when I was a teenager, Dad was reading his Time magazine and suddenly shouted, “Well I’ll be god damned!”  Time had an article on the finest and rarest wines in the world.  Near the top of the list was Berg Bergweg, 1956.  “Hell,” he said, “I’ve spent many a cold night curled up over a manhole cover with a bottle of that stuff.  I must have drunk it nearly to extinction!”

He remained a heavy drinker for most of his life, and it was one of those torpedoes that eventually got him.

Miss you, Dad.

Yesterday marked the tenth anniversary of my father’s death. Hard to believe we’ve lived a decade without him. Here’s a collection of stories about my Dad that I’ve written on this blog previously (scroll down past this one, or read them all together if you like).

When I was in high school, Dad got me a job at the auto parts store where he was the manager. The picture on the left was taken when we both worked there. The store was part of a local chain of NAPA jobbers called Franklin Auto Parts, and it was owned by a triumvirate of interesting characters from Rocky Mount, in Franklin County. The most vocal member of this trio was named Jack Martin.

Jack was the archetype of the loud, superficially friendly salesman — with a dose of Franklin County crudeness thrown in. For example, my father told me about one time they went to dinner at one of Jack’s favorite steak restaurants after they had all been out drinking for hours and felt the need of an alcohol sponge in their stomachs. Jack frequented this establishment so often that he had his own preferred waitress who knew exactly what he liked to order and how he wanted it cooked: T-bone steak, extremely rare. But on this occasion that waitress had the night off, and someone else approached the loudly populated table. Perceiving immediately that Jack was the one in charge, she asked for his order first.

“Hey, where’s Dolly?” said Jack.

“Oh, she has the night off. What’ll you have?”

Jack paused long enough for his impaired faculties to process this strange turn of events. “Well, T-bone steak, of course!”

“And how would like that cooked, sir?”

Jack pushed himself back from the table, and said in a voice loud enough for anyone who cared (and many who didn’t) to hear, “Well, honey, you just knock his horns off, wipe his ass, and run him in here!”

That was not uncharacteristic of Jack, but he was actually quite likable once you got past his rough manner. He appreciated honesty, and he liked the work I did for him. So much, in fact, that he came to the store one day when I was a senior in high school and offered me a promotion. Dad was sitting by the counter listening to our conversation.

“Chip, if you’ll stay here with me instead of goin’ off to college, I’ll give you a store of your own.”

I replied, “No, I’m going to college to make something of myself. I’m not going to work for you for peanuts for the rest of my life, like my Dad.”

Dad slapped his knee and burst out laughing so hard the cigarette fell from his mouth. “You tell him, son!” He related that episode to every friend of his that came into the store for days afterward, laughing afresh at each retelling.

I had a habit back then (still do to some degree) of speaking my mind before considering how it might make others feel. I’m sure my words rubbed a lot of salt into Dad’s long open wounds. He had given up his dream career in NSA years before, just to be with his family. Then we settled in rural Virginia where both sides of the family had lived for centuries. Even though he was a highly skilled Russian linguist, the best job he could find anywhere around was managing an auto parts store. He was damned good at it, but his talents were grossly under-utilized.

At that moment, though, Dad didn’t care a fig for any of that. He was just proud that I had stood up to the boss — and that I had refused to take a cheap ticket out of my dreams.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

– Kahlil Gibran, echoing Nietzsche

That was Dad’s best quality.

My Dad had a love-hate relationship with his US Air Force career. On the one hand, he loved the work he did for NSA during the Cold War as a Russian analyst. On the other hand, he hated all of the “chickenshit” rules and regulations, as well as how much time he had to spend away from his family. But he always voiced his distaste in his own signature style of humor.

When I was not quite two years old and my sister not quite one, my father was assigned to a year in Shemya, Alaska — a barren island in the Aleutians where the only companionship other than his fellow airmen were the ubiquitous Arctic foxes and one huge Malemute named Boozer (the second, pictured), who shared their beer and wandered the base in a drunken haze.

My mother, sister, and I stayed with my mother’s parents on their ninety-some acre farm, along with one aunt, two great-aunts, several pigs, many cows, a duck or two, chickens, and guinea hens. We children enjoyed tagging along with our grandfather while he silently performed his chores, and listening to our grandmother’s stories, but we often missed our father — who came to have a mythic significance.

Living among older folks in a family with a long history represented vividly by a family cemetary within walking distance, casual conversation often turned towards those who had gone on before. I remember one time, sitting in my mother’s lap at the table with all these relatives discussing people who had died and of course someone inevitably said that everyone has to go sometime, as if that were a new idea. Well, for me it was — and I thought to myself, “One day all these people here will be gone, and we’ll talk about them.” And now they all are, except for my sister, my mother, and myself.

My mother, who was then a Southern Baptist, often sang us this hymn:

For God so loved the world
He gave his only Son
To die upon a tree
From sin to set me free
One day he’s coming back
What glory that will be
Wonderfullest Love for me

At that tender age, we didn’t pick up on the gruesomeness of a mythology in which a father will sacrifice his son for the sake of his own botched creation, nor did we perceive the inherent solipsism of the last line. What I picked up on was the line “One day he’s coming back,” which is what Mommy always said about Daddy.

“Mommy, did Daddy die?”

Hmm, let’s see. Given someone who will be coming back someday, the probability that they died first could be computed as the probability that people who die first come back afterwards, times the probability of their having died in the first place, divided by the probability of their coming back whether or not they had died. But I lacked sufficient data to plug into Bayes’ formula. Not to mention a complete lack of understanding of logic in general. My little brain then operated more analogically — and not very precisely at that. More allegorical, as are the thoughts of most children and many adults. But neither had I been introduced to the concept of blasphemy, which helps to keep allegorical thinking within prescribed bounds.

My mother corrected my error, and I’m fairly certain that was the last time anyone ever confused my Dad with Jesus Christ.

When he finally got the orders to return from Shemya, my Dad had to find whatever flights he could hop from Alaska all the way back to any airport within driving or thumbing distance of southern Virginia. He managed to get to Seattle, but everything out of Seattle to anywhere not in Alaska was booked solid for days. So there he was, stranded not far from where I’m sitting now, wishing he could find a way all the way across the continent. It was overcast and raining (imagine that). He never spoke well of Seattle afterwards.

Dad entered a nearby bar and began scouting around. He fell into conversation with a fellow who was leaving that night on a plane to Chicago, who offered to buy a drink for a man in uniform. My father bought the second round, and they soon became fast friends. Dad was a handy drinker, and his new buddy struggled to keep up. Dad bought the next round as well, to his companion’s high accolades regarding his newfround friend’s most suberp generrossity. After sheveral more rounds, our eshteemed pashengerr began to whynder won the bar was turnin’. Then he suddenly noticed the time and realized that he needed to hurry to his gate. He said a quick goodbye, stood up, and promptly passed out. Dad lifted the ticket neatly from his jacket and headed for his flight to Chicago.

Once on the plane, he was finally able to get some sleep — and he dreamt that he was in a plane that was going down, without hope of survival. In his dream, he looked out the window and saw “UNITED” written across the wing in big letters — just before he awoke, relieved to realize that he wasn’t on a United flight.

In Chicago, he worked hard to find a flight eastward, and finally secured one heading to Dulles. He just had time to get on board, but he was in high spirits. He was heading home! An elderly lady in a nearby seat whimpered that she was afraid of flying. My father, still in uniform, assured her on the safety of modern air travel. While thus engaged, he happened to look beyond her and out the window. Across the wing, written in big letters: “UNITED”.

All during that flight Dad worried he would never see his family again, alternately chastising himself for his superstitious fear, all the while hiding his consternation from his elderly fellow-passenger. They landed at Dulles without incident.

Then, Dad got orders for Fort Meade, Maryland. NSA Headquarters, and also close to one of the best eye surgeons in the country, who would help to make my right eye functional, if not very well aligned. We had a good life in Maryland, with Dad coming home every night.

One of the memories imprinted as if on my retina was the day we moved into that apartment on the second floor with a balcony. Dad drove us in the blue/white ’58 Plymouth around behind the building, where one of the movers waved to us. We went up into the apartment, where boxes lay scattered about. Dad found a big living-room chair, sat down it, and said “Come here, son!” With a big grin he scooped me up in his arms and pressed me against his prickly face, reeking of Old Spice and cigarettes. It’s still one of my favorite memories.

When it came time for new orders, they told my Dad, “You have a choice: Trebizond, Turkey or Peshawar, Pakistan.” Both were remote — no family allowed. That, added to Dad’s frustration at not having been promoted for over five years due only to quotas, broke it. “Nope. I’ve got one more choice: Gretna, Virginia” — hometown to both of my parents and their ancestors for hundreds of years. Forever afterwards, Dad cursed the Air Force for forcing him to decide between his family and a career the likes of which he never found again.

On his last day at NSA, my father wore his dress blues to work — which naturally drew attention, but even more so because of a single personalized addition he had made. As Dad left at the end of the day, he happened to meet a Colonel at the door. After the customary salutes, the Colonel asked his reason for wearing the dress uniform. My father informed him that today was his last day in the service. The Colonel wished him luck and gave him leave to go.

My father didn’t dare look back as he walked away, but he could hear the Colonel laughing behind him. He had caught sight of Dad’s unique wardrobe customization: pinned to the coattails of his dress blues — a sprig of mistletoe.

You know that you’re really starting to grok a language when you begin to dream in it. As opposed to merely being able to translate to and from your native tongue, your mind has learned to swim in the rhythm and harmonies of a language if you can continue that activity in the less intentional realm of dreams.

My father, who was once a Russian linguist in NSA, continued to dream in Russian often for the rest of his life. Occasionally he would even speak Russian in his sleep.

When I was in college, I was simultaneously studying Hebrew and Greek at the same time I was programming in COBOL, Algol, and Assembler (Data General Eclipse variety). That made for some bizarre sleep-talking entertainment for my roommate.

Aside: I wrote a short poem back then for a female colleague:

Life is like a COBOL program:
Skip a period and you’ve had it.

Just before the birth of my first son, an old college roommate came to visit. At the time, I was just getting down and dirty with process control programming on RSX-11M in Fortran77. Among its many limitations, RSX-11M required that installed tasks have names that were unique to three characters in order to be launched from an MCR (“Monitor Console Routine” — i.e., command) prompt. Writing new utilities required quite a bit of ingenuity to create TLA‘s that were both unique and memorable.

Anyway, to celebrate my roommate’s visit, we split a large bottle of Bacardi 151 — and neither of us were frequent drinkers. In the middle of the night, my (first) wife awakens to discover me, sitting naked at the table, holding in my hands a stuffed gorilla (a present from an earlier girlfriend) and talking to said simian in three-letter “words”.

That’s when she called the priest to inform him that should she go into labor that night, he (not I) would be accompanying her to the hospital.

Over the years, I’ve often dreamed in computer languages. From the pithy and obscure C language dreams:

*(meaning = &significance)

Does that crash? Depends on what holds significance. Then there’s the long, dreary, mantra-like liturgies of Java and C#:

public class monthlyExpenditure

(with eighteen different constructors). The occasional VB nightmare:

Set Life = Nothing

and the more recent pleasurable dreams of Ruby:

moments.each { |diem| carpe diem }

This morning I awoke a happy man. Last night I had my first dream in Lisp, with my thoughts elegantly unfolding in a parenthesized Mandelbrot set.

(defun life(means) (what (you (think it means))))

Of course, you must first define what, you, think.

I follow a few simple rules about maintaining some shreds of privacy when blogging. I never mention living family members by name, nor do I include photos of them. I don’t publish our physical address or even our street name (it’s handy to have a box at the UPS Store for a mailing address). I don’t mention what schools my kids attend. And it’s not just to keep weirdos from tracking down my children. As TDavid pointed out, “when they become adults we feel that they should decide what they do and don’t want Googled”.

And who knows what kind of successor to Internet search will be available by then? Back in the early 80′s when I was clawing at the corporate ladder, I probably would have been pretty embarrassed to have my colleagues see this picture of me and my Dad, taken in 1976. Funny, now I’m more embarrassed about ever having participated in that PHB-dominated culture than I am about having gone through a teenage Messianic phase .

My Dad played a good Satan to my Jesus. He drank, smoked, cursed, stayed up ’til all hours, drove fast, didn’t go to church, and didn’t mind getting into a fight. He and I exchanged the traditional parent/teenager roles to some degree.

But he taught me a lot. As a good Tempter should, he was always trying to make me into a real man instead of some sort of an angel. He would often force me to fight him with real punches (against my wishes) so I would be able to hold my own on the schoolyard. When he’d finally get me to knock him down or draw blood, he’d sit back and laugh, and then get up and give me a big bear hug. He taught me to aim and fire a shotgun when I was five, to drive a tractor when I was eight, and to drive a ’51 International pick-up on the farm when I was ten.

We spent a lot of time together in that ’69 Dodge Monaco pictured right behind us. Late nights after Johnny Carson we would hit the back-roads for more advanced driving instruction when I was about 14. I still remember the way that boat would pitch and yaw over the paved waves of state highway 40. The feel of the vinyl-covered steering wheel in my sweaty palms at 4AM on the way home as I tried to pilot that barge between the lines while Dad snored in the seat beside me.

By the time the picture above was taken, I had become a religious pacifist. I vowed never to become like my father. As Mark Twain said:

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

My father did the one thing for me that helped to humanize me more than anything else I have ever experienced. He put me to work at the auto parts store he managed. Yes, he put my introverted, naive ass right out there in front of the public. And what a public it was: mostly salty old mechanics who had no time for religion or philosophy. It taught me a lot about dealing with all kinds of people. For instance, when you’ve been told that you aren’t to extend credit to a particular customer because of his payment history, and he walks in and says “charge it to my account”, you don’t respond with “I’m sorry I can’t, because you don’t pay your bills.” After he stormed out, my other coworkers were a little too eager to inform me that the gentleman in question had been known to put people in the hospital when they pissed him off. I’m sure that the only thing that separated my scrawny ass from the mutilation it so richly deserved was my father’s reputation.

Dad cultivated his reputation, in his own words, as “the meanest son of a bitch in Pittsylvania County.” He was former NSA. He left the front door of his house unlocked, but every gun in the house was loaded at all times. He used to drill us children on what to do in case of a home invasion. My station was under the foot of the stairs with the .410 shotgun. Dad parked his car (and later his truck) in town with the doors unlocked and the key in the ignition. To anyone who asked he replied that he hoped someone would mess with him so he could have the pleasure of beating the living shit out of them.

That’s why on one Thanksgiving when I was living alone in California and I made a surprise trip back to my parent’s house in Virginia, I knew that the front door would be unlocked. I walked in without so much as knocking. Neither was I surprised when Dad instinctively reached for the loaded rifle he always kept near his chair (it’s by a corner of the cabinet just off the left edge of this picture). Of course, he immediately set it back in its place when he recognized me and gave me a big hug instead of some lead.

My Mom and sister had just taken the turkey out of the oven, so I had timed my spontaneous red-eye trip perfectly. Have you ever tried to get airline tickets for the day before Thanksgiving, on the day before Thanksgiving?

The last time I saw my father alive was on a Thanksgiving four years later, along with my new (current/final) wife and our young child. Dad knew he was dying. He was very thin and frail, and had a hard time getting around. But, as usual when I came to visit, he insisted on driving his grey Silverado pickup to the local store in town, taking me along for conversation. Though his steps across the parking lot were measured and painful, he held his head high and looked everyone in the eye. He left the truck unlocked, and the key in the ignition.

And nobody messed with the meanest son of a bitch in Pittsylvania County.

Yes, John, I am worried (Thanks RexWorld). Really worried.