Dear Readers,

I’m at the end of a long and terrible cold/virus and I’m feeling weepy.  I miss my dad.  I had him for eighty-three years, but it wasn’t enough.

What provoked this weepiness?  This morning I hung my coffee mug on the hooks under my kitchen cabinet here in Cramer Hill.  It was thirty-some years ago that my dad put up those hooks for me.  Seeing the hooks made me cry.

When my dad died in 2003, I cried, but somehow I bricked up how terrible I felt. It was too hard to bear. Life had to keep rolling on.

Sometimes, though, it hits me that he’s really, really gone and inside my heart, I feel all crumply and sad.    It’s irrevocable I’ll never talk to him again.

Dad had a cockatoo in the jungle of New Guinea when he was there as a lineman in WWII and he was crazy about the bird. He was a kind, young soldier in the U.S. Army from North Camden who befriended a beautiful white cockatoo.

He made some sort of application to try to send it back to the USA.  I don’t know if that was possible?  However, he said that another soldier had taught the bird rude words and then there was no chance for the application to be approved.  I don’t think he ever forgave that soldier.  My father didn’t talk like that and that soldier ruined my dad’s dream to send the bird home.

When I grew up, we kids only heard bits and pieces of family stories and I’m sorry for that.  I wish that I could ask him to tell me more.  What was the bird’s name?  Did he tame it?  (I have that idea.) How long did he have it?  Who turned down the request? What happened to the bird after he left New Guinea?

There are so many times that I want to tell or ask him something and I can’t.  Usually I just brush it away because what else can I do?

Today I cried and then I decided to write a blog.

Rest in peace, Dad.  William Edward Wunsch, Jr., 1920-2003.

 

Thanks for reading.

Marguerite (Wunsch) Ferra, Cramer Hill resident

 

M