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This year I got a gift, which is also a challenge. It is a year of writing the answers to Storyworth questions which will be assembled in a book after a year
Paul Edward Miller was 27 when I was born. He had survived a stint in the Army as a Morse code operator in Manila. He had relocated from the Pittsburgh, PA area where he had been one of the youngest of more than a dozen siblings and nieces and nephews raised jointly by his Dad, Brother-in-law and oldest sister after his mother died when he was 7. He married my mom, and they had a difficult time conceiving and then had miscarried a baby boy before I showed up in the 4th year they were together.
Dad loved kids, and he was a playful and energetic companion. He had nicknames for me, the neighbor kids and my cousins that made us laugh and feel special. He worked hard and came home to scoop me up and onto his shoulders, but after playing he wanted to sit down, put up his feet, drink a beer and watch the news. “Hey kid, you make a better door than you do a window.” Meant we were blocking his tv view. Kids were fun, but blood made him faint and he only ever changed one diaper. He had iron clad ideas, he had gender roles, boys got motorcycles and had to mow the lawn, girls helped their mom and never got the motorcycle. No wife of his was going to keep working once there were kids to raise. He didn’t have kids so he could go out and party or leave them behind on a vacation, but his equal share in raising us was bringing home the check and being there when he wasn’t at work. Mom never really got a break.
When we adopted my first brother, I was almost 5, and then 12 when my brother Lance was born. Dad did learn to be softer with having a Down’s syndrome baby, he loved all three of us intently and would have easily given us everything he had. He was smart, maybe the smartest man I ever met, certainly could have been a Jeopardy champion. As a child, his family financial status meant he had been tracked to a technical high school and never allowed to consider college. His first new pair of pants were for 8th grade graduation and he tore them that same day, scrambling over a chain link fence. His sister who was only a year younger than he was, never let him forget that he had dropped her only doll in a bucket of water, which made her go bald.
He was raised in a prejudiced time and place but saw people as individuals and was often amazed that the people he made friends with were always exceptions, “he’s not like a real Mexican” to the stereotypes he didn’t question. He used words like “Hunkie, Wop, Nigger, and Polock” in the jokes he repeated and as the term used to name items like Brazil nuts and cabbage rolls. I don’t think he ever questioned that until he had kids in Jr. High, and by then he had met enough exceptions to begin to change his language. He never really met a stranger, just friends he didn’t know yet. He taught me to love people and to have an obnoxious sense of humor and I miss him every day.
When I became a mom he loved being a grandpa. He played tirelessly with my boys and my brother’s three children, but that was cut short when esophageal cancer killed him just before his first two grandchildren turned 4 and only 5 months before the birth of his 5th and final grandchild. I often made decisions on how I was going to parent by reminding myself that he would have given anything to be able to say, “yes, I’ll take you fishing. Or Yes, I’ll play with you and read to you.” So I said “Yes” a lot more.
when I cried my three year old assured me, “the part of us that is the strongest, never dies, and the part of Papa Paul that loved us was the strongest part of him.” He was a complicated, loving human born in complicated times and nearly impossible poverty, but he grew to be a generous and wonderful man.
