"Daddy" Part II: "Velda"

Her name was Velda which is Germanic and means "power." She had been born and raised in Love's Valley in Love county, Oklahoma, not ten miles away as a crow flies from where my daddy had been born and raised. They grew up not knowing one another existed and a score of years would pass before they first met.

She had moved with her family to California as a teen and would bloom there like one of the ubiquitous orange blossoms of her adopted state. The image is appropriate because every one who knew her remarked on her beauty and the sweet fragrance her life emitted.

In the late '40s Daddy was stationed at March Air Force Base in Riverside. He and Velda were introduced through his uncle and her aunt. Daddy at the time was young and handsome, and wild.

On one occasion, waiting to visit with her, he and his buddies were killing time in Ontario, sharing a bottle of Bourbon. When the time came to go to her home, Daddy told them, "Don''t bring that bottle to the Brown home." Dismissing this, the custodian of the whiskey carried it to the house and, sitting in Mr. Brown's favorite chair, stashed the half-pint bottle of Bourbon on one side of the cushion of the chair and a bottle of Coke on the other. When Mr. Brown arrived home from work, he took his paper to his favorite chair and began to read. Shifting in his seat, he noticed something strange and fished both bottles from inside the cushion. With a glare, he strode with the bottles to the front porch. Pitching the whiskey into the air, he threw the Coke bottle at it. Both exploded. Returning to his chagrined and embarrassed guests, his pulled up all of his one hundred and twenty-five pounds and said with a voice husky with anger, "Jim, don't you ever bring that stuff into my house again!" He would never have to say this again.

The romance grew, while Daddy's wild ways continued. Once, laughing, he told Velda of a night he spent in the jail in Big Bear for drunk and disorderly conduct. Velda did not laugh and sternly told him, "Jim, if you are going to continue to have anything to do with me, you are going to have to change your way of living." He did.

Shortly, thereafter, he professed faith and was baptized in the Ontario Church of Christ. And, soon after that, while the family was making plans for their wedding, the two of them traveled to Quartzite, Arizona, where they were married by a justice of the peace. I think this reflects a certain wildness, or, at least, nonconformity, in both of them.

They were unspeakably happy and they spread that happiness wherever they went. Velda, like Jim, was a happy, garrulous, gregarious person. Everyone remembers them as a couple who spread joy wherever they went. "There was always so much laughter wherever they were," my aunt remembers. That is how they are remembered: Two beautiful, happy people.

On October 25, 1951, their only child was born. Daddy always called me on my birthday, and he always began the conversation with these words, "It was snowing on Mt. Baldy the day you were born. It was the happiest day of my life." The happiness continued and the dozens of Kodak photographs from the period attest to this. There was only one shadow; Velda suffered from acute indigestion and it seemed to get worse and worse. Other than this, their life was full: Velda keeping their little house, loving her child; Jim working and occasionally preaching at the Church of Christ. It was a good life. It was a charmed life.

But Velda's suffering increased. After her doctor tried everything to relieve her symptoms, he finally referred them to a specialist in Pasadena. They made he trip to Pasadena together. They had been there before to enjoy the famous Rose Bowl Parade. After he had examined her, the doctor came to Jim in the waiting room and said, "I want to operate in the morning."

Jim was with Velda's parents in the hospital waiting room where the surgeon joined them after the operation. "Mr. Smith," he said, "I am so sorry, but your wife is suffering from advanced colon cancer. There is nothing we can do for her but make her as comfortable as possible in the coming months." Jim managed to croak out the inevitable question, "How long?" "Six months," the doctor replied. And six months later- to the day, Velda died.

The next six months were hell. Velda wasted away from her normal one-hundred-forty pounds to barely seventy-five. She was given more and larger doses of morphine for the pain, but toward the end, she was screaming with pain fifteen minutes after the last dose. Her grieving mother cared for her and for Tommy while Jim continued to work. At times, she would weep and say to Jim. "Take care of my baby, Jim. Take care of Tommy!"

On her last day, she was taken to the hospital in a white ambulance with Jim sitting, chatting with the driver. Thoughtlessly, making small talk, he said, "I remember the last time I rode in this thing..." Velda, with tears, uncharacteristically cried out, "Jim, Shut up!" They together had been bringing Tommy home.

She died in the night. She had turned twenty-four her last birthday. The funeral that followed, the friends, the family, the expressions of grief and love and sympathy were all a blurr. There are colored slides of the grave, covered with flowers. There were memories of how he grieved, how he keened out his pain at the grave and finally had to be pulled away, all of which trickled my way over the years.

But, for twenty years he would say nothing, would tell me nothing of my beautiful, engaging mother, apart from snippets like, "She was fine." "She was good." "She was better than I ever deserved." "She was beautiful."

On a March day in 1973, on the day when he first met my own beautiful wife-to-be, the floodgates of memory were opened, and as Kathy and I sat and listened and wept, he, also weeping, told us the beautiful and tragic story. I was twenty-one and for the rest of his life we would be best friends.

...to be continued