YESTERDAY AND TODAY: A MOTHER DAUGHTER FATHER'S DAY TRIBUTE TO OUR FATHERS
PART 1
My adoptive father and my birth father, met for the first and only time in Galveston, Texas, at a west-end marina, sometime between 1953 and 1961, a decade or so before I was born.
I picture the moment. Bill Meyer, a heavy-set Hispanic man, sporting a white guayabera shirt and Captain’s hat, turns around, net in hand, asking, “Shad or shrimp Partner?” I imagine Jerry Knight, a short blue-eyed twenty-something, locking eyes on the man ten years his senior, tugging at his straw hat, and pointing toward the tank. “Shad for the Pass, thanks.”
Scooping shad, Daddy probably reported on what fish had been running where, mentioned what fish were biting, during whatever tide, along whatever jetty, and wished the man luck. “Don’t need luck, when you got skill,” the cocky angler would say swinging the bait bucket into his truck bed. Neither man aware that a decade later they’d share more than bait, tackle and small talk—they’d share me.
Forty-odd years later, that young bait-shop customer would be 69 years old, sitting next to me, the grown-daughter he’d never known he had, watching old home movies from my adopted life. And there on the screen, Bill and Jacqui, my future adoptive parents, would stand and wave to the camera under the stilted Tiki-style marina, restaurant and dance hall they owned and operated. Bill would step forward in that white shirt and adjust his Captain’s hat, and Jerry’s eyes would light with recognition.
“I bought bait off that man,” my birth father would say, pointing at the screen. “There in Jamaica Beach, stopped in many times on my way to San Luis Pass.”
Little did either man know that after Hurricane Carla tore a path across the island in 1961, Bill and Jacqui would move to South Houston and try to start a family. Nor did they know that in March of 69, Jerry would create a baby at his family camp, with a young lady he spent the evening with there, along the banks of the San Bernard River. She would not tell him she was pregnant. The situation would be handled as a “private” adoption, and the baby would be handed to Bill and Jacqui on Jan. 11, 1970, along a curb outside a local Houston, Texas hospital.
“No way! Are you sure you remember him?” I ask. “I’m certain that man sold me bait many times. You don’t forget such a big friendly guy wearing a Captain’s hat.”
I had heard that many reunited adoptees discover wild synchronicities once they find their natural families, like learning they both had the same major, or both like pistachio ice cream, but this was on a whole new level, leading me to believe synchronicity and reunion is a real thing.
A few months later, my daughter Victoria and I would bring my birth father Jerry, who used the moniker Pop by then, back to Galveston, to gaze up at the beach front A-frame where we had lived with the man who’d sold him bait four decades before. By the time I was 12, Daddy and my mother had returned to the island with me for a summer. They decided they wanted to stay. Thus from 12 to 21, 1982 to 1991, I lived on the west end of the island in a front row home on the beach. In 1989, I would give birth to my daughter Victoria, and it was at this house where her father Jack and I carried her up the stairs, all of three days old, and placed her in her grandfather Bill’s arms.
Jack and I and the baby would live there with my parents for several fun-filled years. Bonfires and BBQ, fishing and fireworks, horseshoes and horses on the beach, fish frys, crab boils and poker nights followed; all set to a Fats Domino, Eagles and Jimmy Buffet soundtrack. Victoria would grow to call her grandfather Baba, and share many special memories with him. However, at the tender age of 6, on Sept 30, 1995, she would witness her Baba’s heart failure, and watch the paramedics carry his body down those same steps she was carried up. My mother would leave to join me and my daughter in Austin, Texas, and would never return to West Beach.
Thirty odd years later, long after her father and I mutually went our separate ways, and two years after my birth father passed away, my daughter would call me with “big news.” “Mom, Dad wants to rent a beach house for Father’s Day. I told him we should get our old house, it’s a rental.”
And that is what they did. Her father Jack rented the house we once owned. My daughter and son in law, and my two grandsons, as well as Jack’s three son’s from a later marriage, and several other family members, came together to build new memories in this treasured spot. As I write this from my childhood home, it’s 7 am, grandson asleep in the top bunk above my head, the room Daddy died in a floor below. And, rather than be sad for a past now long out of reach, I am elated.
Victoria had inadvertently found just the thing to ease the pain of facing my second Father’s Day without either father.
Last night, I took my oldest grandson to the crabbing spot where I learned to crab so many decades ago. We stopped by the marina my parents once owned, and as we made our way across the parking lot, “What a Wonderful World” drifted on the breeze from a nearby bar.
“That’s the song I played at my Daddy’s funeral,” I say, swinging our bait bucket into the trunk.
I see friend’s shaking hands, saying ‘how do you do, they’re really saying ‘I love You.’
“We love you too Daddy,” I say, handing Ethan a flashlight.
“Maybe we’ll get lucky tonight,” he says, as we head toward the pier.
“Don’t need luck when you’ve got skill,” I add, as a smile as wide as Galveston Bay spreads across my face.
PART TWO
My daughter also wrote a little something for Father’s Day. She did a beautiful job, and I am so excited to include below as a companion piece to this post:
“A Great Soul” by Maya Angelou “A great soul serves everyone, all the time. A great soul never dies. It brings us together again and again.”
It’s Father’s Day weekend, and I’m sitting on the beach where I ran and played as a child, my senses brought to life. The beach air tousles my hair, the sand grinds between my toes, I smell salt and kelp, and I can almost feel his eyes on me from the top deck where he sat and watched over me so many times. My Baba, my grandfather, known to others as Bill Meyer. I lost him at six years old, but the imprint he made on me seems everlasting. I feel his soul when I tap my feet to the rhythm of a Fats Domino song, I feel it when I’m preparing a delicious meal for my family or mixing up a batter for pound cake or chocolate chip cookies. I hear his laugh come out of me when I’m overfilled with joy surrounded by those I love.
When Maya Angelou wrote, “A great soul never dies, it brings us together again and again,” she was certainly speaking about a soul like my BaBa’s. A few months ago, my father asked me if I wanted to plan a family beach trip, and my first thought was to rent the beach house where I lived with him and my family as a little girl. That house calls to me, I feel him there. I feel him and my Nana, his adored wife, pulling me back to the beach.
Pulling me to a place where time slows down and the memories made feel more meaningful. The place where for over 30 years my loved ones have convened to celebrate, relax, laugh together. Where countless meals were shared and countless stories told around a table covered in cups filled with Chivas Regal and poker chips.
Over the years, we’ve reconnected to this old house. Anytime we were in the area, we stopped by, we walked the beach, along with important people we’d brought into our lives since Baba left us, and pointed from the outside looking in telling our old stories. My birth grandfather, Pop, was one of those very special people we brought to teach him more about Baba, the man who adopted and raised my mom, the man who loved me, his little piddly-dip, more than life itself.
So, two months ago we decided to rent our old house and set out for a week of togetherness. When I was little it was my Baba, Nana, Mom and Dad, countless cousins and uncles and aunts. One uncle in particular spent a lot of time here in the 90’s- my uncle
Kevin, my dad’s brother, enjoyed many sunny days on the beach. His son, my cousin Christopher was my favorite childhood playmate and I relished the times we spent running wild and free together along the sandy shore.
Here today it’s my Mom and Dad, Pam and Jack as the patriarchal figures, and myself with my two sons, my brothers and their families and cousin Chris. Uncle Kevin is with us in spirit, and we plan to spread his ashes together on the beach on Father’s Day. I think he is up there cheers-ing to this glorious family reunion right along with us.
Even though it’s been years since the last time we gathered here. Somehow it also feels like we never left. Like the house knows us, knows that finally, we are home.
We lost our Baba here, and along the way we lost many others who left their footprints on the sand of Sea Isle and imprints on our hearts. But this week, I feel them all here with us. I know they wouldn’t miss it for the world.
This post is dedicated to my Dad, Jack Broughton, Grandfather Pop and Uncle Kevin Broughton. And of course to the great soul who connected us all, Bill Meyer, my Baba.
Happy Father’s Day in heaven, Baba. Tell Nana, Pop and Kevin we love them. Give everyone a kiss and hug from us.
Love Piddly Dip, Peep, and J
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