Enough

Daddy and I are walking slowly through Chicago, slowly because he is almost 82 and I do not want him to fall on my watch. While I want to look up at the cumulus clouds puffing their chests between the glittering windows of the sun-kissed high-rises, I am fixated on curbs, conifer cones and cracks in the sidewalk. I hold his elbow with the false confidence that, should he lose his footing in his diabetic sneakers, I will be able to keep him upright.

  Every few blocks someone thanks my father for his service. This man, who was 100 feet under the North Atlantic in a nuclear submarine out-maneuvering Russian subs when I was born, wears his U.S. Submarine Veteran hat everywhere he goes. Or should I say one of three. He has brought them all on this three-day trip to see the Cubs at Wrigley and the White Sox play at Rate. Along with three plaid shirts, coordinating trousers and the package of catheter tubes he pulls from his suitcase when we get settled into the Embassy Suites, he unpacks the black Vietnam Veteran hat with embroidery on the bill, his blue US Navy Veteran hat covered in pins from his various conventions and the yellow Holland Club cap recognizing that he qualified for submarine duty over 50 years ago.

  If you don’t want to learn something about the subs, thank my father for his service quickly and move on, because if you pause, he will talk. He will share with you that he served for seven years, twenty-one days and twelve hours, not that he is counting. He throws that joke in every time because people laugh. If he is speaking to a civilian, you may learn about the number of days he spent under water (as many as 60 in a row) or that bell-bottoms were invented by the Navy because if a sailor falls overboard, they can easily slip their pants over their shoes to create a flotation device, something dad had to master at 18 when he was training in San Diego.

   If he is speaking to another veteran, you might learn that dad reported for duty on the Grenadier in Key West eight months after the Cuban Missile Crisis or that he worked his way up to chief petty officer and atmospheric analyst, tasked with ensuring that the air quality and oxygenation in was in acceptable range. A mistake could take the lives of all 120 men on board. You might hear the tale of dad’s friend, Buck, who had served in the subs off the coast of Japan during World War II. They had torpedoes aimed at the island nation and were told to back off. Soon after the sub moved further out to sea, they looked through the periscope and saw the mushroom cloud over Nagasaki.

  These are all stories I wouldn’t have known had I not explored cities and sat in stands at baseball games around the country as we slowly move through dad’s late-in life declaration of his bucket list dream of seeing games at all 30 major league ballparks.

  For me, this mission isn’t about the baseball at all, though I am learning more about the game. More importantly, I am learning more about my dad.

  My father wasn’t someone I ever talked to as a child. He had a rotten temper and I mostly looked for ways to avoid him. I knew he’d had a difficult childhood but whenever I asked questions about the loss of his parents when he was young, he’d say “I think I’ve just blocked out the memories.” So, I stopped asking.

  He didn’t talk about his service much either. It seems my mother’s animosity toward the Navy had silenced him. They met in their late teens in Brooklyn when she was in nursing school and the cute boy from Tennessee wearing his Navy whites was on shore leave in the Big Apple for the first time.

   She knowingly married a sailor, but she grew to hate being a military wife, ostensibly because it took him away from her for long stretches of time. When I was four and my brother was two, she’d had enough. Dad had fulfilled his commitment and once he was discharged, they moved from Charleston to Raleigh so he could begin his career with Southern Bell.

  As we sat in Fenway two summers back, my father revealed that his greatest life regret – besides losing the love of his life to cancer when she was only 55 – was not staying in the Navy.

  Now I knew that my mom had a tendency toward passive aggressive acts and was often manipulative with her children, but I never realized she’d acted that way toward my father as well. She closed the chapter on his Navy experience by tossing every Naval item he had in the trash. Gone without his knowledge was the white dixie cup cap he was given upon enlistment right out of high school, his pea coat, his dress blues and the memories they conjured. All dad had left was the dolphin pin which now dons his Veteran cap.

  Yet he still calls her the love of his life. But sometimes I wonder if they ever had deep conversations in the 35 years they were married.

  I know that conversation is not something I learned to do in my family. We didn’t ask a lot of questions. We didn’t talk about opinions. We never spoke around the dinner table. There was a lot of yelling. There were a lot of tears. If there was a discussion, it was about table manners and it was more of a lecture than a tête-à-tête. It wasn’t until I was in college and was invited to a professor’s home for regular Sunday dinners that I realized people actually exchange ideas over meals. This wasn’t just something made up for the movies or happy family sitcoms. 

  I vividly remember sitting around Professor Lauterborn’s table as people debated, sharing perspectives and feelings, and there was laughter as the wine flowed and everyone participated and before you knew it, three hours had gone by. Those people knew what I was studying in school.  They knew about the classes I was passionate about and the clubs I was part of.

  At home, no one asked. It wasn’t until a month before I graduated from college that my dad inquired “So Suzanne, what is it that you are getting your degree in? Some of the fellers at work were asking and I didn’t know what to tell them.”

  Indeed, I never felt truly seen by my family. But I am determined to see and know my father in this last chapter of his life. And maybe give him a chance to know me.

  So, in Chicago, over deep-dish pizza at Lou Malnati’s, I ask more questions and listen to more stories and then I say, “So dad, it is nice that we are having this conversation and I really enjoy learning more about you, but I wonder if there is anything you would like to know about me?”

  He pauses, takes a long sip of beer and a deep breath, and then he finally asks, “Was I a good father?” Again, we talk about him. But maybe, just maybe, knowing that I am the kind of person who will make the time to take him to these cities and ballparks is all he really needs to know about me. He knows I love him. And maybe that is enough.

As shared at Story Salon on December 3, 2025.