Sunday

OK, I took a break there. Back on schedule now.

Continuing about my father from last Sunday. I recall that when I was about three years old I asked him for a piggyback ride. He said he couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t understand about his accident. During the summer of 1958 I was away in Connecticut picking tobacco to try to make a little money. It worked. I did make a little money. Very little. It was close to slavery. I received a letter from my father. He said that he was sick. When I got home I went to see him in the hospital. I was 14. He was dying from kidney stones. He had once told me that he passed his first stone when he was 17. He had a little jar that held 26 kidney stones that he had passed. I’m not sure that was all of them. He was in pretty much constant pain. The fact that he had been so badly injured at the Sun Oil plant when I was very small compounded the pain. He died a week later. His kidneys pretty much crystallized. That’s when Sun Oil stopped giving us the $50 a week that we lived on. I’ve always regretted so deeply that he never lived to see his son do well. As I said, he had to drop out of school when he was eight years old and go to work shoveling coal at the steel plant. He would have been so proud to see me with a PhD in physics.

As a footnote, I’m very fortunate. I have a high calcium score. That’s related to kidney stones, although I’ve never had one. A high score, whatever that means, is 300. Four years ago I had mine checked. It was 1210. My sister, who passed away last year, had a score of 1720. My chest x-ray looks like a Greek statue. Without the muscles.

Gary E colorized the photo of me and my father that I posted last Sunday. How does Gary do it?! Thanks again, Gary!