Our dad almost never talked about THE WAR. The few times I remember him talking about it he said he was at “The Mop Up At Guadalcanal.” Maybe everyone called it that because that’s what it was called. But since I never heard anyone else talk about it, I always thought that was HIS name for it. As a kid I always pictured him with a big bucket and one of those Navy swab type mops, my dad standing in some muddy canal pulling that mop from side to side, swabbing like crazy but never able to get all the mud up and out of there. In these images my dad was always whistling under his breath. Which is what he did when faced with a daunting Mr. Fixit-type job. Like putting together a bike on Christmas morning.

My dad was not one of those handy-around-the-house type dads. He was more the “I’ll make huge gobs of money and hire other people to do all that other stuff” type. He wore custom-made suits and dress shirts and Italian silk ties. Even his casual clothes were the best you could get. He never had a pair of raggedy jeans (I never saw him in a pair of jeans at all) and his khakis were always specially made for the task at hand. Thus, when he was going out into the country where there were likely to be tall weeds with burrs or thorns, he wore “Bush Khakis” designed not to allow anything to stick to them. As if he was in The Bush – you know, in Africa. Not that he ever actually went anywhere near “The Bush” in Africa or anywhere else.

The only time I ever saw him wear clothes that looked at all worn was on a boat. For boating he went for the “salty” look. He had a series of battered hats, each looking at least twenty years old and as if he had fished it out of the water after someone else had cast it overboard. His boat was always orderly, each line (not ropes, please) carefully swirled in a flat circle on its appropriate spot on its correct deck next to its own cleat. And you would never see a speck of dirt on my dad’s boat. Salt yes. Salt was de rigueur. Dirt was un-Marine Corps. He named his 30-foot Egg Harbor Semper Fi. You see this slogan, which is a bastardized version of the Marine Corps slogan Semper Fidelis, on a lot of cars in eastern Virginia where the Marines long ago established Quantico as their HQ. Here’s us pulling up at a gas dock in Essex, Connecticut, one summer – me at age eleven:

The man who works the pumps sees us heading for the dock. He stands waiting to receive the bow line my brother is ready to toss.

“Here son, toss it over.”

“Got it?” My brother.

“Yeah. Who’s that astern with the aft line, your sister?”

This is a joke, because it’s my mother. She tosses him the line and he pulls the boat alongside. He walks past the stern of the boat to tie up the line to the big cleat on the dock and looks up to see the boat’s name carefully painted in bold golden letters.

“You Goddam sonofabitch bastard.” The dock guy.

“Yeah, you too, you M-F-ing goldbricking bastard.” My dad yells back at him as he jumps from the boat to the dock.

Why is my mother smiling at this, I wonder.

The two men clasp hands as if they’re old buddies. Back slaps all around. They walk over to the gas pumps swearing and yakking.

“Mom,” I look over at her.

“A Marine.” She reports and goes below to perform some galley type chore.