The Woods Colt Adventure

THE WOODS COLT ADVENTURE



    It perhaps sounds trite to say my hero is my father but like so many people before, my father was a hero using all the measurements applicable to the title.
He was a quiet man, one who worked hard, and tried to do good by those around him.  He’d gone through a marriage and an unhappy divorce long before my birth.  In fact, one of my half-brothers graduated from West Point when I was still a baby.  In the mid 1940’s, my arrival made me, in country vernacular, a “woods colt”.  But my father loved me.  This is firmly lodged in my memory.  And from things related by those who knew us both, he tried to do the right thing by my mother.  Money won out however.  She preferred the money she got for my half-sister and half-brother rather than another marriage.  Who knows, perhaps she had a crystal ball; he died the summer I was six.

    But in six and a half years we went places, we two.  Weekends were our time because he didn’t live with us so Saturdays I went to his rooming house.  First, there was shopping, always something special for me, but my brother and sister received the same amount of money for themselves.  They were several years older than me; they would take off to find some sort of booty.  Amos and I would head back to the rooming house to read.
 
    We trekked through the grimy, narrow lanes of Dickens London, shivering as the wind blew in off the Thames.  The sun beat down on us mercilessly as we planted rice under the yellow China sky.  I became a child of Dublin, playing in the muddy streets, or Margaret Lennox, the little girl in “The Secret Garden”.  My father, yelling “Mush”, trudged behind the dogsled along Alaskan trails with me, our noses cold and red; arrows grabbed stray hair as we ran beside Hawkeye and Magua.  Every week another adventure, while in the process my father taught me to read.

    By the time I began first grade at age five (we didn’t have kindergarten then) it came as a great shock to me to see the books they gave us.  “See Spot run” was a far cry from my usual reading fare.  Weekends with my father helped me cope that first year of school.

    July 3, 1950 he died.  But he’d already given me something that couldn’t be taken away.  He taught me to read, to love words, taught me I could travel the world from Alaska and Australia to deepest Africa and visit European cities already ages old, and get there from wherever I happened to be.

    My mother made me call him Amos; it would have embarrassed her to have me call him father.  Now his gift of the love of language helps me write my own books.  When I visit some of our favourite places for real and stand on the castle parapet or the top of the moors, Dad is right beside me.