My Father’s Burns Are a Family Legend
Such an event scars a family
I don’t know how old my father was when the accident happened. Older than two, I’d say, but younger than five, because he remembered it so clearly. I think he was four, running around his family apartment with his twin brother, and as they say of kittens, into everything.
My father says he reached up to the pot his mother was boiling on the stove; I have no idea why, perhaps the fire underneath the pot attracted him? The next thing he and everyone knew was the pot spilled over onto his chest and he screamed in pain and terror.
I know a doctor was called, but don’t know how long it took to get to my father. As soon as the doctor saw my dad, he knew what he’d have to do: scrape the burning flesh from my father’s chest, while his screams elevated until people on the street outside could hear him.
When I first heard this story, I was eight and asking my dad about the scars on his chest and neck. I could barely listen to the story he told me, and I seem to remember putting my hands to my ears, but still being unable to stop listening.
This tale is more than a story in my family; it has been amplified beyond a family story into a deeper, over-arching legend that I believe says something about my father and the world around him that other stories do not say.
If you looked at my father’s chest once he became an adult, you would find it easy to see where the flesh had been sliced, discolored sections enmeshed with his normally ruddy skin. There is a distinctive look to skin that has burned.
But while you might call it “unsightly” I see the preservation of most of his chest and neck as a miracle and feel very grateful for it.
I would like to think his doctor used some kind of pain-relieving ointment when the deed was done, and that my father’s pain subsided quickly. He does not remember, so couldn’t tell me. What I do know is that as he got older, my dad forgot about the appearance of his chest, more or less, and went swimming without a shirt, wearing only trunks.
Pictures of my father as a boy show a happy-go-lucky red-haired kid, likely “into everything” as he always had been. In fact, he looks a lot like my son did when he was eight years old.
By age twelve, I pretty much forgot about the burn episode, even if we were at a pool or beach or swimming together. As a teenager, I went swimming at a lake with my family, and recall a man with one leg, as the other had been amputated at the knee. He walked with great determination through crowds of people who were likely trying not to stare at him.
I was one of those people, looking everywhere else I could besides at the man’s leg. It seemed to me his defiance of all the eyes around him made him braver than other people. I didn’t think of my dad that way, though, because whatever self-consciousness he may have had was completely hidden.
I had nearly forgotten about my father’s chest by the time I was old enough to bring a serious boyfriend home with me. It was summer, and we had gone to the lakeside beach a few times when my boyfriend started talking to me in a low tone of voice, as though he was sharing a secret.
“Do you know what happened to your dad?” he asked me. “It looks like he was burned pretty badly.”
I looked at my father, surprised. Suddenly, his burned chest seemed more obvious, and I could see him through my boyfriend’s eyes.
“Was he in a fire?” he said.
“No,” I replied, and explained the story as I had known it as briefly as possible.
My boyfriend was impressed. “I knew something serious must have happened,” he said. “Your dad was very brave when the doctor was scraping him.”
“You don’t have a choice about stuff like that,” I wanted to say, but didn’t.
There were so many other things my father had been brave about — but they weren’t the kind you’d notice in everyday life. Because there was a forty-plus year difference between my father and me, some of the stories he shared seemed like he’d grown up on a different planet — but I could still understand what he was talking about.
Dad had been a soldier in the Philippines in World War II, and told me about his experiences there. My mother explained that when they were visiting the idea of marriage, my father told her he might not return from the war, or return missing an arm or leg.
“I’ll take my chances,” she said, and so they married about a month before he was shipped off to boot camp. He returned three years later, at the same time one of his Army buddies did. Another legend came out of that situation, too. Because he and his buddy grew so close, my father (or his friend) waited several months until they could both be discharged. Neither of them could recall who had stayed behind for the other.
My dad also fought his way through Bayonne, New Jersey, when chased by a gang of boys who wanted to hurt him because he was Jewish. He grew up hungry and poor, but was honored at school because of his talent with math. When his teacher asked him to stand in front of the school, he said he was terribly embarrassed by the state of his shoes.
When he and I were trying to decide what to do to help my mother with memory loss, I said I was sorry about the stress that must be plaguing him.
“Nah, this is nothing,” he replied. “My whole youth was stress.”
We were in a rowboat together, navigating the lake water at my parent’s retirement home. My dad’s words sent my mind to the young man I had seen in numerous photo albums through the years. While tears stung my eyes, he had no tears of his own.
If I could have saved my father from the burning that disfigured his neck and chest, I would have eagerly. I have to wonder, though, whether what he went through as a four-year-old boy prepared him in some way for everything he encountered as he grew older.
I don’t mean for a minute that the boiling water was a good thing; but maybe learning that he could survive something like that taught him to be less afraid of things than I was (and mostly, still am).
Which brings me to the last legend about my dad I’m sharing here.
On his first night in the Army, someone took a picture of my father, drinking coffee with other soldiers. At the bottom of his cup, my father told me, was a large, fat cockroach. He reached into the cup, grabbed the roach and threw it onto the ground — and then continued drinking his coffee.
This event is one of the stories I like best about my dad. Knowing life could and would throw whatever it had at him made him stand a little straighter, learn to box, and create a business with my mom that succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
You can probably tell that my father meant a lot to me. The calamity he endured showed me that what life teaches us about courage is often learned through experiences we’d rather not have. Watching my father deal with those experiences taught me everything I needed to know about grace and strength.
I will always be grateful to him for that.
