RaisingDad

Yesterday...      ...my father was sitting in his--uh... make that  my --favorite chair in the great room watching a baseball game on the best TV in the house. You know what I call the baseball games he watches? E pluribus unum.      He has a perfectly fine TV in his own room. It's even bigger than the TV I usually end up watching upstairs in my work-out room.      My father is sitting there, picking his teeth with an old worn-out tooth-pick. He has just finished a five-star, four-course meal courtesy of my wife. I hear the catholic church is in the process of making Pope John Paul Ringo & George a saint. Well, before they do, they'd better put my wife at the head of the line if they know what's good for them.      Me?      I'm sitting at the kitchen counter enjoying a hot cup of Irish coffee, just minding my own business, trying to remember when the last time was...

My Dad has started to enjoy watching cartoons with his great-grandson. I don't know why, maybe because when he was a kid there weren't any cartoons. Heck, there wasn't even TV.      At this very moment, my father is in the great room watching cartoons with his great-grandson. I'm sitting there, too, but I'm busy writing this because cartoons these days are apparently geared towards toddlers and people over the age of 90.      As I sit in here, my father's smacks and clicks   and oohs and ahhs are driving me crazy. He goes, "Ooohweeeee, it's cold in here," and keeps turning his head to look at the clock. His head must be on a swivel, the way it keeps swinging back and forth to check the time. When Edgar Allen Poe wrote The Pit and the Pendulum , he must have been thinking about the back and forth motion of my Dad's head.      Not to get off the sub...

A man walks into a bar and says, "Bartender, give me two beers. One for me and one for my little buddy here."      With that, he pulls out a three-inch man from his pocket.      "Wow!" says the bartender when he sees the little guy. "Can he drink a whole beer?"      "Sure," says the man, so the bartender serves them both a beer, and the little guy drinks it all up.      "Well, I'll be," says the bartender. "Can he walk?"      "Sure," says the man, and the little guy walks over and pours himself another beer.      "That's amazing," says the bartender. "Can he talk?"      "Sure," says the man. "Little Buddy, why don't you tell the bartender about the day you told God to prove He exists."     Raising My Father RaisingMyFather.BlogSpot.com jimduchene.BlogSpot.com  American Chimpanzee @JimDuchene  

I had been upstairs for several hours doing whatever it is I do when I'm upstairs.      Sometimes I don't even know myself.      When I come downstairs, there's no one there. The great room is dark and quiet. No Dad. No TV. No wife with one more chore for me to do.  I almost feel like I'm in a Twilight Zone episode where a man wakes up to an empty world... and finally finds happiness.      Yeah, I could get used to this.      I don't turn on the lights, but I do turn on the downstairs air conditioner. It's a little warm today. High 80s . And the humidity doesn't help. I also turn on the TV. It's just about time for the weather lady on Action News , but first I have to listen to the newscasters blah, blah, blah about all the problems we have on the other side of the world. I don't know why they call it Action News , when the only thing ...

Part Three         In 1945, the Japanese were all but defeated, but they still wouldn't surrender. America knew that an invasion would be costly. It was estimated that Allied casualties would be over 800,000 men. This was because the higher-ups in the Japanese military, who had all sworn an oath to fight for the Emperor to the last man, would rather become extinct than to lose their honor by surrendering to the Americans.      Additionally, the Japanese felt that if they could make the cost of victory for the Allied forces so painful in the form of casualties and deaths, the Allieds would be willing to negotiate a settlement much more beneficial to the Japanese than the terms they would receive under an unconditional surrender.      In the book "Unbroken" by Laura Hillenbrand, POW Louis Zamperini talks about seeing old women and children being trained with sharpened bamboo sticks to fight off American ...

Part Two        In addition to this, all through the war the Japanese had no plan on how to defend the empire it had so recently conquered. The Philippines were taken over by the Japanese from the Americans, and then lost it back to Allied (American) forces.      If they had any strategy at all, it was to make the price of victory so high, the Americans would tire of the war and seek to negotiate instead, leaving them with many of their conquests. And although Americans were getting tired of the war, they were still determined to fight until the very end, and so they went forward with their plan to invade the Japanese homeland.      America felt Japan could be successfully invaded and defeated, but they knew it would be at a great cost. Like in the islands of Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the war would have to won foxhole by foxhole, tunnel by tunnel, and cave by cave. The Japanese would have to be defe...

Here's where I lose my Japanese fans. Before you read this, let me just tell you that these just aren't just my father's recollections or opinions. I also referred to the following non-fiction books to back up my Dad's version of what happened in World War Two. If I didn't have at least one verification of an event or an opinion that my father offered, then I didn't include it.   A tip of the hat to Stephen E. Ambrose who wrote "To America / Personal Reflections of an Historian."   A tip of the hat to Laura Hillenbrand who wrote "Unbroken."   and   A tip of the hat to Richard B. Frank who wrote "MacArthur."   Part One          During World War Two, the hatred Japan had for the United States went long and hard and deep, and was probably stronger than its hatred for any other country, including China. As for the Americans, they hated the Japanese just as much.      This began with the bombing of ...