What we know about our parents is based on the stories they have told us or the stories we have heard about them. The week before last, when I got back from Denver, there was a large manila envelope waiting for me. It was addressed to my father. Why am I getting mail addressed to a man dead 30 years? Then I looked at the return address and see that it was from National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri. Last April I had written them asking for copies of all of my father’s military records, so long ago I had forgotten about it. Finally, they are here.

I sent away for this information because I realized I actually know very little about my father and almost nothing about his time in the Navy. With my mother’s passing there is no one left who could tell me anything about him. I sent away for these records thinking maybe the Navy could.

I sat down and pulled out a stack of about 100 pages of copies and started going through them. The first page was a copy of his Notice of Separation from the Navy at the end of WWII. It said that he entered the Navy in 1942 (at the age of 16) but he had lied about his date of birth to get in- something I already knew. Two things surprise me, first, that he only finished the 8th grade and, second, that he was an apprentice cobbler before he enlisted. I flip through more pages and find another surprise; my father worked for his father, my grandfather, for a year before he enlisted. I had been told my grandfather had left his family and disappeared when my father was very young.

As I flip through the pages I keep seeing my father’s signature and this fascinates me. For some reason this makes him seem more real than I every thought of him before. Then I find a copy of his fingerprints and he seems even more real, a person now, not just a memory. I keep flipping. Another big surprise, a form that shows my father living at the same address as my grandfather and grandmother. So, not only did my father work for his father, but also my grandparents were still living together when my father went into the Navy. Why did my grandmother lie about this?

I see these pages are not in any logical order. I find separation forms jumping back and forth in time. Reenlistment forms doing the same thing. A Descriptive List that show at age 22 he was 5ft 10 inches tall and then one at age 20 saying he was 5ft 8 inches tall. Leave records, rating marks records, transfer records, summary of service records, and then one form stops me dead. A Report of Beneficiaries dated 1946 showing my father as being married. I thought he and my mother got married in 1948. Then I look at the name- it is not my mother’s. What? He was married before my mother? I stop reading and call my sister up and tell her what I have in front of me, and what I have just learned. We both have the same question.

Our father walked out on us for good when I was 13 years old. We only saw him once after that when I was 16. He stayed for a day bringing my sisters and I tiny gold miraculous metals blessed by the Pope, my brother a large portable short-wave radio, and my mother a check for $200 that bounced higher than a Super Ball when she tried to cash it. After that we never saw him again. At this point my mother seriously started to look for him to get the child support he owed for his five children. She had the help of the Colorado Governor’s Office and five years later found him. When the courts told him he owed child support he denied having any children or being married to my mother. Then he changed his story and said he was the father of my two younger sisters but not the father of my brother, my older sister, or me (very strange since my sister and I were born in Naval Hospitals and our brother was born in the hospital our father was born in), he still insisted he was never married to my mother. The reason for these bizarre statements became clear when my mother found out my father had remarried. The only thing is, he never divorced my mother. My grandmother always insisted my father was never married to my mother and now my sister and I wonder if she was telling the truth when she said this because she knew my father had been married before, and she knew he never divorced what we now know was his first wife.

My sister ask me if there is anything about our mother in all these papers I have and I quickly turn the pages looking for my mother’s name. I find two forms, one a reenlistment form (no date) that shows my mother as his next of kin and his wife. It also says she was living at the same address as my grandmother. Poor Mom. The other form is dated June of 1950 and is a certified statement in which my father swears that my mother is his wife, that they got married 6-2-48 in Charleston, Mass, and that he had one child, my older sister. Why did he have to sign this? Was his first wife making some sort of claim? Was this the Navy’s way of clearing the whole thing up?

My sister and I are surprised to find out our father was married before but not that he may have been married already when he married our mother. We already knew Dad was a bigamist, we just never suspected he may have been a bigamist more than once.

It’s funny, with all the things I have learned, the information that touches me the most is that, on one form, he listed his leisure time activities as reading and sports, and that he played the saxophone. I always thought I got my love of reading from my mother and here my father says he enjoyed reading too. That he played the saxophone makes me think of my sister who plays the clarinet. I never thought my father contributed any thing to my siblings or me and I find out he passed on his love of reading and his musical talent.

So, the story of my father’s life changes, does knowing this change me? No, I am still who I am. My father is not who I thought he was though, but that doesn‘t matter either. Last week Blue Witch and I pinged in and out of the start of a conversation about time travel. I asked if we would we want to visit the past if we found out what we remembered was not really the way it was. We never got to an answer. Our lives are made up of stories and so is our past. It is only when we cannot let go of these stories that they can cause us pain.