The Lawyer Who Never Went to School
Mine was an unusual life at a usual time. My childhood was one of extreme hardship during a time when most American children lived in a land of peace and plenty. I was at birth John Nathan Crandall Turner. I came to adopt the name much later in life of John Crandall Lincoln. But that is a long story, and better left to the story of my teen years. I write as Nathan Turner not because I am not fond of the name that I have adopted these many years, but out of respect for my father. That too is a story for later.
I was born in 1949 in Inglewood, California, in the United States of America, in the Western hemisphere, on the North American Continent of the land area of the Planet Earth, of (Well, OK, you do not need to know the galaxy). My father’s name was Father. Whether everyone called him that when I was little, I cannot say. Much later, when I met him again after many years, he was simply Father. His given name was actually William. I suppose he was Bill to people outside the family. Or even then he might have been Father. That’s just who he was. He was very quiet, very thoughtful, very intelligent, and, sometimes, very angry. My mother told me that he had a pixieish sense of humor. He was part German; perhaps that is where the anger came from. Perhaps that is just a stereotype, although stereotypes are like jests – they tend to have a kernel of truth in them. He was an aircraft engineer all of his career. I do not think he served in World War II because of that. I always wished I had asked him what projects he worked on during the war. I did ask him what kinds of things he was working on much later. He told me that he was making a small part for a satellite. I did not understand the reference but it sounded interesting. I would have liked to know if, during World War II, he worked on fighters or bombers, or something else in aviation that was directly related to the war effort. I never thought to ask him while he was alive. Somehow we think of all the questions we would like to ask our parents only when it is too late to ask them. The same is true of what we would wish to tell them. Before Father died, when I knew he was very ill with brain cancer, I wanted to visit him one last time to tell him I loved him. I had not been around him much since I was four years old. When I started visiting him when I was 17, and over the years since then, there never seemed a time to tell him. When finally I really wanted to tell him, I was too late. Before I found the time to go to see him, my brother called to tell me he was gone. I had never told him. I was too late, and all I could hope for was a Christian heaven in which I might meet him again. The only reality, the only substitute, was to give my love – warmer for his share – to his grandchildren. We all have known tragedy, and we learn to live with it, but the tragedies do not disappear. They just hide a little bit in a misty gloss of forgetfulness. Yet tragedies are bittersweet because they make life a little sweeter by the contrast.