{"id":1779,"date":"2024-01-20T10:34:32","date_gmt":"2024-01-20T17:34:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.davidgunter.com\/?p=1779"},"modified":"2024-01-20T10:34:33","modified_gmt":"2024-01-20T17:34:33","slug":"waking-up-with-dad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidgunter.com\/es-mx\/2024\/01\/20\/waking-up-with-dad\/","title":{"rendered":"Waking Up With Dad"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It is 3:30am and my dad came into my room to look in on me just now, in a dream of course. In this dream, Dad said he was heading off soon. When I asked where, he only said, “You know me, I’m off to see the world again.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The emotions from this were strong enough that it woke me up, and since I can’t fall back to sleep, I’ve been ruminating to when I was a kid, and Dad used to get up at 4am so he could make the long drive into work and avoid rush hour snarls. We lived in south Kansas City, Missouri, and he worked for General Motors at their assembly plant in Fairfax, Kansas, about an hour away back then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I used to get up with him quite often. Sometimes this was out of necessity; I was an altar boy and this meant that at least a few times a year I was selected to serve the 6:15am mass. To avoid running afoul of Catholic Canon Law<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>, this also meant that I had to eat breakfast well before 5:15am. (I never knew what would happen to me if I broke Canon Law. I imagined a group of clerics with the papal Swiss guards in tow would show up, haul me away, and lock me in a dungeon somewhere. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibilities I suppose, since at least once a month Mom would implore us to clean our rooms and the rest off the house with the admonishment, “What if the Pope suddenly stopped in for a visit!?”)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of the time, however, I got up simply because the television channels that disappeared overnight would come back to life around 5am. Thus my day began with a diet of Popeye cartoons, F Troop, and Lassie reruns. My dad would make me a bowl of oatmeal (my childhood favorite) while I would sit and read the morning comics in the newspaper. We both loved doing the word Jumble, always found in the comic section. I had to get the paper before Dad did, and I’d solve the words and the final puzzle phrase in my head so as not to ruin it for him. Here’s a page from the June 1, 1976 Kansas City Times comic page showing one of the puzzles to which I’m referring. June 1st is also dad’s birthday, coincidentally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Kansas<\/a>
Kansas City Star puzzle page and comics from 1 June 1976<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When he left, Dad would often say that he was off to see the world. It was an inside joke we had. At some point in my youth, an older cousin gifted me his Ambassador World Stamp Album, 1966 edition. It was a thick, ring-bound book with pages for every country on the globe, each containing black and white images of a given country’s postage stamps. The idea was to mount the actual stamp over the image provided on the page. The rings also unlocked for the addition of future pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book was largely void. My cousin had filled in quite a few of the United States stamps and several from the U.K. and France and Spain, a few others here and there. Most of the countries named on the pages were places I had never even heard of, thus it became a geography tool of sorts. I would look up what little I could in an encyclopedia. If there wasn’t enough information there to satisfy my curiosity then I would head to the library where the librarian would pull out the massive World Factbook, a book that contained lots of useful information about every known place in the world. I wasn’t allowed to handle it, but she would photocopy the pages for the places I was interested in, and off I’d go. The Factbook was a publication by the CIA and didn’t appear publicly until 1975, so this would be around 1977 or so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our branch of the Mid-Continent Public Library<\/a> was part of a shopping center development, the Robandee Shopping Center, that also housed a toy and hobby store aptly called Funsville. The hobby shop was adjacent to a soda fountain and burger joint, Velvet Freeze. Around the corner was the A&P grocery store and Green Cross Pharmacy, our family’s go-to for medicine for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\"Robandee<\/a>
Robandee Shopping Center featured ad in the Kansas City Star, 14 Feb 1974<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Funsville<\/a>
Funsville add in the Kansas City Star, 8 Nov 1973<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Rest assured, any time I rode my bicycle to the library, those other places garnered a fair share of my lawn-mowing and snow-shoveling money. Funsville, in particular, had a small section devoted to coin and stamp collecting. My go-to item any time I had extra money to burn was the world stamp grab-bag. This was a small burlap bag filled with stamps cut off from their envelopes and postcards and dumped into a bag. They had cancelation marks with dates, countries of origin, and so on. I would buy a bag, cycle back home, and immediately dump the contents in a bowl of warm water. Within seconds, the water would dissolve the glue and the stamps would float free. With a set of plastic tweezers I would lift each one out of the water and onto sheets of paper towels. When that was done, I put more paper towels over the stamps and pressed them between heavy books to dry. Only then was it time to sort them out and turn through the pages of the stamp album to find out where to put them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was how I told my dad I was seeing the world. Dad, on the other hand, had actually seen the world during his time with the Air Force, long before any of us kids were born. He also collected country shipping labels and export documents from various parts vendors for General Motors as part of his job, inventory management at the automotive factory. He would bring them home sometimes, showing me the countries they came from – Mexico, Canada, Germany to name some of the common ones. In that, my dad saw the world the same way I did, via the leftover bits of shipping material.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I haven’t thought of this stamp album in ages. It is still largely void of most of the stamps, and the pages all stop at 1966, except for the newer ones I later added for the United States. I still have no stamps for the long, lost Ifni, a Spanish province on the Atlantic coast of Morocco ceded to the latter in 1968. Some of the other countries listed no longer exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have no idea what I’m going to do with this album. It has been moved from my childhood home to my first apartment, and every other apartment and home since for forty-some years. For now, I’m enjoying the memories from a time when it represented a unique window. I’m glad my dad stopped in to check on me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\"Ambassador<\/a>
Ambassador World Stamp Album<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Sample<\/a>
Sample of the United States pages<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Apollo<\/a>
Apollo 11-17 stamp series from Umm Al-Qiwain<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"A<\/a>
A sample of United States stamps<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"An<\/a>
An empty page for the former Spanish province of Ifni<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is 3:30am and my dad came into my room to look in on me just now, in a dream of course. In this dream, Dad said he was heading off soon. When I...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1765,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[216,215,214],"tags":[220,217,219,218],"class_list":["post-1779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-autobiography","category-biography","category-nonfiction","tag-1970s","tag-essay","tag-kansas-city","tag-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidgunter.com\/es-mx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidgunter.com\/es-mx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidgunter.com\/es-mx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidgunter.com\/es-mx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidgunter.com\/es-mx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1779"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidgunter.com\/es-mx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1787,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidgunter.com\/es-mx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1779\/revisions\/1787"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidgunter.com\/es-mx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidgunter.com\/es-mx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidgunter.com\/es-mx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidgunter.com\/es-mx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}