Older Women I Have Loved

My mother hated Raquel Welch.

She also hated Lynda Carter. The origin of spite was the same. My father thought they were both absolutely gorgeous. I think I might have been about five, maybe six. I tried to tell her that Raquel was not coming to the house to steal Dad away anytime soon. This was after my uncle had introduced me to George Jones and made it clear we were not related.

“You bet your little behind she’s not…” Mom snorted with a defensive hostility.

Thank god Gal Gadot wasn’t Wonder Woman at the time. Mom might have actually burned the damned house down.

I didn’t think that it was nearly as important of an issue as she did. If my father had meant to go anywhere else, he’d have done it. The asshole gene is too deeply embedded in our bloodline, and it sits somewhere in close proximity to the loyalty gene.

Years later, when my mother was in the throes of Alzheimer’s, I discovered this from my father. We were in an emergency room, and Dad was propped up on the gurney with legs that felt like a store mannequin.

The attending physician was a lovely and brilliant Indian woman. My Dad liked her. I liked her. She wasn’t with the VA, which was another bonus to him, I guess. She was a cardiologist. In a moment of sagaciousness, she had waited for my attention to make the announcement.

“Are you aware that you have heart disease?” She asked my father.

“Yes,” he answered glibly.

This seemed to stun her for a moment. I saw her lightly shake her head, recoil, then prepare for the next volley.

“When and where were you diagnosed?”

“At the VA. Three years ago.”

“And you didn’t think to tell anybody?” The young doctor asked in surprise.

“Why?” He answered as if it were the most normal response in the world. He looked me dead in the eye when he said it. I think that might have been the first point when I understood, with the horror of it all, that my father, the one I had loved and fought, allied and sworn as an enemy in some of my most misguided and misunderstood moments, was falling on his sword.

That was when the Bro Code sunk in. I believe that signing the DNR order later that day might have been one of the hardest things I’ve done in my life voluntarily. But I understood why he chose this path, and I was not going to be the dick that took away his final desire and wishes. It was clean. It had honor. Nobody could fault him or blame him for anything.

When you spend 74 years of your life trying to make something of it all, you have earned the right to go out the way that you wanna go out. I was there when he passed, on the Feast of Saint Benedict, the only man on Earth who knew why and how he had chosen to go out the way he did.

And he knew that I knew. It was an unspoken bond.

Because we share DNA. I was blessed with so much of him, and so the chain had gone for a few thousand years or so. We left Wales over this and got kicked out of Scotland over these genes.

I knew why he found Raquel Welch attractive all those years ago. This isn’t a hard equation. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. She just happened to have a few million beholders or so.

I am not ashamed to say that the first person I recall seeing who absolutely stopped my heart as a very young boy was Liza Minelli. I recall it almost perfectly. My mother had left the television on and left the room, with the TV movie capturing my attention, mostly because of Liza’s doe eyes. I think I might have been about six years old, and other than my mother, she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life.

The movie was Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, and the scene I watched unfold next was the one when she had battery acid poured on her face by a jackass abusive boyfriend.

I was really young.

I was really furious. I wanted to tear his ass up like Chucky from Child’s Play. No one had taught me that, it was present in my little post-toddler psyche.

No matter what the film critics had to say about that movie, which ironically had come out to theaters the week of my birth, it changed my young life permanently. I hurt for her deeply, in my heart, almost to the very point of tears. I don’t really remember the rest of the movie, just that I adored her, and knew that just wasn’t the way you treat people, whether you like them or not.

I knew that I, for one, loved Junie Moon until it ached.

My father wouldn’t treat a woman that way, or a man, as far as I knew. So I was angry. I also never forgot that burning feeling of rage at a woman harmed. It was almost a righteous anger.

Months later, my anger had cooled, and I had gotten some semblance of control over my little self when That Girl came on my radar screen.

Marlo Thomas sent my head in about twenty different directions. But I can say that was an honest thing. My mother was not exactly hard on the eyes by any stretch. The two had a good many similarities. The difference was in the fact that my mother was a bookworm, mostly quiet, and the character of Ann Marie could have easily been my mother with a nice enough dose of speed.

Which explains why my father had hunted her down like a Viking on the North Seas.

You have to understand that in the early to mid 1970s, a majority of my family lived around rural areas in the Deep South, we were the suburbian exception, so everyone else was still stuck and recovering from the 60s. The hairstyles were the same. The way folks decorated their houses was also the same. I think the 70s took hold in our house about 1978, around the time of Star Wars, when we had taken all of the Bee Gees that we could stand and were ready to more fully embrace Elton John.

Eight tracks were dying, thanks to an executive decision in Heaven Above.

I was formed and molded by no small number of the 1960s shows. The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis was a required staple, as far as I was concerned. I liked Bob Denver, who was also Maynard G Krebs, as well as Gilligan. As a kid with knobby knees and zero popularity, I found a constant in his characters I could relate to.

Being a Mary Ann kinda guy, I was always attracted to the girl next door motif. That was what probably led me to my affinity for Kristy McNichol’s character in the show Family.

She was a tomboy, I thought she was adorable, and it didn’t hurt that my real-life affection at school was very similar. I didn’t have the slightest clue about the potential operations of my pecker in those days, but I knew that I needed a beautiful normal girl in my life at some point that had better attributes than just arm candy. She needed to be real.

And because of that fact, so did I.

Media forms us and creates the modes that we will operate on for the rest of our natural lives. I can look back now at the women I adored when I was young and see exactly what I admired about the characters they portrayed and the beauty they each had in themselves as normal people, from the very base of things.

I owe them.

The way I feel about my own family, many decades later, is a result of the love and passion I felt for these people and the characters they fleshed out as I was fresh out of toddlerhood trying to figure things out.

Perhaps I had no inkling what the creation now would be from what could possibly have been portended at the time.

The last sane and cohesive conversations I had with my mother, she still didn’t like Raquel, and I still don’t understand why.

Dad’s dead. She ain’t running off with him now. He might have been a pain in the ass, but he would’ve still been a good catch.