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Paul Turner: Questions for my father

Paul Turner (Dan Pelle / The Spokesman-Review)

Father’s Day doesn’t lose its significance just because your own father is gone.

Its arrival on the calendar every June makes you think about your dad long after he died. It can make you wish you had enjoyed the sort of relationship where conversation came easy and you could have asked questions that might have helped you know him better.

Here are a just few of the many things I would ask my father if he were still around. I’m sure you could come up with your own list. (And if your father is still alive, well, I wouldn’t wait too long.)

Would you agree that worrying about money was your one true calling?

When your B-52 was circling just outside Soviet airspace during the Cuban Missile Crisis, did you wonder if you would ever see your family again?

Do you know how impressed I was that night when we were standing out in the driveway and you could name all the stars in the Big Dipper?

Do you ever wonder how different your life would have been if your father had not died when you were an infant?

Did you know I am sorry about that time you gave Johnny (my late brother) and I those “Word Power” paperbacks and we proceeded to mock the whole idea by pointedly peppering our every utterance with words such as “garrulous” and “truculent”?

How did you maintain focus on what you were seeing through the bombsight when all hell was breaking loose in and around your B-24?

Remember how we used to watch reruns of “The Honeymooners” over and over after the local news on summer nights?

Did I ever actually fool you when I came home hammered as a teen and tried to disguise the evidence with eucalyptus lozenges?

Did Marsha (my late sister) ever come around to believing you about being friends with Jack Palance during the war after you mentioned it that time at the drive-in?

I know what I was told. But am I actually named after Paul Cousamano, your college friend who died in the war?

How come we never discussed it when I stopped going to church the day I left for college?

Did you and Mom ever talk about the stillborn baby that arrived a few years before Mom had me?

When I started working for newspapers in the 1970s, did you picture it being something like old movies set in newsrooms?

You were aware, weren’t you, that saying “It’s been like Grand Central Station around here” was ridiculous when you had a total of two visitors all day?

Are you aware that I now regard it as a four-star bit of parenting that you did not force me to play Little League baseball a second summer even though I know my coach tried to get you to make me play?

Were you and Mom playing a game of chicken with me when you attended my high school graduation even though I stayed home and watched a “Big Valley” rerun? Maybe it was “Bonanza.”

Do you remember how loudly you sighed when you noticed I had replaced an image of the Virgin Mary on my bedroom wall with a picture of the Beatles?

Did you ever think about your Italian-American boyhood friends when you were dropping bombs on Italy?

What did you and Mom see in each other when you first met?

How did you get along with her two sisters?

Remember how you would tell me cautionary tales about how kids in your hometown played with guns or skated on thin ice and wound up paying with their lives? Did you think I bought those stories?

Remember letting me have a little beer when I was a kid, so I wouldn’t find it exotic and alluring when I got older? Nice try.

I know boxing was the only sport you really cared about. But do you remember when we would watch the NFL’s Jim Brown on TV in the ’60s when we lived in Ohio?

What was the backstory on your never failing to say dinner had been delicious?

Remember that skeptical look you used to give me when I would say I had done all my homework in study hall?

What were you thinking when you encouraged my sexually active teenage brother to consider the priesthood as a vocation?

If you had a do-over, how would you use it?

How come we seldom talked politics at home?

To what career did you aspire as a boy?

Which of the big bands was your favorite?

Are you aware that I learned what it means to be a man by watching you?

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