Surviving, Somehow

MY FATHER, who art in heaven since 1986, was born in 1918, and graduated high school at the tender age of sixteen, having skipped two grades, the fourth and the tenth, an arrangement agreed upon by the school system and my grandparents. He was a sixteen year old college student, and flunked out his first semester of college, preferring to play keyboard in a jazz band to studying. He matured and recoverd with a B.A, in Latin, which was then the prerequisite for law school. He graduated law schhol as a tort laywer at twenty two. My grandfather, his best friend, welcomed his only son into his family law firm in 1945, after my dad did a four year hitch in the World War Two navy, a stint as a Lt. Jr. Grade. He served as a navel aviator after learning to fly at the big naval base at Coco solo at the Panama Canal. One bright and sunny caribbean day he was training another pilot, a fellow teenager, cruising languidly at a few hundred feet, when a German U Boat, one of many harassing up and down the U.S. East Coast, surfaced and shot a hole in dad's Steerman biplane wing. The copilot trainee wanted to attack the U Boat with a twenty two caliber automatic pop gun rifle on each wing. Dad said holl no no way, and a cockpit wrestling match ensued, which my father won. The copliot got a scratch on his face in the brawl, put in for and received a Purple Heart for sustaining a wound in combat, amazingly...The family law firm had one and only one client among the fake diversionary ones; the Kansas City mafia. Grand dad and dad got a hefty retainer for getting the made men out of hot water when they broke knee caps, extorted people, ran illegal gambling rackets, and eliminated people. While all that was going on I was being invited to finish high school early in the family tradition, but I didn't want to, and both parents said no hell no, leave him alone. Let him enjoy social maturation among high school buddies, and avoid mental difficulties stemming from being in college way too young. My grandparents and my mother blamed early graduation and the war for my father's post war depression and alcoholism. I met some of dad's mafia clients by accident, and liked them. They and their children liked me too. Summers, my father, to get me out of the way and away from his unscrupulous law practice clients, put me on a plane every year, made all the necessary arrangements, and let me follow my beloved New York Yankees all over the United States and back home in New York for several weeks each summer, my textbooks in tow. I had to prove once a week that I was studying. I still get Christmas cards from the mob kids, all of whom say they did or still are pursuing legitimate careers. I don't ask questions. I might be afraid of the answers. I loved college so much that I refused to quit going to it, and ended up with a doctorate in history, and a career teaching, high school and college, which I loved dearly. I still sneak off to attend as many Yankees games as possible, when my cats allow it, and have done so all my adult life. I'll never completely lose touch with the mafia kids. We were too close and have too much in common. My high school classmates still number among my best buddies. I attend all the reunions, glad that I didn't abandon them early. I have no regrets about my life, but huge ones about my father's, who should have been a musician. which his parents would not allow, rather than a tort lawyer inundated with stress. Of course, how would that have helped him avoid a drinking problem? To a certain extent, you're screwed no matter which way you go. I'm just glad that I have nearly made it through life in one piece, and if the Yankees win one more World Series before I die, I'll die happy.