It's never too late to change

Regular readers, please note: This is not the next chapter in The Animal House Life. I'll return tomorrow to my self-help book in progress.

Today, I'm being serious.

January 29 is the date on which my stepfather, Edmund D. Livingston, Sr., was born. Ed died several years ago. I watched him die. We were all at the beach house for our summer extended family vacation, and he was walking down our informal buffet line, putting food on his plate. He'd just returned from a day driving around alone, visiting his beloved Marines and seeing the area. He dropped his plate, said my mother's name, and fell. We all tried to keep him alive, but he was DOA at the hospital, and I think he was gone when he fell. He died fast and among people who loved him, and that's probably about as much as any of us can ask when that time comes.

Ed was not an educated man. He dropped out of school early--elementary school, I think--to help support his family. He worked hard his whole life. He joined the United States Marine Corps early in World War II as a young man--illegally young, I believe--because serving your country was what a man did. His country certainly didn't treat him particularly well: rather than fix his teeth, military dentists pulled them all; he earned two Purple Hearts but got only one due to paperwork mess-ups in the field; and most of all he paid the big price soldiers in combat always pay: he saw and did things humans should not have to do. He went ashore at Okinawa in a landing with 100% casualties. He was among the first in the occupation of Japan. He served, and he paid.

Ed was never really my father. My mother, who was his second wife, married him when I was about 17, so it was too late for him to be my father. As I said at his funeral, though, I would have been proud to have him as a father. (At his funeral, people turned up whom no one in the family had met. It turns out that all over St. Petersburg he had been doing small kindnesses for people: delivering old food, helping out some folks older than he, and so on. He never told anyone. He just did those things. That was Ed.)

Not long before he died, Ed and my mom went into a Japanese restaurant and ate a nice dinner. He even spoke a little Japanese to the hostess and the server. Afterward, he said, "The healing has begun."

Up to that point, Ed had refused to even walk near any Japanese business of any sort.

Dave and I disagree on this point, but I believe people can change. Most don't, but we all can. Ed, in his seventies and with the horrible weight of war's psychic and physical damage a constant companion, changed. He made himself a bit better.

So don't whine if you think you're stuck. Make peace with where you are, or make a change. Don't tell me, though, that you can't change. You can. Ed did.

I was a Young Marine. The experience taught me a lot, most of it bad, but it gave me a small inkling of what it might mean to be a Marine, and it gave me a lifetime appreciation of the Marines. Ed and I were never really close, but we shared that, and we shared a love of my family, and I learned more from him than he ever knew.

Semper Fi, Ed. I miss you. I always will.