by Pa Rock
Proud Father
Proud Father
Forty years ago today I was at Camp Kue Army Hospital on
Okinawa awaiting the birth of my first child, Nicholas Karl Macy. Nick was already about two weeks overdue, and
he chose that warm and sunny Tuesday afternoon to make his big entrance into
the world.
That was back in the days when some doctors, and military
doctors in particular, didn’t want fathers cluttering up the delivery room, so
I was parked in a small waiting room just outside of Delivery. Nick was a big boy (nine pounds) and his arrival necessarily took awhile. I remember that I
had a headache and the nurses wouldn’t dispense aspirins, so a doctor had to
step out of the delivery room and hand me a couple of headache tablets. The other thing I remember is that I spent my
time watching reruns of Sanford and Son
until Nick finally decided to leave his secure and warm world to venture into
real life.
(I had the opportunity to revisit that waiting room on the
fifth floor of Camp Kue Hospital while I was recently living and working on
Okinawa. As I stepped out of the
elevator I immediately faced the waiting room door – and I was just as
immediately transported back nearly forty years. The room was exactly as I remembered it –
except of a wall-mounted flat screen television which had replaced the older,
clunky one that I had watched then. Several
years ago Camp Kue Army Hospital was turned over to the Navy and renamed Lester
Naval Hospital. The old, original
building has closed since I left Okinawa a year ago, and military personnel and
their families who require medical care are now seen at the new Lester Naval
Hospital which is located at Camp Foster – a Marine Corps base.)
But back to Nick. He began school in Mountain View, Missouri, and attended there through
fourth grade. Starting in fifth grade he
attended the Noel (Missouri) Elementary and Junior High School where he had the burden-to-bear of being the principal’s son. We
moved to Neosho, Missouri, in 1989, and Nick managed to graduate from high
school there in 1991 amid a great deal of family conflict.
Nick now has a fourteen-year-old son of his own whom he
raises on a half-time basis as a single parent. Life has not
always been easy for my oldest, but through it all he has remained a good
person and a great parent – and he has always made me proud.
Happy birthday, Nick.
2 comments:
You forgot.. He's a very witty guy who can hold up a conversation with anyone & always has life experiences & jokes to share. He's a smart cookie & a great parent to Boone.
i have known nick for more than a year and he told me most of all i read in here. his a wonderful person wherein details of good sense of humor is always adhere and i always miss him. its been a month or so that i have not heard from him but all i hope for is that his doing very fine as well as boone and riley..
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