Desert Grave. (Tomasito photo, 2009)
Pop's Differences
Some years ago my father, Andy (Andrew Staffon) Wold, died of a brain aneurysm in his own little paid-for house on Sky High Drive on a hillside overlooking the Ventura River Valley between Ojai and Ventura, California when I was away on one of my far-flung pilgrimages..
“Pop” was in his early eighties and had lived a simple life as a part-time drummer and an appliance salesman.
He and Mom, Lorene Clayton Wold, had raised us kids, Brother Joe, Brother Jack and myself—the middle son—into adulthood in Los Angeles, Albuquerque, New Mexico and Portland, Oregon.
That's about enough of that background stuff.
What I wanted to put on record is something one of Dad's friends at the Lutheran Church in Ventura said to be about Pop (Andy) when I came back
.
“You know,” he said, “Your Dad was very different in a way--I never heard him say a bad thing about another person."
Odd thing. I had never even noticed this.
An even odder thing was—I had never heard him say anything bad about an other person either—and I had lived with and around him all my life.
Well, once he had said that Reagan should have never been elected president because Ronald was the same age exactly as he was “and that was too old to be president.”
But that was the worst thing I could remember him saying about anybody!
He never swore either—and I never heard him argue with Mom—not even once in all those years!
Now, of course, Pop was human—but by golly he WAS different in those mild and old-fashioned ways.
Tomasito, 2009
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