A few memories of my father

There really is a Crane Pond Creek.

It's in the Ozarks over yonder.

If you follow Crane Pond Creek for a spell, you'll come to where Brushy Creek joins up. Stay with Crane Pond Creek a bit longer and you'll wind up at Big Creek, which meanders into the St. Francois River.

In the hills, creeks are how you identify a place, how you give directions, how you tell someone who you are.

My mother was from Brushy Creek. My father was from Crane Pond Creek. My mother and father met somehow and got married during World War II. I was born a month after Japan surrendered. A couple of years later my mother and father were divorced.

I have four childhood memories of my father, who stayed in the Navy while my mother worked in St. Louis and raised me in the one-room apartment in the house with the mansard roof on Geyer Avenue in South St. Louis.

My father took me for a walk down Geyer to Compton Hill Reservoir Park with its distinctive tower that you see from today's I-44. He held my hand as I walked on top of concrete retaining walls along the sidewalk.

As a joke, my father hid me from my mother in a kitchen cupboard. She found me when I started screaming.

We shared a bathroom with other apartments on the second floor of the building where we lived. One of my memories is sitting on the bathroom floor and watching my father use the toilet. Explain that one to a psychiatrist.

My last memory is sitting in a green leather booth at the confectionary my parents had purchased on Grand Avenue after my father left the Navy. My father came out of the kitchen and said goodbye. I was too young to understand "divorce," but I didn't see my father again.

Until I was a sophomore in high school.

The high school band was invited to give a school-day concert in Ironton, Mo. On the way home, the school bus stopped for a snack break in Annapolis, the town nearest Crane Pond Creek. As we waited for everyone to get back on the bus, I saw my father sitting in a car parked across the street. I looked out the window, and the bus headed home.

When I was in my 30s and our children were old enough to know about grandparents, a well-intended do-gooder decided my sons should know their grandfather. The do-gooder was my mother, who took it upon herself to call my uncle, who lived up the road a piece from Crane Pond Creek. We went to my uncle's house, and his wife called my father and said we would be there in 10 minutes. I can only imagine what went through his mind.

At my father's front gate, he and his wife met us. Here were my first thoughts: He still has a good head of hair, and now I know where my blue eyes came from.

When my stepmother -- a wonderful woman -- died a couple of years later, the contact abruptly ended. My sons had grown fond of their gentle, loving grandfather. They were adults before they talked to me about any of this.

Saturday I got the call I had been expecting, and dreading. My father, just days short of his 92nd birthday, had died the previous Thursday. The visitation already had been held. The funeral was the next day.

I didn't go.

After more than 60 years of separation, it didn't seem right to show up at his funeral. I may regret that. Maybe not.

I will hold onto those memories from Geyer Avenue in the 1940s. I love driving by Compton Hill and seeing the old tower.

"That's where my father took me," I say every time we pass. My wife and sons know the words by heart.

jsullivan@semissourian.com