Archive for December, 2021

Storyworth: What are some of your childhood memories of your father?

I was named after my father, but I’m not a junior. He was named William Henry Black. I’m just William Black. I’ve always puzzled over why my parents didn’t give me the middle name of Henry. I remember my mother saying they just didn’t like the name Henry. But there has to be more to it. I’ll never know.

My father died when I was 17 years old. I was in full adolescent rebellion and I still grieve over the fact that many of my last conversations with him were contentious. He didn’t deserve that. He was a good man.

Bill Black was the guy everyone called to fix things. He was a machinist for B.F. Goodrich, so pretty mechanically inclined. I would often accompany him on his house calls and I hated it. My role was simply to hand him the tools and it bored me to tears. I also recall helping him help people whose car was stuck in snow. My father was a master at wrapping chains around slippery tires.

Before my rebellious years – and after he died – I greatly admired him. He was a handsome man. He had jet black hair and brown eyes. His hairstyle was a flat top. My mother never allowed me to grow enough hair to have a flat top. Her preferred style was the wiffle.

He exuded strength. He served in WWII and landed at Normandy on D-Day Plus One and slept in his truck on the beach for his first week in France. He was 26 years old at the time. His account of that experience is attached at the end of this post.

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Storyworth Book

For Christmas, my daughter gave me a subscription to something called “Storyworth.” It’s an online program that sends out a question about your life every week and you, the subscriber, have to write an answer to the question. At the end of the year, it assembles all the answers into a book.

It was a good gift for me because I find writing therapeutic. That said, in the words of a million famous writers, “I hate writing, but love having written.” So, I need encouragement to find the discipline to write. Frankly, in my retirement, there’s nothing to encourage me to write except to achieve the good feeling from “having written.” Until now. I’m sure I will experience pressure and guilt over the course of the week as I procrastinate after the question from Storyworth arrives each Monday. But I do think it will force me to write about things that might be of interest someday to my grandchild Kieran. Or not. But who cares? I’ll never know.

As a further incentive, it will force me to produce content for this blog, the readership for which sometimes reaches into the high single digits. But it does provide some needed pressure and an outlet for therapeutic writing.

So, here I go. Most recent post coming up then chronological going back.