William Allan Jennings (1939-2024)

My father, 2019

My father died yesterday, from complications from COVID and dementia. His condition had been worsening over the past few years; and he was at the stage where he knew almost no one, or where he was, or what was happening.

He still missed my mother, though. Every time I spoke to him on the phone, he would tell me how lonely he was, how much he missed her, how when he woke in the night, he would reach over to the side if her bed, and it was always empty.

They had a long relationship -- meeting when they were 20 years old and 22 years old, and marrying three months later. They drove out to Seattle, Washington together a few days after that, where my father had just been hired as a chemical engineer at Boeing. They had to marry beforehand, because in those days a man and a woman could not rent a hotel room together unless they could prove that they were married.

Once in Washington State, they lived in a tiny pink trailer in a trailer park in Renton, Washington, where over the next five years they would have three children -- my brother Scott, me, and my younger brother Michael. My memories of my father from these days are few and fleeting. I remember him taking care of us one night when my mother went to play bridge, and falling asleep on our couch, waking up briefly to tell me to make sure the trailer door was locked. I had to reach up the lock the door, so I would have been two, I guess, which would have made him around 23.

And I remember him holding me up in the hospital so I could look at Michael, newborn, in the hospital nursery. 

When I was four, he was transferred to New Orleans, where he helped build fuel tanks for the Apollo missions. I remember visiting the plant, and seeing the tanks, which were impossibly big (especially for my four year old self).  We were living then in the trailer in a trailer park in Gentilly, near a coffee plant. (Community coffee, I think.) I remember waking up to the rich smell of the beans being roasted.

I remember when he and my mother bought a house being built in a new subdivision, out in Metairie. We would drive out to the subdivision (Willowdale) on Sunday afternoon to see how the new house was progressing. He would walk us through it, pointing out where the rooms would be. And he found and planted a swamp willow in the backyard, which would grow into the tree I spent half my childhood climbing.

He was never really a hands-on sort of Dad. Taking care of the children was my mother's job. But I remember he built kites for us (using his engineering training). We drove to Florida a couple times a year, so he could go to the races (car races, at Daytona Beach, I think? I don't actually remember that) and we could play in the ocean. Every year, in the summer, we drove to Indiana so we could spend a week with my grandparents in Andrews, Indiana, and a week with my other grandparents, and bunches of cousins, in Richmond, Indiana. That was our big vacation. 

When I was 13, my mother turned up pregnant. She was 34 then, and he was 32, and it was a shock to both of them. But after a few days, my father was delighted. "When I'm in my 40s," he would say, "I'll have someone to take to baseball games, and fishing." My youngest brother, born when I was 14, was his favorite of all of us, I think.

I don't know much about my father's childhood. He would tell us how he had to live on potato soup during his early childhood, because his family was so poor; and how his father bought a farm when my father and his brother were in their teens, so that my father and his brother could learn responsibility -- they took care of a small herd of dairy cattle, milking them, feeding them, keeping the milk cans sterile, and selling the milk to a local dairy. Only when I was an adult did I learn he could imitate the bawl of a young calf -- he did it for my kid. It was hilarious.

He also told us once about how when he was little, five or six, he had a terrible case of boils, so bad that he couldn't walk; and how the doctor have him a shot of penicillin, which cleared them right up. Google tells me penicillin did not become available to the public until 1945, so I guess he must have been six, at least.

I know he graduated from high school at sixteen, and went to college on a scholarship, finishing his degree in three years. This was how he was able to marry my mother when he was 20. Later, when we were in New Orleans, he got an MBA from Tulane.

He worked for NASA until I was 13, when he was transferred to Wichita, Kansas, a place he hated so much that he quit NASA and went to work for Louisiana Off-Shore Oil Port, or LOOP, as Vice-President of Operations and Construction. That was the job that made him rich enough that he was able to retire at 55 -- though he kept working as a consultant after that.

He and my mother spent the next twenty years traveling the world. He ran marathons on every continent, including Antarctica. They went to China. They went to Australia. They took boats up the Rhine. 

When I was living in Idaho, they came out there and we went to Yellowstone Park. The most excited I had ever seen him was when we hiked down to this immense waterfall together. That and the buffalo. It wasn't the buffalo he liked so much as how furious my little dog Spike got about the buffalo. Whenever we drove past one, Spike would go nuts, baying and slamming himself against the car window. That cracked my father up.

The last time I saw him in person was just before the pandemic, when he and my mother drove up to see us. He was already affected badly by dementia, and kept asking me where this was I lived, and what was it I did for a living, again? 

"Do you see?" my mother asked me, when we went out to Wal-Mart together. "Can you tell he's different?"

He hadn't had the diagnosis yet, but he would within the year.

"I don't know what he's going to do, if I die," she told me. "What's going to happen to him without me?"

He missed her, that's what happened. He missed her to the end. Even when he could remember nothing else, he remembered that.

"We were married for sixty years," he would tell me, when I called him. "I miss her every day."

He was the last of my parents, and the last of my childhood. The last person to remember the bicycle he gave me for Christmas when I was ten, or the puppy he gave me when I was eleven. The last person to remember the house I grew up in, or what those vacations to Daytona were like. The last person to remember my brothers when they were babies, or birthday parties, or how I learned to ride a bike.

I'm the oldest in the family now. That's a weird feeling, I have to tell you. Me, the elder.