Framed

This image of me at about age 14 months or so has gone halfway around the world and back again. Along the way it picked up its unusual frame. (Click on the image to see a larger version.)

Take a good look at the image above. No, not at the baby picture of me. Nothing much unusual there. But look at the frame.

My mom mailed a baby picture of me to my dad, probably when he was in Wellington, New Zealand, on his way to Bougainville as a Seabee in World War II. I first saw the picture after the war ended. He told the family many times how it came to be framed. Once things settled down to some extent on Bougainville, commerce between the island's indigenous people and the Seabees and Marines began in earnest. Mahogany was a ready material. The island people made mahogany warclubs intricately inlaid with mother of pearl (and deadly lethal in appearance), highly-polished mahogany bookends, even mahogany crosses, to sell to the Americans.

There were other materials available on the island, too, but they weren't indigenous to Bougainville. The natives scavenged the wreckage of Japanese and American planes scattered across the island. Combined with traditional Solomon Islands materials, the bits and pieces of the planes allowed the natives even more success at boosting their economy.

The frame for the picture above was made of a cross-section of a mahogany tree. The cover over the snapshot was cut from the acrylic windshield of a downed Japanese plane. The screws were taken from the cockpit. I don't know what my father paid - or traded - for the assembled frame, but I am sure it wasn't much. Yet it has survived for all these decades. I found it when I cleaned out my mom's house. I hadn't seen it in years.

My dad, James Vernon Dale Sr., was a man straight out of his time. Born in Thomasville, Georgia, in 1903, where his father was a weekly newspaper editor and subsistence farmer, he eventually made his way through Savannah and up to Richmond. He married three times once he got here, all before the war. His first wife was Lillie Durham Dale. They had two children, Dorothy and a son named for his father. After Lillie's death, the children were raised by their aunts on her side. James Sr. then married Louise Dale, and they had a son they named Robert. Following their divorce, Bobby was raised by his mother. Then, in 1941, three months before the war began, James Sr. married my mother, and they had two children, me and my sister Dianne Christine Dale. James Sr. and Mary Helen Nichols Dale stayed together until he died at the age of 69 in 1972. Bobby and I are the only surviving children of my father's marriages.

I say he was a man of his time because he didn't have the slightest idea of how to deal with or raise children. That was woman's work. Intellectually, he loved his children, I believe. But emotionally, he was distant and authoritarian. I don't know about Lillie (and her sisters) or Louise, but I suspect that they, like my mother, provided the emotional support their children craved. It took me a good two decades after his death to process my feelings about my father. My conclusion was that he did the best he could. He and my mom clothed Dianne and me, fed us well, educated us beyond what he had achieved, and provided a safe home.

My perspective is unique, and it might well have colored my opinion. I spent the first three years of my life as the sole focus of my mom's attention while my dad was in the South Pacific. When he came home, my father had to work his way back into the family. I suspect this was not an easy thing to do. I think - but I do not know - that having to re-establish himself in the family led to a certain, persistent jealousy of my mom's focus on her firstborn. I am sure that my sister, born after the war, and my half-siblings, born before the war, had their own unique perspectives of my father. But life is like that. Things happen, and they have consequences that roll on for decades. As Faulkner said, "The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past."