Cresting the Wave

When the first nuclear bomb in Nevada was detonated in 1951, my grandfather stood in the desert in Army fatigues. He wore goggles to protect his eyes and snapped a photograph of the mushroom cloud. In high school I found that photo in a box of slides, lifting it to the light in awe.

We called him Poppy, but my mom and her sisters called him the Old Bastard. He wore a flattop and an olive-khaki leisure suit, and he smoked a pipe. In 1957, Poppy moved to Corpus Christi with his second wife, Madeline—my grandmother—an aspiring actress from a well-off family in Connecticut. They had met in Georgia while they were both married to other people. They opened a lumberyard in the Flour Bluff area of Corpus, and Poppy helped raise Madeline’s three daughters.

Four years into the new marriage, Poppy developed both colon and testicular cancer, a gift from the nuclear radiation. The surgery made him impotent. He and Madeline became full-blown alcoholics, fighting bitterly. Poppy beat Madeline with a riding crop. Their older daughters, Mary Lou and Lynn, got married and escaped. That left my mom—a tomboy with funny teeth who rarely wore shoes and loved the Beatles—to live with two dysfunctional drunks. She met my father at a raucous party in Flour Bluff. He was enlisted in the Navy and stationed at the local air base. A skinny, red-haired kid from North Carolina, a year out of high school, he drove a 1965 Mustang and kept a Donald Takayama surfboard on the roof to impress girls at the local surf spot on Padre Island, Bob Hall Pier.

In 1969, when my parents first began dating, they’d walk to the end of Bob Hall Pier to catch the sunset, a first glimpse of life’s horizons. They watched phosphorescence sparkle in the crashing waves. Built in 1950 and named after local commissioner Robert Reid Hall, the pier had been destroyed by hurricanes in 1961 and 1967