There are times when I believe that Holiday times were never meant for me or for my family. Not in the traditional sense, at least.

Today, the day before Thanksgiving, marks the 18th anniversary of my father's passing. That year it was the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, but still the first blush of the Holiday Season. It doesn't stop there. Christmas was never just Christmas around my home. It was also Dad's birthday. My birthday is also cluttered. My brother was born two years and a day after I was. If I were born 55 minutes later, we'd have the same birthday -- now how's that for family planning! Then, of course, Father's Day invariably fell either on one of those two days, or the day after. So it was always a catch-all celebration, if there was a celebration at all.

I'm not trying to feel sorry for myself today. It's just that there is always this tinge of remembrance that's always there.

I miss my dad. It's complicated, because my father was nothing like Jim Anderson on Father Knows Best. Or Ward Cleaver on Leave It To Beaver. I wish.

No, my father was equal parts Archie Bunker and Chill Wills's character Jim Ed Love in the old Henry Fonda-Glenn Ford movie `The Rounders.' We used to joke that his Indian name was Sit 'N' Bullshit. Lovingly, of course.

My father was a business agent for a union that represents heavy equipment operators. His job was to show up on job sites, talk to the workers, solve problems, and represent the union by being its face on the job. He travelled all over Central Washington -- his territory covered a number of major construction projects -- from expansion projects at Grand Coulee Dam to high way construction all over the middle part of the state.

My father was a vital man for most of my younger years. He had been a rodeo cowboy before I was born, had been shuttled from relative to relative after his parents divorced as a child. He was signed into the Army as an underage enlistee because there was no place else for him to go. He spent his 18th birthday on the German-
Russian border at the end of World War II. He was a private pilot, a hunter and a fisherman.

It was hunting that forever changed the chemistry of our family.

I was in the 9th grade and wasn't allowed to go on an elk hunting trip with my father and his best friend. They were trekking off to a favorite spot in the Cascade Mountains where they would camp and spend several days hunting at the beginning of the season. On a brisk but beautiful late November morning, just after sunup, they heard something moving through the brush outside their camp, and everyone but my father grabbed their rifle and headed off to see what was there. Dad stayed in camp to get a campfire started and the coffee pot on for breakfast.

He was standing outside his tent, with an axe in his hands, ready to split some more firewood for the fire he had just started when a bullet hit him on his left side, just above his beltline. The impact knocked him down, of course. My dad being my dad, he tried to get up, which was a mistake. His insides wanted to spill out when he did.

A series of events kept my father alive. The first, most fortunate thing, was that my father's best friend was a practicing veterinarian, so there was a first-aid kit in camp that would have been better only if Dr. Christian Barnard were there. He packed and dressed the wound, administering morphine for the pain and getting my father ready to get down off the mountain.

Next, since they had hiked their way way back into the mountains, there was no way to get him down other than carrying him. His hunting partners made a stretcher out of wood and dad's sleeping bag. Meanwhile, one of the men took the walkie-talkie dad had brought with them and started broadcasting a mayday. They thought they were in the middle of no place, as far from any other hunter as they could possibly get. They were wrong. In minutes other hunters came out of the woods and pitched in to carry my father's stretcher down the mountain, to where the vehicles were left. Another ran ahead to get an ambulance there when they got to the parking area.

That country was steep. It wasn't an easy hike, especially so with an injured man on a stretcher. I count it as a miracle that not once, in that entire trip down, did one man slip or stumble.

The next miracle, as I think of it, was at the hospital in Ellensburg, hours later. The doctor on call was not at the hospital, so the resident was there to begin treating my ather. When the resident arrived, about the same time as my mother, who had raced there, some 100 miles from home, he gave her the typical doctor speech about how the next eight hours were critical and that he was getting the best care possible. As he left the room, he told the nurse, loud enough for everyone to hear. `I don't know why I told her that. He doesn't stand a snowball's chance.'

The resident didn't share that prognosis, thankfully. In fact, the resident was just back from a tour of duty in Vietnam. As a MASH surgeon. He was used to treating gunshot wounds and did a very good job of getting him stable and treating the initial damage from the bullet. That was where they discovered that the bullet had not hit my father the way you imagine a bullet to strike a target. It had travelled so far that it had stopped rifling -- spinning through the air. It had lost so much velocity that it was actually tumbling, end over end through the air. When it struck my father, the bullet was pointing straight down, so that it would not distort and mushroom through dad's vital organs. Even though it had entered on his left side, the bullet took the top of dad's liver, bounced along his intestines, passed between his backbone and his skin and lodged on the right side of his back.

To make a long story short, it was 45 days and three operations later that dad returned home for the first time, lookign gaunt and frail -- so much so that his appearance scared my younger brother. He had died three times and had been revived each time.

It turned out that the bullet had damaged his backbone and had damaged the primary nerves that served his left leg. His leg lost all muscle tone and atrophied, and he lost all feeling in the leg. He was in fairly constant pain for the rest of his life, and was on a number of different medications, including pain medication, which changed his personality radically.

What had been a tentative relationship before the accident became an adversarial relationship after between my dad and me. I remember my 21st birthday -- and the brutal arguement we got into. Not physical, but angry and abusive and as caustic as any I have ever been part of. It was a one-way arguement, as well. It took me a long time to understand that it was pain and chemicals that was behind a lot of that character change and reslove my feelings of anger.

I was in my mid-20s before our relationship reached any sort of moderation. There were lots of reasons for that -- reasons that I won't go into now.

So when I say there are memories on days like today, it's memory tinged with what might have been. What would have happened if he had lived another few years, even -- what might we have healed and resolved as father and son.

Still, considering the time of year, I am thankful to have had the time with him I did. It's a formative part of who I am.

More soon.