My father was an incredibly avid soul, gifted in languages and music and theater performance. He worked as a radio announcer during the years we were together as a family. He was admitted to the University of Chicago at the age of 14, which did not turn out as well as might be hoped. My mother was his third wife, so during the years I knew him, he had already been drinking hard for a good decade or two, as far as I can reconstruct.

Nobody wanted to talk much about him after the marriage broke up when I was nine and a half. I never stopped missing him. I miss him today. He was the other half of my soul. We had that perfect understanding and appreciation of one another that sometimes happens between parent and child. I recently read that in certain cases a daughter can be an 'X-clone' of her father. That could explain a lot. I was always called "Bud's Baby" even though I was named for my mother's mother, who was a preachers's daughter.

My father's father was a medical missionary to China, that is how he handled his avidity. He took his MD at Johns Hopkins at the turn of the century, married his Ohio hometown sweetheart, Martha Caroline Carmack, and set sail for China. My father was born and raised there, along with Amy and Mary, his older twin sisters, and my uncles Ben and Hugh. He didn't arrive in this country until he was ten years old. I have often wondered what his teenage years could have been like.