A rogue and a scoundrel?

Oh, the tales I could tell about my father. Problem is I don't know them all yet.

His life is a mystery slowing revealing itself to me. 

He died in 1993 at age 66 from a heart attack, the kind a pack-a-day of smoking earns you. He died alone, a hermit who had led a fascinating life, then abruptly withdrew from it. From what we've pieced together, he did so to think, and record his thinking, and help administer morphine shots to his dying sister, and be a comfort to his mother when she "survived" the death of her ony daughter to pancreatic cancer.

He died on a Sunday; his body was not found till Thursday. No, not a pleasant scene to enter.

But I'm getting way ahead of myself. And I didn't want to make this a long post. I've had a stranglehold on my keyboard this week, ever since news reports of the swine flu "situation" began to emerge. My job is to help businesses prepare for just such events. (I've got lots of blogvisit catching-up to do, and may for a while.)

Back to Daddy 

(Is it a southern belle thing to call your father Daddy? My kids call Mr. B  "Pops," which I prefer.)

Daddy's life: an outline

Born in East Texas, Cajun country (close to where pieces of the shuttle landed)

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Kicked out of the home at 14

Hard-drinking days

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Drafted

Serves (in more ways that one--a story to tell later) in World War II and Korea

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Earns degree in chemistry

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Marriage #1

Hobby: oil painting

Has son, gets divorced

Meets my mom. Marriage #2.

Two years of medical school at Baylor

Wins fiction short story award from the Atlantic

Has me, surprise!

Hospitalized for months. Why: Semi-BLANK

Drops out of medical school

Switches gears, gets PhD in chemistry.

Dissertation on origins of molecules that make up life on earth

Teaches his 4-year-old to play chess

Ends hard-drinking days

Postdoc work at Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto

Insists his daughter introduce him to her friends as Dr. Kimball

Hobby: reads piles upon piles of science fiction

Takes daughter on Saturdays to look at jewelry, pens, books with his name in them

Claims he's an atheist

Makes yearly retreat with Jesuits

Tries unsuccessfully to teach his 9-year-old how to do calculus

Adopts twice, one girl (half Mexican/half slavic), second girl (half Mexican/half Irish)

Brings home brand new car, never having consulted his wife

Brings home mice to inject 'round the clock for his research

Moves back to Texas for tenure-track position at University of Houston

Hobby: Painting with acrylics

Hobby: Making perfumes

Hobby: Making fudge

Grad students love him, some a bit too much

Divorce #2

Very popular lecturer; gets lots of grants, awards, recognition

Hippy stage, wears toupe & denim

Conducts ground-breaking research

Develops drug that cures a form of childhoold leukemia (still used)

Marriage #3

Earns tenure

Walks first daughter down the aisle

Develops heart troubles; gets angioplasty

Not asked to walk second daughter down the aisle

Walks 3rd daughter down the aisle

Diagnosed with narcolepsy

More heart troubles

Divorces 3rd time

Hopes for Nobel Prize

Does not receive Nobel Prize

Retires early

Moves close to sister and mother

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Dies

He didn't have many belongings in his apartment when we 3 sisters arrived to clean it out.  He had books, though. Lots of books. Lots of books on dinosaurs. We couldn't find a will. We kept a few of his books and belongings, but his clothes clung to the smell of death, so we couldn't donate them. We did box up most of the books to give to charity.

On the day of his funeral, I decided to go through the boxes of books one last time. Though we'd each flipped through them searching for his will, which we knew he'd been working on, we never found one. In looking for that one thing, though, we missed a few important others.

Until the morning of his funeral.

That soggy August morning in Houston, I walked out to my sister's garage where we'd lined up the boxes. I wanted one last look at his books before they were to leave our sight forever. I ran my fingertips slowly across the terrain of hardback spines. Maybe it was a way of trying to be close to him by touching some thing that he treasured.

It worked.

To my surprise, I found the following:

Item #1.  A King James bible with a card tucked in marking a page. Printed on one side of the card was a picture of St. Francis; the other side held the lovely peace prayer attributed to him.  I wished I'd paid attention to the pages the card marked, but that's one mystery that will remain unsolved.

Item #2.  A journal he'd kept for 10 years beginning in 1981, when my oldest son was born. The weathered blue canvas cover had a blank spine, perhaps why we missed it. But the first page bears the the following inscription: "To be given to my daugther Kathleen Kimball-Baker, who is instructed after my death to give this to my first grandson, Sean, when she deems him old enough." It is filled with a carefully numbered potpourri of musings, theories about life, observations about society and all sorts of things, quips, and a few choice remarks about women. Just like a scientist to index his observations!

Dr. Kimball always called himself a "rougue and a scoundrel." I am quite sure he was right. But I'm also convinced there's much more to the story.

So much for a short post.

Image 1 by Chemical Heritage Foundation

Image 3 by maximolly

Image 4 by guldfisken

Image 5 by Chocolate Geek