I owe a lot to both of my parents. They, along with their parents, have taught me virtually everything I know. I was very fortunate to have both parents raise me for the entirety of my childhood. I might be biased, but I think my parents are the best on the face of the Earth. I am not sure how I am going to tie this blog post into the American Dream, but get ready for a lot of pictures 🙂
My dad was born in Norman in 1965 to a super country white guy named Thurman (Grandpa McPherson) and a Choctaw Indian named Linda (called Joyce, née Kennedy). He had a childhood that was interesting to me but was the reality for many Oklahomans of his time. He grew up a country boy on 7 acres, which was a lot at the time, especially for a family that came from humble origins. He enjoyed spending his time outdoors, finding any excuse to go fishing or hunting. One of my grandpa’s favorite stories concerns the time that my dad was riding his horse while on a hunting trip and the horse’s eventual upheaval of my dad, bucking the stocky, corn-fed, admittedly hoss clear off his back. He can never finish the story before he succumbs to a fit of laughter.
My dad excelled in school. He was a 4.0 student who worked hard for everything he had and also managed to find the time to be a very successful 2 sport athlete (he turned down a football scholarship to the University of Tulsa (DI) to study engineering at OU). Beginning his sophomore year of college, he got an internship with the Mobil Oil Corporation (before the merger with Exxon) and spent his summers in the extremely confusing town of Cortez, Colorado. It was in Colorado that he was able to refine his hunting and fishing skills, hunting for monster elk in the San Juans and catching trout in the Animas and McElmo Creek.
It was also in Colorado that he met my mother. There are two stories about how they first met. The first story claims that my dad was volunteering at the nursing home where my mom worked and somehow got locked in a bathroom; my mom came to the rescue after minutes of relentless knocking from my dad. The second story insists that they met at a jazzercize class (my dad’s words “If I’d have had big rocks in Cortez like the Romans and Greeks had, I wouldn’t have needed jazzercize”). I still don’t know which story my dad goes with.
My mother was born in California and raised in Cortez, Colorado. She was born in the 70s to some pretty stereotypical Californians (I don’t have the heart to call them hippies – I love them too much). My mom’s dad was an immigrant from the United Kingdom, who sought asylum after his neighborhood was destroyed by the German bombing campaign (an event that was so pivotal in everyone’s life that once they settled in California, nobody would eat German sausages or sauerkraut, and god forbid somebody ever considered getting a Doberman). I really can’t say much more about my mom’s mom other than she was a stereotypical Californian (pardon the redundancy).
My parents are living proof of the popular adage “opposites attract”. My dad was a somewhat conservative half-white-half-indian guy from central Oklahoma and grew up on a farm and my mom surely was (still is) an ultra-liberal who was at least born in a big city. Despite all of this, they managed to meet each other in a small town in the middle of the Colorado Plateau.
They would eventually move to Norman and raise me and my 3 siblings, and I am forever grateful for everything that they have done for me.
I am not sure how to articulate this story’s relation to the American Dream, but at least to me, it makes sense.