My dad would have been 98 today (he died in 1985).

My divorce from Crusty has been final for 20 years - signed into history by a SE AL circuit court judge at 0909h on 9 September 1999.  Every time I think about that timing I like to think my dad was 'up there somewhere' having a hand in setting Fox and me free of a living rat bastard who'd done little but blight our lives since the day I discovered I was pregnant with Fox.

My dad never liked Crusty. Pop always was a good (and instantaneous) judge of character.

1921 was a good year for most Southern California residents, my family included. The ranch was (I'm told) doing well, the state and especially our area of it was booming, even. My gran was smack in the middle of a long-running feud with W. Mulholland - the details of which my father declined to share aside from one oft told story of Mulholland getting the 'good ladies' of a local Salvation Army chapter to bring a Thanksgiving Basket (charity food basket to 'help poor families enjoy a bit of Thanksgiving fare') out to the ranch and the story went Gran drop kicked the basket from the front steps all the way to the good ladies Model T (wood cladding, open air) parked several yards from the veranda.

Pop would have been a few months old so the story (never told while Gran was alive as the speaking of it would set her off ranting for hours and days about that 'horrible man') was one he got from his much older brothers and some of the ranch hands who happened to be there to see it happen.

Chinatown (the movie) was released in '74 and was one of the last movies she went to see. She came home saying the film was so close to the truth it was more documentary than fictionalised recounting of his later years.

When Mulholland 'popped his clogs' via a stroke (Gran called it a 'fit of apoplexy') in '35, she didn't throw a party or do a wee jig in the kitchen garden - she supposedly prayed for his soul daily hoping he'd 'turn his heart back to God' including the day she read in the LA Times he'd died. She (I'm told) nodding grimly and said she hoped he'd repented his ways before dying but wasn't surprised at the way he'd died (although I'm sure she thought a bolt of lightning would have been more appropriate) then went about her day.

So I never really knew what started the feud (although I did hear rumours it was down to his making inappropriate advances to her, and that he'd tried for years to get her to sell the ranch owing the ginormous artesian spring on the property - that one of his descendents finally succeeded in forcing the capping of so his water company could have the exclusive use of - I was nine and the day the County capped that well my life changed forever), never knew if his being Irish (we were and are firmly Scottish) was the beginning of it or the cause of Gran's lifelong 'distaste' for the Irish and in particular 'jumped-up shanties' like the Mulhollands. All I really know is there was a furious feud between them and she would go miles out of her way to avoid driving Mulholland Drive - and enforced that rule with the rest of us. In my entire life I have only been on Mulholland Drive one time and as soon as I realised I'd turned onto it, I got off it immediately (and somehow ended up in Compton in a particularly dodgy part of town). We weren't electrified until the well was capped and that capping and bringing electricity to the ranch made her especially bitter, btw.

By the time I was born in 1956, Gran was an 'old lady' who was hard to get to know, really. Although she did share Life Lessons (cooking, sewing, weeding out 'the good 'uns from the bad 'uns'), she wasn't big on reminiscing the way my friends grans were so I never did hear from her what my father was like as a child, or what the wars she lived through were like for her as cattle ranch wife, or what it was like to watch motor cars replace horses and carriages, or to see a man walk on the moon.

She did say once - one time only - my father was a difficult birth (he was a 'late in life' baby) and child. She did tell me a small bit about the Great Depression years - mostly that she was proud the family had never been stupid enough to get into the stock market, never had debt, and managed to put her surviving sons through uni, again without debt. Most of what I learned from her I learned by watching her, not listening to her (she wasn't much of a talker, I've no clue which forbearer I take after, Chatty Cathy that I am). She made every movement count but never looked as though she was putting in a hard day.

And she never-ever-ever boasted about her going down to Hollywood and getting herself a paid job as a costumer for one of the biggest movie studios of the time. Her Depression era census entry lists her as a head of household and clothing designer making the eye-watering sum of $500 PER MONTH on top of her earnings from the ranch - yes, by that time my grandfather was splitting his time between ranch and his 'legal, real family' and his adulterous union with a Mexican girl down in San Luis (Sonora) Mexico and apparently Gran was just spiteful enough to greet him on the front steps with a loaded .12ga when he'd roll up. Yet when he died she had his body brought back to the ranch and they are now buried together in the Fontana city cemetery family plot holding my family remains going back to the first years after the ranch was Spanish Land Grant awarded in the late 18th century. (Long story, but an interesting one).

She wasn't a 'soft woman'. Everyone who knew her as a young woman said she was one of the county beauties but was 'bookish' with a uni degree in mathematics and hard to know. And I do know she was not the kindest of mothers, which explains my father in a lot of ways. One story goes he got off the train home from WWII and she gave him a hour to 'catch up' with his wife (my mother who'd come over from Britain as soon as 'war brides' were granted passage) before sending him out to ride fences. Gran was in charge, and there was no discussing it.

I come from a long-lived, long-line of civil and mechanical engineers. Progressive people - I was expected to 'be a lady' but also graduate uni as either a civil or mechanical engineer, and I ended a great disappointment when I turned out to be 'little Suzy homemaker' (Gran's scornful 'final word' on what a disappointment I'd become to the family). My birthday gift from my father the year I aced geometry was a handed-down family heirloom slide rule (which my older sister stole while I was at USCG Basic saying it was wasted on me and it should have been hers all along any road).

With my father's grudging approval I toyed with the idea of studying psychology but the truth was I was only interested in it to discover if I was doomed to become as evil a person as the woman I was raised to believe my mother - the second I realised that was my only motivation, found out Dirty Dort wasn't my biological mother, and most importantly that even were she my real mother I still could choose to be completely different, I sold my books for pocket money, dropped out of the classes I was monitoring (long story, I was in uni at the same time I was forcing myself over to the local high school every week-day morning to meet state law I had to be in my 'age appropriate schooling' whilst monitoring uni-courses I could later turn into 'CLEP' grades towards my degree), and really, never looked back.

My dad died 21st December 1985, just a few months after his 64th birthday - his WWII war wounds finally catching up with him. Was he the greatest father ever, no, and I'm the first to say that. But he was my dad, and I still miss him.

Crusty I don't miss at all - although I do, when I think of it, pray for his soul. For what he did to Fox, he will answer to God even if he repents - God is ever merciful so if Crusty genuinely repents what he did to blight that boy's life, God will forgive. But I never want to see or hear of him again, not in this life or any other.