An Opening Statement (Part 2):
I am Capt Nisewaner's daugher and have been invited to see what y'all might remember of the old man as one of your teachers. He had many sides to him that I did not know (sound familiar?), one of those being his life as a teacher after he retired from the Navy. Bring it on!
Things I can share about my dad -- "TA" to you:
--He was enthusiastic about almost everything--people, food, places, golf, vacations, friends, museums, sports, you name it.
--He had an amazing breadth of knowledge about so many things. If I mentioned a country I'd never heard of before, he'd know all about it. Also geography, birds, wildlife, sports, Naval history...
--He rarely, rarely got angry. Or if he got angry, he never showed it. I can only remember him getting truly pissed off at me once, and I was being a totally self-absorbed teenager at the time and deserved it.
--He didn't have a discernable ego. He didn't need to be the center of attention, he didn't need his children to go to certain schools or achieve professional milestones, he faded back at home and let my mom be in charge. It was just never about him.
--He didn't talk about work. Not when he was in the Navy and not when he was a teacher, except to occasionally bitch about the administration. Never heard him say a bad word about a student.
--He was exceedingly loyal. He visited friends in hospitals and rest homes regularly, even when they were sinking deep into some kind of dimentia and had no clue who he was.
--As snappish and bossy as my mom could sometimes get, I never saw him return her illl humor. He just remained even-keeled. Selective hearing was his ally, and sometimes he might just go to another room.
--He LOVED the Navy and the life he lived when he was in it, the travels to foreign lands, the adventures he experienced (quite apart from the horrors of war), the people he met. For a poor boy from Oklahoma - broken home - multiple stepfathers - who got into USNA as the Depression (the first one) was throwing down its blanket of despair, he was LUCKY enough to get into the Academy and have a job after he graduated. On a few occasions--only when Mom was at a safe distance (and couldn't contradict him)--he would reminisce about his years at the Academy or some adventure he'd had in the Navy. It was more of a stream of consciousness than a conversation. You couldn't interrupt him or really ask him questions, and sadly, I was never able to record those fond walks of his down memory lane.
