My Family Tree

I write.  Fiction mostly, and it came easier before my head injury.  When I’m actively working on a new piece, I do a lot of ‘research’ which means I sit around talking to the people in my life.  My characters are based on the souls I’ve met or known or sometimes just briefly came in contact with day to day.

My mother has always been the main source of material.  Raised in a Catholic family she attended twelve years of school filled to the brim with uniform-laden girls and black and white nuns.  She’s told me the most amazing stories to which she always adds better not show up in any of my pieces.  She knows they will.  It’s a game we play.

While visiting with my parents not long ago, I looked to my father for a moment.  My maternal grandfather had just died without my ever having met him taking with him all the stories of his life.  I didn’t want to miss my father’s stories.

We sat on the couch laughing for a couple of hours.  My Uncle Arch was there because it was the holidays and he always stayed with my parents for a few days before he went skiing.  That day I learned some things I’d never taken the time to know.

My father joined the Navy when he was just seventeen.  His father signed the paperwork for him and he left home to travel the world.  I remember as a child seeing the slides, no digital pictures then, of the Sistine Chapel he’d purchased in Rome.  I remember how clear and crisp and beautiful his tattoo was back then.  Death before Dishonor.  But I didn’t know my father had stood on the deck of the USS Lowry during the Cuban Missile Crisis taking pictures of the Russian submarines. I’d never looked at him and thought veteran.

My father, like my husband, is a veteran.

Uncle Arch joined in adding to my surprise.  This man I’d loved since the day he brought me a wind up penguin on a cross-country trip to take my grandmother from Philadelphia to San Diego had flown helicopters in Vietnam.  All those years I’d know he was in the Navy, I had the pictures of him just home from Annapolis and the one of him with the awful mustache when he became commander of the base.  I’d even memorized every song from a Naval record he’d given as a child - I still know all the words to Anchors Aweigh.  But I didn’t know the rest. 

He is a veteran.

That evening we talked at length about my veterans.  My Uncle Donald, Army, Silver Star.  My Uncle Russ, Navy.  My grandfather, Navy.  My Great Uncle Michael, Army, gave his life in WWII. 

The list seemed to stretch on forever and I was taken by the fact I’d neglected knowing about all these people.  I missed their stories because I wasn’t listening. 

But I’m listening now and my pen is poised.