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Show every morning at eight and came home at five-thirty. He wore a Velcro strap around the cuff of his right leg so the fabric of his pants wouldn't get caught in the chain. At night, he sketched pictures of airplanes for us and sometimes he brought home books filled with photographs of those jets and bombers and cargo transports. It was years before we understood that dad was as far removed from the actual airplanes as anyone involved in the process could be. But at the time we imagined him tightening nuts and bolts and testing out the controls in the cockpit. It also took years for us to understand how much dad disliked his work, how dissatisfied he was, and how he felt trapped between the job he hated and the war that job kept him from fighting. That was the year we wore three-piece suits and clip-on ties to church. The sleeves were too long and the legs too short but mom said we looked like little gentlemen. During church we counted the pockets on our vests and pretended we were secret agents with some clever device hidden away in every fold of our Sunday clothes. Mom hushed us when we argued or fought and dad said it wasn't okay to bring guns to church, not even pretend guns we made with our hands. So we turned to pencils and paper and made mazes for each other. Sometimes dad drew incomplete pictures like the head of an elephant or the wheels of a car and then asked us to finish them. Sometimes he showed us how to fold paper airplanes but made us promise not to fly them until we were outside. That was the year we wore our suits to Amy's funeral. We didn't play games then and we didn't draw. We sat quietly and listened as first one and then another of the people from our church stood to talk about the blessing Amy had been. They talked about how |