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Show take me away from my mother. Up until school, I could count on one hand, one finger really, the number of times I had been away from my mother. My father would come and go, friends move overnight, the packers arrive a warm day in June and throw all my stuffed animals in a large moving box labeled "girls room" in magic marker, but my mother remained. Every day. To the bank, to the exchange, the commissary, the Public Works offices, I held her skirt as we walked across the parking lot. At Hospital Point, I remember riding an open boat from the ferry dock near our house to the landing at Ford Island where we would shop at the commissary and play in the brown fields. Wearing an orange life preserver, one meant for adults, I would hold her arm as we headed into the harbor, gulls caterwauling in the air and the breeze thick with salt. The boat was grey, as were most things in the military, and filled with the blue uniforms of enlisted sailors on their way to or from work. While waiting for the boat to arrive, I would clamber over the wooden benches that sat on the landing, pick at the tar on the brown beams of the dock, or lean against the cool concrete walls. My mother sat nearby, making a grocery list, reminding me, use your indoor voice. Even when my brother, Scott, arrived, she made me feel like the center of her life. Never traveling further than her voice could reach me, I orbited her sun and wished for nothing more than its warmth. A scar on my little finger reminds me of the only time she left me, when she had to fly to South Dakota, pregnant with Scott, and nurse her own mother after open heart surgery. Under my father's care, I managed to somehow get into the desk drawer and slice my finger open with a razor blade. After a trip to the emergency room and a set of 58 |
