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Show Breakers Unlike a military childhood, military service ends. Mine, at the age of twenty-one. And while I can no more shed my military past than I can my own skin, I do know the day when I relinquished my ID card and all its attendant privileges: my wedding day. The path from bucket to altar is clear to me but only in hindsight. When my father handed me over to my husband in a church dressed in carpet the color of blood, all that mattered was that I had finally been chosen, not that I had never thought to choose. Before that moment, however, came a trip across the country with my family, the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college, two months traveling across the US in a 1964 Winnebago the size of a barn. More than the near-end of my military service, that trip marks the end of my childhood, the last time I was simply a daughter, before I met John, slept with him, began keeping secrets of my own. My father's original plan, his lifelong dream in fact, had been to sail around the world with his family in a small boat of some sort, but either because of the cost of water craft or the fact that four of the five of us didn't know how to sail, he and my mom chose instead to cruise the interstates of America armed only with a Let's Go guide as thick as my fist. We began in the middle. After flying from Hawaii to Kansas City, we took a small plane to Grand Island, Nebraska where we visited my aunt and uncle and picked up the Winnebago. Our route was a giant figure eight beginning with a month exploring the East Coast and then finishing the trip in the West. Beyond that, we had little sense of a 195 |