| OCR Text |
Show the doors began to close against my body, people yelling, the voice on the loudspeaker, no longer electronic, ordering us to clear the doors, clear the doors, clear the doors, and in the distance my dad running for track 21, the poster from Les Mis slapping his thigh. Looking back twenty years later I cannot help but wonder why we didn't stop at a coffee shop to talk about the play and wait an hour for the next train. But that was not how our vacation unfolded. Those visions of wandering from one city to the next poking about in sleepy towns and bumping into wonderful restaurants never materialized. The one time my mother was a little crazy and took a detour into a town that held what in family lore has become the world's largest ball of twine, my dad was mad enough to spit nails. While we had thought there wasn't a plan, a set way of doing things, a specific way to trek across the country, there was. And my dad held both the map and the key. When he explained the military chain of command to his daughter, he relied on the metaphor of a pyramid. At the base, he said, little discrimination was made about who made it in. To enlist, you only had to visit the local recruiting office and, begging any criminal record, you could join. As you moved your way up the pyramid, however, it became much more select. Most of those with a college degree made Lieutenant JG (Junior Grade), and barring any conduct unbecoming of an officer, most of them made Lieutenant. For him, barely a year passed before he received his first stripe. Some of those made Commander, in fact many of his closest friends, but far fewer made Captain, the rank at which you traded a plain brim on your cover for one embroidered in leaves of gold. Almost no one made Admiral, only the very best. In the back of his mind, or maybe it was in his heart, he had always thought he 204 |
