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Show no longer narrating the story of his life in the military out loud for us but leaving us to connect the details into a story we all knew too well. By the end, my mother had tears in her eyes and my father was visibly upset. No matter how beautifully arranged on the page, no matter how expensive the album, nothing could make the end of his career anything but painful. My father stood up and left the room. The summer my family drove across the country in a Winnebago the size of a barn, my father tried to outrun that pain. But we could not drive fast enough. In almost every state we ended up lost, the tiny map in the Let's Go book failing us again and again. Only recently have I considered why my father took two months of vacation when before he had never taken two weeks. Only recently have I wondered where he was that summer, as he sat in the captain's seat, piloting the Winnie like a spacecraft. Only recently have I tried to name what hunted us. And when I turn around and look behind us what I see is Failure keeping pace, never lagging, a shape I know as intimately as my own belly, the same figure who demands I am never late, never wrong, never at a loss, and always making good time. 212 |
