“That was a darker part of my service to my country. I grew up thinking my father would one day kill me. I never remember a time when I was not afraid of my father’s hands except those bright, palmy years when Dad was waging war or serving in carrier-based squadrons overseas. I used to pray that America would go to war or for Dad to get overseas assignments that would take him to Asian cities I’d never heard of. Ironically, a time of war for the United States became both respite and separate peace for my family. When my father was off killing the enemy, his family slept securely, and not because he was making the world safe for democracy.“
This was one of the paragraphs that drove me to set Mary’s book down for a while. Like maybe 6 – 7 months, or so. I could “relate.”
We never knew “which Dad” was coming home on any given evening. A ‘happy Dad?’ A ‘pissed off Dad?’ Who ever knew? By the time I entered high school I had a fairly well-developed “6th sense,” but it wasn’t until here of late that I knew what it was. My room at that time, was in the basement. I could “sense” not only when Dad came home, but the mood he was in! I think that was the beginning of my well-developed sense of survival…