My father served in the US Navy for something like 22 years. I can't remember the exact amount of years he was in the service, not because I never cared to remember it, but because many of those years I had no idea what he was doing. He was gone quite a lot during my childhood, off cruising the world on a Destroyer, and collecting different types of wood from ports in countries I will never see even as an adult.
Side note: From time to time I can remember him telling us how other sailors would visit the strip clubs and hookers while in port, and he would head out and buy pieces of wood not common back in the States. My father...the wood collector. HA
Growing up in a military family meant that we moved around the United States more times than I can remember. No really, I cannot remember just how many times we moved. My fifth grade year alone our family moved three times. From Virginia to Rancho Bernardo, California, and then to San Diego. I am not holding this against my father. I am actually saying thank you.
One of the best parts about being in a family that moved to a new house, on average once every two years, is that I have memories spread all over the country of homes that I may never see again. Here is what I want though. I want to see these homes I lived in as they stand now. To see how time has treated them.
The words are easier to type out than it is for me to set aside the time and money to visit each of the homes though. One of them, the duplex in Guantanamo Bay Cuba, I will never see again in my adult life. Unless I fly from Canada or get a fake passport.
As for the rest, I wanted to write out what I remember.
The apartment in San Diego. AKA the first time we lived in SD: The training grounds for German Shepard K9 units. The hillside of Iceplant leading down to highway 15.
Colchester Illinois: The abandoned house along the walk to school my father claimed was haunted. The train tracks where we placed coins to be flattened. The small patch of skinny trees behind the home that I never got to explore in the snow.
Cuba: The bunkers in the hills behind the house that the Navy Seals would come practice in. The beach where we had a birthday party and my sister wanted to pet the large iguanas. (This home serves as a staging ground for any home in a story I read that holds the same feelings in words, as I felt as a child).
Virginia: The church I attended school at. The house behind ours where an old man lived that paid me to fetch his golf balls he accidentally would hit over our fence. The garage where my brother fell out the window.
Rancho Bernardo: The pool where we swam when we wanted. The road out in front of the apartment complex where my father told us why you should never trust something that looks like trash in the road while driving in a car (like how a brown paper bag is really a small muddy boulder that will mess up the exhaust when you run it over). The auditorium in the school across the street where I attended Webelos.
San Diego: The canyons across the street from both of our homes. The baseball complex down the street. Countless other small memories too numerous to list.
I see now that writing it all out has shown me the list is not terribly long, and very doable. An English professor in one of my classes at WWU once told me that writing a paper means surprising yourself by the end at what you have discovered along the way. What I am saying is that I am surprised at how this journey I want to take one day is not all that far-fetched.
And here is the John Denver song that lead to the thought for this post:
No comments:
Post a Comment