I started watching a movie tonight, Taking Chance. I don't know why I thought I could get through it. Because Kevin Bacon is hot? Because Kevin Bacon wearing a military uniform and oak leaves -- even if it is a Marine uniform -- is even hotter? I didn't get through it. This definitely wasn't a night when I should have tried to watch that movie. After writing about Memorial Day Monday night, this wasn't even the week for watching that movie.
But I did start thinking, or wondering .... some things almost seem like fate, like they are going to happen no matter how unlikely, how improbable, they are.
That I would become an officer's wife was one of the most unlikely things that could have happened. When I was a little kid, I remember watching the bodies coming off the planes from Vietnam. It was horrifying and I couldn't look away. When I was a teenager, the military was the enemy. The draft. The long, unfair war. The lies that came out. Nobody I knew would have anything to do with the fucking military.
Except my first love, L, the boy I fell in love with in high school. We were together for a while, and then we broke up. Sort of. We dated other people, and every once in a while we went out together just to stay in touch. He always said we would get married after he graduated from college and went into the Air Force to become an astronaut. He was 2 years older than I was, and he was on the track to becoming an Air Force officer. Class president, swing choir, football/wrestling/track star, National Honor Society. I don't know what else. I wasn't into guys like that, but I was into him. And I believed we would get married eventually. In the meantime, I was having too much fun being a bad girl to care about the future.
Even though we didn't go steady for long during high school .... even though he went steady with a cheerleader longer than we did ..... I felt a connection, a bond that seemed inevitable. Our dads went to school together. His dad was the fastest runner in the 8th grade. At the 8th-grade graduation from country school, my grandma beat him in a race. And later he was my junior high principal and first basketball coach. My cousin married L's older brother.
The first time I got drunk I was with L, and I went to my first concert with him. I know you'll be curious so I'll tell you. We slept together, but we never went all the way. He was truly the first boy I loved, but more than that .... I felt that connection. I can't explain it.
L went away to college, joined ROTC. We got together sometimes when he came home, but we weren't "together." It was fine. We would get married when he graduated and went into the Air Force.
Except he didn't. I left home when I was 17 and moved to Iowa City. L would show up sometimes and surprise me. It caused problems with the guy I was dating, but I didn't care. L came first. We were going to be married. We were connected.
But then he got into drugs -- pot and other stuff too -- and he dropped out of ROTC and then college. He was driving a truck. The last few times I saw him, I was already living with LtColEx. L would drop in unexpectedly, sometimes in the middle of the night. The last time, LtColEx loaned him money. He was a mess for a while.
And the connection was broken. I felt it when it broke. It was there like a familiar, safe cord tying us together, and then it was gone.
L got his shit together relatively quickly. He wasn't meant to be a burnt out loser. But it didn't matter. Something too big to get back had changed.
And the connection with LtColEx was there and it was even stronger. We got married when I was 18, which was a huge shock to everyone who knew us. (I was not pregnant.) L never talked to me again after he heard we were engaged. In fact, when we did end up in the same bar on the square in my hometown one night, he got up and left as soon as I walked in.
LtColEx never intended to go into the military. Never. When he told people he'd decided to go to officer training school, they were stunned. His dad tried to talk him out of it, but we'd already decided. We wanted out of Iowa, and he had a choice of managing a Color Tile, going back to the farm, or becoming an Air Force officer. We chose the Air Force.
L chose the family farm. And one of the things LtColEx and I said we would never do, no matter how much his grandfather begged, was go back to the family farm.
I have to wonder -- because Miss Serendipity does spend a lot of time fucking with my life -- if my marrying an Air Force officer was somehow inevitable. It certainly wasn't a lifestyle I dreamed of or even wanted. I was rebel. If ever there was a poor potential officer's wife, I was the one. I didn't know one damn thing about it when LtColEx dragged me out of my job tending bar to our first assignment. My learning curve was steep and painful. It wasn't a fit.
And yet ..... there was that connection, and it's still there. Now it's born of all those years as a military wife in a military family. But it seems it was there before. Why, I don't know.
If L had stayed in ROTC and gone into the Air Force would I have married him, and would I have a couple of blond, blue-eyed kids today? Who knows? We can't see alternate universes. But I think .... maybe ..... maybe, yes. I think so.
I haven't talked to L since the last time he showed up stoned and broke and sad in the middle of the night. I want to be clear: that was a detour for him. It wasn't who he was, but lots of people get lost for a while at that age. For years -- later -- he sat with my mom and her husband at hometown high school football games. My niece was friends with his daughter. Every time I go home I hope I'll run into him, but I haven't. In a town of 2000 or fewer people, I haven't.
My mom says I think too much, and it's probably true. But this week, after I wrote about what it's like to lose friends and to worry about being the next wife to watch that blue car pull into the driveway, I have to wonder: Is there such a thing as destiny?
Do you have any destiny stories? Has anything ever happened to you that was unlikely and yet inevitable?
I mean, seriously, I could have married Kevin Bacon, but he only plays a military officer in a movie. Not the same thing at all.
A funny bit of serendipity occurred while I was in Iowa last month. Mom was showing me her new dining room hutch and the drawer she had for storing Grandma's silver and some other old things like curling irons she heated up on the wood stove and a set of five old spoons. Mom said, "I used to choose one of these spoons every morning to eat my breakfast with. See, each one is a different one of....oh, what were they called? There were five babies that were born..."
"The Dionne quintuplets?" I asked.
"Yes, that's who they were! The Dionne quintuplets," she said. "They were very famous back then."
A year ago I'd never even heard of the Dionne quintuplets. They were famous in the 1930's for being the first quintuplets to survive after birth, but that was long before my time. They were, or are (two are still alive), older than my mom.
The Dionne Quintuplets
I knew about the Dionne quintuplets because I talked about them a lot this past winter when I played Lil, "the zany sister who plays the piano and breaks into song," in a community theatre production of The Octette Bridge Club. The play is about eight Irish Catholic sisters who meet for a weekly bridge game. The action takes place in 1934--the year the quintuplets were born--and 1944. Lil was particularly enamored with "those tiny, tiny babies" who were "so small one could fit in the palm of your hand. In the palm of your hand!"
You'd think doing a play with seven other women, all playing sisters, might be fraught with drama--the real life kind--but it wasn't. The eight of us became remarkably close over the weeks of rehearsals and productions--almost like real sisters only we didn't fight. But we did help each other put together costumes, nursed each other through colds, got together early to run lines or work on music. And we even supported each other through some pretty tough times.
One sister's grandmother died in hospice the week of production. She couldn't come to the dress rehearsal because she had to be at the funeral home. But she was back for opening night, holding it together by a thread. The play ends when, after an especially emotional revelation, Lil suggests they all gather around the piano and sing "You Are My Sunshine." My "sister" Nora said to me before the performance, "I don't think I can get through that song tonight." She was facing the audience and the back of the piano. I was playing the piano with my back to the audience, facing her. I said, "You just look at me and we'll get through it."
So we played the last scenes, and luckily we were all supposed to be crying anyway....then I led the sisters to the piano to sing us out of the show. Nora took her place in front of me as I hit the intro notes. I looked right into her eyes and gave her the biggest smile I had, trying not to cry myself as I saw her struggle. But she bravely smiled back and we sang, and she looked for all the world like she was having a great time singing with her sisters. The lights came down, we hurried off stage, and then had to come right back out in pairs for our curtain calls. As we faced each other from opposite wings waiting to go out together, I could see Nora was still struggling. So I kept smiling at her as we met in the middle and walked back across that stage together and took our bows...The show must go on, right? Falling apart was for later in the dressing room.
Nora wasn't the only one who needed her sisters during those weeks. A couple of weeks before production, I had to have my standard poodle, Pippi, euthanized. My daughter and I took her into the vet's office and held her while she died. And then I went to school and taught, and I went to Octette rehearsal. As soon as I got there, my oldest "sister," Martha took me in her arms and let me cry a while. She'd been through it before. And my other sisters took their turns hugging me and commiserating. But the show goes on even when it's a practice run. We took our places on stage and started running the show.
Everything was fine. I played zany Lil and talked about how I wished I could see those tiny babies, and how we were going to be even more famous than them because our picture was going to be in the rotogravure. Everything was fine....until we got to the end of the first act. I didn't even see it coming. The sisters were sharing a moment of remembrance of their late parents, crossing themselves and saying, "God rest their souls." And Lil, after a theatrical beat to let the audience see how much we missed them, starts to sing one of their Daddy's favorite songs. And it goes like this:
Old dog Tray ever faithful
Grief shall not drive him away.
He is gentle, he is kind,
No better friend you'll find,
No better friend than old dog Tray.
I got about three words into it before it hit me what I was singing and I started crying. My seven sisters realized it when they saw the tears roll down my cheeks and they started singing louder to get me through it. Martha took one hand and Alice reached across the bridge table for the other. By the end of the song, all eight of us were crying. The director, assistant director and producer stared at us from their seats in the house for a few long seconds as we sniffed and dabbed. And then the director jumped up and said, "You aren't supposed to cry there. It's way too early to start crying." Then we all laughed, and Martha told him I'd just had to put my dog to sleep that morning. So he gave me a big hug too and we took a break.
All that to say, I knew nothing about the Dionne quintuplets until last winter, and yet if you mentioned them to any of my seven sisters from Octette, I think they would all experience the same rush of memories I did*. And here was my mom showing me a full set of spoons, handles molded into the little girls' likenesses and engraved with their names.
I wish I could say my mom gave me those spoons to bring home with me, but she didn't. I have to admit I covet them. It's mostly because they belonged to my grandma and my mom used them as a child. But I also wish so much I could show them to my Octette sisters. We talked about the poor Dionne quintuplets and how tragic their lives were....but I probably won't end up with the spoons. It's better not to expect things like that to happen.
I'll just enjoy the moment of serendipity. And be glad for my sisters--both the ones I share blood with and the ones I shared Octette with.
* I'm just starting rehearsals on a new play; one of my sisters and the director, our honorary sister, will be in it with me. Nora beat me out for a part in a play that goes into production this week, and it's being directed by Octette's assistant director. We see each other several times a week at the theater (different theater). I'm also stage managing a play there so our rehearsals overlap. Most of us are friends on Facebook, so we've kept in touch. We may not be as close as the Dionne quintuplets, but we forged an amazing connection in those weeks we played sisters. After a while, we weren't even acting any more.
I've enduredembracedevoked experienced a lot of changes in the past few years. One of those changes was the amputation of my role as an Air Force officer's wife. I'll admit, I wasn't always terribly involved, even after I climbed a steep, confusing learning curve that started when I was 21, and we moved all the way from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to our first assignment at Mather AFB in exotic Sacramento, California. I was only active in the Officers' Wive's Club the years we lived on base. Often the expectations and rules and structure chafed me to the core of my hippie being, but I became, in spite of my reluctance, an experienced officer's wife. After my husband (Lt. Col. Ex) left ops (stopped flying), the wing and squadron responsibilities ceased, as did the camaraderie of that special class of wives within the Air Force. But there were still the TDY's, the PCS's, the dining outs (or is it dinings out?)....and if this means nothing to you, don't worry about it.
I'm about to make a point, and the point is that the military, and each branch of the military, has its own unique culture and language. Bet you knew that; so do cops and firefighters and teachers. It's true of every group of people.
The subset of military wives have their own unique set of survival skills within that culture. I can buy (the easy part) and then sell (the hard part) a house in the most depressed market in the country often with only a few weeks' notice. I can pack up that house oversee movers who come to pack up the house, arrive in a new city that I didn't choose, and start a new life....sometimes more than once in a year. I can dance with a general and I've enjoyed a drink or two at the bar at the NCO club (although I got in trouble for that; wives have rank too, I learned). I can replace the insides of a toilet, clean up vomit from a kid's bed while I've got a 104 temperature from my own flu, and I can celebrate major holidays by myself. I've been alone for every one of them at least once. I can live so far from my family that I can't afford to go home for my grandmother's funeral. I can earn a college degree even if I have to attend four colleges in three different states to do it. I can lie in a hospital bed hooked up to IV's and monitors, trying desperately not to give birth at 28 weeks, and listen to the wing commander tell me he won't bring my husband home because sometimes the mission is the most important thing. (And I can stare unblinking at that wing commander until he leaves my room.) If the Air Force sends him on an assignment without his family, I can hold a military officer's place in his family open on my narrow shoulders for a year and half, so that when he gets back to the States, he can step back in almost as if he hadn't been gone. Almost. At 25 I could walk with another wife, a neighbor, whose husband's plane had disintegrated into the side of a mountain, and give her some small comfort. And I could will the blue cars that carry the people who give wives the bad news to pass by my driveway as they drove down the street..... I could go on. I can live a life in a system that proves this saying: If the Air Force wanted him to have a family, it would have issued him one.
I have skills that could have come only from immersion in the Air Force for almost 30 years. It's not a mantle anybody can put on unless she's paid her dues,* and I am proud to have survived those 30 years because I know how many military marriages don't, whether because of divorce or an airplane flying into a mountain in Utah (another story). I have seen airmen snap to attention and salute my car (not me) at a razor-wired gate thousands of times, and every single time I felt a surge of pride for the sacrifice those boys made by giving their lives over to their service.
But the past few years, since my divorce, I haven't been involved in the Air Force except for cashing my retirement check and trips to the commissary and base medical center. I don't wash a load of blue uniforms every week or listen to that particular language made up mostly of acronyms. After almost 30 years, one of my major life roles simply dissolved.
This summer though, I've been reminded of that life again. I've experienced a couple of reprisals that made me both nostalgic and, at the same time, filled me with wonder that I made it through some of the experiences the Air Force forced on me ... and made me miss that life more than I ever would have expected. They also reminded me of the pride and patriotism I felt for both the job Lt. Col. Ex performed in service to this country, and for the pride I felt in the strength and fortitude of my family as we supported his career no matter where it took him and for how long.
Earlier this summer I went to the tattoo at the nearby Air Force base. (Click the link. The tattoo has nothing to do with ink.) As a family, we used to go every year, even when it was much smaller and was just the base 4th of July fireworks, but somewhere along the timeline of my marriage falling apart, so did this tradition. This year, in addition to the most excellent Air Force Band of Flight, Lone Star was scheduled to play. The tattoo is one of the few times one of the secure parts of the base is open to the public. When we started going years ago, maybe 10,000 people showed up. This year, there were 100,000. It was huge.
I'm not going to tell the entire story of the night, because....well, because. But I do want to write about spending an evening back in that culture because it felt like coming home for just a few hours. I probably wouldn't have gone if I hadn't had the opportunity to go with someone whose military career mirrored, in many ways, that of Lt. Col. Ex, at least in longevity and that culture I'm talking about. It's difficult to do something like that with a civilian** who doesn't speak the language, doesn't automatically live the culture. I have to either change my language or explain the acronyms and the whys; sometimes it's just not worth it to do that.
Let me give a couple of examples. One thing that happens at a tattoo is that various military airplanes do low fly-overs as the music is playing and people are eating and walking around, awards and medals are given out and dignitaries honored. Most non-Air Force people wouldn't know a B-52 from an F-15. (And I have an embarrassing B-52 story from that night that I won't tell here.) But we sat and watched the planes fly over, identified most of them (OK, he was better at it than I was because he's still involved in the Air Force and I'm years out of the flying part of it), and shared stories from the past about experiences they brought up.....and didn't have to define the language and culture and geography we both already knew. Comfortable. Familiar.
And, although many people would enjoy the amazing and talented Air Force Band of Flight (unfortunately, more seemed to be there for Lone Star), if I'd gone with a civilian, he wouldn't have felt the same rush of pride and excitement after the MC asked people to stand when the song for their branch of the service played.....and we waited patiently through the official hymns for the Marines, the Navy, the Army, the Coast Guard.... and then stood and cheered as the opening notes to "Wild Blue Yonder" blasted from the speakers and the familiar words came automatically to our lips: "Off we go into the wild blue yonder, climbing high into the sun...." I wouldn't have looked over at a civilian and seen tears running down his cheeks that matched mine. It's a special bond military people share that goes beyond language and culture.
And then this week, something special happened that really brought back all those years of being a military family: my daughter gave birth to her daughter, to my first grandchild, at the military hospital at the base here. It's the same hospital, the same family birthing center, where she was born twenty years ago while her dad was still active duty. It was so familiar to be there with her, coaching her through the labor and the delivery***....and yet different too. She's lucky she has family here, because we didn't. Lt. Col. Ex and I did it by ourselves with just the medical personnel, like we had 6 years before at a base in Georgia where her brother was born.
My relationship with Lt. Col. Ex is.....strained and distant. But that day, in that place, brought back memories that only he and I share. And now our daughter gave birth to our granddaughter in the same place where she drew her first breath of life.
But that's not all. My daughter's boyfriend grew up in a military family too. His dad flew fighters in Viet Nam, ten years before Lt. Col. Ex began his Air Force service, and his dad also retired here and works at the base. My granddaughter's daddy was also born in the same hospital, on the same ward. And his parents still have the little t-shirt they were given that matches the one that was given to our new little family this week.
It seemed so strange to all of the grandparents that these two kids, who were born in the same hospital a year apart, brought their daughter into the world in the same place. Military life is transient. Military kids are born on bases all over the world. I don't know how often two military "brats" who were born at the same hospital have birthed their own child at the same hospital, but I doubt it happens often. I felt an immense sense of serendipity and synchronicity that it happened to us in a such a vagabond culture as the military.
I hadn't met my daughter's boyfriend's dad until today, and didn't know his mom well. But we sat in the hospital room and talked as if we'd known each other for years. That common language. That common culture. That place where we'd experienced a life-changing event....then and experienced it again with the next generation. We sat and talked for almost two hours while our granddaughter slept
on my daughter's belly.
I guess after 30 years, most of my adult life, as a part of the military family, I should expect it would still be a part of me. But I had forgotten for a while, as I went through all those many changes--some losses, some new gains, some just different. And I didn't know it, but I missed it. It has felt good this summer to revisit that part of me, to recall who I was in that role, that familiar role. I realized that those changes don't erase the past; they just make the present different. Those years will always be a part of me....hell, they formed much of who I am today... but I can step back into that role to the degree that the situation requires, and then I guess I can step back out again when I have to. It's all part of that mysterious story that's still unfolding, scene by scene and chapter by chapter.
* Military kids are special too, but this blog is all me, all the time. And don't fucking call my kids brats. They're survivors.
** Technically we're both civilians too, but there are civilians and there are civilians.
*** Hellz yeah, I've got a lot to say about that. Soon to come.
