Season of Flowers

My students are writing personal narratives, which prompted me, on this late afternoon, to delve into my files and read a few of my own. I am posting some excerpts from one I wrote a few years ago:

We knew, my older brother Matt and I, that my father had enlisted in the Air Force in 1963. He told us that he had wanted to get away from home, out from under his father, and so, instead of waiting to be drafted, he simply marched downtown and enlisted. My grandfather had served in the Air Force twenty years before, during World War II, stationed in India. I don’t know what he did there—the mystique lingers now after his death and maybe I don’t ask because I want to leave a little romance for my own imagination to discover years from now.

Matt and I knew that my father was stationed at Da Nang, injured in the explosion at the airbase in Bien Hoa, and eventually sent home after several months of rehabilitation at Clark Airbase in the Philippines. We’d seen the white, squiggly scar on his knee, touched it even.

We didn’t know this because he talked about it very much; we knew this from watching his slides. Every couple of years or so, the slides of his time spent in Viet Nam got pulled out of his underwear drawer where they were boxed inside a crumpled A & P grocery bag, and the rickety slide projector that overheated was battled from the back of his closest, along with the mini-movie screen.

There was always a thrill to this event, especially when I was a child. The lights around the house would be clicked off, and we would sit together in the living room, in the dark, and listen to my father tell us the same stories. I remember the nightmares my father would have sometimes when I was young and slept in the room at the top of the stairs. He would yell in the middle of the night. My mother would tell stories of how he once grabbed her thigh and squeezed it, urging her to “watch out.” The closest things we had to knowing what he might be dreaming about were in these slides—or somewhere around the edges of the frames.

We saw the red tipped silver bombs full of napalm. We heard tales of Hanoi Hannah and the V.C. and could almost recite back the types of bombs and planes flashed before us. We read the words “Mua Doa hoa,” on the side of a B-57 Canberra attack plane and knew the words meant: “season of flowers.”

I can remember the slides more than the occasions which prompted the effort of getting them out. Mostly, I remember the darkness, the family sitting together in the living room without the television on, the hum of the projector, and the way the scenes flashed before us like the fragments of a memory within a memory.

There were times after the slide show, after we helped my father put away the projector and screen, that he would open the little side door on his dresser and pull out his cigar box. The box had a Spanish lady in an oval on the front. She wore a red scarf around her head and a Mona Lisa smile on her lips. Inside were a few snapshots, yellowed newspaper articles, dog tags, colorful paper money, and Filipino coins. We would flip through the small green and yellow English to Vietnamese dictionaries and try to pronounce the language.

I remember holding the dog tags and reading the name impressed in the metal. White, Howard B. That wasn’t my father. He never went by Howard, mainly because it was my grandfather’s first name. He’s always gone by Blain. One of the photos had White, Howard B. leaning against a jeep, shirtless, his grey-blue eyes framed by thick, black glasses. In the background the sky is grey, leaden with storm clouds. Everything in the box smells like dust.

The dog tags list his blood type, O neg, and at the bottom, it says: Episcopal, but my father is a Baptist these days. The yellowed newspaper clippings talk about the V.C. (Viet Cong in parentheses) ambushing people, or bombing airbases. Canberra attack planes bombed right back. One of the newspapers has my father’s picture, lying in a hospital bed being tended by a nurse whose face is obscured. I own this cigar box now and all of its artifacts. My father gave it to me a few years back. Every time I look at that picture of him, it’s hard to think that I am older than he is, almost twice the age of that young man in the picture.

Now that I am older, I go back to that picture of my father—18, bare-chested, drab-green pants—I don't know who took it. Does he even remember? The ominous storm clouds in the background oppress the sky; so heavy, so laden with deep blue, you expect to smell the scent of rain in the ink. I look at this picture and wonder if he could see outside of that frame, and know that five years later, he would be set up with the red-haired bookkeeper for an A & P Christmas party, marry her six months later, father a son in the fall of the following year—a son who would grow just as strong in body, but weaker in mind and heart, a son who would commit suicide at 24 years old, the exact same age my father was when Matt was born.

Would my father have made different choices, if he'd known? Would any of us? My father and brother worked together, near the end of Matt's life, at the same hardware store. When the family would get together, they would make inside jokes, talk about screws, bolts, and hardware stuff. They laughed. In 1994, after Matt learned from his mistakes and slumped in his white Dodge Shadow, my father said he knelt beside his son, brushed the hair from his forehead and kissed him.