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.

The Future Daydream

When I was a little girl, at recess, I would go to the rusty swings and kick myself back and forth. Not the “high” swinging joy of the other children. Just a couple of kicks to keep me swaying. The swings made a distinctive whiny screech, melodic, haunting. From my childhood home, you could hear those old chains scream loudly, almost echo throughout the nearby neighborhoods.

At recess, I used to keep to the edges of the playground. I was a solitary child at school. I watched the other children with a kind of fascination and awe. I felt apart from them. My participation in my school girl years was voyeuristic. I did not flip upside down on the bars. I did not climb to the top of the monkey bars and gossip with the other girls. I did not play Dodgeball. Some days, I did. Most days, I kept to myself, or else had conversations with the teacher. Children my age seemed concerned with things I did not care about. And, so, I would sit in the grass, or on the swings, and entertain thoughts with more depth than I probably ever have since.

On those swings, I used to project myself into the future. I imagined myself ten years older hearing the screechy whine and imagined myself remembering myself as a child. The future adult would look back on the child with a sense of sadness and nostalgia. It was my present self in communication with the future self. I knew that after ten years past, and if I heard those swings, I would remember that very moment again. A strange coded communication between me and who I would become.

I am much older now than ten years. In fact, I am now, at least, twenty years older than the school girl who dangled her legs from those swings. In my imagined future life, I was pretty with long brown hair, a slender body, perpetually youthful, the kind of woman people wanted to know and talk with and be around—that kind of simple, easy beauty some women have. I smiled a lot. I think I was married with a couple of children, but I don’t know if my fantasy provided as much detail as that. I am remembering an imagined memory from over twenty years ago.

I wonder what the child would think of this adult. I teach, now, for a living. I spend most of my days talking in front of people. I can breeze into a room of strangers, and generally, leave with just as many friends. I am comfortable stepping over the careful perimeter I used to keep as a child. I still watch. I am still an observer, but I have learned how to navigate in that “other” world. In my heart of hearts, I still believe that I am a listener, someone as willing to listen as speak. There are few things I enjoy more than delving into someone else’s thoughts, hearing all of the person's stories.

Even though I do the very thing I used to dread as a child (speak in front of people everyday), I will always be that painfully shy child who kept watch from the shadows.

When I go back to my parents’ house, I sometimes hear those swings, and in a flash, I am eight years old again, feeling the weight of years yet to live, wanting to move forward in time to be the woman I imagined myself capable of. Perhaps who I am now would disappoint that child. Maybe I am closer to that child now than I was ten years ago. We will never sit down and have a conversation, compare notes.

But, sometimes, in the quiet, when you close your eyes and listen to the rush of tires through rain, you can hear the echo of who you used to be, through the clutter of adulthood and all of its white noise.

These days, at 34, I have stopped rushing myself through time. It is enough now to listen to the cry of swing sets and appreciate this specific moment I have been given.