Wrapping Up Remembories Week...A Most Poignant Remembory

My dad was a career Air Force man; an officer and a gentleman. I spent my first eight years of life as an Air Force Brat. This meant moving, and it meant that Dad was sometimes gone.

It was worse for Aaron--he was older, he was a boy who needed his father. He had it longer than I did--fifteen years--and he struggled more. But fuzzy memories do come back to me sometimes, especially those involved with Dad's assignment in Turkey.

The Turkey assignment was unaccompanied, so Dad was gone for about eighteen months while Mom, Aaron and I settled into our new home in Rancho Cordova, just northeast of my moms parents' place in Sacramento. I was only three when Dad left, but a few things stand out.

I remember bits and pieces of the saga of the broken leg--when I was three and the shopping cart I was riding in tipped over. I can remember an ambulance, and I can remember the hospital. I can remember a heavy cast and being carried everywhere.

I remember Aaron standing in front of the fireplace at our Rancho Cordova house after one of Dad's too-short visits, crying his eyes out because Daddy had to leave again.

I remember sitting in front of the tape player in the living room, hearing Dad's voice from the cassette reading to me as I followed along in the book he'd mailed with the tape. "Turn the page, Megan," he'd tell me from thousands of miles away.

I remember him coming home to visit and crouching down in front of me to give me a present--a red purse with Bert and Ernie on it. He hung it around my neck. I wish I still had that purse.

I remember asking him--more than once--if he really was home "forever" when his assignment in Turkey was finished and he was stationed, finally, at Mather in Rancho Cordova. Hearing him reassure me.

I don't remember running along a glass partition at San Francisco International, a partition that separated the incoming travellers from their families on the other side. I don't remember following my daddy along that partition, but he does, and it's a story he relates fondly.

I remember Dad's military career being Big and Important, and I remember his retirement. It wouldn't be 'til I was an adult that I'd be proud of our history as a military family. At the time, it's just what was.

At least, that's how I remember it.