20/20 Hindsight

The story I have always known is that my parents met when they were twelve. I always thought it was a romantic story.

They were friends growing up, my parents. The story goes that my mother's high school boyfriend was my father's best friend. After graduation, my parents dated eachother. I knew that later on, when he proposed, she refused repeatedly and finally said yes in a jealous rage over another girl. So the time in between graduation in 1965 and marriage in 1970, I filled in myself. I know what love is, and I imagined passion and a bond that would lead to my conception and life as I've known it.

They dated, I am now told, in the late sixties, you know how things were then. In his final 30 days in the states, my father took some time to visit my mother in Wyoming, where she attended college. In pictures she is slim, bombshell blonde, always smoking.

I once heard her joke to a friend that he was supposed to leave on a certain date and that a week later they were skiing in Colorado and she asked,

"Weren't you supposed to leave a week ago?" and he said,

"What the fuck? I'm AWOL already. What are they going to do? Send me to Vietnam?"

She laughed like this had been a really clever joke. My father always has been a kidder. In pictures he is sometimes smiling, his hands are rarely visible. All this, I knew as history.

What I didn't know until recently was that my parents were only casual lovers. My father returned to the states one year later and married my mom within six months. When he was at war, she wrote him, once.