My younger brother is a history buff. The kind with bookshelves full of obscure titles about Russian history and his other personal favorite, Napoleon (they’re both short and aggressive). Now he’s tackling a subject a little closer to home — a biography about our father.
They were sitting at my kitchen table yesterday afternoon, going over a rough timeline of my father’s 20 years in the military. My dad loves to tell a story, so there were a lot of interesting and funny anecdotes shared. He’s never talked that much about his military service, but he fought in Vietnam and served tours in Germany and Korea. One of the stories he shared really struck me as a great example of his restraint and convictions.
For a while he taught a rifle course at a college in Pittsburgh and had his uniform spit on by a student in an elevator. The young woman said something to the effect of “if we didn’t have to pay for all you people, we could go to college for free like they do in Russia.” I can imagine many people would’ve told her to catch the next flight over. Not Dad. He stayed silent and let the woman go on her way, probably feeling smug about her personal protest. Dad’s perspective was different, believing that anything he might have said or done in response would have only reflected poorly on himself or his country.
2 comments ↓
i really liked this entry. kudos to you + your brother.
when i was back for christmas, my dad + i got into a long conversation/argument about how little we know about his life before our family. there were too many questions to fill in such a short visit/conversation, and dad’s a pretty private guy. but the questions my sister + i had were numerous.
so we wrote them down. and i got my dad started blogging (on a private blog for our family) about his life in india, moving to this side of the world, etc.
entry by entry, he’s filling PAGES about his life we knew nothing about, on his terms, and at his pace. and at the end of it all, i’ll have it printed in a book.
I love the idea of Dad blogging, privately or publicly, and tried to convince him of it. Maybe if I go all the way and set something up for him he’d give it a whirl. He has a lot to say and a pretty interesting life story, starting out on a farm in rural Illinois where his parents were sharecroppers! I didn’t even know that until recently.
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