working his way through a pot of coffee, “Conrad and the girls would have to stay here and finish college.” Her voice was full of its usual relaxed poise, and her point—that the family would be split up if we took the assignment—had the effect of tempering my own excitement about going away.
I don’t know if they’d ever thought as hard about any of my father’s previous military transfers; I would have been just a baby, if I was born at all. But it was clear that they’d never before turned one down. Every two or three years, my brothers and sisters had been made to pack up, say their goodbyes, and throw themselves into new schools with a sense of blind hope. I’d grown up envying them that kind of mobility. I was three years old when we moved to California, and I’d only ever known two places before it, though if I’d truly been capable of knowing a place at age one or two, it was a knowledge that had been swallowed up by the part of the brain responsible for forgetting.
Ultimately, it came down to my parents’ decision that we couldn’t go to Germany and leave my brother and sisters alone halfway across the world. And so, just like that, my father said goodbye to twenty-six years of military service. He was forty-five years old. He pushed the uniforms with all their chevrons and colorful decorations to the back of his closet and let a beard grow in.One Friday afternoon, he brought home the nameplate from his desk and his Swingline stapler, and we became civilians.
In no time, my father found work as an electronics engineer about eighty miles from home in then sleepy Silicon Valley. This was the early 1980s, before the viral explosion of Internet start-ups—long before the Internet itself. Technology had not yet begun to dominate the realm of private life; it didn’t fit so easily into a person’s pocket. Technology was public. It made bombs or launched rockets into space or made sick people well, and so it wasn’t terribly strange that my father ought to be doing some kind of work that the rest of us barely knew how to envision. All we knew was that, instead of the air force blues or fatigues he used to wear, he left the house in sport jackets and ties and made his way to the town of Sunnyvale. It was a long drive away from our maze of neighborhood subdivisions, along overpasses and freeways threading between low wheat-colored hills. Finally, he’d cross the bridges leading him over the San Francisco Bay and continue south along the highway choked with other cars doing the same. It was a slow crawl, morning and night, at least ninety minutes each way, through tollbooths and traffic cloverleaves, to a background of talk radio. I wonder now what he thought about in the car. Did he view this new daily journey and what it led to (more money, for one) as a blessing or something worse?
I felt relief, but I didn’t know why. Not about Germany but something more nebulous. I was only eight years old. I didn’t understand most of the political talk that went on around me, but I could tell when my father was heating up. Usually, that happened when my brothers or sisters sought to challenge his views on things America had done in the world. When Americans made news for refusing to pledge allegiance to the flag, he’d snort at theTV screen, “If you don’t like it here—” and in my head, without wanting to, I’d finish his sentence. I didn’t know what went on in the Soviet Union, but I didn’t like hearing my father grow gruff and stern, didn’t like watching him screw up his mouth, flare his nostrils and stew. Instinctively, I must have figured that some of this defensiveness had to do with the fact that his job since the age of nineteen had been to protect the United States. I assumed that stepping into an easier kind of life, one where he didn’t have to stand quite so straight or always be so well-shaved, so perfectly shined and exemplary, would help my father to relax some of his stubborn
I don’t know if they’d ever thought as hard about any of my father’s previous military transfers; I would have been just a baby, if I was born at all. But it was clear that they’d never before turned one down. Every two or three years, my brothers and sisters had been made to pack up, say their goodbyes, and throw themselves into new schools with a sense of blind hope. I’d grown up envying them that kind of mobility. I was three years old when we moved to California, and I’d only ever known two places before it, though if I’d truly been capable of knowing a place at age one or two, it was a knowledge that had been swallowed up by the part of the brain responsible for forgetting.
Ultimately, it came down to my parents’ decision that we couldn’t go to Germany and leave my brother and sisters alone halfway across the world. And so, just like that, my father said goodbye to twenty-six years of military service. He was forty-five years old. He pushed the uniforms with all their chevrons and colorful decorations to the back of his closet and let a beard grow in.One Friday afternoon, he brought home the nameplate from his desk and his Swingline stapler, and we became civilians.
In no time, my father found work as an electronics engineer about eighty miles from home in then sleepy Silicon Valley. This was the early 1980s, before the viral explosion of Internet start-ups—long before the Internet itself. Technology had not yet begun to dominate the realm of private life; it didn’t fit so easily into a person’s pocket. Technology was public. It made bombs or launched rockets into space or made sick people well, and so it wasn’t terribly strange that my father ought to be doing some kind of work that the rest of us barely knew how to envision. All we knew was that, instead of the air force blues or fatigues he used to wear, he left the house in sport jackets and ties and made his way to the town of Sunnyvale. It was a long drive away from our maze of neighborhood subdivisions, along overpasses and freeways threading between low wheat-colored hills. Finally, he’d cross the bridges leading him over the San Francisco Bay and continue south along the highway choked with other cars doing the same. It was a slow crawl, morning and night, at least ninety minutes each way, through tollbooths and traffic cloverleaves, to a background of talk radio. I wonder now what he thought about in the car. Did he view this new daily journey and what it led to (more money, for one) as a blessing or something worse?
I felt relief, but I didn’t know why. Not about Germany but something more nebulous. I was only eight years old. I didn’t understand most of the political talk that went on around me, but I could tell when my father was heating up. Usually, that happened when my brothers or sisters sought to challenge his views on things America had done in the world. When Americans made news for refusing to pledge allegiance to the flag, he’d snort at theTV screen, “If you don’t like it here—” and in my head, without wanting to, I’d finish his sentence. I didn’t know what went on in the Soviet Union, but I didn’t like hearing my father grow gruff and stern, didn’t like watching him screw up his mouth, flare his nostrils and stew. Instinctively, I must have figured that some of this defensiveness had to do with the fact that his job since the age of nineteen had been to protect the United States. I assumed that stepping into an easier kind of life, one where he didn’t have to stand quite so straight or always be so well-shaved, so perfectly shined and exemplary, would help my father to relax some of his stubborn
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