A loud resounding cheer quickly traversed the inside of our Freedom Bird, the moment our wheels got off the ground! We were "Homeward Bound" like Simon & Garfunkel sang about in those days! We were scheduled to stop in Guam and refuel, and then we would have enough fuel to make it the rest of the way to Tacoma, Washington and McChord AFB. THIS time in Guam, I did not buy the 2 magnums of champagne that I did on the way to R&R when we stopped to refuel at Anderson AFB. Sometime before leaving for the States, I must have called my Dad in Seattle (still flying for Boeing as a 747 Instructor Pilot) to see if they could pick me up & let me visit a couple of days. Dad knew his way to McChord Base Ops since that's where he was stationed when I first went to live with him when I was 8 1/2. Dad & my sisters were there -- stepmother was not. Don't know why but that carried its own message, eh?
Two days was about all Stepmother Sadie and I could stand of each other. It took me many years more to conclude she really had some mental or emotional problems causing her to treat me the way she had for years. I guess I got a clue when I saw her later in an anonymous photo as a younger woman in a therapy group in a psychology text I had in graduate school. Paradoxically, she was a lifelong motivator for me to want to learn the science of how come people act & think the way they do. I think I understand more than she realizes but there is much guesswork since she seems to have kept many big secrets. We are vulnerable to others' lies of omission as well as commission. But the missing info, itself, turned out to be the best clue about the big picture of what was really wrong. I believe Sadie had much more in common with my ex-to-be than I knew at the time. But I later became able to tell when my wife was hiding or lying about something -- of course, it was way too late by that time to change anything.
After two days of visiting (more with my sisters who were probably more concerned about me than anyone else in that household), I continued on "my journey home." Denver was next, where I reunited with my Dad's brothers & sisters & cousins, got my Volkswagen "bug" which had been up on blocks in my grandmother's garage for the last year, drove to a cousin's to put my stash of textbooks in the back seat, and got ready to drive to Laredo and meet my new family of adulthood! Luckily, those hundreds of pounds of books in the back seat were heavy enough to keep me from rolling the Volkswagen when my brakes went out totally at 40 mph, and I had to yank the wheel sharply to the left and do a "ground loop" in the middle of a busy 5-lane street in Denver! The VW did "a counterclockwise 180" and stopped cold, only popping one tire off the rim!
Luckily, it was the only 10-second period of the next 3 minutes with no cars in the approaching lanes. Wouldn't it have been ironic if I had made it through a whole year flying hot combat in Vietnam only to come home and be killed after 3 days in a car accident? This is one of those times, I think I had a guardian angel helping me. (There were others.) PS: Note to Self -- when a car sits for a year on blocks, BLEED the bloody brakes for air bubbles! Duuh on me!
posted by Richard A @ 10:00 PM
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