Today I am sixty. This morning, a fading black and white picture reaches out at me as I stiffly scuffle down the hall to our bedroom, cup of black coffee in hand, to help my wife make the bed. The picture is set in a dark mahogany frame and placed near the ceiling mixed in with diplomas, portraits of our lineage, baby snap shots, unit pictures of past generation’s wars; all neatly kept on my present family’s bedroom hallway wall of fame. In this photo I appear dressed more for a costume party than the next four years in the fleet. Boot camp issue dress blue uniform, stove pipe pants, cocked white hat, a hollow faced scowl of grim determination; my posed expression now convinces me I was nowhere near an old salt then. What other embarrassing shots like this float loose in my family’s catch-all box of unsorted history? In the margins mother’s stunted high school long hand reads, “Steven, Sept. 24, 1967, 19 yrs old”.
For forty-three years I’ve stared at this picture; re-read her terse statement; interpreted her words countless ways. Was it a declared fact? Did her sparse sentence give away her maternal fear this may be the last picture she’d ever take of her only son? Was it regret that she gave birth to me at all, if this was what my life had come to? Was it her resigned pain? Her fear? Did I break her heart? Am I suffering remorse I didn’t consult with her before I joined?
I did poorly in college. The draft board kept records of my grades. I knew the board would send me a letter any day. My choices were limited, out of my hands. I had no options. I refused to be infantry fodder in Vietnam. Dodging to Canada? Never. The Navy seemed the safest choice I had. She didn’t know I’d joined until a few months later when the Navy sent her a form letter saying I was “…doing just fine.” Given the nature of those times many mother’s hearts were rent in half. I hope one day she’ll find solace she was in good company and will privately forgive me.
I imagined, falsely then, this shot expressed the resigned certainty I knew what I committed to. The future has been a surprise to me ever since. Two ruined marriages later; two children that aren’t close to me; a failed business; two repossessed cars; a bankruptcy. I’m on my third marriage and we’ve thrived in modest prosperity these past eleven years. I’m as much a success as I’ll probably ever be. I survived. That’s an accomplishment a mother should be proud of. Isn’t it?
My mother wrote often while I was away. Most times I was grateful she wrote, but not always. I seldom wrote back at first, then wrote less as the unchanging tedium of the Navy remained…. unchanged. At times, when I did respond, convinced maybe a bit of sane clarity rules some parts of life, a drastic event destroyed any understanding I had of life at all; a plane crash killing all but me; a bullet whizzing too close past my nose that caved in the temple of the guy crouched beside me; a starving child, hand held out for alms, I ignored. I meant only to survive, be done with the Navy, go home. I never wrote her about those times, those fears, those hopes. I don’t remember when I quit writing her altogether. No mail sent was better mail than any mail received by then. She says she understood. She says I just wasn’t the writing kind. I don’t believe she truly feels that way. She just schmoozed over it, hurt, hoping for an explanation why from me some day. I’d circle the earth twice before I saw my mother again. I came home four years after she took this fuzzy 4” x 6” image of me.
We hugged at the airport. She didn’t let go when I thought we’d held each other long enough. We were silent. She whimpered. Then she wept. I brought my shoulder down for her to rest her chin and wet cheek on. Ultimately, I asked her to stop crying. “It’s alright now ma. “ I said. “If I can‘t cry, you can‘t.” She stopped. Then she let go. I’ve cried often since at the usual events; weddings, close friends funerals, my sisters’ death.
At baggage claim I plucked my sea bag with all the grace of a seasoned sailor. I hoped to impress her I came back a man. I nimbly heaved the bag on my shoulder, then we began. She commented on my tailored silk Hong Kong dress blue’s all Southeast Asia sailors proudly wore when they came home. “Your uniform fits close on you!” she said. The thin silk weave waltzed well on me as if my pace seemed more a dance. This wasn’t the standard issue I wore in the picture I now chuckle at. She held my arm while we walked down the airport halls. I flipped my shirt cuffs up and showed her the finely stitched dragons a Chinese Hong Kong tailor weaved in multi-colored thread, for extra, just for me. She spotted the tip of a yellow stripped tail attached to the hidden Bengal tiger tattooed further up my forearm. “You’ve changed!” she said. I agreed.
She listened attentively as I carefully chose what stories she, my queen of decency, should be privy to. I couldn’t insult her sensibilities; she wouldn’t understand. I was her Walter Raleigh (before the Spanish Armada), (before the “Sir“); knelt on a knee, head bowed, reveling in hypnotic accounts of the Americas to my no non-sense liege. She listened with the set aside patience a beneficent female head of state must keep handy when conceited boys who think they’ve reached manhood speak.
I skipped less romantic narratives. I passed on telling her of the drunken brawls at the enlisted club in Guantanamo, Cuba between womanless sailors and bald headed marines that insulted the sexual preference of one or the other’s mother. I skipped any reference to the Philippine whores in Alongapo claiming me as theirs for fifteen dollars a day. Each new partner’s practiced mastery of the butterfly knife kept other whores at bay until I’d quit paying the present partner’s daily rate. The Geishas in Sasabo and Yakuska, Japan remain private affairs no sailor ever shares. Then there was Sydney, where women were plentiful, bountifully built, generous–ten to every man. No pictures of those events exist.
Instead, I reeled off quixotic journeys to places she might have dreamed of once but knew she’d never see. I served up undulating, smooth, clear blue sheets of liquid glass-like Caribbean waves that gently lap at a port bound slow ship’s hull. I led her by the hand to stand with me, stifled by the heat of the silent Doldrums, arms opened upward, eager to embrace the first warm westerly wind east bound sailed ships once needed to survive a cruise. She cupped a hand to her ear as if listening for softly sung songs windless Horse Latitudes play while crooning for more lost sails to strand. Together, we straddled the Equator an afternoon, my ship of tales at full stop, adrift. We lingered at the widest part of the earth–surrounded by endless, wave-less green seas; the closest ancients on this globe ever got to the sun without leaping. We became new Shell-Back initiates; joint lifetime members of King Neptune’s crew.
My enlistment, then my generation’s war, ended. I came home one last time to stuff most of my memories into cubby holes that still remain locked up, cobweb tight. I couldn’t stay home long. I left my mother behind–again. This time I explained myself. She saw sadness in my black ringed, hollow eyes and blessed me. I was grown, she knew I couldn‘t stay. I wandered east, then south, then finally west; as far away from the Navy’s scars as I could go.
I dust off most memories from that life with less caution now as I look up at this image. Leaping dolphins racing in a frigate’s speeding wake; still, sultry, muggy, January South Pacific nights; a vortex sucked from the sea to fill a thirsty cloud on its way to rain on land; a spout sprayed from a baleen whale’s blow hole just risen with a belly full of krill–these are the parts I savor now.
I’m still not sure I grasp the true intent of my mother’s words on this photograph. Maybe I do. I doubt I’ll ever ask. I’m only certain that in this shutter’s glimpse I was “Steven, Sept.24, 1967, 19 yrs old”; a blurred image caught in black and white of a loving mother’s son placed in a cluttered collection from the past.
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A beautiful memoir. Bravo!!