Where Did I Come From?

I’ve often wondered—and more lately—what has made me the person I am.  After all, in some ways I’m pretty conventional, but in others—boy, am I “out on the edge!”

I’m sure that some of it has to do with growing up with the (U.S.) military.  I did go to kindergarten in a civilian setting: in Ferndale, Pennsylvania (a suburb of Johnstown), along with my cousin.  My grandmother and my aunt and uncles lived nearby.  But—I lived with only my mother, not my father.  My father was working in Japan.

This is the earliest time I remember—a time without a father, at least physically.  I knew I had a father; he just wasn’t there.  I knew where he was; it was just “somewhere else.”  I remember his visit one year over Christmas.  He came to be with my mother and my two sisters.

Then my father was back “for good,” and for five years we all lived on an Air Force base in Virginia.  I had been born in Virginia (on an Army base) but remembered nothing about it.  My father had left for Korea, probably when I was two, in the aftermath of the Korean War.

Why the switch from Army to Air Force?  My father was not actually in the military.  He worked for the Red Cross, which has a division that supports the military; that is, it provides humanitarian assistance for military personnel.

Up until the age of eleven, I lived in a rather artificial environment.  I walked down the street a few blocks to the base elementary school.  When I wanted to go to a movie, I walked a little further down the street.  When I wanted to go swimming in the summer, I walked a block to the Officers Club.   We bought some of our food at the base commissary, additional food at a supermarket off base.  We bought other stuff at the Base Exchange (“BX”).  “Off-base” was a bit of a drive; we could walk to everything on-base.

The church we attended offered a generic Protestant service designed not to offend any of the Protestants in the military.  There was also a Catholic service and a Jewish service.  I’m not sure how the Mormons and more “fringe” Protestants felt about the Protestant service.  Eventually, after several years just attending Sunday School, I went with my mother to Sunday services (I don’t think my father ever attended).  I don’t recall the services being at all “evangelical”—although I remember a few hymns such as “The Old Rugged Cross” and “Stand Up, Stand Up For Jesus.”

But how is it that, in time, I became a Unitarian Universalist Pagan; and realized that I was bisexual and polyamorous?