My Parents’ Environment

Driving home from folk dancing this evening, past eleven p.m., I think of my parents and their environment they grew up in:  Very different from the environment I live in now.

I’m driving down Highway 101 in California, from Palo Alto to Sunnyvale; no more than ten miles.  The highway is full of cars driving seventy miles an hour; the lights are blinding.

This calls up memories of Virginia in the 1950s and 1960s, when my parents and I (and my sisters) lived on an air base in Hampton.  How does this call up these memories?  The environments are opposites!  In 1960 the Interstate highway system had not yet been constructed through Hampton.  We would not have been driving on such a highway, full of cars, so late in the evening.

As I recall, almost everything in Hampton would have been closed by 11 p.m.  Certainly the airbase would have been completely quiet except for the Air Force personnel on duty, somewhere out around the air field.  Although, remembering later years when I lived on an air base in Japan, I can imagine that the Officers Club, just a block from where we lived on the air base in Virginia, might have still been open.  But for me, who lived there as a boy from age six to age eleven, Langley Air Force Base was quiet indeed in the evenings.

Whereas I have just spent an hour watching and listening to traditional dance music from Eastern Europe, which of course would have seemed odd to American military personnel in 1960, smarting still from the launching of Sputnik and the Russian downing, over the Soviet Union, of the American U2 spy plane piloted by Frances Gary Powers.

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?