Title
Author
I've been looking out of old eyes
Since one crisp October afternoon when I was eight,
When I realized my father might die,
That my father probably would die.
I crossed a threshold.
Into adulthood and I couldn't go back.
I crossed the threshold and joined my mother
Who had opened the door by saying,
Your father is going to Vietnam.
But then she offered me a deal.
We wouldn't talk about it again.
She would let me pretend that I could
Keep my childhood and she wouldn't tell anyone.
When he got on that plane at Logan Airport
To go to San Francisco to go to Hawaii to go to
Saigon to Ben Hoa,
We just watched him walk away down the jetway.
And then we went to our window,
Floor to ceiling plate glass at the gate
Straining to see into his tiny porthole window,
Hoping he had a seat on our side
That he could still see us as we tried to see him,
One last time before he was flown away.
Now I wonder how my father felt
and what he saw getting on the plane,
watching us watching him
wondering himself how he could leave
a wife and four young children.
But there were only three children there.
He didn't know old eyes were watching him.
So I waved and smiled and tickled my sister
Until she cried.
Sometimes while he was gone
A letter, phone call, photo or card addressed to me
Would wake me out of my pretend childhood
And remind me of adulthood I denied.
Then I remembered that all of him could stop.
I tried to forget that he was somewhere
I needed to write to him with an address that wasn't also mine.
When he asked me about school and what I was
reading or how long my braids were,
I answered him like he was at our dinner table or
stuck at work and then dashed back to denial
on a bike with a sparkly gold banana seat
that he put on before he left.
When he came home, he brought shiny silk pajamas
And foreign dolls that no one played with
Temple rubbings on tissue paper
Brass lamps and china that we'd always use on Thanksgivings.
We rode around in a beat up white convertible that spring, top down, flying in a Corvair that Ralph Nader called "unsafe at any speed."
That car was cancelled so quickly just because he said so--
Why couldn't he just have said something like that
About the war?
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