By Peyton Whitaker
This story is a reflection of the internal changes, cognitive dissonance, and challenges we face when transitioning from one period of life to another. It explores the retirement of a highly respected naval flight officer who is confronted with jarring perceptions of his own identity when he reenters the civilian world. Told in my own voice, I attempt to not only reflect on my father's life but narrate the realization of my father's personification - the moments where my father became not only my parent but a whole and round person with his own wants, struggles, and desires.
Photo by Natalie J. Whitaker
“We’re all just feathers floating in the wind,” he says.
Turning his head left and then right, he touches two fingers to his temple to ensure his hair isn’t beginning to tickle the tops of his ears. He gets a haircut every two weeks like clockwork, trimming the hair that’s been thinning since he was only a freshman in college. The last time I accompanied him – me sitting in a poorly padded seat in the lobby, him giving careful instructions to the same hairstylist he saw two weeks prior – I could’ve sworn she only pretended to trim the peach fuzz that lined the perimeter of his naked crown. When he was all done, there was so little hair on the floor, you could hardly tell anyone had a haircut at all. He paid $17.95 plus tip and promised the woman that he would be back in two weeks. My father is a man of habit, of routine, of order and having things done a certain way. The haircut is as much a part of him as the hair itself, rooted into his head.
It had been over 10 years since anyone had required him to be clean shaven, have his hair cropped above the ears, or be in uniform. Nonetheless, I never saw him with so much as a 5 o’clock shadow or in anything but work slacks and a collared shirt on a day he was going to school. He takes a final once over of himself and floats on a breeze out the door – towards a day of policing the senior parking lot, stale coffee from the donated machine in the teacher’s lounge, and questions not from his students, but of himself.
I don’t know much about what my father did in his twenty years of service before I was born. Even now, when I ask pointedly for stories about the things he’s done, the places he’s been, and the people he’s met through being an officer in the United States Navy, it usually doesn’t yield anything tangible. The stories diffuse into life lessons and wisdom conveyed in convoluted tangents and analogies. He’s a humble man – expecting your respect, but never bombarding you with why he deserves it. Yet, material mementos of his achievements and a life already lived have been present throughout my life – allowing me to piece together the puzzle that is him. He’s in the ornate, gold-framed letter his officers wrote and signed, consecrating my father’s precious legacy as “one of the few Americans who truly serve our country,” and given to me as a gift on my very first birthday. It still hangs in my college apartment bedroom. He’s in the small model airplane poised in flight that is an exact replica of the P3-C that he commanded – his name printed in tiny script on the nose – that has sat on his study desk my whole life. He’s in the scrapbook that permanently resides on the coffee table in the den – every page saturated with memories and nameless faces of those years in Kaneohe Bay. He’s in the way I could feel everyone lean into him when he began to speak on that one bring-your-daughter-to-work-day at the National War College – his students as enraptured by him as I was.
I peeked around the door to see what was taking him so long, though I already knew. Dad always dried my hair after my post-swim practice shower – a duty he had taken joy in since I was only a baby. It had been twenty minutes since I had gotten out of the shower, and my hair still lay damp at my shoulders. Large wet clumps of a botched bob stuck to my cheeks as I leaned in from behind the French doors of the master-suite. He was hunched over an ironing board, the service khakis he was to adorn the following day the subject of his scrutiny. They had been picked up from the dry cleaners earlier the very same day, yet he serviced it with an iron anyway, assaulting every minor wrinkle that remained. He fastened the rainbow to his breast pocket with a greater ability to communicate through color than any painter. Afterall, a uniform was so much more than a uniform; it is a currency of respect; a way of demanding the reverence he was owed without ever parting his lips. The uniform is a materialization of the self; something outside of the body that is still recognizable as you. Everyone in the military knows who they are – they are reminded every time they get dressed for work. My impatience caused me to lean too far into the door causing it to creek on its hinges. He peered up at me through the top of his bifocals; his hands poised above his work like a tinker working on a pocket watch. I saw the faintest trace of a smile as his eyes danced over my still-wet hair. He haphazardly fastened the last ribbon and shrugged the uniform onto a hanger residing on the bathroom door. There his super suit will wait for him until he must be a civil hero again, but for the night he was just Dad, and he was blow-drying my hair.
He returned upon a gale, flustered and disheveled from the gravity of his homeward bound reflections of the day’s events. He announced his arrival with an orchestra of manhandled doors. First the car’s, then the garage’s, and finally the master bedroom’s, where he wrestled off the belt that has been pinching him in the middle and restricting his frustrations to his upper half. His footsteps as he returned to the keeping room sounded heavier than normal. The house quivered and the knick-knacks on the mantle rattled with the heel-toe of his gait as if his frustrations were so solid, they were acting as rocks in his pocket. He hardly smiled as our half-witted – but undoubtedly loveable – golden doodle presented him with her newest treasure, a peanut butter-filled bone, with a wag in her tail and a smile that reached from her eyes to the wiggle in her butt. He brushed her off and sat hard in the leather recliner we refer to as “Dad’s Chair.” From my position across the room, I could see him staring fixedly at the television – playing an old British show neither he nor I cared about but watched anyway because momma loved them – but his eyes were blank. It was times like these, when his face was so rigid that it looked like it’d clink if you tapped it with your fingernail, that I thought Dad would have made an extraordinary poker player. If only it weren’t for that every so often, he would grind his teeth – a dead giveaway that something was troubling him.
He only breaks his trance when momma announces, “okay gang, dinner is on the table.” We sit at a round table in the breakfast nook with four chairs, but that is only set for three. The vacant seat remains set for the purpose of the tablescape – a decorative linen napkin polka-dotted with pastel colored Easter eggs, fanned by a bedazzled napkin ring, and sat atop a teal placemat. The same arrangement occupied each setting at the table when we weren’t eating and to top it all off a paper mâché floral tree in bloom with Easter eggs dangling from the branches like ornaments stood on the Lazy Susan – a declaration of the coming of a holiday we didn’t celebrate. But momma decorates for all the holidays. At Halloween, statues of witches forebodingly stood in the corner of the bathroom; during the month of February, red and pink striped, dotted, and hearted ceramic bowls filled with chocolates littered the house; and at Christma, momma puts up trees so spectacular they make the ones at the Biltmore House and on cheesy Hallmark movies look like child’s play. Decorating was her way of finding joy in the little things, adding whimsy to my childhood, and cutting the tension created by the profundity of Dad’s responsibility as an officer that he carried with him in everything he’s done since. In my family, the dinner table is a safe place. Like a Catholic’s confession, except it’s not the threat of damnation, but garlic mashed potatoes topped with chives and honey-garlic chicken that makes the truth feel like deliverance.
It wasn’t long before protein and starch transformed into miseries as Dad lamented the day’s injustices. The staff meeting had started thirty minutes late. Twenty-three percent of his Honors Anatomy and Physiology class had failed the quiz despite grade inflation and having been spoon-fed the answers all week. He overheard one of his freshman environmental science students claim that the card trick he had practiced until late the night before to get their attention and make them smile at the beginning of class was “lame.” He could hardly get a senior student – wearing a JROTC uniform, an ode, an imitation of his past life – to look up from her phone whilst trying to explain where she went wrong on the most recent exam. With every aggravation momma and I would take another bite in hopes of consuming his discomforts and digesting his adversities – removing them from his life completely. But momma and I could never eat enough. To eat all of Dad’s problems was to devour him whole. His problems were not simply limited to an unorganized faculty and staff or students apathetic to their own success. Rather, these transgressions acted as a mirror showing him a version of himself unrecognizable - an image of himself distorted and out of focus. Dad lived in a world where he said “jump” to the response of “when, where, how many times, and how high?” and was losing footing in a space where authority was nothing more than a vocabulary word. He saw hostile interactions and failed assignments as personal blows; something to work harder at, to improve, to manage, to control, rather than the natural way of things – the universal laws governing the synergy of teenagers and adults. Momma and I would listen and eat until we were about to burst or the tension in Dad’s shoulders noticeably dissipated, whichever came first.
Most of what I’ve learned about life came from dad; most of dad’s life lessons are framed through quotes from the movie Forrest Gump. My perception of reality and character were built off principles like “stupid is as stupid does” and “life is like a box of chocolates...” So, as the dinner time discourse diffused from a sobering monody to frivolous argument over what to watch on television until it was reasonably late enough to sneak off to bed, we settled on Forrest Gump. As the white down feather hammocked on the breeze above the opening credits, we settle into one another as much as we settle into the sofa and Dad’s Chair. The cold blue light of the television felt warmer in the presence of my parents. We stay this way for an hour or so, a kind of recharge for all of us, before retiring.
I wake with a parched throat and cottonmouth so severe it feels like I’m swallowing sand. Sleepily I slip from under the bedcovers and slink to the kitchen on tipped toes. As I get closer to the heart of the house, I see warm, yellow light seeping out from under the door to Dad’s study. I drink a whole bottle of water while listening to the metronomic clack of fingers stroking keys and an ocean of pages, no doubt belonging to an Anatomy & Physiology textbook. Dad is my Sisyphus, an absurd hero whose destiny is to find meaning in a world that is inherently chaotic and meaningless. When I think about Dad, I think about moving forward, what’s coming next, and how to do what I’ve already done better. For every good sailor knows you navigate by the stars not by the wake and regardless of your skill as a navigator, you are ultimately subject to the wind.
Photo by James C. Whitaker