The Choreography of a Coincidence

I basically want to stay

I basically want to stay out of all war discussions forever, mainly because I don't know enough to be in them and, truth be told, I really don't want to know enough to be able to discuss the issues night and day. I'd rather have the little bit of bliss that ignorance affords.

I never knew my grandfather. Colonel Donald Garth Fisher of the Air Force Special Ops. Squad was raised in Dutch Pennsylvania, joined up in Hazelton, and while stationed in Texas met and married a brilliant 16 year old music major at Baylor. They were promptly sent to a Minnesota base, where their daughter was born, and 2 years later to California, where their son was born. The majority of the Fisher kids' childhoods were spent in Ithaca, New York, and in Alaska, 30 miles form the arctic circle. My mom has stories of running trap lines with her dad, seeing the aurora borealis, raising great danes with scary German names, jumping off of the roof into 5 feet of snow, and playing soccer at 3 in the morning during summers (when there was only one hour of darkness every day). She also has the ultimate give-your-child-grief story of walking uphill, both ways, through the snow, barefoot to school every day, and all she wanted for Christmas was a flashlight so the bears wouldn't eat her. Or something like that.

When Vietnam started, Don was sent off to the conflict, and his wife and kids went to Laurel, Mississippi to stay with her parents until he came back home. The rest of their childhood was spent there. Two days before my mother's 14th birthday, Don's plane was shot down over Laos and his unit was captured. They were sent to the POW camps (his photo turned up in a newsreel before the movies), and were all declared dead 11 years later.

I cannot fathom growing up without a father; growing up not knowing where your father is or what's happened to him is unthinkable. It must have been absolute torture, holding on to every little sliver of hope you received, dealing with a government that would barely give you any information, then having your husband or your father declared dead with no real evidence of the fact.

The POW news hits home too much for me. I don't want to know.