Who's Your Daddy?

(Me with Dad, June 1977)

                My dad served for over twenty years in the US Air Force. Throughout his career, he was assigned temporary duties that took him away for several days sometimes for weeks or even months at a time. As young boys, we would often accompany Mom when she went to pick him up after he returned from one of these TDY assignments. These trips to get Dad at times occurred at odd hours. I remember being four or five years old lying in the back of the station wagon with my brother Marc watching the streetlamps zip by backwards as we stared out the window up at the sky. We would pretend they were Imperial starships we were trying to evade. When Dad returned from Operation Desert Storm, we actually got to skip school to greet him on the runway as he and the rest of the 5th MAPS disembarked.

                Dad likes to tell the story that when I was really little—barely talking, Mom and I (and probably Marc) would sit in the car outside the squadron building, waiting for him to come out. And apparently, anyone who came out of the building dressed in a flight suit would be greeted by a little boy yelling out the station wagon window. “Daddy! Daddy!” Much to the mortification of my mother, my exuberance for seeing Dad caused more than a few chuckles because to me, I guess, anyone who wore the uniform could have been my daddy. I can only wonder what some passersby might have thought. Thankfully for Mom it wasn’t long before I could tell my dad apart from the other airmen.