When I turned eighteen, Carter was gone, and so were most of the job prospects for teenagers. The common sense play was a stint in the military where you could grow up and get a skill. Perhaps it was that the military wasn’t for me (or I wasn’t for the military), but I had no interest beyond enjoying the sea stories of the few sub sailors I had met.
But my day-to-day choices were about what you’d expect from a seventeen-year-old from a broken home (mixed family, a “yours, mine, and ours” household), and the ultimatum was Boot Camp or just the boot. Poor decisions were a habit by then, and I chose the US Navy.
Contrary to my mother’s hopes that they would make a man out of me, the Navy was in the habit of enabling boys to stay boys indefinitely. My hopes of computer training were at first delayed by general shipboard duties, and then redirected into applications that were of little use in the civilian markets. Not much call for anti-submarine warfare systems operators on Main Street.
I got to boot camp on Veteran’s Day just north of Chicago and finished computer school in San Diego in time to arrive back home by March 1st. After missing Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, and my birthday, I dropped back in to the Shoreline scene while everyone was hibernating.
So, what was my hero’s welcome? What is the sound of one hand clapping?
They stationed me in the exotic sea port of South Boston for my first year. My ship sailed from the pier to dry dock and back. But I could walk home. I walked to the train at South Station, got off the train at Saybrook station, and walked to Spring Brook Road. Sometimes my family was even happy to see me.
For a year I hung around like the smell of damp in an old carpet. When my ship sailed south, I faded away into the fog like a train crossing a long bridge, following that single, straight track away with no road back.
Since then I’ve lived in Virginia Beach, central New York state (twice), Midcoast Maine, Raleigh, Northern Maine, Central Maine, and Cincinnati. Do you notice the place that is not on that list?
For decades, I claimed I didn’t leave home; it left me. My mother divorced and moved to Canterbury. Her mother moved back to her childhood home in Danielson. It was as if it had disowned me. But it only felt that way to me. To the Shoreline, there was no more impact than if one spring peeper stopped peeping somewhere. One firefly extinguished.