It is strange how I can not at all remember where I packed the bread, but can be suddenly struck with a flashback of an event from when I was eighteen years old. I was in a fancy beachside town in south Florida, standing behind my parent's car with the trunk open. We had driven there to cash in on a promised free weekend in an unbelievably ritzy hotel. My dad had recently been freed from a Vietnamese prison camp and was one of the first two men to return to the USA. We were probably some of the first people to discover what "15 minutes of fame" could mean. It was 1973 and my dad didn't have to spend money anywhere. Even I had my photo pasted on the front page of a few newspapers. My dad went from eating pumpkin soup in a ratty cell, wondering if that was where he would die to getting free nights in a luxurious hotel in Boca Raton. They were supposed to be sequestered in the Philippines, while they were slowly brought up to speed, but my grandmother was dying of a long term illness, so they rushed him home...to all of the news people, and all of the photographers. We lost the war, but we got our POWs back...something to celebrate!
What none of us wanted to talk about was, how could anybody just do that? We maintained a facade that everything was fine, and we were living happily ever after. Never mind that when he left for the war he had four little crew-cut Sunday school kids, and he came home to teenage long haired hippies. Then there was his subservient Air Force wife that had somehow turned into a war protester and activist. He was rolling with it as best he could, and we could only get hints of what was going on beneath the surface.
There were times when things went differently and today was one of them. We had driven, all 6 of us, crammed into a car made for 5, for 4 hours down to Boca to the fancy hotel, only to find that nobody there knew anything about Glen Perkins, EX-POW and welcome was not laid out for this family. I was standing outside of the trunk of the car, holding my prize possession, my 6 foot twin-fin surfboard, the first board I had purchased new, with an acid-wash design in my favorite green. The reason I could afford this board was it was made by a local shop that cut some serious corners in materials making it. It had a couple of little pressure dings already merely from me carrying it.
I was standing there with my board in hand, long haired surfer in my flip flops and shorts, while valets in suits stood by figiting nervously. My dad comes outside with a frown and growing look of sunburn on his neck and face. I recognized this situation and was ready to start hitchhiking home. Something had gone wrong inside the hotel and we were leaving. He grabbed my board and was trying to get it back in the trunk while I had a growing sense of alarm about how many pieces of my board were going into the car. I said, "Dad, it won't fit like that."
"I'll make it fit!" he said.....and that went down in the history of the family forever.
I got up early this morning, looking for the bread, and glancing around this campground, packed with campers, looking almost more like an RV sales lot than a campground. I've got my megavan full of man toys and puppy stuff, and Dad's Airstream camper. Airstreams aren't all that common, and whenever you see one, you can tell they have been loved a little more than ordinary campers. My eyes go high and I see the four or five giant dents on this new camper and wonder just where my dad had decided this thing had to fit....
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