Just a Little Wasn't Enough

Damned by faint praise: a family history

"I've got some news I need to share with you."

Trademark pause. "Okay... I'm listening..." His voice was even, but skeptical. He had heard "news" from me before, and he was wary.

"I joined the Marines , Dad."

I was excited to give him good news, for a change. It had been four years since the 9-1-1 prank call incident, but the "news" that his son—a fireman's son—had been involved in calling in false alarms still hung between us like an unpleasant mist. It wasn't not enough to obscure things, or even really be felt on the surface. It was just an unspoken taint in a relationship we were both struggling to understand. Now I had better news; I was excited, but I was trying to play it cool, trying not to be that little boy still tugging at his shirttails.

It had been four years since I had embarrassed him, and I had finally found something he could be proud of me for.

"You what...?"

"I enlisted in the Marines. Yesterday afternoon. I'm gonna be a grunt, Dad, the hardest job they have-—put it all out there on the line, of I have to." I couldn't keep the smile out of my voice.

There's a lot of things a young man can do after high school. Some trundle happily off to business school with the 3.9 GPA they've had since freshman year, or some collegiate football program they've been training for since they were eight years old. Some get married to the first girl they ever kissed. For so many of them, it's just the next logical step. But for a long-haired hood on the knife-edge of finding something dangerously stupid to fall into, it was one hell of a leap.

The pause again. It disturbed me a little, but Mom had blinked in silence a few times, too, when I told her. Before the tears—tears of pride, relief, love. As far as she was concerned, Mom could already see me in the uniform. But there was that initial pause. Mothers and fathers probably all feel it, I thought, waiting to hear what I needed so badly.

"Well... I hope you know what you're doing. Not many people are gonna be looking for a retired rifleman when you get out."

That was the best he would give to take with me into the hottest crucible of my life: what I wouldn't be able to offer.

@---@---@

He was there when I graduated boot camp. It was a long trip from the Midwest, but he was there. There were only a few people—him and my sister-in-law —so it seemed pretty significant.

He stood tall with Grandpa and me, three generations, in a picture I still have in a shoebox around here somewhere—all three of us in various approximations of parade rest. Grandpa looked tough and proud; Dad looked appropriately like a proud papa. He even smiled.

He told people, "My boy's a Marine."

@---@---@

He died a couple of days after I arrived for an extended stay in Ireland. My brother called to tell me.

"What happened?" I asked, not very interested.

"Stomach cancer, apparently."

"Must've been a bitch to go through."

"I guess," my brother said, no more invested in the conversation than I was. "I wasn't sure you'd care, but I thought you should know."

"Yeah, I guess so. Thanks, man. Take care."

There had been a time I would have cared. Those bridges had been burnt for years, for my brother and me both, burnt down even beyond ashes.

But there had been a time I would have cared very much.

@---@---@

"This is my boy--he's a Marine."

That's what he told people.

But that's not what it sounded like to me. All I could ever hear was that no one was looking for a used rifleman.