take care of myself. I had been the only child of protective parents, raised in Sarasota, Florida, where, as a fifteen-year-old girl trying out for the cheerleading squad, I had met Rex. He was two years older than I, a junior and the captain of the football team.
We fell in love that autumn, the season I made the cheerleading squad and the football team went undefeated, and from the first, ours was a love that never wavered or wandered off center. Rex was everything I wasnât, and thus it was only with him and through him that I felt completed. He was stern and disciplined, sophisticated yet rough-hewn, gentle but at the same time demandingly straightforward.
And there was a sense in which I completed him, too, for I allowed him to be tender and naive, shy and insecureâcharacter traits he otherwise would have been ashamed of and would have denied himself.
3.
As soon as Rex graduated from Sarasota High, we got married. It was the summer of 1950 and the second half of the twentieth century had just begun. How were we to know that war with the Orientals would break out and, within a year, with me pregnant, would separate us?
Rex went to Texas as an Air Force cadet and earned his wings in record time. I closed up our little apartment, put our wedding gifts and furniture in storage, and went home to live with my mother and father. Three weeks after Rex had left Texas for Korea, I gave birth to our first son, Rex, Jr., whom Rex in his letters instructed me to call âBif,â the name by which he had been known when he played fullback for Sarasota High.
Even from that great a distance, Rex was a doting father. My parents and I would laugh gaily over his long letters filled withcareful instructions as to how we should care for his namesake and how my parents should care for me. In some ways, Rex was able to make it seem that he had never left. In my heart, though, I knew how far away he really was.
4.
But now it was twelve years later, and just as the Vietnam War was different from the Korean, Rexâs absence from his family was different. Over a decade had passed between the wars, and our life together and our lives separately had changed in many subtle ways.
When Rex had come back from Korea, taller, leaner and, yes, harder than when he had left, we had been able to resume our life almost as if there had been no interruption at all. And in a real way, for, when he had been drafted, our life together had not yet had a chance to begin, there was no interruption. As if his absence had never existed, and as if we had not begun at all, we were able to begin anew.
We bought a new, three-bedroom mobile home with a cathedral ceiling in a mobile home park over by the Bay, and Rex went back to work for his fatherâs plumbing company, a journeyman plumber, as before, starting at the bottom, as before. But, âThe skyâs the limit!â he used to say to me, late at night as we talked in bed of our plans and hopes for the future.
I was newly pregnant with Hunter, and touching my swelling womb, feeling the life stir there, knew how right he was. âOh, Rex, not even the sky can limit us !â I would tell him, as he drifted peacefully off to sleep.
5.
Hunter was born, a healthy, bright child, serious and intense from birth, just as Bif had been boisterous and cheerfully gregarious from birth. Hunterâs personality brought out another side of Rex, a side I hadnât seen before. With his second son, Rexwas somber, morbid almost, encouraging in the boy, and thus in himself, activities that were solitary, physically strenuous, and somewhat dangerousâsuch as hunting and deep-sea fishing, rock-climbing, scuba diving. Was this a result of his war experiences, things he wouldnât talk about, couldnât talk about, even to me? I wondered helplessly.
âWhat else are you going to do with a boy named Hunter?â Rex would tease me whenever I asked him why, for example, he was
We fell in love that autumn, the season I made the cheerleading squad and the football team went undefeated, and from the first, ours was a love that never wavered or wandered off center. Rex was everything I wasnât, and thus it was only with him and through him that I felt completed. He was stern and disciplined, sophisticated yet rough-hewn, gentle but at the same time demandingly straightforward.
And there was a sense in which I completed him, too, for I allowed him to be tender and naive, shy and insecureâcharacter traits he otherwise would have been ashamed of and would have denied himself.
3.
As soon as Rex graduated from Sarasota High, we got married. It was the summer of 1950 and the second half of the twentieth century had just begun. How were we to know that war with the Orientals would break out and, within a year, with me pregnant, would separate us?
Rex went to Texas as an Air Force cadet and earned his wings in record time. I closed up our little apartment, put our wedding gifts and furniture in storage, and went home to live with my mother and father. Three weeks after Rex had left Texas for Korea, I gave birth to our first son, Rex, Jr., whom Rex in his letters instructed me to call âBif,â the name by which he had been known when he played fullback for Sarasota High.
Even from that great a distance, Rex was a doting father. My parents and I would laugh gaily over his long letters filled withcareful instructions as to how we should care for his namesake and how my parents should care for me. In some ways, Rex was able to make it seem that he had never left. In my heart, though, I knew how far away he really was.
4.
But now it was twelve years later, and just as the Vietnam War was different from the Korean, Rexâs absence from his family was different. Over a decade had passed between the wars, and our life together and our lives separately had changed in many subtle ways.
When Rex had come back from Korea, taller, leaner and, yes, harder than when he had left, we had been able to resume our life almost as if there had been no interruption at all. And in a real way, for, when he had been drafted, our life together had not yet had a chance to begin, there was no interruption. As if his absence had never existed, and as if we had not begun at all, we were able to begin anew.
We bought a new, three-bedroom mobile home with a cathedral ceiling in a mobile home park over by the Bay, and Rex went back to work for his fatherâs plumbing company, a journeyman plumber, as before, starting at the bottom, as before. But, âThe skyâs the limit!â he used to say to me, late at night as we talked in bed of our plans and hopes for the future.
I was newly pregnant with Hunter, and touching my swelling womb, feeling the life stir there, knew how right he was. âOh, Rex, not even the sky can limit us !â I would tell him, as he drifted peacefully off to sleep.
5.
Hunter was born, a healthy, bright child, serious and intense from birth, just as Bif had been boisterous and cheerfully gregarious from birth. Hunterâs personality brought out another side of Rex, a side I hadnât seen before. With his second son, Rexwas somber, morbid almost, encouraging in the boy, and thus in himself, activities that were solitary, physically strenuous, and somewhat dangerousâsuch as hunting and deep-sea fishing, rock-climbing, scuba diving. Was this a result of his war experiences, things he wouldnât talk about, couldnât talk about, even to me? I wondered helplessly.
âWhat else are you going to do with a boy named Hunter?â Rex would tease me whenever I asked him why, for example, he was
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