As a guest blogger whose debut collection is about my experiences as a military pilot’s spouse, I would certainly be remiss in not commenting on this part of my life. In my poem, “Heroes,” I say, “The truth is / So much of it now is just like life, the guys / coming over for a drink after work and the XO / breakdancing in a pair of running pants / at the Christmas party and all the lieutenants / in reindeer costumes with their girls on their arms.”
I have been fortunate to have done many things in my life—singing in Lincoln Center, and standing at the feet of the statue of David, and swimming in the glow of a bioluminescent bay, and reading books in libraries older than the town I grew up in. But the life I live now is a life all its own. There is something magical in being always part of a group, always part of something larger than yourself. There are the downsides, of course—filling out the paperwork before your husband leaves for a deployment, writing down who you would like to be with you, should you be informed of your husband’s death. And there are the crashes that happen, more often than you would like, one of them just a mile from your house, the flurries of phone calls and texts, finding out it is not your husband but someone you know anyway, because everyone here knows everyone, it seems. You are friends with widows who are too young to be widows, and you watch them get married again, and understand that it is beautiful because they are in love, but sad too, because in the back of everyone’s mind is the bride’s first love.
But there are the friendships. There is laughing at dinner with a group of women while across the world your husbands are laughing together at their own table, on an aircraft carrier, having breakfast. There are the group trips to far-away ports where you check in to luxury hotels with swimming pools as large as banquet halls. There are the grand balls that are supposed to be sophisticated but everyone knows will be debaucherous. There is your two-year-old daughter seeing “Dada” flying every plane she sees overhead, and there is watching movies where actors pretend to live the very life you are, in fact, living now.
But, mostly, there are ordinary days. There is running into someone you know at Target, and filling lunchboxes for school, and wandering the aisles of department stores looking for sheets. There are afternoons at the beach and afternoons at the waterpark and afternoons at the museum. There is reading books and cleaning the kitchen and walking the dog.
Still, it has been, as James Salter once wrote, looking back on his own years in the military: “a great voyage, the voyage, probably, of my life.”
Terrific post. -- DL
Posted by: The Best American Poetry | October 06, 2015 at 10:10 PM