Blue Sky Dream Read Free

loved that language, mastered it with a convert’s gusto, searing it onto the goofy tongue of the teenager until the new talk was all that was left, fused so thoroughly with his personality that it still inflects his everyday sentences. In my father’s parlance, even if you’re just fixing a toaster, you don’t “try this or that,” you
exhaust the various possibilities.
You don’t “figure it out,” you
troubleshoot successfully.
And when it’s time to do the next doable thing, you don’t “get around to it,” you
turn to.
Words of crisp, controlled action, a language built on the notion of worth proven through competence. A language earned.
    I liked it. I was good at it. And it was my own idea.
If you proved competent enough, the place where the Navy trained you to fly fighter jets was Corpus Christi. We are told Terry happened to have moved there because tropical Corpus Christi was not at all the Midwest of her girlhood, and that she was a medical technologist at Driscoll Children’s Hospital. We are told that a Navy friend of Hal’s happened to chat up a roommate of Terry’s sunbathing on the local jetty, and that as a result Terry happened to end up wearing a homemade sarong at one of the luau parties the naval aviators held around the Officers Club swimming pool. We are told Terry happened to meet Hal there, and then saw him again at one of the parties thrown by Terry and her friends. These were parties where, by the end of the night, the two parakeets named Hit and Miss invariably would have been let out of theircages and then one of the men who tended to be invited—they were oil geologists and interning doctors and military aviators, the better class of Sunbelt transients—would look funny as he tried to catch the birds and put them back.
    “Your father liked to laugh,” Terry says of Hal now when asked why, six weeks after their first date, she agreed to spend her life with him. “We both liked to laugh. That was very important. And when he came over for Thanksgiving dinner he did the dishes. I noticed he was very polite and I sure liked that.” This is how my mother and father talk about Terry and Hal back then, in phrases that never focus to a precise dot, with the broad positives that attach to the goodly characters in folktales. We, the four children, nod in smiling wonder since we have no way to know if it was anything different.
    By summer the newlyweds were finished with Corpus Christi and living in a tiny apartment in San Diego. My father had been assigned to a fighter squadron based at Miramar Naval Air Station, and there he was given his F9F-8 Cougar to fly. It wasn’t the fastest jet in the world (though it cruised at Mach .86, about ten miles a minute), but what made the F9F-8 an advance for the day was its range, the fact that its wings had been equipped with extra fuel tanks. So, its wings engorged with fuel, its body an air-rammed blast furnace, its pilot breathing bottled oxygen inside a Plexiglas bubble, the F9F-8 Cougar was very much what a jet was made to be: a machine that consumed ferocious amounts of energy while wildly shrinking time and space.
    What this meant to my father is that he could phone his parents from San Diego as he did one summer morning in 1956, casually announce he was coming to visit them, burn three tons of JP Kerosene on his way to Seattle, roar low over the air base before landing and, wearing a helmet with six stars painted across it, greet his awed mother and father in his fluent new language:
Made good time. Airplane performed well. How’s everyone?
What could they say to him? He was telling them America’s favorite story, the story of the son who zooms past his father’s sternly conventional expectations, the son who roams far and returnstransformed. The son in his F9F-8 Cougar had made himself such an exotic stranger, so much his own man, that he could roam in and out of his parents’ lives at a speed of ten miles a minute.
    S uch a fantastic