The Magical Stranger Read Free

father taking command of the Black Ravens. Would I like to come out to Whidbey Island for the ceremony? There would be a formal dinner—a dining-out—the night before where I could meet the guys in the squadron, fliers like my father. And who knows? They’d invite some Black Raven alumni; maybe one of them might even have known Dad. The next day, there’d be a formal ceremony where Commander James Hunter “Tupper” Ware would formally relieve Doogie. Afterward, I could get a tour of the base and even sit in the cockpit of an EA-6B Prowler, Dad’s old plane still in service thirty years later.
    I’m a writer; I inhabit other people’s lives for a living. The Navy left me without a father but with some useful skills. I am adept at playing the new kid, making my way in strange worlds, never knowing where the bathrooms are located. This is what I do. Still, Breining’s invitation frightened me. Some historians trace the start of the war on terror to November 4, 1979, the day the hostages were taken in Tehran. That would make Dad’s crash the first American collateral damage. Thirty years later, fathers still fly EA-6B Prowlers off carriers. Their sons still skate at the Roller Barn. The war goes on and on. All that changes are the “Welcome Home” signs. But my family surrendered long ago. We fled that world, refugees never speaking of our destroyed homeland.
    A colleague nicknamed me—half mocking—the magical stranger because I get people to tell me things. But to me, the magical stranger has always been my father. He was brilliant and unknowable, holy but absent, a born leader who gave me little direction. Peter Rodrick was one of only 4,000 men in the world qualified to land jets on a carrier after dark. And he was an apparition, gone two hundred days of the year from when I was six until he died. Even when he was home, he was away, working sixteen-hour days, writing up flight plans, and diagramming aerial tactics. He was such a ghost that I didn’t fully accept he was gone for years. It just felt like he was on an extended cruise.
    Evidence of the actual man was harder to come by. Most of it was locked away in cruise boxes and crates in Mom’s basement: a framed picture from the Brockton Enterprise of a boy with a pole on the first day of fishing season; a long black leather sleeve holding a sword, and a small metal box containing envelopes with single dollar bills sent to him on his birthday by his father, the envelopes still coming for years after he died.
    I had made some tentative steps at connecting with Dad, but they always ended in sadness. I visited his marker at Arlington National Cemetery twice when I was in Washington as a college kid. I would climb the hill up to his section and sit down on the hard ground. I’d pick out the dirt that lodged between letters reading IN MEMORY OF PETER THOMAS RODRICK CDR US NAVY JAN 6 1943–NOV 28 1979 . I’d cry and flip a middle finger at tour guides droning on about Audie Murphy to tourists in passing trolleys. I never told my family.
    An early attempt to write about the past burned me. In 2002, I turned thirty-six, Dad’s age when he died. My wife and I lived in suburban Boston, an hour from Dad’s hometown of Brockton. We were talking about starting a family, and she wanted to raise our children in a blissful suburban security neither one of us had as kids. I wanted to live in LA or New York. But there were larger issues. She was convinced that I wouldn’t be a proper father until I had made peace with my own dad.
    I readily agreed. I pitched a magazine story on Navy pilots and eventually spent three weeks on the USS Kitty Hawk , Dad’s last ship. I sat in the chapel where Dad prayed every morning. I left on a transport plane from the same catapult he used on his final flight. I finally understood a flake of his life. But the end result was the opposite of what I had hoped. My wife