Missing in the pic

For years, I have seen above picture. Lately, it’s on my home-office desk.

Sister’s family left side. Ours, right side. With my Mom, situated in the middle. Always the matriarch of the extended family. My brother, far right, was a Medic Captain (divorced and ran into his wife and kid on Wake Island, where this was taken).

But only now that it dawns to me why I had that thousand-yards stare: my Dad was left behind in a hurry. He stayed behind for a good 10 years from that turbulent time we found ourselves vetted in the middle of the biggest ocean on Earth.

“Do you know, where you’re going to, do you like the things that life is showing you.”

It’s hard to predict and project your life 10 years into the future. Let’s just say, recent announcement out of Berkeley’s Lab. It might be another 2-4 decades before we see commercial and consumer applications as we now begin to see with Tesla.

I can predict though the entrenchment, resistance and lobbying of the incumbents. After all, there are so much capital invested in other renewables (esp. the fossil fuel industrial complex).

So, the front row have been doing well: adjusted, fed and clothed. Warm clothes. Their kids to, interracially marriages. The back row. Not too good. Just passable.

I am left stranded. Off sync. Always seem to miss a few beats, generationally and culturally. Can’t interracially marry (barely codified yesterday here in the US). Can’t go back to date among our own race (heck, if I could, I would have visited with my Dad, the missing person in the picture).

There was some happy endings: he signed the house over to the government, then joined us with just a shirt on his back. Later, Dad passed away in a Winchester, VA home. There aren’t many tales to tell, except for some legendary incidents e.g. swam after a rescue boat for our family to evacuate to dry land during a Northern Vietnam flood, shooed away a thief in the night by a throw of a kitchen knife, and of course, stood up for me against my alley bully.

We need fathers. Good ones. To serve and protect. a 911 kind, a sensitive kind and a juggler of many balls in the air. Tall order. No wonder in today’s toxic environment, we find many single moms on welfare, on WIC’s etc…Where have all the good men gone? Back in my days, my Dad, a discharged Army man, came home every single night. Supper waiting. Songs waiting. And at times, visitors waiting.

We had something of a home life. Sunday outings and graduation parties. It’s the Confucian culture that held us together, more in death than in life. We commemorated the dead. Remembering the day they passed away and got together every year on that same date. To retell tales and to encourage each other to live on.

Now that I realize who is missing in that picture, I can comprehend the anxiety and restlessness present: if I did not know his whereabout, I would never know if he lived or died. And most of all, on what day of the calendar should I remember him. That’s what got me antsy and apprehended, shown in a thousand-yards stare beyond the glistening sea for a glimpse of the person missing in the pic.