Anything Further, Father?

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If I were to stand in a doorway and mark where the top of my head reaches with a pencil, then have my father do likewise, the marks would fall at about the same height.

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"Measure Up" by Andrea Bonifacio

I recently interviewed my father about his experiences in Brazil. I wanted to see where we measured up on that topic. This is part of what I found out.

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Mission.

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“So, how did you end up in Brazil?”.

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The short answer is that the military sent him—to Brazil and many other places, including Colorado, Dakar, Panama, Singapore, and Spain, all part of the Army program he was involved in. Most of his travels fell within the span of two years; he was in Natal for about six months, the longest stint.

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"Map Overlap" by Andrea Bonifacio

Natal wasn’t the city he thought he’d be sent to. His team did their analysis from stations in both Natal and Recife, and in the end they assessed Recife as the better location. But Washington D.C., knowing about its rocket base, chose Natal instead.

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“What was it like living there?”

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The Army sent him off to each station at short notice; he rarely had much time to learn much about the places where he was going, Brazil included. But this was never really a problem for him: He worked, ate, and slept at military bases; he was almost always in the company of other Americans; and when they went out, it was with local guides who showed them around.

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“Did you have trouble with the language?”

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Like I did? Jacob-and-angel, word-wrestling moments? Aggravating—er, character-building—experiences?

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He didn’t learn Portuguese in advance of going to Brazil, but then he didn’t really need to—his life was fairly isolated from the locals. They had guides who could speak the language and help them out when they needed it. He did admit one frustration: Occasionally he met people who didn’t want to understand him. He could tell when they were purposefully not trying to be helpful. But other than that, he never had any real trouble.

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I recall my Brazzy clan, chatting and asking questions, abundant and overwhelming, talking too quickly and sometimes all at the same time—yet well-meaning and helpful just by their being there, included in my adventure. Not the same world as Dad’s.

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Mystery

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“What was the job itself like? What were you doing?”

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They were satellite chasers. Staying in contact with the other stations, his team used transmitters to send signal blips to one of three satellites, which sent signal blips back in response. For as long as they were in range, the stations could track the path of the satellite, using its signals to confirm its location and the locations of the other stations, as well as other spots on the globe. In this way, they pinned down, adjusted, and corrected points in local survey networks. The ultimate goal was to weave and wrap a net of communication around the world.

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"Relacionamentos" by Andrea Bonifacio

The work was slow and uncertain. They could never know for how long or how far they’d be able to track the satellites on any given day. They could end up working any hour of the day or night—they had to send the signals and get the data when they could, a little piece at a time.

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Hiking in the woods, I follow a trail marked by blazes. I pass one and watch the trees for the next. A line is not drawn on the ground before me, so unless I have a map, I must continue in faith, looking to see the next blaze to know that I am not lost.

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“So did you ever get to see a picture of what all of this added up to?”

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His experience was more a list of repeated tasks: Compile data. Set up equipment. Send signals. Wait. Disassemble. Write report. Repeat. But he never saw the end result—the net, the map, whatever it was supposed to be. For him, there was no big picture, just piles of partly-assembled pieces. He suspects they ran out of money before the program was even completed.

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"Dollar-Led" by Andrea Bonifacio

Dad and I have done many jigsaw puzzles together. With the exception of Relativity, we always finished those puzzles, even de madrugada (the wee hours of the morning). How could this lack of results not bother him? But I sensed no frustration in his voice as he spoke—I guess a good soldier doesn’t question orders, let alone ask to see the top of the box in advance. Or perhaps it’s something just too far in the past to be worth getting upset about.

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Myth

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“Did your work strike you as important? Did you ever think, ‘Wow, what I am doing could someday change history…’”

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And, Wow, this is profound. The step-by-step approach, the take-what-you-can-while-you-can, like a metaphor for navigating relationships, or life itself, or trying to understand God. Because of these little trusting steps we make today, the planet will look different to the whole world tomorrow… Such is how my head works.

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He replied, matter-of-factly, that he thought it was intellectually interesting. He liked traveling to places few people went, let alone people he grew up with. And more soberly, he realized that his work could create targets for ballistic missiles—and that he was serving in the Army during Vietnam and not getting shot at. “Besides, just the experience itself on its own was something. Just doing it.”

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Humbled. Okay, got me there.

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“How did you explain this all to Mom? How did you talk about it?”

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“I couldn’t, really. I don’t think she ever understood it. I don’t think she knows to this day—something with the Army and radios, maybe. There’s not many people who can understand it, let alone your mother.”

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Yet somehow, I did. Could I explain it to someone else? Perhaps not. But at least, from what I understood, I could visualize it: Trails and dashes sketched on the stratosphere in bright beams as stations and satellites connected, conversed, and cut short their calls. Blips pulsing in pyramids between heaven and earth, flashing and fading with the turn of the globe like the empyrean mating season of cosmological fireflies. Jacob’s ladder-climbers cruising the course of Columbus’s ships.

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"Pyravision" by Andrea Bonifacio

I blurted back to him my version of his explanation (without all that flowery language) and he stammered a general agreement with my abstract. Understanding! It was an A-ha!, a victory in common comprehension, not complaints or constraints. My head had hit the mark.

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Yet I was so quick to move on to more girlish concerns—big, profound moments of a different kind…

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Miss

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“So what was it like when you first met Mom?”

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Less high romance, more high school mixer. They were in a store, he and his friends from the base. She was there, too, one of a group of three girls, all giggling at them. He thinks he was trying to buy some shoes when Mom started to talk to him. He didn’t think he needed her help, actually—

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…eyeroll…

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—he thought he was doing just fine. But, egged on by her pals, she assisted him with completing his purchase. Then the groups went their separate ways.

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Later that afternoon, it happened again: Same girls, same day, same neighborhood, at another store a few blocks away. For him, this second time was more significant: Love-at-first-sight might be a myth, but second-glance-surety made it truth.

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"Strategic Maneuvers" by Andrea Bonifacio

Dig for more details…

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“But really—here you are in Brazil, working at your job, and suddenly there’s this pretty girl in the picture….”

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He chuckled sheepishly as if he were blushing. He didn’t remember what she was wearing the first time he saw her, or that she stood out so much from the others. He remembers she was just being friendly, like people are—like he himself was, recalling a time when he flirted with a Spokane girl at a burger joint during his college days. The friendliness was like that, easy and unremarkable.

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He remembers that the first time he went out alone to visit her, he wasn’t sure of the address, so he drove down the street past her house without stopping. But when he went by the second time, he knew. “And she was there, waiting for me.”

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They had only been seeing each other for three weeks when they got engaged.

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“How did you propose?”

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He doesn’t remember much about the actual proposal—not less the note he wrote—or exactly what he said. He had to ask her family’s permission, but he asked her first, “got down on one knee and all that.” He didn’t have a ring; they went and looked at rings together afterwards.

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“And…. how did you know you wanted to marry her?”

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He just knew. He remembers that he wanted to ask her, and that it seemed to him she’d probably say yes, and then she did. “We were both serious about each other fairly quickly. It just seemed to be the natural thing to happen next.”

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That’s it?

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That’s it. He just knew.

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Measure

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So… conclusions? Obvious: Life doesn’t have to be complex or cosmologically profound or linguistically limpid to be beautiful, to work out well in the end. You can achieve common understanding in acceptance sans excessive analysis. You don’t need to know engineering or Portuguese to be satisfied with life, to enjoy an adventure, to receive someone’s “help” or hold someone else’s hand.

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"Direct Hit" by Andrea Bonifacio

I know this already. Yet I don’t know it. Our heads may hit the same height, but sometimes Dad and I stand in different doorways. I still track from point A, looking for point B, obsessed with questions for the Top of the Box without having all the pieces yet in hand. What’s the big picture? Who will be there when I arrive?

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But what do I really need to know? For now, better to keep plugging pieces together, to see what fits and to let the picture reveal itself. Toss the map and trust the blazes. And speaking of maps, one last question…

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“Did you ever get lost?”

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To his recollection, he never did. “The roads were simpler back then. It’s not the same now—you’ve seen it, the city’s grown. But back then, you really couldn’t get lost.”

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Beijos,

Andrea

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© Andrea Bonifacio and Sondo Saudade 2009-2010. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Andrea Bonifacio and Sondo Saudade with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.