1978

was a good year. It was the year of Grease and Superman and the first time you could buy a foreign-owned, US-made car in the United States - a small one called the Volkswagen Rabbit. Jimmy Carter is President, mustaches were still normal, and the energy we had been tunneling to Vietnam is now returning to an old favorite: an icier, unfocused military stance against new Soviet leadership.

College had helped him stay away from Southeast Asia, but now a young Wisconsin ROTC graduate still has obligations to fulfill in uniform. His home is a killer-whale, the Polaris class SSBN Vallejo, an undersea industrial microcosm of the tensions in the outside world. Not that he wouldn't get a pie in the face for saying it like that. Real life is angles and dangles, sweat and tension, shallow and deep. There are the rare days pretending to be civilians in the bistro in Rota, or having a smoke in the sizzling sun, shirtless on the deck. But most are harder and darker - colored only with man-made light.

But light doesn't only come from the sun; and there are moments he gets to lay back in his bunk, stare at the gray bulkhead, and travel back to the warm coast of South Carolina, the heat and palmettos and Food Lion. She's there, and he knows news must be soon. Hopes it is. Soon.

And then it comes. It's a Tuesday, but it never feels like that here - a hundred feet from nuclear launch, time is counted differently - but it comes, and May in 1978 turns out to be better than Superman, or Volkswagens, or winning the Cold War. It's the day I was born, and the day LT George A Ridgeway learns that he's now become a Dad.

Happy Father's Day, Dad.

love,
chris
born 9:05pm, May 2nd, 1978, Summerville, SC.

Learn more about my dad in an article written about him in 2004.