In a dusty, fading memory of a National Geographic of my youth, among the bare-breasted African ladies and stripe-shirted Parisians, there is a sunny picture of a lad on a raft, his toes swirling the Mississippi River.  His father had taken him out of school for a year of rafting on that mythic Father of Dreams, if not waters.  Why could not I have a father like that, I grieved.

My own father thought peace, not adventure, was the greatest gift.  He was born and grew in Latvia, in a forest of kin, as much a part of his place as the oak trees planted for the native sons.  A small stone house, a well, three oaks and a horizon of fields.  A burial ground nearby sheltered his ancestors on both sides; their names are gone now, weathered away like the wooden crosses that marked their graves.  But he was there, where he belonged, in the embrace of family, living and dead.

When I was a boy, I would stand in front of the door of my house, looking outside, wishing and wondering.  I think he was like that.  Bye and bye, whatever was beyond the fields of oats and rye beckoned, and he answered.  In a fit of irrational exuberance, he joined the army.

Not bad, really, at least at first.  It was a free country, for that brief period between the great wars, and nothing for soldiers to do but dream of dying under foreign skies, all brave and noble.  They certainly had the songs for it.  He went off to Riga, to the War College.  It was a blast.  Bright lights, big city, no way to keep him down on the farm after that.  He married a girl with an eighth grade education and a mind that was quicker than a hare chased by two foxes and an alley cat.  No slouch himself, he thought she was normal.  They had a couple of children.  You know that feeling, in a dream, when you’ve climbed to the highest peak to look at the world, and you turn around to discover the mountain has disappeared while you weren’t paying attention?

Russians.  Germans, then Russians again.  The world was in one of its fits.  This part of the story is a haze of half glimpsed hopes and fears, mostly projections on my part.  Like one of those stunts on a magician’s stage : a loud noise, a lot of smoke, and when it all clears, everything is different.    In a camp in Germany, full of shattered dreams, I was born, much to the chagrin, I’m betting, of my brothers.

The father I knew had had enough adventures, thank you.  He had made some promises to God when all else had crumbled; he did his best to see that his children fulfilled them.  Keep this in mind when you promise things to God: don’t involve others.  Faust probably had a better deal.

These days, I live near the Mississippi, and occasionally, when I drive upriver, I see that kid on the raft in my mind.  I’m older now than my father ever got.  I hope I’ve done as well as he did.