Home » Travel » Alaska/Northern Canada » I Thought You Said The Army - Page 2

I Thought You Said The Army - Page 2

© Sandy McCollum

He went off to boot camp with my reluctant support - I mean, once it's a done deal, nobody has any choices left, so I might as well make the best of it. He wrote me awfully sad letters of homesickness and told me what a jerk his Staff Sargent was, after he'd ‘smoked' Ryan. It tore my heart up and made me ache for him, asking myself over and over, ‘What have I done?' Over the ten weeks, the letters began to change into what he ‘gets' to do next and how long it will take him to advance to the next rank, if he does it right.

He came home a solid, muscle-bound man, much different than the boy who left nearly three months before. He answered me with a ‘yes, Ma'am' and his internal switch lost all it's median speeds - he was on, or he was off. No more watching television or sleeping in. I'd get up for coffee in the morning trying to be quiet so as not to wake him, and an hour later he'd come walking in the front door, dripping sweat from his run. We normally spent about $75 a week more on groceries when Ryan came, but not anymore - he eats a healthy, minimal diet that feeds his body without making it gain extra weight he doesn't need. He's up before dawn and crashes like a truck without brakes, in what we consider early evening.

We traveled together to Portland, Oregon and it was sort of scary for me. The big city and all the stress, and people weren't as friendly as I'm used to here, in Alaska. We went to meet my grown foster sons in a Taco establishment in a ‘bad' neighborhood, and I thought I'd seen him standing at the counter. I approached the young man and gave his ponytail a gentle tug, and when he turned around and I saw it wasn't my foster son, I was embarrassed and apologized all over myself. But, my apologies didn't seem to matter.

This man screamed at me for touching him, yelling in my face and backing me up and scaring the daylights out of me. I thought he might hit me! I turned around for a quick look for my son, and found him and all three foster brothers standing behind me in a line, kind of like a man-wall. I suddenly felt safe, invincible even, and I turned back to face the angry man. When he said he'd have to wash his hair out because he didn't know where I'd had my hands, I raised my hands and looked at them and confidently said, "What? These hands? I've just had them down my pants, mostly." He scared me again as everyone laughed at him and he got angrier. "I think you need some tacos, buddy, you're a little cranky," I continued, and everyone laughed again, infuriating the deranged man. I told my sons we didn't need tacos this badly and we went out the door, but the man wasn't finished with me yet. He followed us out the door screaming and yelling as he went.

The copyright of the article I Thought You Said The Army - Page 2 in Alaska/Northern Canada is owned by Sandy McCollum. Permission to republish I Thought You Said The Army - Page 2 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.