We were all somewhere as we grew up.
So much has been written about those first ten years
we each have spent on Earth
if we lived that long.
My dad. Mom took the picture. That is my brothers and me in the back seat. The oldest is dead. The youngest has agreed he can be represented here. That yellow building is where the old Stars & Stripes was assembled for European distribution.For me, this is the back of an old navy blue Ford station wagon, outside my apartment-style home in old West Germany. We lived here when my parents were in the US Air Force, purely by chance. Maybe they could have been in Ponca, Oklahoma.
From internet archives: this building is awaiting destruction. It is not occupied here but I lived in C-3, that is second to the last set of balconies, and C is the middle balcony. Condemned Stars & Stripes are at the end of the block.I was in old Heidelberg along the Rhine, just before a bridge →I was laying in the back of that station wagon when this came on:
I was rooted there in that moment. I go there occasionally. I feel what it was like to lay in the back of that car with the sun beating down on me as we prepared to drive home to that apartment building outside Darmstadt.
Where do you go? Somewhere special,
I hope. I hope your people loved you the way mine loved me.
In the year before old West Germany (1964–1968)
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: My dad. Mom took the picture. That is my brothers and me in the back seat. The oldest is dead. The youngest has agreed he can be represented here. That yellow building is where the old Stars & Stripes was assembled for European distribution.