Movies with Mom -- Mike N.
A s some wiser folk have observed, remembered family history often varies from the details others remember. If relating some things eventually brings me some corrective epiphany, so be it, but for the moment these are my memories, and that's good enough for this and now. My father was largely out of the picture by my 10th birthday. There had been considerable, simmering tension on the home front for many years, well before I came along, but a blend of wanting to maintain appearances for propriety's sake - both in the eyes of extended family and of my father's superior officers, as he was in the thick of what would become his first career, in the US Navy - my mother's self-cripplingly rigid adherence to elements of her Catholic faith, and the stretches of relative peace at home while he was at sea, on deployment, combined to keep them technically together for far longer than they likely should have. My older siste...