| I was always leaving behind
what I was just about ready to become.
|
Pat Conroy xix * |
| By necessity, I made my own
private treaty with rootlessness and spent my whole life trying to
fake or invent a sense of place.
|
Pat Conroy xviii * |
| Home is a foreign word in
my vocabulary and always will be. At each new base and fresh
assignment
I suffered through long months of trying to catch up and learning the
new steps required of those outsiders condemned to inhabit the airless margins of a
child's world. None of my classmates would ever remember my name when it was time to rotate
out the following summer.
|
Pat Conroy xviii * |
| I'm pathetic in my attempts
to make friends with everyone I meet, from cabdrivers to bellhops to
store clerks. As a child my heart used to sink at every new move or
set of orders. By necessity, I became an expert at spotting outsiders. All through my youth I was
grateful for unpopular children. In their unhappiness I saw my chance for rescue and always lept
at it.
|
Pat Conroy xxi * |
| We grew up strangers to ourselves.
We passed through our military childhoods unremembered. We were transients, billboards to be changed, body temperatures
occupying school desks for a short time. We came and we went like rented furniture, serviceable
when you needed it, but unremarked upon after it was gone.
|
Pat Conroy xix *
|
| This is my paradox.
Because of the military life, I'm a stranger everywhere and a stranger
nowhere.
|
Pat Conroy xx * |
...I can walk away from best
friends and rarely think of them again. I can close a door and not
look back. There's something about my soul that's always ready
to go, to break camp, to unfold the road map, to leave at night when he house inspection's done
and the civilians are asleep and the open road is calling to the Marine and his family again.
|
Pat Conroy xxi * |
| My mother, speaking to one
of my military brat cousins: "But you put down roots everywhere you went,
didn't you?"
My cousin: "No, Aunt Dorothy, not roots. Vines.
|
Pat Conroy
The Great Santini |
| I had been seized by a need
to move on that was so overwhelming it eclipsed any sensible
notions of sticking out the usual cycle of job queries.
|
Mary Edward Wertsch p248 **
|
| You can be a leader, anything
you want, because you are not tied to a community perception
of who you are.
|
Daughter of an Army Major p252**
|
| What happens in the long run
is that you develop a certain immunity to getting attached to anything.
|
Warren p258 ** |
| I've got nothing to lose because
I've lost it all before.
|
Mary Edwards Wertch |
