Blue Sky Dream by David Beers

Author:David Beers [Beers, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-81909-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

ANOTHER LOCKHEED SON

On a bright morning in the autumn of 1994, I sat at the big oak table in the dining room my parents had added onto their ranch home some years back. The hour was early and the house was quiet. The day before, the children of my sister, Marybeth, had filled the sunny rooms of the house with their shouts and laughter and the electronic beeps of their toys. Now there was only the sound of the coffeemaker gurgling, my father in his pajamas clearing his throat across the table from me, the pages of the Saturday newspaper rustling as we read and waited for the coffee to be ready.

I was in town to conduct interviews, having long ago made words my livelihood. During my years as a journalist I had freelanced for many publications (once, even, Vogue) and I had held a few editing jobs, most recently at Mother Jones magazine, a consistent basher of the “military-industrial complex” that employed my father. I had found words with political implications the most interesting ones to write, words that strove for the ring of reason and fact but which, in the end, always appealed to the murkier aspects of human nature, moral sensibility and fear and faith.

None of my articles had ever required of me the technical precision, the obedience to immutable natural laws, that engineering had demanded of my father. Journalism had asked merely that I know how to arrange certain pliable arguments and evidence in interesting contraposition to others, and that I maintain a sharp interest in some aspect of the world for a matter of weeks or, at the most, months. Journalism had allowed me to live wherever my wife, Deirdre, and I happened to want to live; at the moment, Vancouver, British Columbia. Though there was little financial security in my sort of work, I continued to like it well enough and it often brought me back to the Bay Area where I could visit with my parents for a few days in the house where I had grown up and where there was always a room with a soft bed and a chest of empty drawers awaiting my arrival. The house and the room were still there for me because, all those years, my father had stayed put at Lockheed, had stuck with aerospace engineering, had with my mother paid off the mortgage. He had followed his original life plan, believing it on the whole a sound one.

Anyone who knew no more than these things about the two of us might well have concluded that all my father and I had in common were our balding heads as we bent them over the pages of the newspaper that morning in silence, each of us trying to make a bit more sense of how the world had changed and whether the future was turning out as well as we had been given to expect.

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