THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, March 29, 1995 TAG: 9503280268
SECTION: MILITARY NEWS PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: MY TURN
LETTERS FROM HOME
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
Dear B.G.,
Had the cruise ended just a few weeks ago, we could have congratulated ourselves on how we squeaked by without anything truly bad happening.
It's gotten a little stressful here in the past month. The good news is my sister doesn't have cancer, just a whopping hospital bill. But last night Daddy was admitted to the hospital with heart failure.
I think he'll be OK for now. Six hours after he got there, he was telling everybody to go home, picking the oxygen mask off his nose to be sure they understood him.
So I spent the weekend on the phone, getting updates from home and staying busy with the house to keep my mind occupied.
The neighbors are having a hard time figuring out why I don't just plop down in a porch rocker and wait for the boat to get here.
``I've never understood,'' one of them said to me the other day, ``why you always do all this work right before the ship comes home.''
She's been puzzled by the sight of me painting the mailbox, the front door, the porch furniture. She's been watching me run back and forth over the lawn with the mower, the drop spreader, the rake and edger, bits of pine straw and bugs in my hair and mud on my shoes.
And it's not over. Barring any sudden trips home, I've got to wash the windows yet, the car, vacuum the house, make sure both the rascal and I have something nice to wear when we're standing pierside waiting to see you wave at us.
Warm clothes? Cool clothes? Better have two outfits each, just in case. Pulling crabgrass, I'm making a mental grocery list featuring all your favorites.
``Why don't you just wait and let him do it?'' she said, ``That way, he'll know how hard it was.''
She doesn't think that you know darn well how hard it was.
It was no picnic being left with a 2-year-old who's ``testing the limits,'' ``finding her boundaries,'' and all those euphemisms the child-rearing experts use to describe the unbelievably awful behavior and spectacles a 2-year-old can put on.
She hasn't a clue that during half the phone calls you made home from the ship I wasn't real chatty, even pretty mad sometimes and just plain exhausted from juggling my job, our sitter - the much-loved and absolutely irreplaceable Miss Linda - the house, the yard, the blasted leaky French doors and everything else that's come up in the past few days.
So why is it important to mow and polish and rake and get everything in apple-pie order before the 14th?
Several reasons. You have a chance to relax when you get back - no ``Honey-do'' list.
Second, it proves that, darn it all, I can do this Navy wife thing for six months by myself very nicely, thank you. Still doesn't mean I like it, but I made it.
So I clean, run up a phone bill to mom in N.C., and watch the news, hoping nothing will happen to delay that ship. Turkey invades Iraq, Bosnia steps up its efforts to cut off the Serbs' east-west supply line, two guys drive cross the border into Iraq by accident and get locked up and I sit here with my fingers crossed, thankful that it's the Roosevelt's turn and mentally pushing the Ike toward the west, Spain and the Atlantic.
It's going to be good to have you home, to see that madness on the pier - women in crazy, romantic clothes, too short, too tight and showing far too much cleavage for the middle of the day.
To enjoy that huge feeling of relief when the ship rounds the corner and comes within view. To see the kids' handmade signs, balloons bobbing in the wind and those soft little babies, all dressed up for their first look at daddy.
This part, you say, is the hardest for you. That last few weeks aboard ship when the work is winding down and you just want to be home.
This is the part I like best - the end of cruise and the beginning of another honeymoon and my best friend coming home.
See you soon. Love, Quiche MEMO: The author is the wife of a crew member aboard the Norfolk-based carrier
Eisenhower, scheduled to return from sea April 14.
by CNB