Guard Duty
June 8, 2006 | permalink
One of the things that I had to do for The Old Man, one of my duties, if you will, was standing guard. Despite being a physically powerful person, the abuse he endured during his childhood made him more than a little paranoid. What he was most afraid of, I think, was being taken unawares, without a chance to flee or fight someone face to face. Using a public restroom made him especially anxious, and this, whatever it says about my childhood, is one of the things that stands out in my memory.
We travelled a lot by car when I was younger, and I must have stood guard over The Old Man while he peed in every picnic area, truck stop, and rest area along the Eastern Seaboard. At first, I was too young to realize that standing guard was what I was doing; he would just come to the bathroom with me when I went. As I got older, I realized that he was nervous about being that exposed, and that having me around made him feel safer. That he believed that with me there, nothing could happen. Or maybe that's not right- maybe it was more like, with me there he would have some warning if something went down. I'm not sure. But it became part of my job, one of the facets of my unswerving service. It was another one of the ways that I was the adult, caring for the scared child that lived in The Old Man's skin.
The strangest thing about it, looking back, is that it didn't seem strange to me at all. Like so much of my childhood, it was just another set of circumstances that existed in the world I lived in. I had never known anything else. It was normal.
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