On my 18th birthday, I received the registration letter from the Selective Service to register for the draft. There were rumors that if Bush was re-elected he was going to re-instate the draft, and this was a troublesome rumor for me because, as I said, I was 18. So I did what I always do when I’m worried about something and I talked to my dad, which isn’t what I should always do when I’m worried. He gives me that “wax on, wax off,” kind of advice where I come to him looking for a simple reassuring answer and come away with not only more questions, but also a profound sense of bewilderment. He had the kind of knowledge that comes from mountains, lakes and trees.

I asked my dad if he had ever been drafted. He took a deep breath, sat back in his rocking chair and crossed his arms. He looked very natural in that chair he had built as a boy one summer in Michigan; now it nods back and forth on our patio whenever he steps out for a breath of fresh air. I realized too late that his answer would take the form of a long story and so I sat down in my lawn chair and prepared myself for the enigma of a story my father tends to tell. This is the story he told me…

“Well, I was in Munich and I received a letter from Selective Services indicating that I would be drafted soon. I decided that I’d rather enlist with the Navy then be a foot solider in Vietnam, so I took the train to Bremerhaven where some kids told me how to find the naval base. I jumped on a bus, and passed through this fenced area, which I thought was odd, but nobody said anything. The recruiter was out to lunch so I went to grab a bite at the commissary; I got a burger and fries and was ready to pay.”

I tried to picture my dad as a young man and found it difficult as most children do; we see our parents as these one sided individuals, dominated by their master status as our parent. I found an old photograph of him standing next to a hanging three-point buck with one hand resting against the tree, and one hand resting on the butt of his gun. I can see a young man hardened by the premature death of his father, a country boy who felt most at home in the woods behind his house. He’s smiling and he stands about 5 9′ and weighs a buck forty. His time as a Peace Corps volunteer is evident in his malnourished cheeks. His sharp mahogany eyes complemented his hair, which was the color of mustard yellow maple leaves, which he wore short and parted on the right. His skin resembled the bark of a birch tree, a very light complexion sensitive to the sun. I couldn’t see the palm of his hand but I knew it would be calloused from the years he had spent outdoors, hunting, chopping wood and gardening. His shoulders slumped slightly, extended too far, like branches burdened by the weight of winter’s snow. Forged in Lake Huron, he became a capable adult, conscientious of his place on this planet. I could see him purchasing that burger and fries looking for a familiar meal in foreign territory.

“Where’s your ID?” said the cashier. I pulled out my passport and showed it to her and then she called the guards with assault rifles over. Apparently that was the wrong ID!” He let out a chuckle, the kind of laugh acquired when the years have displaced the emotional intensity of the moment.

“It turns out this was a ‘secret’ N.A.T.O. base, so they interrogated me for an hour and I figured out they weren’t going to believe that I wasn’t a spy.”

I had to pause for a moment to take this new information in. The fact that someone thought at one point in time, that my father could have been a spy was more than I could believe. After all, this is the same man who tried to raise chickens at our house in Nepal without my mother’s consenting knowledge. That lasted a whole 26 hours. He might have gotten away with it if he hadn’t gotten a rooster that Ca-Cawed at 5:46 in the morning. It also didn’t help that he kept them right next to the house in the car sized crate that my mother walked by every evening in her garden stroll. Raised in rural Michigan, my father’s a farmer at heart and just didn’t have the deception in him to be a spy. Even now, in Virginia he still kept a small garden of tomatoes, mint leaves and grapes and hunts, whenever deer are in season. He said he was going to tell my mother eventually, using the eggs they’d lay as leverage to keep them and he still believes that would have worked.

“So I said. ‘Listen…maybe I am a spy; but let us assume for one minute that I am who I say I am; an ex-Peace Corps volunteer, looking for the naval recruiter. Assuming this is the truth, it would be awfully embarrassing if word ever got out about how easily I walked into your base.”

Here I was expecting him to be detained until the U.S. Embassy stepped in and instead he found his own way out. My father has a Ph D, so I know he’s an intelligent man, but there are also some days when he spends half an hour minutes combing the house for the hat on his head or the keys in his hand. These days he’ll remind me to do a chore I completed weeks ago. I see medication come through the mail that promises to improve your memory or your money back. I know that he’s getting older and it’s getting harder to remember the small details, e-mail passwords, my girlfriend’s name, and his children’s birthdays. Every year his glasses get thicker and his organization system becomes more complex.

I remember lying in my bed trying to postpone my bed time by asking question after question and my dad would answer every one of them, even the tough ones like is there a heaven? Can Raja, our lab, come with us? Why do dogs have to die? It saddens me to witness my father’s mind failing him, to see that hazy look as his eyes search for recognition. I wish he would stop aging.

“The guards decided they couldn’t detain me any longer and escorted me to the recruiter’s office and I took the two tests, a physical and an officer test. I passed the officer test, but I failed the physical because I’m 50% red-green color blind.” His uneven mustache reminds me of my uncle, the way it tilts to the left.

His brother has the same affliction. This explains how both he and his brother owned and wore the most ridiculous combination of neon aqua-green swim trunks, an old stained white t-shirt, a flimsy hat, knee high socks and water shoes at the same family reunion. I thought it was a joke when they stepped out from changing and were dressed identically for water tubing down Michigan’s cold summer rivers. When I asked if they had choreographed their outfits, they stopped walking, looked each other over from head to foot and started chuckling while making comments like, “I didn’t realize how handsome we looked” and “Boy, I guess a keen fashion sense is genetic, waddayouknow!”

My dad has a boyish grin at times, something age hasn’t been able to take from him.

My father continues his story. “They told me that I couldn’t join the Navy and would have to join the Army. I asked if there was anything I could do to overturn the decision and they said I could try to bring up my case with the higher ups at the Detroit Naval base.”

“So what’d you do next?” I asked.

“Well, I boarded a plane back to the States, landed in New York and just happened to know a friend who needed someone to drive his car back to Michigan. My draft letter said I had to report to the Army recruiter so I went to the Army base and told them that I was trying to join the Navy. The secretary showed me my draft recruitment letter and told me she’d hold on to it if I could join the Navy, so I drove to the naval recruiter in Detroit and I took the two tests again.”

My father is a nice guy and people like dealing with him. He’s quick to give pats on the back or head rubs to friends. I wonder if secretaries understand the power they hold over regular people like my father. They are the gate keepers. I remember playing soccer with my dad and I was trying to make the argument that the only thing that mattered was how good a player you were and my dad insisted that you had to be a nice person; I guess he knew first hand how important it was to be a nice guy because you never know which hands will control your fate.

“This time I did very well on the officer test; the secretary told me that I had the highest score that base had ever seen; a serious accomplishment because it was one of the larger recruiting facilities back in the day. Part of why I did so well was because I had already taken the test but I was also a pretty good test taker in those days. However, I failed the physical test again for the same reason. I still didn’t want to be a grunt in Vietnam so I asked the proctor of my test what I could do about it and he advised me to bring my case up with the officers in charge of enlistment. After about four months of my case getting passed up the branches of the navy recruiting agency, I finally received a rejection letter saying that they wouldn’t take me in the Navy. Accepting the inevitable, I went to the Army recruiter to enlist and the secretary said ‘Tim Gabriel Johnston? Oh. Well we don’t need you to enlist anymore.’” He laughed at the quirk of fate, here he was running all around the globe to enlist in the navy so he wouldn’t serve as a grunt…and the army no longer wanted him!

Why wouldn’t they want him anymore? Here was my father, Mr. Magoo with a PhD, with no more options but to enlist and they were telling him they didn’t want him anymore?

“Well, you see, I had turned 26 and since I didn’t want to be in the armed forces in the first place, I decided not to enlist.”

He had aged past the required level for recruitment. I looked at my father and smiled. He told me that if the secretary hadn’t told him he wasn’t being drafted anymore, she could have got him to sign on anyways. I should have known this would happen; he has this, what will be, will be, element to his character that gave him the ability to roll with the punches. Time and time again, he gets into these complicated situations but he always finds a simple solution and sometimes, solutions fall into his lap. I realized that his aging was part of the reason that I was here; if he hadn’t surpassed the age restriction he probably would have served, might have died and definitely never met my mother at graduate school in Indiana.

I looked my father over as he concluded his story and saw the effect of time on his body. His once lean frame had grown the “papa paunch” and through over exposure to the sun, he had accumulated hundreds of freckles, the way trees accumulate rings. He hunched as he sat at his desk, but I could tell he was still strong, that hidden strength of deep roots. His legs were thick like the oak trees of his youth, hardy from years of toil. His hair has receded, so now he has a permanent laurel of white cresting the tops of his ears, circling around the back of his head. The cataracts in his eyes refract too much light through his thick glasses and so he wears shades whenever he’s in the sun. His hands had become thick from calluses built on calluses; I remember at Christmas, he could carry pine trees with his bare hands and not feel the sting of the needles.

I hope that when I am an old man, my memories gain that cloudy lens that softens pixels so you can’t see the lover’s marks that scar the trees. The lens of memory brings out the best and shades the real; maybe it’s a biological censor built into memory so that when we look back at our lives we don’t see the dirt and broken branches, we see the way leaves glisten and the sun shines. At 60, my father doesn’t have much to look forward to; one day he’ll be uprooted by fierce winds, raging rivers or the crack of lighting and as he falls to the Earth from which he sprang, at least he can take solace in the roots his seed has sown and watching his children grow.

He hadn’t reassured me about what I would do if I was drafted, but I realized that there wasn’t anything he could do to reassure me. I can’t change my fate the same way I can’t change him aging. The most I can hope for is to alter my fate slightly, the way trees lean toward the sun. All I can do is grow tall, bend with the wind and endure the storms and it was that simple.

I had reached the culmination of my childhood. Four years later, I would be accepted to the Peace Corps program to teach English in Lithuania. I think about the day when my children will ask me how I ended up there, while they try to postpone their bedtime and I will tell them what my father told me on that patio when I was 18. “We start as seeds, cast out by the wind. We take root under the shade of our father and eventually we grow tall, drinking in the rain, reaching for the sun and then… we start the cycle all over again.”