Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ieWhat's in your head, in your head?Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie-ie, oh
The song came out in 1994. I knew it was generally about conflict in Ireland but only learned that it was specifically about the deaths of two children in a specific bombing incident in the process of skimming the Wikipedia page as research for writing this piece today.
I'm American. Like most Americans, I don't know much about Irish history though I seem to know slightly more than average, perhaps because my maiden name is Irish in origin and I've bothered to look up a few things occasionally.
For me, the song was about personal psychology in the face of larger world events. For me, military conflict and personal trauma -- including sexual assault -- were bound up together in the zombies in my head and I valued the song for that reason and for being from an Irish band.
The connection between the military and personal trauma was deeper than I understood for much of my life. It was only after my father's death that I finally put some clues together and came up with answers to what had been unspeakable events shaping my life while no one said exactly what had happened and why choices were made to make sure it never happened again.
Following Dad's death, I started a blog called Native Influence and finally put all the memes of my childhood together and concluded that my father molested me when he returned from Vietnam with a fresh head injury and shrapnel in his brain and then he dropped his retirement papers when I was three and the Army stabbed him in the back and broke its promise to never send him back and he most likely did so to avoid hurting me again, even though it meant he was breaking his promise to my German mother to retire in Germany.
When they met, she told him to go date someone else because she had no desire to live in America. She married him on the condition that he promised to retire in Germany and then he retired in Columbus, Georgia and she spent the rest of his life telling him "You LIED to me."
I don't think my father intended to molest me. I don't think he was a pedophile -- someone attracted to children. I think I was a bubbly, charming toddler like Shirley Temple and he wanted to hold me on his lap and forget the war and things got weird.
And then he stopped of his own accord because his fresh head injury healed up some and he did his best to make amends to me and to protect me and make sure nothing like that ever happened again.
But he failed. He never molested me again but his son did.
Baby, we can talk all nightBut that ain't getting us nowhereI told you everything I possibly canThere's nothing left inside of hereAnd maybe you can cry all night...I'm tired of words and I'm too hoarse to shoutBut you've been cold to me so longI'm cryin' icicles instead of tears
Two out of three ain't bad was released as a single in 1978. I turned thirteen that year. I met the future ex at age sixteen and we were best friends at age seventeen and it turned to romance just before we both turned eighteen.
I had the highest SAT score of our graduating high school class. His overall score was lower than mine but his verbal score was higher.
We were both articulate and talkative. We had endless discussions and arguments that got us nowhere until we finally divorced and stopped trying to sort it out between us and I was just trying to sort it for myself on my own.
A door in the floor came out in 2004. I watched it on DVD as a rental the summer of 2005, the year A sound of thunder came out.
The man I was divorcing moved out in May. I moved to a different apartment in June and spent the summer tossing things out, watching movies and convalescing.
I would go grocery shopping, get enough food to last about three days and rent a few movies. Then we would toss stuff out, I would collapse to the floor, my son would start dinner and I would be too sick to do anything more energetic than watch movies for the next two or three days.
So I would watch the movies I rented to pass the time, put down my own baggage and try to work out new mental models. I watched a lot of time travel movies that summer because they are "what if" scenarios, fictional mental models of decision making processes.
I uncharacteristically went to the theater to see A sound of thunder by myself. I am not a fan of movie theaters. They make me sick and I typically went to theaters with my husband because he liked movies and it was something the two of us could do together.
I came home from this story about the death of a single moth dramatically changing evolution and history and I told my sons "Everything must go. Don't allow me to hang onto a single old photo out of sentimental value. It could be covered in millions of germs."
So we even threw out the one photo of my grandmother's grave that my mother had given me and that still bothers me. But I'm alive and healthier than I'm supposed to be.
A door in the floor was significant for other reasons. I was getting divorced from a man I had married at the age of nineteen. I turned forty that summer and had been married more than half my life and the marriage never really worked in part because it was strongly shaped by traumatic events in my childhood and we could never quite live it down.
I mostly found the movie therapeutic because of the blonde little girl growing up in a house haunted by events that occurred before she was born...
The little girl is named Ruth and she's about three or four. She is the full-blooded much younger sister of two dead boys whom she never met who died in their teens suddenly and unexpectedly.
Their walls are covered with photographs of the couple's teenage sons, who were killed in an automobile crash...
She was conceived after their tragic death in a misguided attempt to save the marriage and she views the photos everyday and has all the stories associated with them memorized.
When I was a blonde little three year old girl, my father dropped his retirement papers to avoid being sent back to Vietnam and bought a house in Columbus, Georgia. I grew up listening to stories about my parents' glory days, back when my dad was career military.
My father was a two time decorated veteran. He had a Bronze Star with a V for valor designation from World War II and a Purple Heart from Vietnam.
When he met my mother, he had a joint savings account with one of his two sisters. She was a single mom and if he died overseas as an active duty military member, he wanted his sister to immediately get all the money in his savings account without having to go through probate.
They had an agreement that she could dip into his savings "for emergencies" and he eventually realized she had been doing so regularly to the tune of about a year of his salary. On the excuse that he was now with my mother, he quietly closed the savings account so she couldn't get anymore of his money and never said one word to her about the incident.
He thought marrying my mother would take six weeks because he was an American soldier and she was a German national in post World War II Germany. It took more like two years and a stack of papers a foot tall.
During that time, they had a baby and he moved the family repeatedly at personal expense because they weren't covered by his military benefits. He eventually went back to the states briefly to finally get it sorted, a trip that had my mother living in fear that he wouldn't come back.
My dad was a stand up guy. He was salt if the earth, a Mensch, every descriptor I can think of for someone you can count on to do the right thing under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
He went to great lengths to protect his loved ones from bad things out in the world that weren't even his fault and from bad things within himself that were the price of being a man, like PTSD from military service.
And it wasn't enough. My mother felt betrayed and I ended up the victim of incest twice over at the hands of two male relatives who were both better people than most I've met in the world.
The larger world all too often steps between people in their private lives. Men who mean well typically expect their women to do the women's work and fail to see the insidious ways that undermines her career aspirations and personal independence and how it poisons their relationship.
I've sorted out how to live peaceably with two adult men -- my sons -- without being their bitch, burdened with all the women's work and lacking defacto rights on par with theis. I still have no idea how to sleep with a man without ending up his bitch.
I write in hopes that my words will be an ounce of prevention for someone else, saving them the pound of cure no one seems able to come up with in this world.
Writing this piece has filled my head with what is probably my earliest memory of my father.
I was born in Columbus, Georgia and the family briefly returned to Germany. The return trip to the US was, I think, six weeks on a boat.
I have been told my father held me and pointed out a whale in the ocean. I don't remember the whale. I sometimes remember my father and the boat and the hugeness of the ocean.