Free Saving Graces by Elizabeth Edwards Page A

needed something concrete. Thinking about the Catholic schools at the time, the Nixon side of the room found just the opening we needed. Donald Segretti, Nixon’s later dirty-tricks guru, was not in our class, but he might as well have been. The campaign for Nixon consisted of a few posters in the hallways and a calculated, oft-repeated rumor—in which I was as culpable as every other student on my side of the class—that, as a Catholic president and commander in chief over our dependents’ schools, John Kennedy would send us all to school on Saturdays. Nixon won the mock election at Kinnick Elementary School by a landslide.
                      

                      
    Normally a tour of duty is over in the summer, but my father got assigned to a six-month tour at the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk beginning in January 1961. We were leaving Japan early. And we were leaving three days after Christmas. Mother had to plan Christmas for fourth, fifth, and sixth graders, go to Christmas parties and school and church pageants, pack all our belongings—some marked for storage, some for use in our smaller Norfolk quarters—pack traveling clothes for all five of us for a seven-thousand-mile trip, and be ready to leave by ship on December 28th. It was a testament to the flexibility of the military family, or at least the military mother. We had a tree decorated entirely with paper ornaments we made. It had the advantage of being entirely disposable—we tossed it out, still fully decorated, after Christmas—and while my brother and sister and I were making ornaments, it allowed Mother uninterrupted time to pack. Somehow she got everything done. And on December 28th, the five of us went aboard ship and headed back to the States.
    It wasn’t until a couple of days later that Mother realized she hadn’t gotten everything done and, in fact, had forgotten something important. On December 30th, my father gave her a lovely pearl pin for their thirteenth wedding anniversary. Their wedding anniversary? She looked so forlorn that my sister and I went to the tiny ship store and bought some handkerchiefs and thread. We spent the rest of the day embroidering my father’s initials on her only gift to him. She gave it to him, and he acted pleased. The next morning Mother awoke, certain she had nothing left to be done. Except that we had crossed the International Date Line, and it was December 30th again. My father had figured this out before the trip, so on their second thirteenth anniversary in as many days, he gave her a mink stole. My sister and I went again to the ship store and again bought and sewed. And again he acted pleased. Maybe he was, but one thing I am certain of is that my mother was relieved to wake up the next morning with no extravagant gifts awaiting her.

CHAPTER 4
    ZAMA
    O NCE WHEN MY older children were in school, they asked me to show them on the globe all the places I had lived when their grandfather was a pilot. I traced my history with my finger: a single line that crisscrossed the Pacific, back and forth, back and forth, and back and forth again. It seemed so simple, but with each reversal of direction, our family’s lives had changed. In the winter of 1961, when I was eleven, the line took us from Japan to Norfolk, Virginia, to a new school and new quarters, and by the summer of 1962, it had taken us from Norfolk to Annapolis, Maryland, Annapolis Junior High School, and grand quarters on the parade grounds at the Naval Academy.
    By the fall of 1962, Wednesday parades became a feature of our lives, a line of junior high school girls sitting on the top row of the bleachers, pointing at—and in our imaginations choosing from—the four thousand college boys marching in front of us. With Wednesday parades came Wednesday tourists who walked our streets, peered in our windows, and sometimes even came in and sat down in our living room. Mother would find them running their