It's Veteran's Day in the U.S.  My cousin LH sent me this photo today of her dad (left) and my dad (right) at the wedding of one of my dad's sisters, January, 1946.  World War Two had been over for about a month:

While my dad looks twelve, he was, in fact, nineteen, still on active duty in the Navy.

It's odd to look my father in the eyes -- the early prototype of my father shown here -- and to know so much more than he does about what will happen to him in his life.  He knows, basically, nothing.

He will finish college at the University of Michigan.  Then he'll move to Washington, D.C., where he will go to law school, and then become a lawyer.  He will own an MG TD.  He will live on Thomas Jefferson Street in Georgetown.  A partner at the firm where he works will attend one of the legendary parties which he and his roommates will throw and later say of it, "that's not an apartment you're living in, Mr. Schneider; that's an abattoir."  He will get married, and then divorced a few years later.  He will marry again; the woman he marries will die three years after that.  He will have many three-martini lunches and play many games of squash at his club.

For a brief time, he will experiment with wearing a beret.  Also, he will experiment with having a goatee.  These experiments will lead him to conclude that he is neither a beret person nor a goatee person.

Over a Thanksgiving weekend several years later, friends will introduce him to his future, third wife.  They will conduct a mostly telephone-based romance for three months (she in Seattle, he in Washington).  He will propose to her over the telephone at 3:00 AM east-coast time; they will get married a month later, in Seattle.

They will travel around Europe for six months.  When they return to Washington (which will be in flames following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.), they will have two children, and then he will move with his wife and two children to a small town in Maine.  He will continue to practice law there.

His daughter will become heavily involved in raising goats and in massacring her brother on the tennis court.  His wife will become heavily involved in teaching kindergarten.  There will be animals other than goats, too: there will be chickens, rabbits, ducks, and (while he'd prefer otherwise) cats.  And pigs, and his wife will develop a lifelong love for pigs.  His son will drift slowly towards computer-nerddom (later to drift away from it, only to return to it years after that).  There will be much music and community theater and drives down country roads which don't go anywhere and Caribbean steel drumming (a staple in the small Maine town) and selling lemonade at the county fair which E.B. White had in mind when he wrote Charlotte's Web and getting up at 4:45 to go to the office but always being home by 6:30 in the evening to watch John Chancellor.  In winter, he will play tennis on the high-school basketball court, whose hard-rubber surface is about twenty times faster than the grass at Wimbledon.

There will be family trips to many places in the beloved Volkswagen camper which he and his wife will have purchased in West Germany at the beginning of their six months in Europe.  When the VW has long since become little more than a bucket of rust precariously balanced atop an engine of sorts, a transmission, and wheels with studded snow tires on them, he will wait until the rest of the family is elsewhere and then hire a tow-truck to haul it away.  He will take pictures of it as the truck tows it away.

He will know almost everyone in town, because so many of them will be clients; the few he doesn't know, his wife will probably know because she will teach their children in kindergarten.  His son will have a paper route.  When his son goes away to boarding school, he will take over this paper route; around Christmas, his customers, who will get a bang out of the fact that their paper boy is a lawyer -- their lawyer, perhaps -- will tip him not with a crisp ten-dollar bill but with a bottle of bourbon.

He will marry people for free; lawyers in Maine are also justices of the peace, so he'll have the authority to do that.  His "fee" will be that he will be the second person to kiss the bride.  His son will move to New York to go to college.  His daughter will go to school in Nova Scotia.  His son will work for a publishing house for several years.  His daughter will work with mentally retarded adults.  His son will fall backwards into a career building what will be called "web sites."  His daughter will move to a farm in Pennsylvania.  He will take many cross-country trips with his wife. 

His wife's bile duct will become clogged, ruining her liver, and she will require a liver transplant, which will be a success, and every year, on the anniversary of this transplant, he and his wife will eat liverwurst and wonder who the man in Tampa, Florida was whose liver she has.  He will have been smoking a few packs of unfiltered Lucky Strikes every day for several decades when he is diagnosed with lung cancer; he will be told by a surgeon that the tumor cannot be removed.  He will get a second opinion from another surgeon, who will remove the tumor, which will not have returned fifteen years later.  He will walk less well than he once did.

His best friend RC, organic farmer and gentleman, will die.  He will not go to church much, because while he was raised in the Episcopal church, he is agnostic or atheist.  But sometimes when his wife is out of town, he will go to church because he likes Rob, the minister.  Generally, though, he will say, "why should I go to church when I can see Rob at the post office?"  He will serve on the board of the small town's excellent library.  He will organize film festivals.  He will participate in "celebrity spelling bees."  He will walk still less well than he once did, but he will purchase an electric scooter which will make him "feel thirty-five again."

My dad, age nineteen, knows none of this.  He knows only that his older sister is getting married to her terrific high-school sweetheart JB (also just back from the war), and that that's swell, and that he's in the Navy but that the war is over and that the good guys won (the next war, a long, cold one, is brewing, but he doesn't know that yet), and that he's posing for a photo with his other older sister's husband, and that life is grand.

Thanks to PW, via LH, for the photo.