Excerpt from the book A Family of Strangers

Signs of the Times


It is the fifties in suburbia. The ground's been bulldozed free of inconvenient trees and hillocks. The houses are brand new, identical, laid out in rows on streets named for birds and flowers that reside elsewhere.


Everyone is about the same age with two or three kids in the elementary school at the end of the block, the men all vets of World War II, wound a little too tight. No one talks out loud about the war.


Because every house in the subdivision has the same layout, we always know where to turn when we visit our friends. Every thermostat is set within the recommended “comfort zone.”


Outdoors, the terrain is bleak, corralled. In our backyard there are just two trees, fresh from the nursery: a willow and a mimosa, mere saplings, thin and anemic.


The willow comes closest to serving as a tree-house shelter, a small temple of herbed air I can hide in to sulk or dream.


The mimosa, austere, queenly, is a lesson in tact. Its leaves close up the moment I touch them, withdrawing from any offer of companionship.



Anatomy of Secrecy


My father likes to be alone. He escapes into one of our two bathrooms with a paperback best-seller or crossword puzzle for an hour at a time. "Where's Max?" my mother wails, exasperated, as she and my sister and I stand by the front door, coats on.


He is an engineer, a math whiz. But for all his cerebral speed, my father is a fairly slow man, sedentary, a three-pack-a-day smoker. His every move is deliberate, a calculated part of a larger plan.


Maybe a person has to move slowly to think as fast as he does.


He’s an expert, knows things we can't begin to imagine. He knows that there is life on other planets.


"How do you know?"


“I’m not allowed to reveal that," sotto voce.


Because his work is vital to national security, it would be dangerous to test his reticence with my childish probing.


His ability to keep secrets is in part what he’s well-paid for.