Past in all its beauty and pain comes rushing back when recalling growing up

My brother Frank recently returned to Columbus. He has not been back since he left town in 1974, the year I graduated from Columbus High School. Frank is the reason our family left Georgia for Oregon. That’s a longer story I detail in our family’s memoir “After the Flag Has Been Folded.”

We spent a day together, my brother and I. We drove out Morris Road and parked near the baseball field where Frank once threw a curve ball that knocked out my front tooth.

It liked to have scared our daddy to death. I wasn’t but 4or 5. Daddy swooped me up and carried me into the house, rushing me to the bathroom, and trying to clean me up before Mama saw me. Daddy knew if Mama saw my busted lip and missing tooth, he’d have a lot of explaining to do.

Walking alongside the culvert that bordered the woods we once considered our very own hidden kingdom, Frank and I recalled how we used to stand there among the pines and kudzu and call out “Bob White! Bob White!” until the birds answered us.

“What do you remember about Fort Benning?” I asked.

“Sand Hill,” he said.

Mama taught us both how to drive on the roads snaking around Sand Hill. I thought at the time she was teaching us how to drive there because there wasn’t much traffic. But maybe it was because of the thuds of the military exercises taking place nearby. Maybe Mama figured if we wrecked the car out where loud noises routinely took place, no one would notice.

As the oldest sibling, Frank has the most memories with dad. Being the only boy, he has different kinds of memories with our father than I do. He remembers going to the jump towers at Fort Benning with Daddy. I have no such memory.

I do, however, recall going to Martin Army Hospital with my father after a tumble off the top bunk in the bedroom. I busted my chin on the way down. The blood spray was quite spectacular, reaching all four corners of the bedroom’s ceiling.

Daddy threw me in the car upside down, with my head hanging off the seat, blood spraying the floorboard. It was pitch dark outside, way past my bedtime, which is why I was trying out my gymnastic abilities. I wasn’t sleepy.

Daddy didn’t even take time to dress me. Just scooped me up in that way that Army dads do and took me to Martin Army, and me wearing nothing but a cotton slip, which was tie-dye red by the time we arrived.

“Who’d you get into a fight with?” the kindly doctor at Martin Army teased me. I was still crying so I couldn’t answer.

“Muhammed Ali,” Daddy replied. He was trying to laugh but I saw his blue eyes squinch shut when that doctor threaded a needle through my split-open chin.

For all his Army bravado, Daddy never could stand to see one of his children suffer. I reckon most daddies are tender-hearted that way when it comes to their own.

“I remember being at Fort Benning, and me and Dad watching through the woods as some recruits did military exercises,” Frank said. “I don’t think we were supposed to be there.”

“I remember that, too!” I said. A part of me had always assumed it was some dream, something I’d imagined doing.

Most of the good memories my brother and I share before Daddy died involve the city of Columbus and Fort Benning. That he waited some 40-plus years to return to this city that raised us up speaks to the trauma we both endured in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

The night I graduated from Columbus High, Mama sat on the front stoop of our brick home on 52nd Avenue and told me she was going to move off to Oregon. I was welcome to join her. It didn’t really matter, she was going whether I did or not.

Frank was already living in Oregon. Like her son, Mama had a difficult time living near Fort Benning. The base just held too many memories that hurt too much for a Gold Star family like ours.

“Your daddy loved you very much, Karen,” Mama said, handing me my graduation gift. “He loved nothing more than to dress you up, that blond hair of yours combed all pretty. He’d carry you all over base showing you off.”

I remember that, as well. The stiff dresses itched as did the lacy socks, but none of that mattered as long as my father was holding me close.

I suppose It is the memory of my father, of the man he was, of the family we once were, that prompts me to answer with pride “Fort Benning” whenever anyone asks me where I grew up at in Georgia.

After all, anyone who is from these parts knows that Columbus and Fort Benning are simply siblings who have a shared history of loss and love.

Author Karen Spears Zacharias is a former Ledger-Enquirer reporter.

This story was originally published October 21, 2018 at 2:30 PM.