The Time My Dad Took Me to a Bar

And made me promise I would never tell

I think I was around ten or eleven years old at the time. I’m not sure exactly.

Back then, every Sunday afternoon my father would take us four kids to the library on base. If it was summer he would then take us to the public pool for a few hours of swimming. In winter after the library he would take us to the bowling alley. The important thing is that he got us kids out of the house for a few hours so that our mother could spend some time without any kids around. Thanks to her migraines she needed a lot of child-less quiet time alone. The migraines always got worse when the kids were home.

Of course, being Sunday we kids had already spent a couple of hours at church in the morning — an hour of mass and an hour of Sunday School. While our father took us to and from the church he never went to mass himself. And our mother was an atheist so she never, ever set foot inside of a church. So my parents enjoyed a couple of child-less hours on Sunday morning together. It was after lunch when our dad got us kids out of the house for the afternoon.

There came a Sunday afternoon when my brother and two sisters had prior commitments. I don’t remember what they were but I think my sisters had some friend’s birthday party to go to and my brother had some dork…