And there it is. If you muse long enough, you get to it: I wanted to go to Alaska because that is where my dad spent his war years, the only time in his life that he traveled anywhere farther than a fishing cabin on some midwestern lake. A small-town dirt-poor Illinois boy who got sent out with one brother or another every afternoon to bring back dinner for the family. Tramping through cornfields and woods with a shotgun and a couple of dogs, always dogs, and then tramping back with a squirrel or a rabbit for dinner. Using bamboo rods to catch walleye out of somebody’s pond or out of the Edwards River. My dad, who learned sports at their rural school from a teacher—Miss Laura Smith, who tucked her long skirt into her bloomers and taught my dad and the other guys to pole-vault. He said, “Boy, she could do the long jump—you oughta seen her. And she taught me to sprint.”

He told me that years later, at Laura Smith’s funeral in the little town—a town so drab and meaningless, stunted, that the only funeral parlor was called Crummy’s—there were rows and rows of men in their stiff good clothes with weathered faces and white foreheads (the telltale sign of a farmer at a funeral) paying their respects to the coach who had taught them layups.

Anyway, my dad got called up for World War II and was sent to the Presidio in California for his training. I loved the word presidio; it sounded like a foolish leader or a musical instrument. And lots of things happened to him there. He was crudely circumcised, for one, carried to and from the mess hall for days afterward by his horrified and sympathetic buddies, and he was laid up in a ditch during a training maneuver and left there ankle-sprained for twelve hours in the hot sun, provoking forever after the question he would always pose to me: “Honey, does your dog have plenty of water?” He couldn’t even fire his gun to announce his dilemma because they were training with wooden rifles.

See, I know the stories very well; I listened to him then the way I listen to Terry Gross now.

He grew very close to the men in his unit, the guys who winced over his sore dick with him and crouched in small groups smoking cigarettes to have their pictures taken, but before they were all sent to the European theater, he got plucked out of the mix and made to go to Alaska.