Politics

I ’m doomscrolling on Facebook — past puppy photos, Paul Schrader recounting his ayahuasca journey, hopeful dispatches from second and third marriages — when a post stops me.

Someone says that he asked Pete Hegseth to drop a bomb on Iran in the name of my dead father.

The past is the present again.

IT’S NOVEMBER 1979. I’M AN eighth-grader in Oak Harbor, Washington state, folding and rubber-banding copies of the Seattle Times and counting the days. My father, Cmdr. Peter Rodrick, leads VAQ-135 — the Black Ravens — an electronic-warfare squadron flying EA-6B Prowlers out of NAS Whidbey Island. His hangar is five miles from our house. But he isn’t here. He’s never here.

He’s deployed on the USS Kitty Hawk, and I haven’t seen him in six months. He missed my 13th birthday and a fairly disastrous year at Oak Harbor Junior High marked by paddlings, not asking a crush to dance with me to “Reunited,” and a school reputation entirely built on my ability to eat five ice-cream sandwiches for lunch every day. But that’s about to change. I’m flying to Honolulu on Dec. 10 to meet him and ride the carrier with him back to San Diego. I know it’s happening because the “Welcome Home” signs have been already painted. They are right here in the garage, next to his shrouded MGB convertible.