More than 40 military family writers - Stories Around the Table: Laughter, Wisdom, and Strength in Military Life

Stories Around the Table: Laughter, Wisdom, and Strength in Military Life

2014 Elva Resa Publishing

Individual essays copyright of respective authors.

Cover photo 2014 Karen Pavlicin-Fragnito. A special thank you to Jeff Ross of Ross Pictures for conducting the cover photo shoot, and to cover models Elsa Bardwell, Ryan Bird, David Edgerton, Michelle Edgerton, Naomi Edgerton, Ciana Fragnito, Elizabeth Hjort, and Alexander Pavlicin.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Design by Andermax Studios and Connie DeFlorin.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stories around the table : laughter, wisdom, and strength in military life.

pages cm

Compiled and edited by Terri Barnes for Elva Resa.

ISBN 978-1-934617-29-8 (paperback)

1. Families of military personnel--United States. 2. United States--Armed Forces--Military life. 3. Families of military personnel--United States--Biography. 4. Families of military personnel--United States--Psychology. 5. Adjustment (Psychology)--United States. I. Barnes, Terri, 1963-II. Elva Resa Publishing.

UB403.S76 2014

355.0092273--dc23

2014033460

Ebook: 978-1-934617-30-4 (epub); 978-1-934617-31-1 (kindle)

Elva Resa Publishing

8362 Tamarack Vlg Ste 119-106, St Paul, MN 55125

ElvaResa.com

MilitaryFamilyBooks.com

A portion of proceeds benefits nonprofit organizations serving military families.

T HE MOST ENTERTAINING STORIES, ENGAGING DISCUSSIONS, AND WISEST ADVICE often take place around a table. Usually food is involved, but no matter what we eat or drinkchicken or pizza, cheesecake or chocolate, wine or lemonadegathering with others opens our hearts to more meaningful relationships and deeper conversations.

Military friends gather around the table on special occasions and ordinary days, sometimes because we live far from our own extended families, and sometimes simply because military friends understand the way we livethe risks, the rewards, the nuances, the acronyms. We dont have to explain. They know.

Stories Around the Table: Laughter, Wisdom, and Strength in Military Life was inspired by those friends and gatherings. Both of us, Karen as a Marine wife, author, and publisher at Elva Resa, and Terri as an Air Force wife, author, and military family columnist for Stars and Stripes, have over the years encountered many military family members in need of support and friendship. Weve also met people in military life with expertise to share, some who regularly write or talk about their experiences on social media, in published books, at workshops, over the phone, on the radio. We wanted to invite all of them to sit at a kitchen table togetherwith us and other military families, new and seasonedto laugh, lend insight, and tell stories.

Alas, neither of us has a kitchen table big enough or mobile enough to make that happen for military families all over the world. So, instead, we began inviting military family members to help create a book, a collection of stories and lessons learned.

More than forty contributors accepted our invitation: wives and husbands, service members and widows, moms and dads, daughters and sisters, published authors and new writers, business leaders and founders of nonprofit organizations, volunteers and community advocatesall military family members with stories to tell. Theyve generously and transparently shared wisdom from their lives, gained through tragedy, trial and error, and both everyday and extraordinary circumstances.

Its our pleasure to invite you to join us, too. In this literary gathering of military friends, youll find laughter, nourishment, clinking glasses, bare feet under the table. You might not ever meet these storytellers in person, but through their words, you may begin to know them as friends. Its our hope that their stories will encourage you, inform you, and connect you even more strongly to the wonderful life we all live.

With such a diverse group, weve dished up a varied menu, yet we havent covered every aspect of military life. There are so many ways to live this life, so many ways to create and enjoy a military family. Weve simply started a conversation, a come-as-you-are dinner party, where everyone is welcome to hear or share a story.

What are your questions? What perspective do you bring? Come, join us at this table. Stories Around the Table is more than a book. Its an experience, one that reaches out in multiple ways. Proceeds from this book benefit organizations that directly support military families who need help beyond what a table of friends or a book can provide. Readers can connect with authors and find ideas for hosting live Stories Around the Table gatheringsthe best we can do to get our kitchen tables to youby visiting StoriesAroundTheTable.com.

Whether you gather in a kitchen, a back yard, or the coffee shop around the corner, we wish you delicious food, sweet friendship, and a generous helping of stories to go around.

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

~ J.R.R. Tolkien

I f I could give one piece of advice to new military spouses it would be this: Ignore the standard address book advice to Write in pencil, erasing as you move. Instead, get an address book that allows you to add pages, and write those entries in pen. Yes, its easy enough to keep all this information on your smart phone, but if your phone is the only place you store this vital knowledge, youre always one unfortunate encounter with water or concrete from losing it all.

Record your friends names, addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, anniversaries, and other tidbits like you mean it, because they have more meaning than you realize. Hand-carry it as you move just as you do medical records and external hard drives. Ive watched friends fill moving boxes with journals, scrapbooks, recipe folders, and photo albums, while their address books stayed as thin as the day they bought them. I was the same way.

I can tell you the special ingredient in our lasagna recipe and the dates of my husbands promotions, but I struggle to remember the name of the lady who brought my daughter home after seeing her take a spill on her bike on the way home from school. I thanked the woman with a basket of muffins and a box of Band-Aids. Her house smelled of cookies and cat litter when she opened the door. But what was her name? Id written it downin pencil. Then we moved again, and she and I barely knew each other. So I erased it.

Among the many things our address book once contained were the names of our childrens friends. When moving into one new environment after another, safety is always an issue; so is getting to know a new neighborhood and making new friends. My address book rule is this: My child cannot visit a friends house until Ive met the parents and have the friends name, parents names, address, and phone number in my book. I made time to meet the parents because I didnt want worrisome thoughts in the back of my mind about the people and environments where my kids played. The address book rule had another benefit: My address book was a more reliable tool than my childrens memories when sending birthday party invitations to friends. As my children grew older and challenged the rules now and then, having their friends information recorded and handy was like having a bullhorn, GPS, and social media all rolled into one.