My parents divorced when I was quite young. I don’t remember much about it; some images here and there, flashes of light. Sounds. I remember the beach. We were living in the coastal city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia at the time and I do remember the beach. Before my mother and I left, she pulling me and our suitcases along to escape a shattered marriage and a place she despised, my father took me for a walk along the Red Sea. I imagine we said a gruff yet tender goodbye, that he told me to be a man and take care of my mom and other stuff a dad is supposed to tell a son should such a situation befall them. My mother was furious when he brought me back (we were heading straight to the airport) because I had somehow misplaced my shoes and she was apoplectic about the prospect of me flying back to America barefoot. I gather we ended up finding a pair like 4 sizes too big in which I duckwalked the Atlantic.

Their marriage was likely over long before this day of my sandy toes, but it sounds a telling event: my dad has never been big on such concerns as how others protect their feet. Looking at the timeline of it all, it was probably over even before I was born, and my appearance simply prolonged that last painful spell, but as my mother tells it, she left when she felt ready to leave. Part of her newfound willingness was undoubtedly courtesy my now stepfather, who appears in my memories around this time as a slim and dapper man smelling of cologne, wearing a safari suit and Ray Bans, with hair so perfectly coiffed it would make a newscaster blush. He is fond of the story of my first words to him: “Bruce, you have a very nice car.”

Bruce gave me my first Tintin comic. This was some months later with my mother and I back in the States, living in our house in Sterling, Virginia and he stationed in Beirut, Lebanon after completing his assignment in Jeddah. (My dad now disappears into a haze and is not fully recovered, with the small exception of another beach trip, this time in Thailand, until my early teens.) Bruce and my mother were still courting at this point and it behooved him to curry favor with her precocious child. He says he struggled to find an appropriate tack till one day when he was perusing a newsstand in Beirut and came upon a Tintin comic. He had seen Tintin years previously, in Algiers, at the house of a colleague with a young son and he thought they would be perfect for me. He was right. I couldn’t wait for my mom to get a package from Bruce in hopes there would be a new Adventures of Tintin comic inside for me. At this point I don’t know if you could even get them in the States. I certainly know they weren’t available anywhere in Sterling. Each time one arrived I read it immediately and read it again. Tintin and Snowy and Cuthbert and Captain Haddock became some of my favorite companions.

When a suicide bomber drove a van filled with explosives into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983, 63 people were killed. My stepfather was not among them, though many of his colleagues were. He had left Beirut and flown to Athens to see my mother for a long weekend (I’m not sure where I was at this time, probably staying with a neighbor). That was when they decided to get married, and despite the conclusion of his successful and fortuitous courtship, I continued to get my Tintin comics.