As a starting point for writing, I will tell the stories surrounding the assortment of pictures in my background.
broken wine glasses
I broke one of the Shaw’s wine glasses and decided to make art out of it, keeping three pictures:
the broken wine glass in front of the tree, in front of the red clock, and in front of their wall art of a woman with her finger over her mouth.
In January of 2011, we finally went on the vacation we had been discussing, using some money saved from our deployment, and ultimately just kicking around England for a week.
Troy and I spent a few days in Mansfield with my friend Robert Shaw, whom I met in 2004 in Hong Kong. Robert was the first person to get me drunk when I was seventeen. In 2011 he was working as an intensive care nurse and his wife, Carol, was a medical student.
Troy and I decided that, since we were meeting some people he would likely never see again, he was going to be a doctor. I decided to play along with it; thought it might be fun. I didn’t realize upon going into the trip that we would encounter three medical students, all of whom hung on Troy’s every word as he creatively told the tribulations of being an Army doctor in A’stan. It went well; Troy was mentally taxed by the end of it.
The assumed identities didn’t work as well at the pub crawl in London, as we found that the women we’d met were well practiced in the art of deception themselves.
-AJ
