JUST ACT LIKE EVERYTHING IS PERFECTLY NORMAL: Random Memories of a Military Dependent - Poetry by Sheila Bucy Potter

Publication Date: April 1, 2017
Paperback Chapbook, 40 pages
ISBN 978-1-937968-35-9

At one point during Sheila Bucy Potter's childhood as a “military dependent,” her mother observes “Real people don’t like this.” Working out the logic of this, Potter concludes that she must be invisible, which explains

…why I had no friends,
Why no one ever talked to me,
And why I was never called on in class.

Later, in one of her imagined dialogues with her older brother, she reveals that she knows things about their parents because

I’m little and no one pays any attention
To me. It’s like I’m deaf.

But Potter was not deaf, and if she felt invisible it only served to make her more perfect observer. What she heard and saw and lived through as an “Air Force brat” in the middle of the Cold War fills these poems, and the child she was still inhabits the memories of the woman she grew into through these experiences.

Some are humorous, as in the story of an encounter with a hammerhead shark while fishing – not a man-eater, her father assures the family, prompting her mother to ask

How do you think he feels about
Women and small children?

Many are poignant, particularly recollections from her time in England and especially “The Brownie’s Sang ‘Waltzing Matilda’” where memories of a schooldays skit prompt a meditation on the end of empire. Others reflect the fatalism of the age that left a legacy of cynicism, as she and her brother recall the “Alerts” on their father’s airbase and the rules that ensured “Our mothers would know where to find our bodies.”

Most of all, these poems tell of a child forced into early responsibility:

Service kid, trained in cultural relativism
Before it was even popular,
I was a diplomat I was told, more than once,
A little one, true, but a symbol nonetheless.

They tell of rootlessness, of saying goodbyes to places, and of eventually coming “home” to a place where she felt “More like ET.” No doubt the poet’s fellow military “brats” will read these poems with more than a few smiles and nods of recognition. But it is even more important for the rest of us to read them, as a reminder of the demands we make on the families of those in uniform. They don’t get medals for their service, but we ought to salute them all the same.

After a childhood spent in England and several locations around the United States, Sheila Bucy Potter has lived most of her adult life in Kentucky. She has degrees in English and History from Murray State University; an MA in Medieval Literature from Southern Illinois University; and post-graduate work in English Literature at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of three poetry poetry collections, and her work has appeared in the Journal of Kentucky Studies, Heartland Review, Pegasus, and in Bigger than They Appear: Anthology of Very Short Poems (Accents Publishing, 2011).

Sheila is an Associate Editor and the lead reader for Broadstone Books. She lives in Frankfort, Kentucky.