(The Twelve Ways of Christmas, Part 5: The Way of Watching)
Ken Johnson’s answer had become automatic, though dead-on accurate. Whenever someone found out he had flown helicopters for the army in Viet Nam, they would often ask, “So what’s it like to be a pilot in Viet Nam?”
“Months of boredom,” Ken would say, “followed by 15 minutes of sheer terror.”
Ken’s military training, and his subsequent years as a police detective, had made him an expert at noticing things that others were oblivious to. He would pass a random building in a strange city and mutter, “Somethin’ not right going on in there.” He could spot and usually identify one of 18 different kinds of smiles, or when an interviewee was lying or hiding something. But none of his experience or training, including the gritty lessons learned from a failed marriage and some very tense relationships with two of his adult children, could have prepared him for this.
Somebody took a shortcut to Ken Johnson’s heart. [click to continue…]
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