Guest Post by William A. Glass, author of As Good As Can Be
As Good As Can Be’ is a work of fiction, but it draws from my experiences growing up as an army brat. Naturally I left a lot of real-world happenings out. Below are descriptions of two episodes that cut cut out of the book?
Quite a few real-life episodes didn’t get used in the book. One that came close occurred in 1955 when my family traveled to Europe on the SS United States. On the last night of the voyage, my parents were invited to dine with the captain. They left my sister, then 11, in charge of her four younger siblings. We played nicely until eleven or so when the fighting started. After a storm of complaints from neighboring cabins, the deck steward tried but couldn’t stop the mayhem. He called on a ship’s officer who also failed to halt the effusion of blood. The officer reluctantly went up to the first-class dining room for a word with the captain, who then asked Lt. Colonel Glass to restore order in his cabin. My father had been charming the socks off of a Duchess (or so he claimed) and was so irate at being interrupted that he kept us children up for the rest of the night which meant we were all asleep that morning when the ship made a brief stop to let passengers off in Liverpool. Dad was still awake, however, and went ashore. Later he rubbed it in that he saw England and we didn’t. The ship landed in Bremerhaven that evening, and the Glass family spent the next four years in Germany.
Another episode that occurred in real life and almost made it into the book is when I went to visit my older sister after she trapped a boy from college into marrying her. She was living with him, his mother, and her child on a beautiful stretch of the Chesapeake Bay on the Eastern shore of Maryland. The mother-in-law was a cold, blue-blood. The son was a spoiled rich kid who seemed more interested in his toys (airplane, sport-fishing boat, and race car) then the child. The three of them were living in an antebellum plantation house complete with African American servants. In the morning, I went up in the plane with my brother-in-law, who tried mightily to get me to throw up. When that failed, he took to dive-bombing the house to wake my sister up. I had a private chat with my sister before I left. She admitted that things were very tense in the house, and she felt completely isolated. However, anything was better than being a home dependent on our father!
There were other scenes that were left on the cutting room floor in order to keep the length of As Good As Can Be within reason. The above ones were the hardest ones for me to get rid off!
Bill Glass
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