fusion.

My mom was a free lovin' flower child
My dad enlisted in the Vietnam War.
How's that for fusion?
My mother graduated high school in 1971, didn't go to college at first because of all the violence taking place on the university campus. She was afraid. She was afraid to think. She was afraid to speak.
My dad didn't finish high school--he dropped out at age 17--but if he had, the year would have been 1963. He joined the United States Marine Corp, turned 19 in the jungles under siege. This was his choice.

As a child, I often wondered how my parents ever came together. Why a naive idealist and a war-ravaged nationalist would ever consider marital union? For lessons to be learned, I supposed, compliments of one another. One to stir things up and the other to smooth out the wrinkles.
The wrinkles soon revealed themselves as rifts, while it became evident that the stirring was actually a boil.
My parents divorced when I was five.

. . .I began writing my memoir in Jazz class one summer. . .