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marrying a Grinnell marrying a Stephens marrying a Jocelin. These seafaring ancestors of mine sailed down the coast from what’s now Massachusetts to Connecticut and New Jersey—plying trade routes and dodging pirates between the Colonies and the Caribbean—until, with the Revolutionary War, the Jocelin line settled in North Carolina.
    Amaziah Jocelin, also spelled Amasiah Josselyn, among other variants, was a privateer and war hero. As captain of the ten-gun barque The Firebrand , he was credited with the defense of Cape Fear. Following American independence, he became the US Navy Agent, or supply officer, of the Port of Wilmington, where he also established the city’s first chamber of commerce, which he called, funnily enough, the Intelligence-Office. The Jocelins and their descendants—the Moores and Halls and Meylands and Howellsand Stevens and Restons and Stokleys—who comprise the rest of my mother’s side fought in every war in my country’s history, from the Revolution and the Civil War (in which the Carolinian relatives fought for the Confederacy against their New England/Union cousins), to both world wars. Mine is a family that has always answered the call of duty.
    My maternal grandfather, whom I call Pop, is better known as Rear Admiral Edward J. Barrett. At the time of my birth he was deputy chief, aeronautical engineering division, Coast Guard Headquarters, Washington, DC. He’d go on to hold various engineering and operational commands, from Governors Island, New York City, to Key West, Florida, where he was director of the Joint Interagency Task Force East (a multiagency, multinational US Coast Guard–led force dedicated to the interdiction of narcotics trafficking in the Caribbean). I wasn’t aware of how high up the ranks Pop was rising, but I knew that the welcome-to-command ceremonies became more elaborate as time went on, with longer speeches and larger cakes. I remember the souvenir I was given by the artillery guard at one of them: the shell casing of a 40mm round, still warm and smelling like powdered hell, which had just been fired in a salute in Pop’s honor.
    Then there’s my father, Lon, who at the time of my birth was a chief petty officer at the Coast Guard’s Aviation Technical Training Center in Elizabeth City, working as a curriculum designer and electronics instructor. He was often away, leaving my mother at home to raise my sister and me. To give us a sense of responsibility, she gave us chores; to teach us how to read, she labeled all our dresser drawers with their contents— SOCKS, UNDERWEAR . She would load us into our Red Flyer wagon and tow us to the local library, where I immediately made for my favorite section, the one that I called “Big Masheens.” Whenever my mother asked me if I was interested in any specific “Big Masheen,” I was unstoppable: “Dump trucks and steamrollers and forklifts and cranes and—”
    “Is that all, buddy?”
    “Oh,” I’d say, “and also cement mixers and bulldozers and—”
    My mother loved giving me math challenges. At Kmart or Winn-Dixie, she’d have me pick out books and model cars and trucks and buy them for me if I was able to mentally add together their prices. Over the course of my childhood, she kept escalating the difficulty, first having me estimate and round to the nearest dollar, then having me figure out the precise dollar-and-cents amount, and then having me calculate 3 percent of that amount and add it on to the total. I was confused by that last challenge—not by the arithmetic so much as by the reasoning. “Why?”
    “It’s called tax,” my mother explained. “Everything we buy, we have to pay three percent to the government.”
    “What do they do with it?”
    “You like roads, buddy? You like bridges?” she said. “The government uses that money to fix them. They use that money to fill the library with books.”
    Some time later, I was afraid that my budding math skills had failed me, when my