Read "Dispatch: A Story of My Parents" from The Nebraska Dispatches by Christopher Cartmill:

"I remember when I was a kid thinking that the house we lived in was on top of an enormous hill. At the time we lived in a part of Kansas where there are no hills. That’s what memory does.

While other kids’ houses smelled of beef barley soup, our house glowed with the scent of whiskey and Miss Dior. My father was a handsome self-made man from the southern great plains who had been something of a ne’er-do-well in school—caring more for golf than education. That is, until he married my mother. She was a part-time model and self-made woman of great energy and beauty and education. Her passions were for the theater, for teaching, and for my father.

Robert Samuel Cartmill was a grain merchant. When I explain that my family moved around a lot while I was growing up, most assume I was a military brat. My brother and sister and I grew up following the harvest, literally and figuratively. For a couple of years we lived in hotels as my father worked his way up to becoming an important figure in the industry, to this day remembered and respected by those who worked with and for him.

Everywhere we lived my mother made it a home. She had a magic energy. She made it appear, to everyone around, that we had been living in each place for years. Not only were all boxes unpacked in a matter of hours, but we were embraced by the community and treated like natives within weeks of our arrival. Joyce Ellen Cartmill had glamour, yes, but also a charm that made everyone feel as a truly treasured friend.

By the time I came around, my parents had seemingly lost interest in photographic documentation. There are only a handful of pictures of me in early childhood, and almost all are the same: usually my brother is in a sporty, crisp suit, my sister is in a sweet little dress and shiny shoes, and I am in nothing but my underpants. There’s me standing by a birdfeeder—in my underpants. There’s me on an Easter morning—in my underpants. There’s me at my father’s side near the Christmas tree—in my underpants. There’s me playing what seems to be a game of Cowboys-and-Indians—in my underpants. My mother told me many pictures got lost in one of our moves.

I felt distinctly out of place most of the time. Only two things fascinated me: playing at theater and observing all the interesting people my parents entertained. I would stage plays and monologues for family and guests and sometimes had to be restrained in my enthusiasm for telling stories. I loved making them and hearing them. On one extraordinary evening I sat at the end of our long dining table while a Japanese associate of my father’s told his story of being a kamikaze pilot who never took off. Just as his squadron was getting set to take off, he told us, the end of the war was declared. He was just one interesting person among many.

My father was never keen on my theatrical interest. “Acting is for the flighty and the neurotic,” he once told me. “You’re not that. But you’ll do what you must. Whatever you do, son, you’d better do it to the best of your abilities—nothing by half and no mediocrity. You come from better people than that.” The artists he respected most were writers. I started writing while he was sick, working on what eventually became my first play.

My father didn’t live to see it produced or to know me as a writer. My mother took my hand on the opening night of that play when it premiered in Chicago and said, “It’s nothing by half.” It certainly wasn’t. My first play was a six-hour epic about the French Revolution. My mother never missed a performance or an opening night of it, no matter when or where. She worked very hard to understand my work, not just support it. She became an artistic home for me."