The Admiral's child: One probable reason why McCain flip-flops so much

• (Click on the photo of young Ashley in the pink shirt to see a portrait of my father)

After my father went off to war in 1944, my mom and my sister and I rented a sweet little house on Charles Street in Point Loma, near the US Naval base at Coronado. That place was so nice. We had a cat and a loquat tree and some chickens and my mom hung out with the rest of the Navy wives whose husbands were stationed in the Pacific. I played down by the water, bathed in the glow of my mother's love and didn't have a care in the world. And almost every day, we got a letter from my father.

"How much I miss you!" my father would write. "I think about you three constantly. I can't wait to see you again!" It was like getting letters from Santa Claus every day.

Good grief. I was SO happy.

And then the spit hit the fan. My father came home. And my father tried to run our house like he ran his LST-50 back in Occupied Japan. Plus we moved to Los Angeles and then on to a solid Republican town just south of SF while he hunted for work. Bye bye paradise, hello concentration camp -- or so it seemed to me at the time.

My sister rebelled by becoming an obnoxious brat. She got into so much trouble all the time that she used to always carry a paperback book in the back pocket of her jeans so that the wire coat hanger she got spanked with wouldn't sting so much.

Not me.

I rebelled by becoming wishy-washy. Whatever anyone said to me, I would agree with. I also learned to lie, back-pedal, manipulate, pass the buck, let other people take the fall, hide under the bed, become two-faced, whine a lot and flip-flop.

And I learned how to do all this just from being a lieutenant commander's kid. Imagine what I would have been like if I had been an admiral's child!

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I'm sending this essay from an internet cafe in Shenyang, China, where I'm trying to get everyone to wear Obama buttons. Will be back on September 12. Hopefully.