I came into the memoir class with several expectations. I expected to read memoirs. I expected to learn about writing them. I expected to have my desire for reading memoirs satiated.
What I have learned is that memoirs -- both reading them and writing them -- can be even a better experience than I expected.
I admit it freely; I'm still not sold on the necessity of publishing my work. I have, however, enjoyed writing. For the first time in years, I've actually tried to set aside time to write and to think about my writing. It's so easy to get caught up in the everyday life -- looking after children, teaching, keeping the house clean... okay, scratch the keeping the house clean part. And for gosh sakes, don't even talk about cooking. As my son said to someone who asked him last year, his mother's favorite dish to fix is "take out."
But taking the memoir class has forced me to spend more time in my own writing. I've enjoyed that. I think the part I enjoyed the most -- even if I did face it with great trepidation at first -- was being able to have such a good group of people to share my work with and to hear their words and experiences. It made me remember one of the reasons I loved the original Lowcountry Writing Project so much -- it makes you take the time for your own work and it helps you form those bonds with other writers.
Another positive I've gained from the class is a renewed understanding of my own students' writing processes. I think sometimes if we haven't written essays or memoirs ourselves, we forget just how difficult it can be. I teach some very creative, talented students, and I have even more respect for them now that I've been a "student" recently myself. I adapted our first memoir assignment for my English students; I think I told them that if I had to write a memoir, they had to write one too. I have read some of the most interesting, insightful, heart-rendering pieces that students have written in years because of that memoir assignment. I almost feel that because I was honest with them about what I was writing and the fear I felt in sharing my ideas and my words, they felt more comfortable about opening up with me.
I've read lots of memoirs over the years -- particularly since I started teaching AP Language two years ago with its focus on non-fiction. This class has just whetted my appetite and made me want to read more. I plan to continue writing as well -- maybe not for publication, but certainly for my own family. I've been amazed at how my children have been so interested in what I was writing. It makes me want to write more about them and about their growing-up years, so they'll have it in the future.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
The Bottom of the Sea
“Mama, it looks like the ocean just dried up. It looks like the bottom of the sea!”
The words seem matter of fact now. We’ve said them so often.
“Let’s go to the bottom of the sea.”
“Did you go to the bottom of the sea today?”
“You’ve not going to believe what I found at the bottom of the sea. Six whelk shells!”
“Don’t you dare pick up any more of those cockle shells. I already have a huge box full of them in the garage. Leave some for other people at the bottom of the sea.”
Fifteen years ago, the bottom of the sea seemed like magic – words that made me laugh when I first heard them, words that became part of our family lexicon, words that I treasured from my tiny, running, leaping, blond-haired miracle of a boy. They seemed like poetry at the time. They’re still words I treasure today: the defining description of one of my favorite places on earth.
To some, the bottom of the sea just looked like a big sandbar off the east shore of Ocean Isle Beach in North Carolina. It didn’t come up overnight; it had grown over the years. My parents would call me when I was working and they were playing at the beach, telling me about being able to walk no deeper than their knees far out into the ocean, picking up sand dollars nestled under a light layer of sand, even pulling some up with their toes. They found mutli-colored whelks; they could spot some rolling gently in the surf, but others would be buried in the sand, only the tip of a gray-hued knob peaking through the mixture of water and sand that swirled around their feet.
I never seemed to be there at the right time. It was always high tide, or I was busy sunbathing on the pier behind the house, or visiting when it was too cold to even think about wading in ocean water.
But when Connor came along, things changed. We spent more time at the beach, more time with the family, more time exploring and riding in the boat and combing the sand for shells while Connor dug holes or waded or even sat and built giant masterpieces with shovels and trucks and buckets.
We were riding in the boat, Connor with his bright orange lifejacket on, me with my too-tight blue one, the men bravely facing the sea with no lifejackets at all. It was near low tide, and the ocean had receded enough to show a broad expanse of shimmering sand.
“Look at that.” I can remember gesturing to my dad, who couldn’t hear me over the combined whine of the engine and the harsh breath of the wind blowing.
“Yeah, it’s gotten a lot bigger. It’s the sandbar.”
Other boats were pulled up on the steep ledge. I motioned, and we too pulled up our Whaler. The boat bumped into the drop-off, and Connor hovered on the edge of the boat, deciding whether to jump or be lifted by the adults. He decided on jump. His feet hit the sand with a wet thump; his joy was palpable as he began to run – laughing and pointing at the ridges formed by the water beating ceaselessly on the sand – except at low tide. It did look like the ocean had simply dried up – that the shape of the sand was mimicking the very waves themselves.
Bottom of the sea. I loved it. I still love it today.
That first day at the bottom of the sea began a tradition: as soon as possible, often before we had even unpacked the cars or put away the groceries if it was nearing low tide, we’d be putting the boat in the inland waterway heading for the bottom of the sea. The bump of the boat onto the shore, the impatient tugging at the ropes tied to the anchors to free them from the tangled ropes, the hurried dumping of the anchors – always carefully repositioned by my dad while the rest of us ran or skipped or hopped or walked onto the bottom of the sea.
We searched for shells along the edges of the sandbar, seeking an elusive whelk or finding a perfectly polished olive. If you picked up a shell with a live creature in it, first you screamed, then you laughed, then eventually – often with disappointment – you threw it back into the water. Never keep the live ones, even if there were millions of them still alive in the ocean and it seemed like just that one perfect shell.
We picnicked, spreading our beach towels onto the sand and opening up the red cooler to retrieve juice boxes and Diet Dr. Peppers and sandwiches made just a little bit soggy by their ride in the cooler. If the children were content, sometimes the adults would even close their eyes for just a minute, catching the full effect of the warm sun on our faces.
And we walked, walked for what seemed like miles, following children skipping across the wavelets, stopping to wade through the dozens of tiny shallow pools left behind by the retreating sea. The children – first Connor, next his friend Micah, then my daughter Julie, eventually my niece Mia – would flop into the bigger pools and pretend to swim through them, splashing salt and water and sand into the air around them, their bright lifejackets shimmering in the hot sun. It was a rite of passage when Connor first took his lifejacket off at the bottom of the sea; it meant he had joined the ranks of the grown-ups – or at least the near adults who could be trusted not to walk off the deep edge into the fast-moving channel or wander too far into the waves.
We hunted for stingrays along the deeper edges of the sandbar. It was my husband’s favorite thing to do. He’d spend an hour at least walking slowly, stepping carefully, watching for that flash of white when the stingray would be startled into a velvety movement to avoid his foot as it hovered near it. We saw hundreds, maybe even thousands, of them over the years.
We chased birds, both us and the children and the collective dogs. Because the bottom of the sea was separated from the island by a deep channel of water, it was safe to let the dogs run free – the only place I can think of that our crazed, white Jack Russell could rip and roar without being in danger of being run over or without being a danger to someone else. (He liked to bite, especially me.) First Connor, and then Julie and Mia, would chase the flocks of sea gulls and terns and even pelicans that rested on the outer edges of the bottom of the sea. The sea gulls would fly away first, screeching in mock indignation but forgetting within seconds why they were in the air. The pelicans always were the last to fly, waiting with wounded dignity to the last possible moment when it was apparent that the children were not going to stop their pursuit. The pelicans flapped elegantly away – maybe a hundred yards, maybe 500 yards – maybe so far we didn’t see them land.
We were not always alone. Other people over the years discovered the secret of the bottom of the sea, although in my heart I can’t believe it was as important to them. We gave advice to other shell seekers, we talked to visitors to the island, we asked fishermen how the fish were biting, we stopped to pet sandy-wet labs. One time we even saw an abandoned boat; it looked a lot like the one the Skipper and Gilligan were on when they were lost at sea during a three-hour cruise. My husband wanted to climb on board and check it out; I, the reader of many detective novels, was afraid of a possible bomb or a dead body or a lurking detective waiting to pin a crime on us. We left the boat alone.
Each year, the bottom of the sea grew larger, eventually so large that at low tide it touched the end of the island, allowing people to walk over to it who didn’t even have a boat. It was nearing the end of its time, but we didn’t know it then.
My father called me one afternoon. He and my mother were at the beach; it was winter. “I have bad news,” he said.
It was the bottom of the sea. The federal government had funded the island government’s request to dredge the channel between Ocean Isle and Holden Beach. Too much sand had collected, making it difficult for boats to navigate into the inland waterway. The dredging went on for months. It built up the beachfront along Ocean Isle – but not in the way we’d expected. Front beach had a steep drop off, and shells by the millions were crushed into tiny, sharp rocks that cut your feet and made it difficult to walk in the surf. The one positive by-product were thousands and thousands of olive shells – black olives as my four-year-old daughter called them -- that escaped the grinder and were deposited in the sand.
But the damage was done. The bottom of the sea as we knew it was gone. There’s a nice deep channel now, and sometimes, if you’re there are the right time, there’s even a small sandbar that appears at an extremely low tide. It’s a sandbar that you can pull your boat up to, get out and walk on, even find a few shells.
But it’s not our bottom of the sea. That bottom of the sea is gone with the tide. But to me, it will always be there.
The words seem matter of fact now. We’ve said them so often.
“Let’s go to the bottom of the sea.”
“Did you go to the bottom of the sea today?”
“You’ve not going to believe what I found at the bottom of the sea. Six whelk shells!”
“Don’t you dare pick up any more of those cockle shells. I already have a huge box full of them in the garage. Leave some for other people at the bottom of the sea.”
Fifteen years ago, the bottom of the sea seemed like magic – words that made me laugh when I first heard them, words that became part of our family lexicon, words that I treasured from my tiny, running, leaping, blond-haired miracle of a boy. They seemed like poetry at the time. They’re still words I treasure today: the defining description of one of my favorite places on earth.
To some, the bottom of the sea just looked like a big sandbar off the east shore of Ocean Isle Beach in North Carolina. It didn’t come up overnight; it had grown over the years. My parents would call me when I was working and they were playing at the beach, telling me about being able to walk no deeper than their knees far out into the ocean, picking up sand dollars nestled under a light layer of sand, even pulling some up with their toes. They found mutli-colored whelks; they could spot some rolling gently in the surf, but others would be buried in the sand, only the tip of a gray-hued knob peaking through the mixture of water and sand that swirled around their feet.
I never seemed to be there at the right time. It was always high tide, or I was busy sunbathing on the pier behind the house, or visiting when it was too cold to even think about wading in ocean water.
But when Connor came along, things changed. We spent more time at the beach, more time with the family, more time exploring and riding in the boat and combing the sand for shells while Connor dug holes or waded or even sat and built giant masterpieces with shovels and trucks and buckets.
We were riding in the boat, Connor with his bright orange lifejacket on, me with my too-tight blue one, the men bravely facing the sea with no lifejackets at all. It was near low tide, and the ocean had receded enough to show a broad expanse of shimmering sand.
“Look at that.” I can remember gesturing to my dad, who couldn’t hear me over the combined whine of the engine and the harsh breath of the wind blowing.
“Yeah, it’s gotten a lot bigger. It’s the sandbar.”
Other boats were pulled up on the steep ledge. I motioned, and we too pulled up our Whaler. The boat bumped into the drop-off, and Connor hovered on the edge of the boat, deciding whether to jump or be lifted by the adults. He decided on jump. His feet hit the sand with a wet thump; his joy was palpable as he began to run – laughing and pointing at the ridges formed by the water beating ceaselessly on the sand – except at low tide. It did look like the ocean had simply dried up – that the shape of the sand was mimicking the very waves themselves.
Bottom of the sea. I loved it. I still love it today.
That first day at the bottom of the sea began a tradition: as soon as possible, often before we had even unpacked the cars or put away the groceries if it was nearing low tide, we’d be putting the boat in the inland waterway heading for the bottom of the sea. The bump of the boat onto the shore, the impatient tugging at the ropes tied to the anchors to free them from the tangled ropes, the hurried dumping of the anchors – always carefully repositioned by my dad while the rest of us ran or skipped or hopped or walked onto the bottom of the sea.
We searched for shells along the edges of the sandbar, seeking an elusive whelk or finding a perfectly polished olive. If you picked up a shell with a live creature in it, first you screamed, then you laughed, then eventually – often with disappointment – you threw it back into the water. Never keep the live ones, even if there were millions of them still alive in the ocean and it seemed like just that one perfect shell.
We picnicked, spreading our beach towels onto the sand and opening up the red cooler to retrieve juice boxes and Diet Dr. Peppers and sandwiches made just a little bit soggy by their ride in the cooler. If the children were content, sometimes the adults would even close their eyes for just a minute, catching the full effect of the warm sun on our faces.
And we walked, walked for what seemed like miles, following children skipping across the wavelets, stopping to wade through the dozens of tiny shallow pools left behind by the retreating sea. The children – first Connor, next his friend Micah, then my daughter Julie, eventually my niece Mia – would flop into the bigger pools and pretend to swim through them, splashing salt and water and sand into the air around them, their bright lifejackets shimmering in the hot sun. It was a rite of passage when Connor first took his lifejacket off at the bottom of the sea; it meant he had joined the ranks of the grown-ups – or at least the near adults who could be trusted not to walk off the deep edge into the fast-moving channel or wander too far into the waves.
We hunted for stingrays along the deeper edges of the sandbar. It was my husband’s favorite thing to do. He’d spend an hour at least walking slowly, stepping carefully, watching for that flash of white when the stingray would be startled into a velvety movement to avoid his foot as it hovered near it. We saw hundreds, maybe even thousands, of them over the years.
We chased birds, both us and the children and the collective dogs. Because the bottom of the sea was separated from the island by a deep channel of water, it was safe to let the dogs run free – the only place I can think of that our crazed, white Jack Russell could rip and roar without being in danger of being run over or without being a danger to someone else. (He liked to bite, especially me.) First Connor, and then Julie and Mia, would chase the flocks of sea gulls and terns and even pelicans that rested on the outer edges of the bottom of the sea. The sea gulls would fly away first, screeching in mock indignation but forgetting within seconds why they were in the air. The pelicans always were the last to fly, waiting with wounded dignity to the last possible moment when it was apparent that the children were not going to stop their pursuit. The pelicans flapped elegantly away – maybe a hundred yards, maybe 500 yards – maybe so far we didn’t see them land.
We were not always alone. Other people over the years discovered the secret of the bottom of the sea, although in my heart I can’t believe it was as important to them. We gave advice to other shell seekers, we talked to visitors to the island, we asked fishermen how the fish were biting, we stopped to pet sandy-wet labs. One time we even saw an abandoned boat; it looked a lot like the one the Skipper and Gilligan were on when they were lost at sea during a three-hour cruise. My husband wanted to climb on board and check it out; I, the reader of many detective novels, was afraid of a possible bomb or a dead body or a lurking detective waiting to pin a crime on us. We left the boat alone.
Each year, the bottom of the sea grew larger, eventually so large that at low tide it touched the end of the island, allowing people to walk over to it who didn’t even have a boat. It was nearing the end of its time, but we didn’t know it then.
My father called me one afternoon. He and my mother were at the beach; it was winter. “I have bad news,” he said.
It was the bottom of the sea. The federal government had funded the island government’s request to dredge the channel between Ocean Isle and Holden Beach. Too much sand had collected, making it difficult for boats to navigate into the inland waterway. The dredging went on for months. It built up the beachfront along Ocean Isle – but not in the way we’d expected. Front beach had a steep drop off, and shells by the millions were crushed into tiny, sharp rocks that cut your feet and made it difficult to walk in the surf. The one positive by-product were thousands and thousands of olive shells – black olives as my four-year-old daughter called them -- that escaped the grinder and were deposited in the sand.
But the damage was done. The bottom of the sea as we knew it was gone. There’s a nice deep channel now, and sometimes, if you’re there are the right time, there’s even a small sandbar that appears at an extremely low tide. It’s a sandbar that you can pull your boat up to, get out and walk on, even find a few shells.
But it’s not our bottom of the sea. That bottom of the sea is gone with the tide. But to me, it will always be there.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Book Review
Tamela K. Watkins
Memoir Review
Nov. 7, 2007
My 17-year-old son already thinks I’m an idiot. I talk too much and too loudly, and I’m prone to crying at embarrassing moments, like when he made his senior speech during the band competition on Saturday.
But he does understand the importance of humoring me at times, and he did that beautifully when I called him to my room two weeks ago to read my favorite lines out of the current book I was reading.
“Listen to this,” I cried exuberantly. He smiled. “She’s writing about one of her cats. Listen to what she says: ‘She hardens her gaze when she sees me, then bolts across the snow, an elegantly flung scarf’” (40).
He smiled again, a little less brightly. “That’s good, Mom.”
“Yeah, but wait. Listen to this one. Listen to how she describes wild turkeys. ‘I am always surprised to see them, sensing before they appear at the edge of the woods their great dark shapes – bundles of rags on stilts’” (59).
“Okay, mom. Is that all?”
See, he humors me. Sometimes he thinks I’m funny; sometimes he thinks I’m ridiculous; sometimes he thinks I’m sweet. It’s exactly the same way I felt about The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year by Louise Erdrich. The memoir is one of those books that you can’t decide if you love or hate. Depending on the mood you’re in when you pick it up, you may be totally enchanted by Erdrich’s descriptions of motherhood, particularly focusing on the first months being at home with a new baby. Or, if you’re in a different mood, you may despise the memoir, finding some of the more mundane subjects she covers so tedious you want to throw it under the bed and pick up the new Sandra Brown “trashy” novel instead.
Perhaps that’s the point of the whole memoir Erdrich writes: being a new mother has tremendous joy and spirit mixed with the everyday sameness that comes with being sleep-deprived and frustrated at another day not being planned by yourself, but instead dictated by someone else’s tiniest, loudest needs.
There’s a strange poignancy to the memoir because of the circumstances that surround the author. She writes often of her husband Michael and their three daughters; she even gives recipes of different meals Michael cooks for her and the family. She also makes a reference to their three older children, all adopted and suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome. As I was reading the first part of the memoir, something kept nagging at my memory; I knew I’d read Erdrich’s The Master Butchers Singing Club – which I loved – but her husband’s name, Michael Dorris, sounded familiar. Finally I googled their names – now I know why I remembered him. Years before – about five years or so after the writing of this book – allegations of abuse by Dorris had been made by Erdich’s daughters and by the three older children; Dorris committed suicide before the case went to trial. It adds a bitter element to the whole story; her complete love and respect for her husband that she shows in the book seems so out of place when you know the “ending” of the story. It made me uncomfortable.
Perhaps that’s one of the drawbacks of memoirs: do future events make what was written at the moment unimportant? Less beautiful? Less meaningful? If I know that James Frey has now admitted that much of his “memoir” A Million Little Pieces was “embellished,” does it make it worthless? If I know that the family that August Bourroughs writes about in Running with Scissors says much of what he wrote is made up -- even going so far as to sue him in civil court -- does that mean I can’t enjoy the book?
Those are difficult questions to answer. Maybe I would have liked The Blue Jay’s Dance more if I had not known the family history. Maybe not, since I often felt as if I were reading something written for a creative writing class rather than a heart-felt memoir. It was too fluffy – too much of “nature is beautiful” for my taste. The most touching moments, however, are when she talks about her children – and her cats! I love the cats. They felt real, with true behaviors and emotional reactions to events.
I’m not sure I would recommend The Blue Jay’s Dance to someone else; instead, I would be glad to show them the parts I highlighted. That would give them the essence – the rest is just fluff.
Memoir Review
Nov. 7, 2007
My 17-year-old son already thinks I’m an idiot. I talk too much and too loudly, and I’m prone to crying at embarrassing moments, like when he made his senior speech during the band competition on Saturday.
But he does understand the importance of humoring me at times, and he did that beautifully when I called him to my room two weeks ago to read my favorite lines out of the current book I was reading.
“Listen to this,” I cried exuberantly. He smiled. “She’s writing about one of her cats. Listen to what she says: ‘She hardens her gaze when she sees me, then bolts across the snow, an elegantly flung scarf’” (40).
He smiled again, a little less brightly. “That’s good, Mom.”
“Yeah, but wait. Listen to this one. Listen to how she describes wild turkeys. ‘I am always surprised to see them, sensing before they appear at the edge of the woods their great dark shapes – bundles of rags on stilts’” (59).
“Okay, mom. Is that all?”
See, he humors me. Sometimes he thinks I’m funny; sometimes he thinks I’m ridiculous; sometimes he thinks I’m sweet. It’s exactly the same way I felt about The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year by Louise Erdrich. The memoir is one of those books that you can’t decide if you love or hate. Depending on the mood you’re in when you pick it up, you may be totally enchanted by Erdrich’s descriptions of motherhood, particularly focusing on the first months being at home with a new baby. Or, if you’re in a different mood, you may despise the memoir, finding some of the more mundane subjects she covers so tedious you want to throw it under the bed and pick up the new Sandra Brown “trashy” novel instead.
Perhaps that’s the point of the whole memoir Erdrich writes: being a new mother has tremendous joy and spirit mixed with the everyday sameness that comes with being sleep-deprived and frustrated at another day not being planned by yourself, but instead dictated by someone else’s tiniest, loudest needs.
There’s a strange poignancy to the memoir because of the circumstances that surround the author. She writes often of her husband Michael and their three daughters; she even gives recipes of different meals Michael cooks for her and the family. She also makes a reference to their three older children, all adopted and suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome. As I was reading the first part of the memoir, something kept nagging at my memory; I knew I’d read Erdrich’s The Master Butchers Singing Club – which I loved – but her husband’s name, Michael Dorris, sounded familiar. Finally I googled their names – now I know why I remembered him. Years before – about five years or so after the writing of this book – allegations of abuse by Dorris had been made by Erdich’s daughters and by the three older children; Dorris committed suicide before the case went to trial. It adds a bitter element to the whole story; her complete love and respect for her husband that she shows in the book seems so out of place when you know the “ending” of the story. It made me uncomfortable.
Perhaps that’s one of the drawbacks of memoirs: do future events make what was written at the moment unimportant? Less beautiful? Less meaningful? If I know that James Frey has now admitted that much of his “memoir” A Million Little Pieces was “embellished,” does it make it worthless? If I know that the family that August Bourroughs writes about in Running with Scissors says much of what he wrote is made up -- even going so far as to sue him in civil court -- does that mean I can’t enjoy the book?
Those are difficult questions to answer. Maybe I would have liked The Blue Jay’s Dance more if I had not known the family history. Maybe not, since I often felt as if I were reading something written for a creative writing class rather than a heart-felt memoir. It was too fluffy – too much of “nature is beautiful” for my taste. The most touching moments, however, are when she talks about her children – and her cats! I love the cats. They felt real, with true behaviors and emotional reactions to events.
I’m not sure I would recommend The Blue Jay’s Dance to someone else; instead, I would be glad to show them the parts I highlighted. That would give them the essence – the rest is just fluff.
Monday, November 5, 2007
My Papa's Chair -- Final
PaPa’s brown naughahyde chair sits by the side window. A green glass ashtray rests on the floor where the footstool juts out when he’s sitting. A pipe – the mouthpiece chewed -- is laid carefully in the center of it. Three cans of Prince Albert are lined up in the windowsill, the rectangular four-inch high tin canisters arranged in order of how full of tobacco they are. We grandchildren prank-called people on the party line – when Rodie Huggins up the road wasn’t gabbing on it – to ask if they had Prince Albert in a can. “You better let him out then,” the cousin charged with making the call would yell and hang up the phone, and we’d all convulse in laughter, the boys punching each other in the arm..
My PaPa was never sitting in the chair when we called. We would never have dared call if he had been. It wasn’t that we were afraid of him. Just the opposite. Instead, it was the idea of not disturbing his quiet dignity. Of not showing disrespect to his neighbors he’d lived around for 60 years. We didn’t want to disappoint him, somehow.
I remember being 16 and staying alone for an extra week with my grandparents – a special treat that didn’t happen often enough. It was summer in Alabama, hot, sticky, 95 degrees. My grandfather was 79 years old, and he was hoeing in the garden – an acre filled with butterbeans and corn and tomatoes – that he always planted 100 feet from the house. He had on his work overhauls, the faded ones, with a yellow plaid shirt with sleeves that came down to his elbows. His arms were tanned and ropy with muscle, even though he was an old man. When the sleeve happened to move up, a glimpse of pale white skin with tiny blue veins in it would show – sun never saw that part of his arm. He pushed up his straw hat and wiped his sweat-beaded brow with his nicely pressed white handkerchief; then he folded it back just so along the creases and stuffed it back in his chest pocket. His hats, his overhauls, his boots were all a part of who he was. He had his pair of work overhauls, his neatly starched, dark-blue going-to-town overhauls, and his dark church suit. He had three hats: the straw work one with the sweat-stained crown, a newer, cleaner straw version he wore to town, and his taupe fedora he religiously wore to church. He had two pairs of boots: the mud-caked work boots with tired creases in the ankles and the brand-spanking new going-to-town boots. The neatly polished black shoes with the black laces were for going to church. Except for what he was wearing, his clothes were lined up neatly in the closet he shared with my grandmother, the closet he built himself when he built the five-room house they shared for so many years.
PaPa always seemed to have a blue truck – except for the seafoam green one he bought one time. It was the ‘60s, after all, and you were supposed to live dangerously. Living dangerously might not have been his style, but saving money was. My grandparents’ farmhouse sat in a plateau at the bottom of one big hill and the beginning of another one that led down to a shallow creek. PaPa went to town once or twice a week, although when some of the grandchildren were visiting he took more trips to the triangular-shaped store where the roads forked at Needmore. He bought us bottled orange drinks or “pops” for the cousins from Ohio. But it was the journey home that we all anticipated. We crested the top of that last hill and started toward the house. The outline of the roof peeked through the trees. PaPa – without saying a word -- snapped the transmission smoothly into neutral, took his foot off the brake, and coasted – at an ever-increasing speed -- down the hill. The windows were down, and the wind blew harder and our hair whipped faster around our faces. With a slight right turn, we sailed into the pebble-strewn driveway, right up to the vine-covered front porch, before he jammed his foot on the brake. It was the thrill of a lifetime.
He milked the cow every morning for the first 10 years of my life. He got up at dawn, dressed in his work overhauls, and headed across the two-lane road. Two green chicken houses – the industrial-sized ones – surrounded the house, one behind the double clothesline in the back and one on top of the slight incline across the road, in the middle of one of the cow pastures. The milk cow stayed to the left of the chicken house, the one that housed the blue tractor that if we were lucky we got to ride on with PaPa. He’d go to the gate and call the cow with a little whistle. It was brown, and it had horns, and it was tame. She’d trot to the gate, walk serenely out and head almost unprompted to the barn across the road, ready to be milked. PaPa would come in the house with a full tin bucket,, steam rising slightly from the warm milk. I would never drink it.
When I was 11, we came to visit. The cow was gone. I don’t know what happened to it. The milk in the refrigerator was pasteurized, in a carton, bought at the store. Things change.
Papa loved to sit on the front porch, most often resting in a straight-backed kitchen chair, maybe leaning it against the wall, pipe in hand. If the grandchildren stopped, even for a moment, he talked. He loved to talk. He told stories about serving in the army during World War I. I think about it sometimes, the stories I wished I had paid more attention to and that I had written down when I had the chance. He was 19 when he went to war, a boy fresh off the farm from Alabama. I remember him telling about being on a ship going to France and a German U-boat firing torpedoes at their ship. Other boys didn’t know what the torpedoes were, yelling about the logs heading for them. I’ve often wondered if he was one of those boys.
My cousin Mike says he told him stories about the girls, the French girls. I’ve seen the postcards he bought. But he never told me those stories. Instead, he told me about someone in his camp who bought a monkey, a monkey that got into lots of trouble and was one of his fondest memories. It was only after PaPa started telling me stories that my mother realized her father hadn’t been a cook in the army, but an orderly. It suddenly made sense to her why he was so helpless in the kitchen.
My brother and Wayne were the two youngest grandchildren. When our families visited at the same time, PaPa took them to the “crick” at the bottom of the second hill. It ran its course through the middle of the “bottom pasture”; sometimes cows were there, sometimes not. The creek was clear some of the time, although it had an orangey tint to the water from the clay banks that bordered it. PaPa, however, did not go fishing when the water was clear. “Fish can see you if there’s no mud stirring,” he told the boys. They nodded in agreement. Of course. But he took them for treks through the woods bordering the pastures. They climbed the hills, hopping from one fallen log to another or sighting good places to dig worms. If they got thirsty, PaPa stripped leaves off of the bright green “cowcumber” trees and fashioned cups from them – cups that held cold water from the spring that bubbled under the bluff. In the winter, the boys and PaPa went squirrel hunting. PaPa toted his .22 rifle and the boys triedto walk as quietly as they could, their hands jammed inside the pockets of their corduroy jackets. Even when he was 80, PaPa could sight a squirrel 100 feet away and knock it out of the tree with one shot. Andy and Wayne smiled. Of course.
He wasn’t always a grandfather. At one time he was a 25-year-old farmer marrying a blue-eyed girl with long dark hair on a February day when it snowed. Both families waited; his about-to-be mother-in-law baked a chocolate cake, a novelty in northern Alabama when a customer had to mail order the cocoa from a New York catalogue. The preacher, who promised to be there come rain or shine, didn’t show up in the snow. So the about-to-be groom rode on a horse to a nearby town to fetch a preacher. He found one.
Then he was a father of seven children, a father who plowed fields with two mules during the day and laughed when his second youngest daughter – my mother – clucked her tongue and imitated him -- “Git on up Belle” -- at the mule when she was five years old. He smoked his pipe and read the Bible aloud while my mother sat in his lap. He stayed up in the middle of the night when my mother had an earache and blew warm smoke into her ear when she cried with pain. It was magic because the pain always went away.
The year my grandparents married, my PaPa carved a rolling pin for my grandmother out of a single block of wood. It was a light golden color, made out of pine, slightly uneven on one side where my grandfather pressed too hard on the planer when he was smoothing the wood. But it worked. It helped make thousands and thousands of cathead biscuits. It helped make hundreds of blackberry pies, made from berries picked by my grandfather and sometimes my grandmother from the prickly, scratchy bushes growing wild in the ditch across the road from the house, berries that occasionally came at the cost of chiggers or scratched arms. It helped shape dumplings for the chicken stew and pot-pie crusts, hundreds of them consumed at a metal kitchen table loaded with bowls of “country” food that always held a bowl of English peas – my grandfather’s favorite – the bright green kind from the frozen food section at the Piggly Wiggly in town. That rolling pin was an object of fascination for children who would rub their hands on the sides of it and for grown-up grandchildren who would good-naturedly jest about who would get it one day. It became a symbol, somehow, more than just a rolling pin.
My PaPa sat in his brown naugahyde chair, smoked his pipe, watched Wheel of Fortune religiously at 7 o’clock every weekday evening, and went to bed at nine every night, even when company visited and the house was full of people. When a car rattled by on the road, PaPa pulled back the white sheer curtain to see who it was. More likely than not, he recognized the car, knew who it was.
After my grandfather died, the family gathered – all of us, the ones from South Carolina and Ohio and Tennessee along with the Alabama ones. When my brother and I pulled into the driveway, only one other car sat there. No one pulled back the curtain the look.
It was one of the saddest, loneliest moments of my life.
My PaPa was never sitting in the chair when we called. We would never have dared call if he had been. It wasn’t that we were afraid of him. Just the opposite. Instead, it was the idea of not disturbing his quiet dignity. Of not showing disrespect to his neighbors he’d lived around for 60 years. We didn’t want to disappoint him, somehow.
I remember being 16 and staying alone for an extra week with my grandparents – a special treat that didn’t happen often enough. It was summer in Alabama, hot, sticky, 95 degrees. My grandfather was 79 years old, and he was hoeing in the garden – an acre filled with butterbeans and corn and tomatoes – that he always planted 100 feet from the house. He had on his work overhauls, the faded ones, with a yellow plaid shirt with sleeves that came down to his elbows. His arms were tanned and ropy with muscle, even though he was an old man. When the sleeve happened to move up, a glimpse of pale white skin with tiny blue veins in it would show – sun never saw that part of his arm. He pushed up his straw hat and wiped his sweat-beaded brow with his nicely pressed white handkerchief; then he folded it back just so along the creases and stuffed it back in his chest pocket. His hats, his overhauls, his boots were all a part of who he was. He had his pair of work overhauls, his neatly starched, dark-blue going-to-town overhauls, and his dark church suit. He had three hats: the straw work one with the sweat-stained crown, a newer, cleaner straw version he wore to town, and his taupe fedora he religiously wore to church. He had two pairs of boots: the mud-caked work boots with tired creases in the ankles and the brand-spanking new going-to-town boots. The neatly polished black shoes with the black laces were for going to church. Except for what he was wearing, his clothes were lined up neatly in the closet he shared with my grandmother, the closet he built himself when he built the five-room house they shared for so many years.
PaPa always seemed to have a blue truck – except for the seafoam green one he bought one time. It was the ‘60s, after all, and you were supposed to live dangerously. Living dangerously might not have been his style, but saving money was. My grandparents’ farmhouse sat in a plateau at the bottom of one big hill and the beginning of another one that led down to a shallow creek. PaPa went to town once or twice a week, although when some of the grandchildren were visiting he took more trips to the triangular-shaped store where the roads forked at Needmore. He bought us bottled orange drinks or “pops” for the cousins from Ohio. But it was the journey home that we all anticipated. We crested the top of that last hill and started toward the house. The outline of the roof peeked through the trees. PaPa – without saying a word -- snapped the transmission smoothly into neutral, took his foot off the brake, and coasted – at an ever-increasing speed -- down the hill. The windows were down, and the wind blew harder and our hair whipped faster around our faces. With a slight right turn, we sailed into the pebble-strewn driveway, right up to the vine-covered front porch, before he jammed his foot on the brake. It was the thrill of a lifetime.
He milked the cow every morning for the first 10 years of my life. He got up at dawn, dressed in his work overhauls, and headed across the two-lane road. Two green chicken houses – the industrial-sized ones – surrounded the house, one behind the double clothesline in the back and one on top of the slight incline across the road, in the middle of one of the cow pastures. The milk cow stayed to the left of the chicken house, the one that housed the blue tractor that if we were lucky we got to ride on with PaPa. He’d go to the gate and call the cow with a little whistle. It was brown, and it had horns, and it was tame. She’d trot to the gate, walk serenely out and head almost unprompted to the barn across the road, ready to be milked. PaPa would come in the house with a full tin bucket,, steam rising slightly from the warm milk. I would never drink it.
When I was 11, we came to visit. The cow was gone. I don’t know what happened to it. The milk in the refrigerator was pasteurized, in a carton, bought at the store. Things change.
Papa loved to sit on the front porch, most often resting in a straight-backed kitchen chair, maybe leaning it against the wall, pipe in hand. If the grandchildren stopped, even for a moment, he talked. He loved to talk. He told stories about serving in the army during World War I. I think about it sometimes, the stories I wished I had paid more attention to and that I had written down when I had the chance. He was 19 when he went to war, a boy fresh off the farm from Alabama. I remember him telling about being on a ship going to France and a German U-boat firing torpedoes at their ship. Other boys didn’t know what the torpedoes were, yelling about the logs heading for them. I’ve often wondered if he was one of those boys.
My cousin Mike says he told him stories about the girls, the French girls. I’ve seen the postcards he bought. But he never told me those stories. Instead, he told me about someone in his camp who bought a monkey, a monkey that got into lots of trouble and was one of his fondest memories. It was only after PaPa started telling me stories that my mother realized her father hadn’t been a cook in the army, but an orderly. It suddenly made sense to her why he was so helpless in the kitchen.
My brother and Wayne were the two youngest grandchildren. When our families visited at the same time, PaPa took them to the “crick” at the bottom of the second hill. It ran its course through the middle of the “bottom pasture”; sometimes cows were there, sometimes not. The creek was clear some of the time, although it had an orangey tint to the water from the clay banks that bordered it. PaPa, however, did not go fishing when the water was clear. “Fish can see you if there’s no mud stirring,” he told the boys. They nodded in agreement. Of course. But he took them for treks through the woods bordering the pastures. They climbed the hills, hopping from one fallen log to another or sighting good places to dig worms. If they got thirsty, PaPa stripped leaves off of the bright green “cowcumber” trees and fashioned cups from them – cups that held cold water from the spring that bubbled under the bluff. In the winter, the boys and PaPa went squirrel hunting. PaPa toted his .22 rifle and the boys triedto walk as quietly as they could, their hands jammed inside the pockets of their corduroy jackets. Even when he was 80, PaPa could sight a squirrel 100 feet away and knock it out of the tree with one shot. Andy and Wayne smiled. Of course.
He wasn’t always a grandfather. At one time he was a 25-year-old farmer marrying a blue-eyed girl with long dark hair on a February day when it snowed. Both families waited; his about-to-be mother-in-law baked a chocolate cake, a novelty in northern Alabama when a customer had to mail order the cocoa from a New York catalogue. The preacher, who promised to be there come rain or shine, didn’t show up in the snow. So the about-to-be groom rode on a horse to a nearby town to fetch a preacher. He found one.
Then he was a father of seven children, a father who plowed fields with two mules during the day and laughed when his second youngest daughter – my mother – clucked her tongue and imitated him -- “Git on up Belle” -- at the mule when she was five years old. He smoked his pipe and read the Bible aloud while my mother sat in his lap. He stayed up in the middle of the night when my mother had an earache and blew warm smoke into her ear when she cried with pain. It was magic because the pain always went away.
The year my grandparents married, my PaPa carved a rolling pin for my grandmother out of a single block of wood. It was a light golden color, made out of pine, slightly uneven on one side where my grandfather pressed too hard on the planer when he was smoothing the wood. But it worked. It helped make thousands and thousands of cathead biscuits. It helped make hundreds of blackberry pies, made from berries picked by my grandfather and sometimes my grandmother from the prickly, scratchy bushes growing wild in the ditch across the road from the house, berries that occasionally came at the cost of chiggers or scratched arms. It helped shape dumplings for the chicken stew and pot-pie crusts, hundreds of them consumed at a metal kitchen table loaded with bowls of “country” food that always held a bowl of English peas – my grandfather’s favorite – the bright green kind from the frozen food section at the Piggly Wiggly in town. That rolling pin was an object of fascination for children who would rub their hands on the sides of it and for grown-up grandchildren who would good-naturedly jest about who would get it one day. It became a symbol, somehow, more than just a rolling pin.
My PaPa sat in his brown naugahyde chair, smoked his pipe, watched Wheel of Fortune religiously at 7 o’clock every weekday evening, and went to bed at nine every night, even when company visited and the house was full of people. When a car rattled by on the road, PaPa pulled back the white sheer curtain to see who it was. More likely than not, he recognized the car, knew who it was.
After my grandfather died, the family gathered – all of us, the ones from South Carolina and Ohio and Tennessee along with the Alabama ones. When my brother and I pulled into the driveway, only one other car sat there. No one pulled back the curtain the look.
It was one of the saddest, loneliest moments of my life.
Bright Pink -- Final
“Don’t look, don’t look,” I chant to myself. “Don’t look suspicious. No sudden moves. Oh my God, those men have submachine guns.”
It is dark when we get off the plane, a sticky heat radiating from the tarmac even though it is 11 o’clock at night in late November. Lights resembling garage floodlights give an eerie glow to the soldiers, standing with submachine guns cocked nonchalantly on hips.
I shake my head.
Don’t be ridiculous. I’m legally in Ecuador. It is 1998. I have a passport. I have American money. No reason to be frightened.
We hustle with the rest of the departing passengers, almost running in the rush to get to customs first. Too late; we’re in a long line. It seems like a dream. People stand close together in two long lines – another plane has landed at the same time as ours. It’s eerily quiet; no one talks loudly, no one pushes. The guards with the guns are inside the airport terminal, too.
A man with bright blue eyes with crinkles in the corners walks by our line twice. He’s staring. He approaches. “Are you a teacher? Here to adopt a baby?” We both nod in shock. “I’m George. You know. From Florida. We’ve talked to you on the phone. We’re here to adopt our son.”
Relief. Someone we know – or at least kind of know. He speaks Spanish. He’s been here before – lots of times with family and with friends he’s made over the years. He knows what to do. We wave wildly to his wife, standing in the second customs line 10 feet away from us. She grins, waving just as enthusiastically back. I wonder how they knew who we were in this crowd of people, most of us obviously foreigners. Maybe the red Elmo I have clutched to my chest is a clue.
The line seems to move faster after we meet George. We join George and Michelle after customs, searching in the quiet for our bags on a long table in the middle of a deserted concourse.
This is nothing like an American airport. No people scurrying. No intercom calling flight numbers. No carts with piercing beeps carrying the old or sick back and forth between flights.
We grab our bags, making our way out of the double doors. Then the noise hits. The steamy heat again, and this time soldiers standing casually at the doors while what seems like hordes of people press against each other, waving arms, calling names. Taxi drivers yell frantically trying to get the attention of just one person to snag a fare. George and Michelle’s friend Roberto is waiting to drive them to the orphanage; they want us to ride with them. But we feel guilty, unsure of what to do. We know the orphanage is sending someone to pick us up. We don’t want to leave him without explanation after the trouble he will have gone to. Then we see one lone white sign with WATKINS printed carefully on it. The man holding it is in jeans, a blue and gray striped shirt. Somehow he seems to know we’re the right ones when he sees us. He gestures; we follow.
As we go to his taxi, three or four people trail after us, trying to carry our suitcases to the car. A thin boy – maybe 10 years old -- walks closely behind me, but I clutch my fannypack -- turned backwards to guard my wallet from pickpockets -- closer to my body. He calls “por favor, por favor” over and over. I look, even though adoption agency employees have told us not to. One eye pleads sadly; one eye stares off into space at a 90-degree angle. I am so shocked that I immediately give him the two dollars I have tucked in my side pocket. An older man follows him; I don’t know what he’s saying, but his voice sounds like he’s scolding. In my mind, he’s saying, “Ask for more, ask for more.” The taxi driver is rough with the boy, forcing him away as he opens the door to the car. We get into the backseat, but the boy pecks persistently on the window – “por favor, por favor.” I turn my head.
The trip to the orphanage is breathtakingly fast – and not because it’s close by the airport. Lights flash by. I see there are no lines on the paved roads except for the center one that separates the onrushing cars. I hold my husband’s hand.
When we pull up outside of the gates, the driver honks the horn. Michelle and George are in a car behind us. The gates swing open into the white-washed, cement compound walls. The next few minutes are a blur, as a man holding a sawed-off shotgun opens our car door. I’ve never seen a sawed-off shotgun before, but there is no doubt in my mind exactly what it is. I am shocked. One more thing that surprises, startles, frightens, confounds me.
We are bundled into our waiting apartment by two young women, both speaking Spanish rapidly. George is talking to them; I find my high school and college Spanish years have truly been wasted. We look around the sparsely-furnished apartment – tiny kitchen with a sink and a miniature fridge, but no stove. Two striped sofas with a long wooden table in the living area. Three doors leading to separate bedrooms. We don’t know until an hour later that another couple and their two children – from Norway – are asleep in the third bedroom. Their journey here started two weeks earlier. They will leave for home in two days.
This part of our journey, however, is just beginning. The journey for our daughter, a sister for Connor, a granddaughter for our parents, the journey that has lasted our entire married lives -- and at times what seemed like a lifetime -- although it’s only really been five months since it started. Julie Maria Nicole. I want to see her now. Others who have traveled here before us have told us that the babies are brought right to their new mothers.
This time, things are different. We are late, after midnight. The ladies shake their heads that it’s not possible to see the children. The babies are asleep, they pantomine. See them in the morning. It will be better. Michelle is my alter-ego at this moment; we are determined. We will not wait until morning. We just want to look. We have traveled far.
They finally consent after much gesturing on our part and rapid speech by George, and we move across the quiet, well-groomed courtyard. We don’t know it then, but one of the younger men working in the orphanage sits on the tiny lawn and cuts the grass with a pair of scissors during the afternoons. There is a round fountain that serves as a tiny swimming pool in the middle, but only the visiting parents and their new children can use it. The other children will watch carefully to see how to act when their parents arrive.
We cross rapidly into the main building. The outer room is painted a vivid green and orange – garish colors that would normally clash but somehow seem fitting in this exotic setting. Michelle and George are led down the hall to the big kids’ bedroom, where Cristian sleeps in a big boy bed. We go into the baby nursery.
She is the closest to the door, the sheet on her bed a bright blue and our family pictures – Jeff and I, Connor, the dog Annie, even our swingset in the backyard -- hanging in their plastic sleeves from the white, flaking bar around the top of the crib. She has staked out her position as “head baby,” I think to myself. She’s not really a baby, she’s 19 months old, but she’s tiny as she lays on her tummy, her butt raised up in the air with her legs curled under her. She looks so much smaller than her pictures; her personality is quiet now instead of the commanding, mischievous persona we have seen in the photographs – the one where she pretends to talk on a plastic phone to her “mama,” the one where she carefully guards the books we’ve sent her from other children crowding round, the one where she stands proudly holding out her arms as if she’s waiting for us to pick her up. Her hair curls in tiny ringlets around her face, wet with perspiration even though the air conditioner is running. She has on a pink sleeper, clean but well-worn with tiny little balls of cloth covering it. I put my hand softly on her back. I have to touch her.
She has on pink. She is our daughter. She is a sister for Connor. Even so far away, we are finally home.
It is dark when we get off the plane, a sticky heat radiating from the tarmac even though it is 11 o’clock at night in late November. Lights resembling garage floodlights give an eerie glow to the soldiers, standing with submachine guns cocked nonchalantly on hips.
I shake my head.
Don’t be ridiculous. I’m legally in Ecuador. It is 1998. I have a passport. I have American money. No reason to be frightened.
We hustle with the rest of the departing passengers, almost running in the rush to get to customs first. Too late; we’re in a long line. It seems like a dream. People stand close together in two long lines – another plane has landed at the same time as ours. It’s eerily quiet; no one talks loudly, no one pushes. The guards with the guns are inside the airport terminal, too.
A man with bright blue eyes with crinkles in the corners walks by our line twice. He’s staring. He approaches. “Are you a teacher? Here to adopt a baby?” We both nod in shock. “I’m George. You know. From Florida. We’ve talked to you on the phone. We’re here to adopt our son.”
Relief. Someone we know – or at least kind of know. He speaks Spanish. He’s been here before – lots of times with family and with friends he’s made over the years. He knows what to do. We wave wildly to his wife, standing in the second customs line 10 feet away from us. She grins, waving just as enthusiastically back. I wonder how they knew who we were in this crowd of people, most of us obviously foreigners. Maybe the red Elmo I have clutched to my chest is a clue.
The line seems to move faster after we meet George. We join George and Michelle after customs, searching in the quiet for our bags on a long table in the middle of a deserted concourse.
This is nothing like an American airport. No people scurrying. No intercom calling flight numbers. No carts with piercing beeps carrying the old or sick back and forth between flights.
We grab our bags, making our way out of the double doors. Then the noise hits. The steamy heat again, and this time soldiers standing casually at the doors while what seems like hordes of people press against each other, waving arms, calling names. Taxi drivers yell frantically trying to get the attention of just one person to snag a fare. George and Michelle’s friend Roberto is waiting to drive them to the orphanage; they want us to ride with them. But we feel guilty, unsure of what to do. We know the orphanage is sending someone to pick us up. We don’t want to leave him without explanation after the trouble he will have gone to. Then we see one lone white sign with WATKINS printed carefully on it. The man holding it is in jeans, a blue and gray striped shirt. Somehow he seems to know we’re the right ones when he sees us. He gestures; we follow.
As we go to his taxi, three or four people trail after us, trying to carry our suitcases to the car. A thin boy – maybe 10 years old -- walks closely behind me, but I clutch my fannypack -- turned backwards to guard my wallet from pickpockets -- closer to my body. He calls “por favor, por favor” over and over. I look, even though adoption agency employees have told us not to. One eye pleads sadly; one eye stares off into space at a 90-degree angle. I am so shocked that I immediately give him the two dollars I have tucked in my side pocket. An older man follows him; I don’t know what he’s saying, but his voice sounds like he’s scolding. In my mind, he’s saying, “Ask for more, ask for more.” The taxi driver is rough with the boy, forcing him away as he opens the door to the car. We get into the backseat, but the boy pecks persistently on the window – “por favor, por favor.” I turn my head.
The trip to the orphanage is breathtakingly fast – and not because it’s close by the airport. Lights flash by. I see there are no lines on the paved roads except for the center one that separates the onrushing cars. I hold my husband’s hand.
When we pull up outside of the gates, the driver honks the horn. Michelle and George are in a car behind us. The gates swing open into the white-washed, cement compound walls. The next few minutes are a blur, as a man holding a sawed-off shotgun opens our car door. I’ve never seen a sawed-off shotgun before, but there is no doubt in my mind exactly what it is. I am shocked. One more thing that surprises, startles, frightens, confounds me.
We are bundled into our waiting apartment by two young women, both speaking Spanish rapidly. George is talking to them; I find my high school and college Spanish years have truly been wasted. We look around the sparsely-furnished apartment – tiny kitchen with a sink and a miniature fridge, but no stove. Two striped sofas with a long wooden table in the living area. Three doors leading to separate bedrooms. We don’t know until an hour later that another couple and their two children – from Norway – are asleep in the third bedroom. Their journey here started two weeks earlier. They will leave for home in two days.
This part of our journey, however, is just beginning. The journey for our daughter, a sister for Connor, a granddaughter for our parents, the journey that has lasted our entire married lives -- and at times what seemed like a lifetime -- although it’s only really been five months since it started. Julie Maria Nicole. I want to see her now. Others who have traveled here before us have told us that the babies are brought right to their new mothers.
This time, things are different. We are late, after midnight. The ladies shake their heads that it’s not possible to see the children. The babies are asleep, they pantomine. See them in the morning. It will be better. Michelle is my alter-ego at this moment; we are determined. We will not wait until morning. We just want to look. We have traveled far.
They finally consent after much gesturing on our part and rapid speech by George, and we move across the quiet, well-groomed courtyard. We don’t know it then, but one of the younger men working in the orphanage sits on the tiny lawn and cuts the grass with a pair of scissors during the afternoons. There is a round fountain that serves as a tiny swimming pool in the middle, but only the visiting parents and their new children can use it. The other children will watch carefully to see how to act when their parents arrive.
We cross rapidly into the main building. The outer room is painted a vivid green and orange – garish colors that would normally clash but somehow seem fitting in this exotic setting. Michelle and George are led down the hall to the big kids’ bedroom, where Cristian sleeps in a big boy bed. We go into the baby nursery.
She is the closest to the door, the sheet on her bed a bright blue and our family pictures – Jeff and I, Connor, the dog Annie, even our swingset in the backyard -- hanging in their plastic sleeves from the white, flaking bar around the top of the crib. She has staked out her position as “head baby,” I think to myself. She’s not really a baby, she’s 19 months old, but she’s tiny as she lays on her tummy, her butt raised up in the air with her legs curled under her. She looks so much smaller than her pictures; her personality is quiet now instead of the commanding, mischievous persona we have seen in the photographs – the one where she pretends to talk on a plastic phone to her “mama,” the one where she carefully guards the books we’ve sent her from other children crowding round, the one where she stands proudly holding out her arms as if she’s waiting for us to pick her up. Her hair curls in tiny ringlets around her face, wet with perspiration even though the air conditioner is running. She has on a pink sleeper, clean but well-worn with tiny little balls of cloth covering it. I put my hand softly on her back. I have to touch her.
She has on pink. She is our daughter. She is a sister for Connor. Even so far away, we are finally home.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
My PaPa's Chair
Oct. 10, 2007
PaPa’s brown naugahyde chair sits by the side window. A green glass ashtray rests on the floor where the footstool juts out when he’s sitting. A pipe – the mouthpiece chewed -- is laid carefully in the center of it. Three cans of Prince Albert are lined up in the windowsill, the rectangular four-inch high tin canisters arranged in order of how full of tobacco they are. We grandchildren would prank-call people on the party line – when Rodie Huggins up the road wasn’t gabbing on it – to ask if they had Prince Albert in a can. “You better let him out then,” the cousin charged with making the call would yell and hang up the phone, and we’d all convulse in laughter, the boys punching each other in the arm..
My PaPa would not be sitting in the chair when we called. We would never have dared call if he had. It wasn’t that we were afraid of him. Just the opposite. Instead, it was the idea of maintaining a quiet dignity. Of not showing disrespect to his neighbors he’d lived by for 60 years. It was the idea of not disappointing him somehow.
He could do all kinds of things we grandchildren didn’t see anymore. There was a passel of us – 14 in all, with lots of in-laws and great-grandchildren almost the same age as the youngest grandchildren. I remember being 16 and staying alone for an extra week with my grandparents – a special treat that didn’t happen often enough. It was summer in Alabama, hot, sticky, 95 degrees. My grandfather was 79 years old, and he was hoeing in the garden – an acre filled with butterbeans and okra and tomatoes and tall stalks of corn – that he always planted 100 feet from the house. He had on his work overhauls, the faded ones, with a yellow plaid shirt with sleeves that came down to his elbows. His arms were tanned and ropy with muscle, even though he was an old man. If the sleeve happened to move up, a glimpse of pale white skin with tiny blue veins in it would show – sun never saw that part of his arm. He’d push up his straw hat and wipe his sweat-beaded brow with his nicely pressed white handkerchief; then he’d fold it back just so along the creases and stuff it back in his chest pocket. His hats, his overhauls, his boots were all a part of who he was. He had his pair of faded but pressed work overhauls, his neatly starched, dark-blue going-to-town overhauls, and his dark church suit. He had three hats: the straw work one with the sweat-stained crown, a newer, cleaner straw version he wore to town, and his taupe fedora he religiously wore to church. He had two pairs of boots: the mud-caked work boots with tired creases in the ankles and the brand-spanking new going-to-town boots. The neatly polished black shoes with the black laces were for going to church. Except for what he was wearing, his clothes were lined up neatly in the closet he shared with my grandmother, the closet he had built himself when he built the five-room house they shared for so many years.
PaPa always seemed to have a blue truck – except for that seafoam green one he bought one time. It was the ‘60s, after all, and you were supposed to live dangerously. Living dangerously might not have been his style, but saving money was. My grandparents’ farmhouse sat in a plateau at the bottom of one big hill and the beginning of another one that led down to a shallow creek. PaPa would go to town once or twice a week, although when some of the grandchildren were visiting he seemed to take more trips to the triangular-shaped store where the roads forked at Needmore, always buying us bottled orange drinks or “pops” for the cousins from Ohio. But it was the journey home that we all anticipated – that we all still talk about so many years later. We’d crest the top of that last hill and start toward the house. You could just see the outline of the roof through the trees. PaPa – without saying a word -- would snap the transmission smoothly into neutral, take his foot off the brake, and coast – at an ever-increasing speed -- down the hill. The windows were always down, and the wind would blow harder and our hair would whip faster around our faces. With a slight right turn, we’d sail into the pebble-strewn driveway right up to the front porch before he’d jam his foot on the brake. It was the thrill of a lifetime.
He milked the cow every morning for the first 10 years of my life. He’d be up at dawn, dressed in his work overhauls, heading across the two-lane road. Two green chicken houses – the industrial-sized ones – surrounded the house, one behind the double clothesline in the back and one on top of the slight incline across the road, in the middle of one of the cow pastures. The milk cow stayed to the left of the chicken house, the one that housed the blue tractor that if we were lucky we got to ride on with PaPa. He’d go to the gate and call the cow with a little whistle. It was brown, and it had horns, and it was tame. She’d trot to the gate, walk serenely out and head almost unprompted to the barn across the road, ready to be milked. PaPa would come in the house with a full tin bucket,, steam rising slightly from the warm milk. I would never drink it.
When I was 11, we came to visit. The cow was gone. I don’t know what happened to it. The milk in the refrigerator was pasteurized, in a carton, bought at the store. Things change.
PaPa loved to sit on the front porch, most often resting in a straight-backed kitchen chair, maybe leaning it against the wall, pipe in hand. If the grandchildren would stop, he would talk. He loved to talk. He mainly told stories about serving in the army during World War I. I think about it sometimes, the stories I wish I had paid more attention to and that I had written down when I had the chance. He was 19 when he went to war, a boy fresh off the farm from Alabama. I remember him telling about being on a ship going to France and a German U-boat firing torpedoes at their ship. Other boys didn’t know what the torpedoes were, yelling about the logs heading for them. I’ve often wondered if he was one of those boys.
My cousin Mike says he told him stories about the girls, the French girls. I’ve seen the postcards he bought. But he never told me those stories. Instead, he told me about someone in his camp who bought a monkey. That monkey got into lots of trouble and was one of his fondest memories. It was only after PaPa started telling me stories that my mother realized her father hadn’t been a cook in the army, but an orderly. It suddenly made sense to her, why he was so helpless in the kitchen.
My brother and Wayne were the two youngest grandchildren. When they were together, PaPa would take them to the “crick” at the bottom of the second hill. It ran its course through the middle of the “bottom pasture”; sometimes cows were there, sometimes not. The creek was clear some of the time, although it had an orangey tint to the water from the clay banks that bordered it. PaPa, however, would not go fishing when the water was clear. “Fish can see you if there’s no mud stirring,” he’d tell the boys. They would nod in agreement. Of course. But he would take them for treks through the woods bordering the pastures. Sometimes I went too. We would climb the hills, hopping from one fallen log to another or sighting good places to dig worms. If we got thirsty, PaPa would strip leaves off of the bright green “cowcumber” trees and fashion cups from them – cups that would hold cold water from the spring that bubbled under the bluff. In the winter, the boys and PaPa would go squirrel hunting, PaPa toting his .22 rifle and the boys trying to walk as quietly as they could, their hands jammed inside the pockets of their corduroy jackets. Even when he was 80, he could sight a squirrel 100 feet away and knock it out of the tree with one shot. Andy and Wayne would smile. Of course he could.
He wasn’t always a grandfather. At one time he was a 25 year old marrying a blue-eyed girl with long dark hair on a snowy February day. Both families were waiting; his about-to-be mother-in-law had baked a chocolate cake, a novelty in northern Alabama when a customer had to order the cocoa from a New York catalogue. The preacher, who had promised to be there come rain or shine, didn’t show up in the snow. So the about-to-be groom rode on a horse to a nearby town to fetch a preacher. He found one.
Then he was a father of seven children, a father who plowed fields with two mules during the day and laughed when his second youngest daughter – my mother – clucked her tongue and imitated him --“Git on up Belle” -- at the mule when she was five years old. He smoked his pipe and read the Bible aloud while my mother sat in his lap. He stayed up in the middle of the night when my mother had a earache and blew warm smoke into her ear when she cried with pain. It was magic because the pain always went away.
The year my grandparents married, my PaPa carved a rolling pin for my grandmother out of a single block of wood. It was a light golden color, made out of pine, slightly uneven on one side where my grandfather pressed too hard on the planer when he was smoothing the wood. But it worked. It helped make thousands and thousands of cathead biscuits. It helped make hundreds of blackberry pies, berries picked by my grandfather and sometimes my grandmother from the prickly, scratchy bushes growing wild in the ditch across the road from the house, berries that occasionally came with the cost to a grandchild of chiggers and scratched arms. It shaped dumplings for the chicken stew and pot-pie crusts, hundreds of them consumed at a metal kitchen table loaded with bowls of “country” food that always held a bowl of English peas --my grandfather’s favorite -- the bright green kind from the frozen food section at the Piggly Wiggly. That rolling pin was an object of fascination for children who would rub their hands on the side of it and for grown-up grandchildren who would good-naturedly jest about who would get it one day. It became a symbol, somehow, more than just a rolling pin.
My PaPa would sit in his brown naugahyde chair, smoking his pipe, watching Wheel of Fortune religiously at 7 o’clock every evening, going to bed by nine every night, even when company was visiting and the house was full of people. When a car came rattling by on the road, PaPa would pull back the white sheer curtain and glance to see who it was. More likely than not, he recognized the car, knew who it was.
After my grandfather died, the family gathered – all of us, the ones from South Carolina and Ohio and Tennessee. When my brother and I pulled up in the driveway, only one other car sat in the driveway. No one pulled back the sheer curtain to look, to see who was coming.
It was one of the saddest, loneliest moments of my life.
PaPa’s brown naugahyde chair sits by the side window. A green glass ashtray rests on the floor where the footstool juts out when he’s sitting. A pipe – the mouthpiece chewed -- is laid carefully in the center of it. Three cans of Prince Albert are lined up in the windowsill, the rectangular four-inch high tin canisters arranged in order of how full of tobacco they are. We grandchildren would prank-call people on the party line – when Rodie Huggins up the road wasn’t gabbing on it – to ask if they had Prince Albert in a can. “You better let him out then,” the cousin charged with making the call would yell and hang up the phone, and we’d all convulse in laughter, the boys punching each other in the arm..
My PaPa would not be sitting in the chair when we called. We would never have dared call if he had. It wasn’t that we were afraid of him. Just the opposite. Instead, it was the idea of maintaining a quiet dignity. Of not showing disrespect to his neighbors he’d lived by for 60 years. It was the idea of not disappointing him somehow.
He could do all kinds of things we grandchildren didn’t see anymore. There was a passel of us – 14 in all, with lots of in-laws and great-grandchildren almost the same age as the youngest grandchildren. I remember being 16 and staying alone for an extra week with my grandparents – a special treat that didn’t happen often enough. It was summer in Alabama, hot, sticky, 95 degrees. My grandfather was 79 years old, and he was hoeing in the garden – an acre filled with butterbeans and okra and tomatoes and tall stalks of corn – that he always planted 100 feet from the house. He had on his work overhauls, the faded ones, with a yellow plaid shirt with sleeves that came down to his elbows. His arms were tanned and ropy with muscle, even though he was an old man. If the sleeve happened to move up, a glimpse of pale white skin with tiny blue veins in it would show – sun never saw that part of his arm. He’d push up his straw hat and wipe his sweat-beaded brow with his nicely pressed white handkerchief; then he’d fold it back just so along the creases and stuff it back in his chest pocket. His hats, his overhauls, his boots were all a part of who he was. He had his pair of faded but pressed work overhauls, his neatly starched, dark-blue going-to-town overhauls, and his dark church suit. He had three hats: the straw work one with the sweat-stained crown, a newer, cleaner straw version he wore to town, and his taupe fedora he religiously wore to church. He had two pairs of boots: the mud-caked work boots with tired creases in the ankles and the brand-spanking new going-to-town boots. The neatly polished black shoes with the black laces were for going to church. Except for what he was wearing, his clothes were lined up neatly in the closet he shared with my grandmother, the closet he had built himself when he built the five-room house they shared for so many years.
PaPa always seemed to have a blue truck – except for that seafoam green one he bought one time. It was the ‘60s, after all, and you were supposed to live dangerously. Living dangerously might not have been his style, but saving money was. My grandparents’ farmhouse sat in a plateau at the bottom of one big hill and the beginning of another one that led down to a shallow creek. PaPa would go to town once or twice a week, although when some of the grandchildren were visiting he seemed to take more trips to the triangular-shaped store where the roads forked at Needmore, always buying us bottled orange drinks or “pops” for the cousins from Ohio. But it was the journey home that we all anticipated – that we all still talk about so many years later. We’d crest the top of that last hill and start toward the house. You could just see the outline of the roof through the trees. PaPa – without saying a word -- would snap the transmission smoothly into neutral, take his foot off the brake, and coast – at an ever-increasing speed -- down the hill. The windows were always down, and the wind would blow harder and our hair would whip faster around our faces. With a slight right turn, we’d sail into the pebble-strewn driveway right up to the front porch before he’d jam his foot on the brake. It was the thrill of a lifetime.
He milked the cow every morning for the first 10 years of my life. He’d be up at dawn, dressed in his work overhauls, heading across the two-lane road. Two green chicken houses – the industrial-sized ones – surrounded the house, one behind the double clothesline in the back and one on top of the slight incline across the road, in the middle of one of the cow pastures. The milk cow stayed to the left of the chicken house, the one that housed the blue tractor that if we were lucky we got to ride on with PaPa. He’d go to the gate and call the cow with a little whistle. It was brown, and it had horns, and it was tame. She’d trot to the gate, walk serenely out and head almost unprompted to the barn across the road, ready to be milked. PaPa would come in the house with a full tin bucket,, steam rising slightly from the warm milk. I would never drink it.
When I was 11, we came to visit. The cow was gone. I don’t know what happened to it. The milk in the refrigerator was pasteurized, in a carton, bought at the store. Things change.
PaPa loved to sit on the front porch, most often resting in a straight-backed kitchen chair, maybe leaning it against the wall, pipe in hand. If the grandchildren would stop, he would talk. He loved to talk. He mainly told stories about serving in the army during World War I. I think about it sometimes, the stories I wish I had paid more attention to and that I had written down when I had the chance. He was 19 when he went to war, a boy fresh off the farm from Alabama. I remember him telling about being on a ship going to France and a German U-boat firing torpedoes at their ship. Other boys didn’t know what the torpedoes were, yelling about the logs heading for them. I’ve often wondered if he was one of those boys.
My cousin Mike says he told him stories about the girls, the French girls. I’ve seen the postcards he bought. But he never told me those stories. Instead, he told me about someone in his camp who bought a monkey. That monkey got into lots of trouble and was one of his fondest memories. It was only after PaPa started telling me stories that my mother realized her father hadn’t been a cook in the army, but an orderly. It suddenly made sense to her, why he was so helpless in the kitchen.
My brother and Wayne were the two youngest grandchildren. When they were together, PaPa would take them to the “crick” at the bottom of the second hill. It ran its course through the middle of the “bottom pasture”; sometimes cows were there, sometimes not. The creek was clear some of the time, although it had an orangey tint to the water from the clay banks that bordered it. PaPa, however, would not go fishing when the water was clear. “Fish can see you if there’s no mud stirring,” he’d tell the boys. They would nod in agreement. Of course. But he would take them for treks through the woods bordering the pastures. Sometimes I went too. We would climb the hills, hopping from one fallen log to another or sighting good places to dig worms. If we got thirsty, PaPa would strip leaves off of the bright green “cowcumber” trees and fashion cups from them – cups that would hold cold water from the spring that bubbled under the bluff. In the winter, the boys and PaPa would go squirrel hunting, PaPa toting his .22 rifle and the boys trying to walk as quietly as they could, their hands jammed inside the pockets of their corduroy jackets. Even when he was 80, he could sight a squirrel 100 feet away and knock it out of the tree with one shot. Andy and Wayne would smile. Of course he could.
He wasn’t always a grandfather. At one time he was a 25 year old marrying a blue-eyed girl with long dark hair on a snowy February day. Both families were waiting; his about-to-be mother-in-law had baked a chocolate cake, a novelty in northern Alabama when a customer had to order the cocoa from a New York catalogue. The preacher, who had promised to be there come rain or shine, didn’t show up in the snow. So the about-to-be groom rode on a horse to a nearby town to fetch a preacher. He found one.
Then he was a father of seven children, a father who plowed fields with two mules during the day and laughed when his second youngest daughter – my mother – clucked her tongue and imitated him --“Git on up Belle” -- at the mule when she was five years old. He smoked his pipe and read the Bible aloud while my mother sat in his lap. He stayed up in the middle of the night when my mother had a earache and blew warm smoke into her ear when she cried with pain. It was magic because the pain always went away.
The year my grandparents married, my PaPa carved a rolling pin for my grandmother out of a single block of wood. It was a light golden color, made out of pine, slightly uneven on one side where my grandfather pressed too hard on the planer when he was smoothing the wood. But it worked. It helped make thousands and thousands of cathead biscuits. It helped make hundreds of blackberry pies, berries picked by my grandfather and sometimes my grandmother from the prickly, scratchy bushes growing wild in the ditch across the road from the house, berries that occasionally came with the cost to a grandchild of chiggers and scratched arms. It shaped dumplings for the chicken stew and pot-pie crusts, hundreds of them consumed at a metal kitchen table loaded with bowls of “country” food that always held a bowl of English peas --my grandfather’s favorite -- the bright green kind from the frozen food section at the Piggly Wiggly. That rolling pin was an object of fascination for children who would rub their hands on the side of it and for grown-up grandchildren who would good-naturedly jest about who would get it one day. It became a symbol, somehow, more than just a rolling pin.
My PaPa would sit in his brown naugahyde chair, smoking his pipe, watching Wheel of Fortune religiously at 7 o’clock every evening, going to bed by nine every night, even when company was visiting and the house was full of people. When a car came rattling by on the road, PaPa would pull back the white sheer curtain and glance to see who it was. More likely than not, he recognized the car, knew who it was.
After my grandfather died, the family gathered – all of us, the ones from South Carolina and Ohio and Tennessee. When my brother and I pulled up in the driveway, only one other car sat in the driveway. No one pulled back the sheer curtain to look, to see who was coming.
It was one of the saddest, loneliest moments of my life.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Bright Pink
“Don’t look, don’t look,” I chant to myself. “Don’t look suspicious. No sudden moves. Oh my God, those men have submachine guns.”
It is dark when we get off the plane, a sticky heat radiating from the tarmac even though it is 11 o’clock at night in late November. Lights resembling garage floodlights give an eerie glow to the soldiers, standing with submachine guns cocked nonchalantly on hips.
I shake my head. Don’t be ridiculous. I’m legally in Ecuador. It is 1998. I have a passport. I have American money. No reason to be frightened.
We hustle with the rest of the departing passengers, almost running in the rush to get to customs first. Too late; we’re in a long line. It seems like a dream. People stand close together in two long lines – another plane has landed at the same time as ours. It’s eerily quiet; no one talks loudly, no one pushes. The guards with the guns are inside the airport terminal, too.
A man with bright blue eyes with crinkles in the corners walks by our line twice. He’s staring. He approaches. “Are you a teacher? Here to adopt a baby?” We both nod in shock. “I’m George. You know. From Florida. We’ve talked to you on the phone. We’re here to adopt our son.”
Relief. Someone we know – or at least kind of know. He speaks Spanish. He’s been here before – lots of times with family and with friends he’s made over the years. He knows what to do. We wave wildly to his wife, standing in the second customs line 10 feet away from us. She grins, waving just as enthusiastically back. I wonder how they knew who we were in this crowd of people, most of us obviously foreigners. Maybe the red Elmo I have clutched to my chest is a clue.
The line seems to move faster after we meet George. We join George and Michelle after customs, searching in the quiet for our bags on a long table in the middle of a deserted concourse. This is nothing like an American airport. No people scurrying. No intercom calling flight numbers. No carts with piercing beeps carrying the old or sick back and forth between flights.
We grab our bags, making our way out of the double doors. Then the noise hits. The steamy heat again, and this time soldiers standing casually at the doors while what seems like hordes of people press against each other, waving arms, calling names. Taxi drivers yell frantically trying to get the attention of just one person to snag a fare. George and Michelle’s friend Roberto is waiting to drive them to the orphanage; they want us to ride with them. But we feel guilty, unsure of what to do. We know the orphanage is sending someone to pick us up. We don’t want to leave him without explanation after the trouble he will have gone to. Then we see one lone white sign with WATKINS printed carefully on it. The man holding it is in jeans, a blue and gray striped shirt. Somehow he seems to know we’re the right ones when he sees us. He gestures; we follow.
As we go to his taxi, three or four people trail after us, trying to carry our suitcases to the car. A thin boy – maybe 10 years old -- walks closely behind me, but I clutch my fannypack -- turned backwards to guard my wallet from pickpockets -- closer to my body. He calls “por favor, por favor” over and over. I look, even though adoption agency employees have told us not to. One eye pleads sadly; one eye stares off into space at a 90-degree angle. I am so shocked that I immediately give him the two dollars I have tucked in my side pocket. An older man follows him; I don’t know what he’s saying, but his voice sounds like he’s angrily scolding. In my mind, he’s saying, “Ask for more, ask for more.” The taxi driver is rough with the boy, forcing him away as he opens the door to the car. We get into the backseat, but the boy pecks persistently on the window – “por favor, por favor.” I turn my head.
The trip to the orphanage is breathtakingly fast – and not because it’s close by the airport. Lights flash by. I see there are no lines on the paved roads except for the center one that separates the onrushing cars. I hold my husband’s hand.
When we pull up outside of the gates, the driver honks the horn. Michelle and George are in a car behind us. The gates swing open into the white-washed cement compound walls. The next few minutes are a blur, as a man holding a sawed-off shotgun opens our car door. I’ve never seen a sawed-off shotgun before, but there is no doubt in my mind exactly what it is. I am shocked. One more thing that surprises, startles, frightens, confounds me.
We are bundled into our waiting apartment by two young women, both speaking Spanish rapidly. George is talking to them; I find my high school and college Spanish years have truly been wasted. We look around the sparsely-furnished apartment – tiny kitchen with a sink and a miniature fridge, but no stove. Two striped sofas with a long wooden table in the living area. Three doors leading to separate bedrooms. We don’t know until an hour later that another couple and their two children – from Norway – are asleep in the third bedroom. Their journey here started two weeks earlier. They will leave for home in two days.
This part of our journey, however, is just beginning. The journey for our daughter, a sister for Connor, a granddaughter for our parents, the journey that has lasted our entire married lives -- and at times what seemed like a lifetime -- although it’s only really been five months since it started. Julie Maria Nicole. I want to see her now. We have been told by people who have traveled before us that the babies are brought right to their new mothers. This time, things are different. We are late, after midnight. The ladies shake their heads that it’s not possible to see the children. The babies are asleep, they pantomine. See them in the morning. It will be better. Michelle is my alter-ego at this moment; we are determined. We will not wait until morning. We just want to look. We have traveled far.
They finally consent after much gesturing on our part and rapid speech by George, and we move across the quiet, well-groomed courtyard. We don’t know it then, but one of the younger men working in the orphanage sits on the tiny lawn and cuts the grass with a pair of scissors during the afternoons. There is a round fountain that serves as a tiny swimming pool in the middle, but only the visiting parents and their new children can use it. The other children will watch carefully to see how to act when their parents arrive.
We cross rapidly into the main building. The outer room is painted a vivid green and orange – garish colors that would normally clash but somehow seem fitting in this exotic setting. Michelle and George are led down the hall to the big kids’ bedroom, where Cristian sleeps in a big boy bed. We go into the baby nursery.
She is the closest to the door, the sheet on her bed a bright blue and our family pictures – Jeff and I, Connor, the dog Annie, even our swingset in the backyard -- hanging in their plastic sleeves from the white, flaking bar around the top of the crib. She has staked out her position as “head baby,” I think to myself. She’s not really a baby, she’s 19 months old, but she’s tiny as she lays on her tummy, her butt raised up in the air with her legs curled under her. She looks so much smaller than her pictures; her personality is quiet now instead of the commanding, mischievous persona we have seen in the photographs – the one where she pretends to talk on a plastic phone to her “mama,” the one where she carefully guards the books we’ve sent her from other children crowding round, the one where she stands proudly holding out her arms as if she’s waiting for us to pick her up. Her hair curls in tiny ringlets around her face, wet with perspiration even though the air conditioner is running. She has on a pink sleeper, well-washed and well-worn with tiny little balls of cloth covering it. I put my hand softly on her back. I have to touch her.
She has on pink. She is our daughter. She is a sister for Connor. Even so far away, we are finally home.
It is dark when we get off the plane, a sticky heat radiating from the tarmac even though it is 11 o’clock at night in late November. Lights resembling garage floodlights give an eerie glow to the soldiers, standing with submachine guns cocked nonchalantly on hips.
I shake my head. Don’t be ridiculous. I’m legally in Ecuador. It is 1998. I have a passport. I have American money. No reason to be frightened.
We hustle with the rest of the departing passengers, almost running in the rush to get to customs first. Too late; we’re in a long line. It seems like a dream. People stand close together in two long lines – another plane has landed at the same time as ours. It’s eerily quiet; no one talks loudly, no one pushes. The guards with the guns are inside the airport terminal, too.
A man with bright blue eyes with crinkles in the corners walks by our line twice. He’s staring. He approaches. “Are you a teacher? Here to adopt a baby?” We both nod in shock. “I’m George. You know. From Florida. We’ve talked to you on the phone. We’re here to adopt our son.”
Relief. Someone we know – or at least kind of know. He speaks Spanish. He’s been here before – lots of times with family and with friends he’s made over the years. He knows what to do. We wave wildly to his wife, standing in the second customs line 10 feet away from us. She grins, waving just as enthusiastically back. I wonder how they knew who we were in this crowd of people, most of us obviously foreigners. Maybe the red Elmo I have clutched to my chest is a clue.
The line seems to move faster after we meet George. We join George and Michelle after customs, searching in the quiet for our bags on a long table in the middle of a deserted concourse. This is nothing like an American airport. No people scurrying. No intercom calling flight numbers. No carts with piercing beeps carrying the old or sick back and forth between flights.
We grab our bags, making our way out of the double doors. Then the noise hits. The steamy heat again, and this time soldiers standing casually at the doors while what seems like hordes of people press against each other, waving arms, calling names. Taxi drivers yell frantically trying to get the attention of just one person to snag a fare. George and Michelle’s friend Roberto is waiting to drive them to the orphanage; they want us to ride with them. But we feel guilty, unsure of what to do. We know the orphanage is sending someone to pick us up. We don’t want to leave him without explanation after the trouble he will have gone to. Then we see one lone white sign with WATKINS printed carefully on it. The man holding it is in jeans, a blue and gray striped shirt. Somehow he seems to know we’re the right ones when he sees us. He gestures; we follow.
As we go to his taxi, three or four people trail after us, trying to carry our suitcases to the car. A thin boy – maybe 10 years old -- walks closely behind me, but I clutch my fannypack -- turned backwards to guard my wallet from pickpockets -- closer to my body. He calls “por favor, por favor” over and over. I look, even though adoption agency employees have told us not to. One eye pleads sadly; one eye stares off into space at a 90-degree angle. I am so shocked that I immediately give him the two dollars I have tucked in my side pocket. An older man follows him; I don’t know what he’s saying, but his voice sounds like he’s angrily scolding. In my mind, he’s saying, “Ask for more, ask for more.” The taxi driver is rough with the boy, forcing him away as he opens the door to the car. We get into the backseat, but the boy pecks persistently on the window – “por favor, por favor.” I turn my head.
The trip to the orphanage is breathtakingly fast – and not because it’s close by the airport. Lights flash by. I see there are no lines on the paved roads except for the center one that separates the onrushing cars. I hold my husband’s hand.
When we pull up outside of the gates, the driver honks the horn. Michelle and George are in a car behind us. The gates swing open into the white-washed cement compound walls. The next few minutes are a blur, as a man holding a sawed-off shotgun opens our car door. I’ve never seen a sawed-off shotgun before, but there is no doubt in my mind exactly what it is. I am shocked. One more thing that surprises, startles, frightens, confounds me.
We are bundled into our waiting apartment by two young women, both speaking Spanish rapidly. George is talking to them; I find my high school and college Spanish years have truly been wasted. We look around the sparsely-furnished apartment – tiny kitchen with a sink and a miniature fridge, but no stove. Two striped sofas with a long wooden table in the living area. Three doors leading to separate bedrooms. We don’t know until an hour later that another couple and their two children – from Norway – are asleep in the third bedroom. Their journey here started two weeks earlier. They will leave for home in two days.
This part of our journey, however, is just beginning. The journey for our daughter, a sister for Connor, a granddaughter for our parents, the journey that has lasted our entire married lives -- and at times what seemed like a lifetime -- although it’s only really been five months since it started. Julie Maria Nicole. I want to see her now. We have been told by people who have traveled before us that the babies are brought right to their new mothers. This time, things are different. We are late, after midnight. The ladies shake their heads that it’s not possible to see the children. The babies are asleep, they pantomine. See them in the morning. It will be better. Michelle is my alter-ego at this moment; we are determined. We will not wait until morning. We just want to look. We have traveled far.
They finally consent after much gesturing on our part and rapid speech by George, and we move across the quiet, well-groomed courtyard. We don’t know it then, but one of the younger men working in the orphanage sits on the tiny lawn and cuts the grass with a pair of scissors during the afternoons. There is a round fountain that serves as a tiny swimming pool in the middle, but only the visiting parents and their new children can use it. The other children will watch carefully to see how to act when their parents arrive.
We cross rapidly into the main building. The outer room is painted a vivid green and orange – garish colors that would normally clash but somehow seem fitting in this exotic setting. Michelle and George are led down the hall to the big kids’ bedroom, where Cristian sleeps in a big boy bed. We go into the baby nursery.
She is the closest to the door, the sheet on her bed a bright blue and our family pictures – Jeff and I, Connor, the dog Annie, even our swingset in the backyard -- hanging in their plastic sleeves from the white, flaking bar around the top of the crib. She has staked out her position as “head baby,” I think to myself. She’s not really a baby, she’s 19 months old, but she’s tiny as she lays on her tummy, her butt raised up in the air with her legs curled under her. She looks so much smaller than her pictures; her personality is quiet now instead of the commanding, mischievous persona we have seen in the photographs – the one where she pretends to talk on a plastic phone to her “mama,” the one where she carefully guards the books we’ve sent her from other children crowding round, the one where she stands proudly holding out her arms as if she’s waiting for us to pick her up. Her hair curls in tiny ringlets around her face, wet with perspiration even though the air conditioner is running. She has on a pink sleeper, well-washed and well-worn with tiny little balls of cloth covering it. I put my hand softly on her back. I have to touch her.
She has on pink. She is our daughter. She is a sister for Connor. Even so far away, we are finally home.
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