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I had a very nice morning with Dag . . . The two of us walked out of the neighborhood and around the soccer fields. Actually, I handled most of the walking, but he did his little chimp-walk (elbows out, hands up) for about a block and a half. At the park, I tried some pull-ups with Dag strapped to my chest and was happy to find that I’m not completely middle-aged yet, despite the predictions of my friend Max. My cousin Amy, however, observed that even in the airport/homecoming pictures, I no longer look like a globetrotting Bohemian but like a dad, which at one point in my life I would have taken for a great insult but right now makes me feel quietly happy. Amy is a great woman –and the source of the flowers beside Shasta and Dagim, above.
Today I slipped out while Dagim was sleeping –I caffeinated myself and faxed some papers to work so Dagim could be added to our insurance, and then, driving home, I started crying with happiness.
These pictures are from the first twenty-four hours, back in Ethiopia.
A few hours to go –our friends Jim and Steven coming by soon and then we’ll all go to breakfast and the airport together. I’m heading to the gym in a few minutes –I want to exhaust myself before this long day of sitting. I put VAMPIRE WEEKEND on my iPod (recommended by Jana ) so that I can have some new and happy music for the next few hours –and, so, years from now, I can put this album on and remember this entire week).
Yesterday, my last day at work for a while (I’m taking five weeks off), I was a little sad because I wasn’t going to be handing out cigars or anything as I became a father –so I stopped and bought some doughnuts, brought them in. And then at noon, we had a staff meeting and all my co-workers, it turned out, had baked a cake and gotten me a box of blue, bubble gum cigars, and they all wished us well . . . I came home and found many wonderful emails (even one from Joan and Nate!), got a phone call or two, looked at the piles of baby toys that Yiums and Fishers and other people have given us –I thought about different babies I’ve known and the baby I was– and I remembered my Uncle Thom, standing in a Texas restaurant before he died, as he described his own father, my grandfather whom I never met– and I don’t feel hysterical, but I do feel full of emotion. I feel my brain stretched between here and Africa, and I open my eyes in France and Singapore (I’m drinking tea with Sid and Nicola and their wonderful children on their dark bed)(and I’ve never been to Singapore but I know that Tony and Althea are there and so I feel like I am too) and I think about my parents smiling this Thursday when they came up and got Tristan, my little dog-brother, and I think about all the popcorn my dad has made me and all the little books my mother read me– and I think: I’ve got to get on that plane soon, before I fall apart.
Thank you to everyone.
Good luck to Jennifer and Jody.
C
ln less than a week, we’ll be in Addis Ababa, meeting this little boy, this small Dagim. I can’t even describe how terrified I am. I deal with rapists and drug dealers and crystal meth makers every day, and none of them scare me like this twenty-two pound boy.
One thing S. and I are both scared of is rejection. We’ve stored up all this love for this boy, but he’s a toddler now –he will recognize that everything he knows and likes is being taken from him –but he can’t understand language, so we can’t tell him all the things we want to tell him.
I’ve certainly been lonely in my life. And maybe a lot of only children are a little sensitive to rejection from their peers. Who knows what shyness is or where it goes? I’m not shy in the classroom (teaching), but in my personal life, I’ve been accused of a silent and daydreaming detachment.
I know that even if Dagim IS wary of us –he would be a little fool if here weren’t scared of two strangers—I know that over time, we will be everything a family is. I know how Shasta is when she’s in love with somebody. That little boy doesn’t stand a chance.
I once heard a recording of Louis Armstrong talking on the stage.
He told the story of being a little boy in Louisiana, and how his mother once sent him down to the river to fetch some water. He said he got down there, saw an alligator, dropped his bucket and ran home.
His mother stopped him on the porch and he said, “Mama, there’s a gator down there! He’s big and mean!”
And his mother said, “Son, you go down there and get us some water. Don’t you know that gator’s as scared of you as you are of it?”
Louis Armstrong laughed: “I told her, ‘Mama, if he’s as scared of me as I am of him, that water ain’t fit to drink!”
Today is Monday. Next Monday, we meet Dagim. I am Louis Armstrong!
Shasta really said it all, on her site.
I’ve really just felt drunk with all these great and lovely valentines we’ve received in the last few days. So much love in this world, and so close to us . . .
I did have a moment last night . . . Shasta asked me to look over an immigration form she was preparing to fax to Ethiopia. Where it said, “Father’s Name” and “Father’s birthday,” I thought to myself: “Oh #@$, she’s goofed. She put my name instead of my dad’s . . .” And then I realized that I was crossing over to a new part of my life and I was sad and happy at the same time.
Our little boy will be Dagim Grant Huntington. One name from his birth mother, one from Shasta, one from me.
I took her picture before she left. She is three or four times as pretty in real life, but I’m still new with the camera.
Yesterday, several of Shasta’s friends made her feel like a lucky sun (warm with love) . . . I dropped her off at Aubrey’s condo in the late morning and picked her up a few hours later. She sat like Alice at a tea party.
(not a mad one, but colorful and scented with lavender)
(no angry queens or hatters)
(my metaphor completely breaking down)
(I think, from the descriptions I’ve had, it was an un-mad tea party –thrown, not by Lewis Carroll or even Jane Austen, but with a mixture of glamour and wit and magic, like an episode of Sex-in-the-City meets Charmed meets The Gilmore Girls).
Anyway, Georgia, Christy, Aubrey, Nicole, Steven, Katrina, Victoria, Lexie, Elizabeth, and Erica –thank you for giving Shasta such a beautiful morning. She was beaming about it afterward. She could hardly sit down, because of her happiness.
This is a picture from a week ago, when our friends Jim and Steven came over for a picnic. This is just to reassure people that Shasta doesn’t obsess over the adoption twenty four hours a day but actually takes a few seconds each day to smile.
This weekend, she smiled a lot, chez Jennifer and Jody. We sat by their tiny (five foot, inflatable) swimming pool and ate and drank and talked. Their lovely little zoo (three chihuahua and two Chinese crested dogs) was so well-behaved, it was like something out of a Disney movie –each dog with his or her own personality but the whole group –I don’t know, Jody and Jennifer like a friendly Shrek and Fiona with a miniature squad of donkeys at their feet. Well, that is, if Shrek and Fiona were played by two stars from the WB.
Yesterday at work, I got into a political discussion with some co-workers. We were discussing gay marriage and one of us said that no matter what most political and religious leaders would have us believe, most people really “don’t care.” It was not, to his mind, the end-of-the-world issue people make it out to be. Jennifer said no, she DID care. She wanted everyone to have the same rights. I said that I cared, and that it was a fairness issue. “If you want to get married in a church,” I said, “then you have to play by the rules of the church. But if two people want to go to city hall, then it should be for any two people.” I reminded my co-workers that when my parents got married, it wasn’t legal in every state either –because my mother was Chinese-American and my father was white. Around this time, an older teacher said, “I just can’t do it, I can’t be politically correct any more. Look, I don’t like gays or towel-heads. There, I’ve said it.”
By “towel-heads,” he meant not just Arabs, but the Asians who run several local gas stations.
This morning, I got up in my usual pre-dawn dark and thought: I really don’t want to go to work today. I’m tired of my co-workers, my students, and thinking about adoption. I’ve still got my health. I just need to feel healthy.
So I’m going to take a sick day and go with Shasta to the Y, where we’ll swim and read books. I’ll climb out of the water and hold my wet face up to the sun. The big bright afternoon will fill my thinning hair with summer. Max said the other day, “I can’t wait until you get a kid and can’t work out every other day. Then you’ll look forty!”
I can’t wait either, brother. But life is still good, all the same.
No real news or great things to say, except that I have been surprised by happiness several times recently. Shasta has filled our kitchen with wonderful, home-cooked food again. I’ve had some good laughs at work with the mischievious MAX. I got an Arts grant that will enable me to take some time off work and write this summer or fall –I hope to combine this with the arrival of our little boy.
Lately, I’ve felt a little incompetent –very ungifted at daily tasks or grown up life. I don’t know how to change the brake pads on my car or how to cut and lay tile for a floor. I should fix things like the broken lawnmower cord. I’ve asked myself: what can I do instead? What am I good at instead? And the answer is, well, I’m not a popular or respected writer or intellectual. I’m not distinguished in my profession. I have trouble drawing mouths. What am I good at? I have some ability for remembering old Spider-man stories, Arthurian legends, and biographical details of Davy Crockett. I can listen. I can do more push-ups than most forty year olds I know. Not a very practical skill set.
But it occurred to me recently that these things might be very useful for a father– that, probably, these things can make me a good dad, and somehow, I’ve done something right after all. My father never showed me how to work on brakes, but he told me about Hercules when I was little. He taught me not to make fun of people for things they couldn’t change (like the way they look). He gave me his copy of On the Road. He insisted I have a dog when I was a little boy. He taught me to ride a bike. He pointed to the world and suggested I might fall in love with it, like he did.
Yesterday I saw the movie MONGOL, which was kind of like “Walk the Line” for Genghis Khan.
I loved the first half of the movie, lost interest for a middling fifteen minutes when he was locked outdoors in a cage and his wife came to rescue him -but, overall, I was helpless. I love this kind of thing. I’ve already written (in this blog) about how Jack Weatherford’s book about Genghis Khan really shook me up. I also love movies where the main character is very quiet and guards a deep inner life, a secret identity. So I’ve got a huge weakness for super-hero movies (and, I think, the reason I didn’t much like HULK was that Bruce Banner is so determined to “cure” himself of his secret identity; he is ashamed of his inner life).
In MONGOL, the young Temudjin (future Khan) is chased and abused by different enemies throughout his early life, but, at two different priests see his eyes and are scared to death of him –even though he’s chained up like a wild animal and not saying a word. Anyway, the acting is great (though Genghis Khan does look a little Japanese at times)(and apparently he’s played by a Japanese), the movie is full of beautiful, beautiful sunlit steppes, “Lord of the Rings” style medieval army action, and also several lovely adoption moments. In the movies at least, Genghis Khan was a terrific father except when he’s away at work (conquering the world).
The young Temudjin’s wife is stolen from him, almost as soon as he’s married –so he travels to visit a man who has been his “sworn brother” since childhood. As children, he and this other boy cut their palms and swore to be brothers (love was more important than biology). As men, the sworn brother is now a powerful chief and he is mystified; he can’t understand why Temudjin would want to go to war over a woman, but agrees as long as Temudjin doesn’t tell anyone why they are going to war. “In a year,” he says. “We will go after her in a year.” Temudjin is not happy with this, but has no choice since he’s accepting a favor. His brother needs time to gather men and do the politics.
A year later, they go to war and there is a great and crushing battle with the tribe who attacked Temudjin. Temudjin finds his wife and she is hugely pregnant. When his sworn brother finds them moments later, Temudjin is kneeling beside his wife, holding her. He looks up and says, “My child.” The brother is confused, about to say something, but then shakes it off as he sees, suddenly, what Temudjin sees: that the biology doesn’t matter at all.
Also, two weeks ago, I saw KUNG FU PANDA, and liked it for differnent reasons –though also adoption related –the huge clumsy panda’s father is a goose –and, at one point, frustrated and feeling like a disappointment to everyone, the panda says, “Dad, sometimes I feel like I’m not your son.”
The goose leans forward and says, “Son, there’s something I have to tell you.” I was cringing, thinking he was going to say, “You’re not REALLY my son,” or some bullshit like that, but he doesn’t. He says the family secret noodle soup recipe, the one he’s been waiting for years to pass on to the panda. Not really his son? It’s not even a question for the goose; it’s all love between them. It’s as if it never even occurs to the goose to say what I was afraid of.
Strangely, I had to see both of these movies without Shasta. But don’t listen to her! They were good! I recommend them both . . .
I teach in a prison. Yesterday, a student came up to my desk and showed me the bar code on the back of his notebook. “You know what this is?”
“Yeah,” I said. “A UPC symbol.”
“It’s an Ethiopian family portrait.”
My student is a forty year old white guy. I generally like him because he can’t remember $@# and he knows it; most of his jokes are about his own bad luck. He considers himself born unlucky because he contracted hepatitis during his years of drug abuse. When I heard his latest “joke,” however, I didn’t think it was funny. I was a little stung, obviously, but mostly I had a selfish reaction: ”Who was discussing my business? Where did this guy overhear something about me? Why is he saying this to me?” (which is just the effect of prison own soul–my own paranoia and institutionalization). But then I decided there was no way he knew my wife and I are adopting from an orphanage in Addis Ababa.
My next thought was, “You know, Mr. ____, there’s nothing funnier than a three hundred pound guy laughing about mass starvation.”
But I didn’t say anything. I gave him a pained un-smile and nodded him back to his seat. The world is full of stupid people and just because they’re stupid doesn’t mean they’re not trying to make you laugh and make the world a better place. Maybe it was a “teaching moment” and I missed it, but, to be honest, with students like mine, there is a lot to teach and we have many moments.
Last week, S. and I went through a mild emotional apocalypse. But today It looks like everything will work out, at least for us. We are hoping to fly to Ethiopia and meet this little boy and carry him home one day soon. But I feel bad, still, for our friends who are still waiting for good news and for the children who are waiting for love and milk. I’d like to think that life is big enough for us all to be happy.
Anyway, Shasta and I had a quiet birthday celebration for our boy. We were full of helpless hope and frustration. I think Shasta looks a bit preoccupied and I am a mixture of grim and mopey. But I like the pictures because I think the house looks like a warm cave, full of love, ready for birthdays.
Since we got our court date, I’ve got the worst pre-date anxiety ever. I can’t shake the fear that we’re going to get stood up somehow. We’ll be standing on the sidewalk in front of a cosmic movie theater, checking our cell phone, and, despite all the plans, we’ll be seeing that movie alone. A lot of people don’t make it through court the first time, but I hope we do.
I’ve been kicking away some other negative thoughts lately. Some of it related to the politics of international adoption (people who think all adoptions should be within a country, not outside) and race (people who think transracial adoptions are naive and doomed) and age (an author who is big on the idea that toddler adoption is filled with attachment issues).
In this huge dogpile of pessimism, the only interesting stuff I’ve heard was in a New York Times article: “An examination by The New York Times of the 2000 census — the first in which information on adoptions was collected — showed that just over 16,000 white households included adopted black children.”
I would have thought this number was way higher.
Anyway, the article points out the difficulties in transracial families –but I finished the piece and thought, “You know what? I don’t care.”
I believe the world is a mystery and good things happen. It’s easy, it’s so easy, to criticize everything. And to think of reasons not to love people. In the end, I love reading and thinking and– to some extent, sometimes, I even love politics. But adoption is about people, not ideas. It’s about children who need love. It’s not naive to believe in transracial adoption. It’s naive to think that your politics are so right, children need to suffer because of them. Who would want to grow up in an orphanage? Who would want to grow up without parents? What kind of person would wish that on kids just to satisfy a smug and vicious belief system?
Life is complicated, but we shouldn’t be afraid of it. People can believe whatever they want, but I prefer to believe that love for a child can’t be the wrong color.
Anyway, I feel all right these days. I look at these pictures we’ve gotten and all the nay-saying becomes a quiet, distant noise like a neighbor’s dog. The photographs (a little boy, teetering back and forth on his tiny legs) remind me that we’re all people and nobody knows what kind of men or women our sons and daughters will become. But we are made for love anyway. Shasta and I are ready to fly to Ethiopia and meet this little boy who is getting bigger every day . . . We can think of nothing else.
S. and I took a few minutes this weekend to try to NOT think about Ethiopia and our family (but we also worked on the nursery)(which looks great).
Saturday we watched DAN IN REAL LIFE, which our friend Steven had recommended. I found myself REALLY liking it, probably liking it more than I should. For one thing, and the only reason I mention it here, it is subtly very adoption-friendly. It’s all about a big holiday with all the grown-up brothers and sisters bringing their spouses and children to the mother and father’s house –which made S. and I, both only children, very thoughtful –but then, without a word of explanation, one of the kids is Chinese. No one ever says a word about it, but this little girl is part of the family like everyone else.
So there’s that going for it. Also the great Juliette Binoche. Shasta is a big fan of everything SJP and so we have seen the very similar movie THE FAMILY STONE several times –but, personally, I liked this better.
People have been perfectly lovely about emailing us photographs of our son. I wanted to surprise S. by having some made into prints and giving them to her for Mothers’ Day -so I went to CVS and did their little kiosk (if I’d have been in Columbus, I’d certainly have gone to Tim Cooney’s shop because the prints he made of our referral pictures were terrific. I’ve been carrying those around everywhere.)(A few nights ago, I met Max’s wife for the first time and found myself crossing the room, saying, “Jennifer, I’ve known you longer than five minutes, so that means I have to show you my pictures”).
Anyway, at CVS, I ordered my prints, then stood around and read magazines while they were processed. The Indian woman at the counter got busy with another customer, so another cashier came up. This clerk was black, in her early twenties, and she glanced at the photo machine, saw the prints of my favorite boy, then asked the first clerk what she should do with them. The Indian woman gestured at me and said to give me my prints. The second woman looked at the pictures again and then said, “No, what do I do with THESE.”
The Indian woman said, “They’re his.”
So the second clerk put them into an envelope and rang me up. I looked them over at the register and said, “Wow, they came out great. Don’t you think?”
And the woman smiled and said yes.
So, Friday, the sky opened up in a gentle, awkward rain and I drove home in it, my heart like a basketball in my chest, all my breathing somewhere far below behind my navel, like somewhere under the ocean, while my head was as big as a planet, full of every thought I think I’ve ever had and yet, really, just one thought because Shasta had called me and said, you’ve got to come home, we got the call.
And home, that day, was my hometown home, the house where my parents live and where I celebrated Thanksgivings as a kid. We were visiting my folks. I parked under a tree in front of the house and ran in the front door. Then we were all upstairs at my parents’ computer, looking at pictures of a beautiful little boy.
Our son.
And anyway, it’s been a crazy weekend. Because Shasta and I keep taking these pictures out of our pockets and looking at them. We’re bumping into things. We can’t put anything away. And I’ve gone over each one, pixel by pixel, on my computer screen. We’ve gotten wonderful emails from everyone we know -thank you, thank you, thank you-and I feel great, but it’s all mixed with a little bit of sadness because I feel sorry for everyone I love, sorry for everyone in the world, really. Everyone except us, because we are the ones this little boy is coming to join. Maybe this summer? He’ll be sleeping down the hall from us. In the little room Shasta’s been preparing. I feel bad for everyone in the world because you’ve all been so good and kind with us but this kid with enormous brown eyes and sharp thoughtful eyebrows and his worried little mouth -he’s not Santa and can’t be everywhere. He’s coming to live with us, and I don’t know how you’ll live without him.
A couple weeks ago, when S. and I were still enjoying SURVIVOR, I got a computer game called The Sims: Castaway Stories. It’s like a computer dollhouse where make believe people have imaginary adventures on a tropical island. The fun thing was that I made a little family –and I was so happy to see tiny versions of S. and me holding our baby at last.
Here is a picture of us NOT holding the baby, but smiling for the camera:
We are almost done with all the bureaucracy of the adoption, but of course that is like saying we are almost done with air just because we are approaching the mountaintop where it is a bit thinner.
Yesterday we got our new 171 form in the mail from immigration, which is the almost-last piece of the puzzle. Unfortunately, it said that our fingerprints expired a week ago, despite our re-visit last month. Shasta immediately jumped into action, making me scan the letter while she emailed our agency coordinator. Then she jumped up and hit the ceiling with her fist before running out into the yard and tearing a tree from the ground with her bare hands.
Today, we got a post-it note from Immigration, along with a new copy of the 171 with a valid expiration date. The note said, basically, “My bad.” I haven’t actually SEEN this letter, but Shasta seems satisfied. She has put the letter somewhere I can’t get my dirty hands on it. She somehow has the idea I might mess it up just because I threw yesterday’s letter into the trash before she got home. What can I say? My father taught me not to leave clutter on the kitchen counter and we got a lot of junk mail yesterday . . .
Shasta and I are a great team.
All of the following is true, though it felt like a dream, but that’s how my life always is anyhow . . .
I felt very lucky this week, and also shamed –my friend and co-worker MAX called me on my way home and asked, “You interested in calling in tomorrow and going to see [a certain political figure]? My sister got me two tickets for his town hall in Lafayette.”
“#$@@ yes, I’m interested,” I said. “I’m in! I’m in!”
I was excited as a little kid because S. and I had tried and failed to see this speaker a month before. We both have been moved by him. I wouldn’t cross the street to see a celebrity and, in person, I probably wouldn’t recognize 90% of the singers or actors on my little iPod, but I admire this politician for all the obvious reasons. Because he’s a good man, I think.
I called S. and told her my plans. “You’ve got to be kidding me!” she said. “I had two students offer me tickets today, but I told them that if they couldn’t get two, then I couldn’t go. You’re going to go without me?”
“Uh, yes,” I said. And somehow– because I am so quietly lucky, because, I guess, if there is any design to the universe, apparently I am supposed to be happy– Shasta easily forgave me for being so selfish and wished me well. Shasta loves me.
And so, Thursday, MAX and I drove up to Lafayette –actually, he drove us, in his big, tinted-window pick up truck, a dirty soda bottle of tobacco juice on his dash (”You realize,” I said, “you rural-working class-son of a (*(&*#, that you ARE the demographic everyone’s talking about now. He’s had the half-race, overeducated, Africa-loving, liberal vote like me for fifteen months.”
Max and his wife named their son after Abraham Lincoln; despite his rough and unshaven appearance, Max is “country” more like Thomas Jefferson than Toby Keith. We had a very good afternoon of rain and far horizon talking before the speech started. Then, I think we were both impressed with how local questions were dealt with. Max and I both work in the prison, so we are, perhaps, a little impatient with crazy people –but the senator, on the other hand, answered one long, strange, story-question about cataract surgery and student loans and a closed LTD plant– he answered it with a huge heart– and was even better with the nine year old girl who asked about school testing and with the law student who asked about the Supreme Court.
It was a good moment. I was glad to feel my life cross, momentarily, with something bigger.
Which reminds me of something great I read this week. I will pass it on, for what it’s worth.
Yesterday, Shasta and I met Jennifer and Jody in person. A beautiful almost-spring day –I had to leave a barber shop with my huge and goofy haircut untouched so we could meet Jennifer and Jody at an Ethiopian restaurant near our house.
I was crabby because I’d wanted to try a new barber shop and after thirty+ minutes in the waiting area, when I got up to leave I looked like I was a pissed off and impatient, but the truth was that I knew Shasta was waiting for me. I’ll go back on Tuesday though; I liked the place. I was the only white person and it was fun to see all these other dads with their little boys sitting in different chairs while the barbers turned them all around. Shasta hates to be late, however, and so we arrived at Abyssinia and looked around the parking lot. Sunlight on the windows and a strong breeze made the junky parking lot outside the Best Buy strip mall seem playful and bright, but we could barely appreciate all that crappy urban beauty because of TIME. And then we met Jennifer and Jody.
Jennifer was very funny and smart in an un-lawyerly way, and came into the restaurant with a boxed and ribboned gift for Shasta and me (a lovely children’s book full of great faces and the world). She and Shasta seem to have a very similar way of preparing for parenthood. After reading Jennifer’s blog and description of her husband, I was expecting someone good at sports, great at DIY projects, uncomplaining, good at math and science –in other words, a walking Y-chromosome. Maybe ten feet tall. Possibly Bigfoot. But Jody was actually very charming, with the trustworthy good looks of a TV anchorman or a pro golfer. As a couple, they seemed like a perfect fit.
In one of those strange parallels of similar people, both Jody and I closed our menus, willing to go along with whatever our wives ordered and then these two, after much indecision, ordered exactly the same things. We ate beef tips and crushed vegetables on the wet enjera bread, talked for a couple hours. Neither Shasta nor I had a camera, but Jody did and the owner took a picture of us.
As Shasta and I drove away, we saw the owner walking past the Best Buy. He was Ethiopian, walking shoulder to shoulder with an older white man we’d seen eating alone in the restaurant. They seemed like friends.
My father, who is one of the smartest people I know, sent me the following article yesterday.
Shankar Vedantam describes race and America in a way that completely makes sense. I’ve had a lot of disturbing conversations on the subject at the prison where I work; I read this essay and wished it was on the sides of buses and printed on McDonald’s menus so everyone could read it and our conversations could be a little different.
I’ll just put it here for anyone who’s interested.
I may not talk about the baby and our lives in terms of merchandise, so much, but Shasta and I are alike in that we both daydream about things related to the baby. I have a list of things I am looking forward to giving our child:
1) Someday I will give him or her the Cross fountain pen my friends in Paris gave me. I was thirty-three years old, adrift and divorced and a failure at work, but I felt, suddenly, very loved. I was sitting at a bar called the Klein Holland, and I opened the box and realized my friends thought of me as a writer and they missed me a little already.
2) I’m going to pass on two arrowheads my grandfather Clayton gave me when I was little. I believe my grandfather found them in the just-plowed fields near Flatrock River, where the Wendel property used to be. They are beautiful: hand-chipped from stone, perfectly edged, with unbroken points. Children today will never find Indian arrowheads on the ground. Not like these.
3) The brass compass my parents gave me one year when I went to summer camp. I remember my parents explaining that if I got lost, I should hold it still and flat and the needle would point to the North. I said, “I need one that points HOME.”
4) My little shelf of favorite books. My friend Jim once gave me a signed copy of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (when I was little, my father told me how much he liked this book and I remember looking forward to being old enough to read it). I’ve also got my signed Maxine Hong Kingston and Jim Harrison.
And maybe someday I’ll have my own books on this shelf, and I’ll be able to pass these on too.
5) I have a signed Frank Frazetta portrait of Kubla Khan. To me, it represents China and fearlessness and also my youth and my friend Mike, who kept this in his secret room for years, then suddenly gave it to me.
6) I have a picture of Shasta frowning at the camera when she was five years old. She gave it to me a few years ago and I love it very much.
7) I have a box of old journals and drawings, a hard drive full of old photos. My mother, so tiny, unable to speak English yet, in an ancient Dallas full of sunlight. My father dressed like the tiny cowboy he hoped to be. My Uncle Thom standing with a basket of fresh tomatoes in an open doorway. My Aunt Sara with her feet up in a little red wagon. I hope that someday our child will open these things and study them. I hope he or she will see my young self –five years old and happy, reading Babar for the first time, or later, so happy in Africa and France, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with people our child has never met—I hope our child recognizes me.
I know my handwriting is illegible, but I hope the pages are fragrant with my life, with all those feelings, and that those moments are somehow loved again.
One piece of merchandise that I am currently mourning is my iPod. An iPod isn’t the kind of thing that has any value five years after you get it, but they are weirdly personal in a way. My last iPod had these words etched on the back: “Africa, America, China/My lonely, lovely head.” This iPod and my dog Tristan have been my constant companions as I walked in the sunrise and sunset this long, daylight savings winter. Tristan is still here, but I, through sheer dumbassery, dropped my iPod from the pocket of my fleece right into a $##$@ TOILET BOWL last night. Shasta is off in New Jersey with her friend Chloe, so now my world is silent.
This post has really gone on too long –but I’m curious: what are some things other people are waiting to give away?
I don’t know if many people are losing sleep over the “cloth vs. disposable” diaper problem, but I suspect Shasta is not the only person researching this and every other aspect of baby-parenthood. I know Jennifer (of Jennifer and Jody) is, for example . . . And the fabulous Rooneys have thought this through too. Anyway, I found this on-line today, and it seems a pretty definitive breakdown of the issue:
I remember reading Superman comics where he would find himself trapped on Bizarro World, a place where a chalky white Superman wore a backwards S and put on glasses to go fight crime. Bizarro Superman spoke like Frankenstein and did everything backward, as did everyone on his planet, so naturally Bizarro World was completely screwed up.
Recently, I’ve felt trapped in Bizarro World.
Since the Reverend Wright controversy, I have heard a lot of people blasting Barack Obama for being secretly angry and hateful toward whites and even America in general. I think that only in Bizarro World could a display of tolerance and openness to other people’s feelings be considered a sign of a candidate’s secret intolerance.
As a man looking at raising a child of color, I appreciated Senator Obama’s speech on race. As a half-Chinese/half-Hoosier wandering goof, I appreciated his reference to his grandmother and the complicated ties that bind us all together. I think that most of the people who are reacting badly to him either a) have not read or heard what he said, or b) live in segregated communities (or families).
My other Superman memory involves a “Superman vs. Muhammad Ali” comic I had. The story involved the two most famous people on earth being forced to box to see which one would face the gladiator sent by an invading army from another galaxy.
I remember –and I still love this moment—that Ali and Superman enter the ring (under a red sun, where Superman would have no powers) and Superman is allowed to keep his costume and cape because “otherwise, many of the spectators from other planets would have too much trouble telling the two apart.”
S. and I had our fingerprints taken today, one of the last things we need to do to make this all happen.
Before we left for the homeland security office, we were all aglow with the moment and took a picture of ourselves. We left without seeing how it turned out, so I drew it in my notebook while we were out. For some reason, I misspelled Ethiopia, but then we got home and it turned out the word was backward in the photograph, as if it were written in a mirror– so maybe it was magic and not stupidity on my part.
Anyway, a big day.
Saturday, S. and I went shopping for a crib. Actually, she’s BEEN shopping for a crib for months. She had been preparing in much the same way the Japanese planned Pearl Harbor. I just went along for the final attack. Somehow I lived to tell the tale. I am the Kamikaze who lived.
Anyway, she picked out a nice one, and I must say I had no idea there had been so many developments in something that is basically half-bed, half-cage. Some cribs resemble nothing so much as little jails. Others look like pirate furniture, like pieces of ships or like they’re made of railroad ties or something, two hundred pounds of wood forming a kind of sandwich around the little mattress. S. picked out a pretty little “distressed” number, a whitewashed hardwood that looks somehow airy and solid both.
S. is obviously the woman for me because only a couple times during those eight hours did I wish I was somewhere else.
I’m not saying I didn’t do a little daydreaming (because that is, I realize, my way) but I also watched S. in action and felt immensely lucky. We stopped for Dairy Queen halfway through the afternoon and I thought, like the poet Lew Welch, “So it comes to this,” and for all the years of wandering around and meeting people and hoping and thinking . . . I was glad it came to this.
I’ve been thinking about my friend and co-worker, Max, whose seven year old daughter came home with her face wet because the kids on the school bus were making fun of her. Her class had been discussing Abraham Lincoln and she brought in a resin bust of Lincoln that Max had made. On the bus, the other girls in her class insisted that her daddy hadn’t made it because it was plastic and then they called her a liar, which made her cry.
I started thinking about the day children make fun of our kid for being black, or acting white, or for being too short or too tall or too happy. I hope to teach our child that he or she is a royal child of Ethiopia, a descendent of Solomon, a prince or princess with an invisible cape of stars.
We are a family of special people, I will say, and if we aren’t like anyone else, that’s because it took ten thousand years for the world to make us and we are special and made for something new. We are airplanes in a world of bicycles, clouds in a world of mountains. I have blood made of the Yangtze and the Ohio Rivers, I’ll tell our child, and Shasta is the smallest and warmest mountain of New Hampshire. And our child is made of love and Africa. We three have original maps and books inside and we are writing stories that have never been heard before.
Also: I was looking at a really great blog the other day and saw a beautiful little sketch that Jana had done of herself and the future. I did a similar one; Shasta added the flowers.
I would love for our child to keep his or her Ethiopian name. I also daydream about other names, of course, but even I know they are mostly impossible for a little Ethiopian boy or girl in Indiana. Or I just can’t imagine my wife going along with them.
I remember when my friend Liz was pregnant. She asked for name ideas. When I only had a couple to offer, she laughed and said, “I know you’re holding back on all the good ones. You’re saving them for yourself, aren’t you?”
Here are some of my favorite names that I know I’ll never be able to use.
For a boy:
Cloud
Crockett
Clayton
Gael
Lancelot
Skyler
Valentine
and, of course, Joe or Zhou.
For a girl:
Morgan LeFey
Do you have any good names you are not using?
Tonight, Gretchen and Brandon are bringing Jayden home from Guatemala.
S. and I met Gretchen and Brandon—what, a year ago? A while back. I’ve eaten half a pizza and two steaks with them and they, in fact, were with us when S. and I saw Juno. As a couple, they are quietly glamorous –Gretchen with a huge smile and lovely self-mocking way (as you can see in her blog) and Brandon handling everything with a quiet masculine grace. S. and I plan to hit the gym (Gretchen emailed Shasta to encourage her to start working out because apparently Jayden already weighs twenty pounds) and then get some Mexican food before coming home to make hot chocolate and stand in the back yard beneath the ruddy orange lunar eclipse. Then, midnight and the plane from Guatemala. Up at four-forty tomorrow morning so I can go to work in the prison. Teach my night class tomorrow night (building up our nest egg) so I can possibly take some unpaid leave when we bring the baby home.
I expect that when they get off the plane tonight, Gretchen and Brandon will be even more tired than I am. But they will be twice as happy.
One other thing –I said so elsewhere on this blog, but I doubt many people saw it—after my long Genghis Khan meditation the other day, I wrote a short letter to Jack Weatherford, the author of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. He wrote back and wished us well with the adoption. So it is all a circle, isn’t it?
Sometimes we feel so separate, and other times, everything is connected.
Three hours later . . . S. did not get home from work until after seven; I still had more preparation to do for my classes, so, of course, we did NOT go to the gym. We did eat some enchiladas verdes and on the way home saw a great, half-eaten, mud-colored moon. We had wanted to meet up with my parents tonight too, but they wisely said we were taking on too much in the middle of the week and they may have been right. We suffer from life-gluttony, sometimes.
It’s not wrong to love life.
Q: Are you excited?
A: I’m so excited that sometimes I feel like a human gumball machine –a goofy little pole with my big head all fragile and see-through. No secrets these days. And all my thoughts are made of candy, not really good for anything except giving to a little boy or girl. A little boy or girl being born in Ethiopia right now.
Q: No, I mean, aren’t you happy?
A: I am happy.
Q: I always talk about Genghis Khan and pan-Asian genocide when I’m happy. What is wrong with you, man?
A: Some kinds of happiness are hard to put into words.
Q: Are you excited about going to Ethiopia?
A: I can’t even begin to say how much I’m looking forward to it. To Africa. The wide, magical sky. A feeling like you’re suspended in mystery. To the familiar and unfamiliar. And the reason we’re going. The happy and frightened walk to the orphanage door. I am looking forward to holding this baby. My son. Or daughter. One time when I was in Central Park, I saw two little kids running as fast as they could toward the carousel. One boy hollered: “I can’t wait! I can’t wait!” I feel the same way.
Q: Are you going to keep the baby’s Ethiopian name?
A: Of course. Well, I want to. If Shasta lets me.
Q: Are you sure?
A: I want to learn how to say and write our child’s name in Amharic. I imagine us sitting in the sun room, where we have the English alphabet stenciled in red letters above the windows, but this child and I will sit there with our journals and my books and I will teach him or her how to write a secret alphabet, in the language of his ancestors, the name he or she has inside. This will be a name not for babysitters or for parent-teacher conferences, but the name between loved ones, the one that will open the universe like a giant door.
Today I was listening to an NPR story about some Oxford scientists who were studying genealogy. Apparently the Y-chromosome passed on in males is completely identical from father to son except in the case of mutation. Because of this, in Europe, scientists had been able to identify a large number of “family groups” that reflected the diversity of cultures and populations there. The scientists took the study to Asia and obtained thousands of blood samples from all across the continent, from Tajikistan through China, etc. only to discover that millions of people were descended from the same man, who had lived about a thousand years ago. The best explanation that 25 scientists could come up with was that it was Genghis Khan. The Mongol empire covered the same area, the existing population was smaller in his day, Genghis Khan was responsible for the mass murder of competing men, and he famously lay with the women of the conquered lands.
I heard this story and a part of me wondered if I, as a Yium and part-Chinese, might be in some way descended from Genghis Khan. I had read a terrific book called Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford, and, goofily, was hoping that I might have some windswept conquering magic inside me. Then a part of me was suddenly sad because whether I was or wasn’t a child of the Great Khan, I wouldn’t be able to pass this on to my son (if we do, indeed, have a son). I won’t be a part of this Y-chromosome delivery service; the thousand year chain-letter stops with me. But then I thought: who cares? There’s nothing precious about my %$#% biology. Everything good about me is something I learned in a book. Or from someone I loved. Everything good about me is something I can give my son or daughter.
And then I remembered and went home and got out out my Jack Weatherford book and found the passage:
he took the unprecedented step of occupying the Jurkin lands and redistributing the remaining members of their group among the households of his own clan. Though some among both clans apparently interpreted this as the Jurkin being taken as slaves, as would have been more in keeping with steppe custom, according to the Secret History, Temujin took them into his tribe not as slaves but as members of the tribe in good standing. He symbolized this by adopting an orphan boy from the Jurkin camp and presenting them to Hoelun to raise in her ger not as a slave boy but as her son. By having his mother adopt the Jurkin boy, as he had her previously adopt one each from the defeated Merkid, Tayichiud, and Tatars, Temujin was accepting the boys as his younger brothers. Whether these adoptions began for sentimental reasons or for political ones, Temujin displayed a keen appreciation of the symbolic significance and practical benefit of such acts in uniting his followers through this usage of fictive kinship. In the same way he took these children into his own family, he accepted the conquered people into his tribe with the possibility that they would share fairly in the future conquests and prosperity of his army.
pp.44-45, the paperback edition
I realized another reason I like Juno.
You watch the movie and you think, no matter how much older or how different you are, you feel like you and Juno should have been friends. You just like her that much. And that’s really powerful for me, I think, because adoptive parents face a lot of mixed feelings about the birth mother . . . We feel gratitude and a kind of helpless tenderness. But we can feel jealous too. And we’re afraid this woman will change her mind. Maybe we’re afraid that someday this person will reappear and confuse or threaten our family. Or we’re afraid this child we love will love this woman more than us. Maybe we’re afraid, too, that this woman herself will hate us. Maybe we feel guilt or that we are bad people because our happiness is based, inevitably, on a tragedy. Sometimes, I feel rotten about things I don’t even believe –like that “Americans think they can buy anything, including other people’s children.” I get sad that people think like this, that people will try to attach ugliness to the most beautiful moments of my life.
How great it is, to meet the character of Juno and feel like we’d be friends. I know she’s imaginary, but to me she represents a woman who will be a great mom someday but needs someone else to love this baby right now. She’s not ready. She’s not able. There are no hard feelings. Some things hurt, it’s true, but nobody loses. There’s mutual gratitude– not mutual resentment—at the heart of this mother handing her baby over. I love seeing trust. And hope.
Some people think life is all about winners and losers, that there is a kind of emotional capitalism at work, only so much happiness to go around, and that we’re all separate.
But life is bigger than that. It’s not about taking, but about living. We share, don’t we? We share everything. Good and bad. That’s what I believe. I’m an emotional Communist.
It was good to see this in a movie, for once.
And that’s all I have to say about Juno.
There have only been a couple times in my life when I was watching a movie and felt: there, that scene, I know exactly how that feels. That’s me. But this morning I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts (www.creativescreenwriting.com) and was reminded of how much I liked the movie Juno.
There are a lot great moments, but the one that really gets me is when Jennifer Garner’s character is waiting for the teenage mother (Juno) to arrive. She’s straightening pictures and the couch, etc. I think maybe a normal reaction is, “Oh, she’s a neat freak. She’s not flexible. She’s a perfectionist. She’s unimaginative, uncreative, the opposite of Juno . . .”
But anyone who has gone through a home visit –seeking approval for an adoption– knows how much you want it and how helpless you are. How much you want to be let into the parent club, and how humbled you are. You try so hard to make everything perfect. You are completely powerless. You are going to be judged. You will do anything. You invite a stranger into your home. You really want this person to like you. You want so much, and the only thing you can do is make some coffee and smile.
During this scene, I had to look away. I looked at the bright green EXIT sign in the corner of the theater. Because I felt myself remembering Shasta the day our social worker came to see the house and it was all just quietly heartbreaking in a good way.
I won’t put my political thoughts on this blog; I see that as a separate conversation. After today. I found this when I was web-surfing, tracking Super-Tuesday. I think it is just, absolutely, completely, great.
I left out so many good ones! I will make a new list at some point down the road.
Superman is still my favorite –because he was from a completely different culture, a planet, even –and, quite frankly, he was a million times closer to perfect than his adopted family was (he could fly and lift tractors, etc.)(they were simple Kansans) but you never read a story where Superman wishes he were back on Krypton. He’s happy. He grows up to be great. And Ma Kent keeps a secret scrapbook full of all Superman’s adventures, even though she can never show anybody who only knows her as “Clarks’ mom.”
Now, if only Superman wasn’t so white.