January, The Epiphany

If I were a better person, I wouldn't admit this.

But my favorite part of Christmas happened when Maggie and Cliff returned to school after the holiday break. I didn't need another sack of flour or spool of ribbon. Nothing was left to mail.

I sat down with a cup of coffee and listened to my New Age holiday CDs that cleverly disguise carols behind flutes and strings.  Without feeling stressed, I gazed at the decorations.

Because I'm a storyteller by nature, I've always created a plot line for every arrangement displayed, but this year I rushed to cover the surfaces. Things were pulled from boxes and clustered around whatever was already there. As Maggie had handed pieces to me, I mentioned I wanted to write something about it all.


She was quiet for a long time and said, "You know you've ended up with an Asian-Fusion approach."

"Isn't that something about cooking?" I asked. We're devoted fans of the Food Network.

"I think that's Asian-infused, Mom."

I panicked. Because Maggie is forever politically correct, I feared I'd made a mistake. "Have I committed that horrible 'cultural appropriation'?" (She once explained that referred to the idea that children learn about other cultures by playing dress up--white children with painted faces and feathers in their hair, pretending to be American Indians. Terribly offensive.)

She assured me I hadn't crossed a line.

So I've taken time to see what she meant, and sure enough, our standard Asian things were indeed thematically entwined with the traditional frou-frou. Our Chinese lady lamp oversaw the Christmas tree. A glass pagoda became a stable. Angels decorated the deer, paused by an unfolded fan. Stone lions protected the Holy Family.

When I told Maggie I wasn't sure how to connect the dots into a clear thesis, she asked why it had to mean something. She said it made her happy to see her favorite Chinese pieces among the Christmas things. Shouldn't that be enough?

It was not lost on me that I finally understood her point on January 6th, The Epiphany. I would not be the first adult to be enlightened by a child. All kinds of things are a wonder on their own, just because they are. Just because they make us happy. 

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Human Heartbeats

It's odd the things you don't think of when you adopt a baby. It never occurred to us that Maggie would be any less our daughter than a biological daughter would be.

But now I realize people think all kinds of odd things about adopted children. 

My husband recently listened to a friend talk about his first grandchild and the wonders of the experience.  Then the friend said, "But I know it won't be like this for you because your daughter is adopted."

What?  She isn't really our daughter so any children of hers wouldn't really be our grandchildren?  Therefore, we couldn't possibly love them completely?  We couldn't feel an equivalent happiness to that of a genetically spawned extended family?

Do divorced people who remarry ever get told they can't really love the new spouses because only a first marriage is a real marriage? No one ever writes about that kind of love being non-transferable.

Yet some children are more real than others in the minds of some.

There are plenty of things I don't believe in, but I do believe love is love. The same love that makes you smile also makes you cry. It floats your spirit just as easily as it sinks it. It isn't measured with a different set of rulers.

If your baby cries, you don't run faster in the night to a biological baby than you do to an adopted one. The human heart moves at the same speed.

The power of adoptive love is captured in Ladybug Love by Kat Lamons and Trish Diggins. They offer 100 charming vignettes from adoptive families on the day they were contacted about their match with a baby in China. That tiny picture they receive of a child on the other side of the world causes smiles and tears that rival those in a hospital delivery room. Without a caption, who could tell the difference in the parents' faces?

The book contains sweet stories about the goodness of mail carriers and adoption agency staff who sometimes faced extreme challenges to deliver the news about a long-awaited baby. There are difficult accounts about the agony of governmental delays, crippling self-doubts, and years of bitter disappointments. International adoption is not an easy path. But more importantly, they provide a firsthand account of joy when the parents learn the news in a grocery store or a garden or an office cubicle. Who would say theirs is a lightweight joy?

I looked up details about the human heart. They are all about the same size and beat approximately 100,000 times per day. It didn't say they beat faster or grew heavier for biological children than for adopted children.

Love for a child weighs the same in any heart.

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December 2013

When Cliff and I moved from Tulsa to Wisconsin, I wrote a Holiday letter to let everyone know how we were doing. It became a tradition. We aren't folks who get sales bonuses or athletic trophies to announce, and based on Maggie's trepidation through her finals, we won't be flying a valedictorian flag anytime soon either. Still, we might have something worth reporting. 

Dear Everyone,

This is an old and embarrassing thing to say, but I think we all looked better when we used to get dressed up, like women wearing white gloves to restaurants. My dad wore a suit to see The Ten Commandments. My closet held plaid dresses with matching sweaters. We paid attention to little things. While you know I’m not especially religious, I have to say I believe God is in the details. By the time I stopped teaching, students no longer knew common expressions like easy as pie, smart as a whip, asleep at the wheel. Lost cultural details. They didn’t know why it mattered either.  LOL My mother used to love saying: When it rains, it pours. It covered a lot of territory. It set a recognizable theme. Well, we’ve had showers and storms this year and weathered them all.

After over 40 years in education, Cliff has finally begun thinking his favorite season is summer.  Free of a MN winter that lasted 7 months, he set off on a solo camping trip to Yellowstone in July. When a deluge of rain left standing water in our basement, Maggie and I called him for back-up. After 4 clear nights under the stars, he hurried home, finishing out his vacation with a few nearby fishing excursions--in water he could manage easily.

Now a high school junior, Maggie landed a summer job at a neighborhood movie theater where she found Prince Charming working beside her. He has all the best traits of every great boy I ever taught. Sitting between us through her 2-hour fall concert to hear her sing one solo line, he announced her talented and brave. When he declared our album collection prime, Cliff exclaimed, “The son I always wanted!” Energetic and spontaneous, he’s perfect for our buttoned-down, organized daughter. In the spring, she went with friends to the State Capitol for the vote to allow gay marriage. When the vote was delayed, she called me in a panic because she needed to be at rehearsal since she was the stage manager. Dodging cross-bearing protestors and rainbow-flag supporters, I remembered my dad’s driving antics during I-75’s first traffic jam to get me to the Beatles’ Cincinnati concert. You do what it takes. She was disappointed about missing the celebration’s high point and her compatriots’ unwillingness to attend the important rehearsal and sighed, “It’s tough to have a moral compass.” She has no idea where she wants to attend college and says understandably, “I’m still trying to do high school.” If she holds onto that compass, we don’t think it will much matter where she ends up.

Although Cliff usually takes the prize for medical emergencies, I got my turn last month. He was raking leaves in the front yard while I snipped dead stems in the garden. I carried the bags to the alley, stepped through the garage door into the back yard, and had no idea what to do. Blank. Something was terribly wrong. After a night in the hospital and an array of tests, they declared I had experienced Transient Global Amnesia. It was a frightening 2 ½ hours of not being able to retrieve information I knew I should know. As I searched drawer after drawer, every mental file was empty. I cried and asked the same questions repeatedly. I couldn’t hold onto anything. Then it was over. Cliff said it was like me to have some incredibly rare, highly dramatic diva disorder. I now wrestle with the metaphorical implications of a brain that throws up its hands and says, “Enough!” I think I exhaust myself to high heaven.

So we’re taking a close look at our emotional weather this year and feeling pretty grateful. We're now dry as a bone, but there’s a lot to be learned from storms. Maggie’s favorite movie, when she was little, was Singin’ in the Rain. She couldn’t get enough of “the happy man,” as she called him, dancing in the puddles in that nice suit and hat. It stands to reason that her favorite room plaque says: Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning to dance in the rain. 

We’re trying. We hope you are, too.

Love,
Karen 

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A Wedding By Any Other Name

When we moved to Minnesota from North Carolina, Maggie noticed something different about her new middle school.

"There are lots of gay teachers up here," she said.  We explained that her last school had gay teachers, too, but they had to keep it secret in order to hold their jobs in a narrow-minded community.

She was incredulous.  So when she reached high school, she joined the Gay-Straight Alliance.

Fairness and honesty have always mattered to her. As a Chinese adoptee growing up in America, she's no stranger to racism, prejudice, ignorance, intolerance. Pick your poison.

For over two years, she's been a dedicated, enthusiastic ally and is now the vice president. She helped create a school-wide activity to challenge gender stereotyping. She worked to pass state legislation allowing gay marriage.

Last Saturday she celebrated her efforts at a wedding for one of her school's gay teachers.

The prelude included John Lennon's Imagine, and the processional was What a Wonderful World, made famous by Louis Armstrong. When the couple lighted the unity candle with their separate candles, the new flame leaped brilliantly.

Fire passes no judgment. Love is love in the presence of light.

These two wonderful men had a typical church wedding. Flowers and scripture readings. Rings and programs. Lunch and toasts. There was not, however, a poofy-dressed bride and a chorus line of bridesmaids. Honestly, I appreciated that.

The absence of sequins and satin kept us focused on their promise and their dream, a dream that any straight couple can take for granted.

At one point in the service, the pastor's blessing said: "...as you walk toward a horizon that never comes." I keep thinking about her words. Maybe she referred to the religious concept of life being eternal, even after death, for those who accept Jesus as Savior. That's certainly fine, but I've never been a stamp-pad hereafter Christian.

Instead of thinking about the next life, I think about her words in terms of this life as a road we're following into the distance, toward a better life on earth.  But if we experience life thoughtfully and bravely, we discover the journey doesn't end in a watercolored sunset on the horizon.  Rather, we keep finding new roads with even greater challenges.  Our ambitions expand because our courage soars, one success at a time.

Something seemingly impossible always awaits us.

My father used to say that I couldn't see the forest for the trees whenever I was stuck in the learning ditch. I had a tendency to be stopped by a single pine. He wanted me to understand the beauty up ahead.

Last Saturday Maggie witnessed that beauty up ahead with David and Tim.

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Here Be Dragons

Ancient cartographers wrote Here Be Dragons to indicate unexplored territories and their imagined dangers. Fair warning, I guess, if you enter mysterious lands.

I’ve lived plenty of places in my life and every one of them is a mapped dot —a city in a county in a state. Nothing mysterious is left.

But I tell you this. No place ever mentions the squirrel hazard. The scary creatures haunt me.

In Oklahoma they chewed through the handle of the hose mobile. An elderly neighbor told me the salt from people’s hands attracted them. That gnawed handle, dangling unattractively, drove me crazy. Cliff said he could fix it, but I’ve been through that before—a man with a roll of duct tape. It’s never pretty.

In Wisconsin they ate my fall pumpkins on the porch our first year there. In subsequent years I carried each pumpkin inside during the night and kept watch throughout the day. Finally I got tired. The squirrels were waiting for me to surrender. They knew my kind.

In Illinois they chewed the pretty wood planters I special ordered.  Their white-picket styling matched our new fence.  Filled with pink geraniums and ferns, they would have caught Martha Stewart’s eye if she’d ever happened by, lost from Connecticut.  The hardware store clerk swore by sour apple spray. It worked, but I couldn’t keep it up.  It rained.  We went on vacation.  The squirrels waited me out.

In North Carolina our yard was filled with birds, so Maggie and I took on an outdoor winter craft project. (I read you were supposed to do that kind of thing with kids.  Otherwise they’d become teenagers with everything pierced and tattooed.) We gathered pine cones, covered them in peanut butter, rolled them in bird seed, and hung them from plant hooks. It was good, sticky fun. The birds were thrilled. 

Then one morning a genius squirrel figured it out. There in our yard, with his friends gathered, he set up Cirque de Squirrel. I couldn’t believe his agility, his relentless approaches. He set that pine cone swinging with his feet, grabbed on, and flew off the hook with it. He had learned well the laws of physics from his time at Harvard. 

In Minnesota I've finally learned that polyurethane spray banishes squirrels from pumpkins until the freezing rain finally wears it off. By then Thanksgiving is over and orange is no longer trendy.  At last.  I won.

But here’s what I didn't know when we bought this house. The real estate description sheet should have been marked: Here Be Squirrels and Such.  Apparently we’re on an ancient wildlife trail that makes our property irresistible.  Something gnawed two places in the new fence in order to pass through. The landscaping crew thought it was raccoons. Then something started eating the new plants, apparently thinking we’d installed a salad bar for their evening enjoyment on their journey through our yard. The same crew figured it was rabbits. I bought 100% guaranteed Bunny Barrier, a mix of despicable bagged herbs. Hung at nose level (One hangs on the arm of our Chinese statue.), it successfully shooed them away.

I was feeling proud of myself until Cliff noticed the hostas at the far end of the yard. The largest leaves were gone; only their stems remained. Clearly the herbal odor didn’t reach that far.

“What will you do now?” he asked.

“Nothing. At the end of the day, we all have to make a living.”

It’s important to know when you’re beaten, when to throw in the towel, when to fold your cards.

I’d take my chances with a dragon any day.

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Sudden Angels Part 3: A Voice from the Closet Floor

If you're lucky, you meet a sensational person at some point in your life.  I mean larger-than-life sensational.  Unforgettable.  Someone who picks you up and turns you around before you ever know your feet are off the floor.

Florence Parry Heide, legendary children's author, was that person for me.

It was 1988 and I had moved to Racine, Wisconsin, and mentioned to a friend that I was writing picture book manuscripts.  The next thing I knew she'd arranged for me to have coffee at Florence's home in the neighboring town of Kenosha. This was not any house either.  It was a massive Tudor on Lake Michigan.  Florence swept me inside, all smiles and grace and good cheer.  She was the most distinctly defined presence I had ever encountered.  Tall and glorious, with a ringing laugh and conspiratorial tone that made you think you were in a 1940s movie with Jimmy Stewart about to enter on cue.

We sat in front of the fireplace in matching upholstered chairs with coffee and cookies on the ottoman between us.  She zipped through my story, looked me in the eye, and said, "I think you have promise."  She gave me a long list of editors, explained how to go about writing a cover letter, toured me through her office with the walls lined with her books, and assured me I could do this, too.

The woman never lost faith in me.  She was the most relentlessly optimistic person I'd ever met.  There were times when she might be uncertain about the trajectory of her own career, but she'd brush those doubts aside to focus on my projects and her certainty about them.

Her certainty in me lasted twenty years.  This was a woman who was in it for the long haul. 

One time I dissolved in tears over constant rejection and she plainly said, "If you stop sending stories out, I promise you will never be published.  No editor will ever call you."

She was right, of course.

Her letters arrived out of the blue, typed in her signature ee cummings style of random exclamation points, ellipses, capital letters, and flag-flying commas.  She always drew a balloon because she said ideas were floating just above us.  All we had to do was reach up and grab one.

Any time!...!  Go ON!!!  It's Yours!!!  Are you looking up NOW??!

And you did.

She was writing and publishing until her death in 2011 at the age of 92.  She was absolutely unstoppable until the very end.

I don't expect to have that kind of gigantic presence in my life ever again.

But then a month ago, she reappeared.  Or rather a note from her reappeared on my closet floor.  It was a card she'd sent when one of her last books, Princess Hyacinth (The Surprising Tale of a Girl Who Floated) was published.  She enclosed a note.

My mother enclosed this message in her Christmas card nearly forty years ago.  This is exactly the way I feel--at ninety.

So I'm 85.  So I'm old.  So I'm slowing down.  
So what?
For each year that has been added to my life has carried an extra dividend: each day an extra gift of sights and sounds and wonders.
And happenings: the successes of my children, the promise of my grandchildren, who carry in them the seeds of my own past; the endurance of friendships; the changing seasons which each year unfold their miracles of beauty and their promise to return.
Thus is every pain and sorrow and regret cancelled out by the awareness of life's bounty.
And above all I cherish the glorious gift of memory--and the certainty that nothing--nothing--can ever be lost.

On a difficult day when I most needed a reminder, it arrived.  It can be logically explained, of course, given the disarray of my closet, but Florence would be uninterested in that kind of logic.

She'd give me a wink and say, "Just reach up, Karen!!! NOW...W...W!"  

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Fifth Grade: Fifty-Year Puzzle

A lot of things happened in Mrs. Wilson's classroom. Some of it must have been good, but I remain haunted by one incident. I was only ten, and I still struggle to understand it.

Our class was assigned to do the February school newsletter. Various students visited kindergarten through sixth grade teachers to collect information. Some talked to the principal, the nurse, the band leader, the cafeteria staff. It was the primitive era of mimeograph machines and typewriters.  Pages were stapled together. Photography wasn't possible, so everything had to be drawn by hand.

The front cover art assignment was the plum. I wanted to do it.

When Mrs. Wilson asked me to stay after school for a minute, I knew it had to be good. It was. She showed me a cover from several years ago and said, "I'd like you to draw profiles of Washington and Lincoln like this." I was excited because I knew my art would be better.

The picture she showed me was really "young." You would never have guessed who the two men were without labels. I knew a side view of an eye did not look like an oval. I knew a nose did not look like a banana. I knew an ear was not a curve. Mine would be realistic.

When I got home, I studied their profiles on coins and began drawing and erasing and starting again and again until they were perfect. When my parents proudly announced my work looked exactly like the presidents, I was thrilled. I left my picture on Mrs. Wilson's desk the next morning.

She asked me to stay after school again. I knew she'd be happy.

"This isn't what I asked you to do, Karen," she said.

"But it is," I insisted. "You asked me to draw Washington and Lincoln."

"I wanted it to look like this," she said, holding up the childish version.

"I can draw better than that," I said. "Mine really looks like the presidents."

"I know you can make yours look exactly like this one.  Do it over tonight."

My face flushed. I was confused. By the time I walked home, I was crying. I told my mother what Mrs. Wilson had said.

"Why would she want me to draw like a baby?  Why wouldn't she want me to do my best?"

My mother leaned against the kitchen counter with her arms folded. She was silent for a long time as she looked at me. This was not like her. My mother was a chatty, bustling woman with the energy of five people. It was unusual for her to be still and quiet at the same time.

"This will be a hard lesson," she said.  "You're awfully young to be running up against it, honey."

She told me there were people in the world who wouldn't be interested in my best efforts. She said some would be resentful. She said they wouldn't understand my determination. Doing things my way, not their way, would irritate them. She said I might be right but that it wouldn't matter. They wanted what they wanted and my arguments wouldn't make any difference. She said the more I resisted, the more insistent they'd be to prove their point at any cost.

She said I'd have to learn when I could back down or compromise or hold fast.

She said that being true to myself would come at a price sometimes.

"You'll have to decide if you'll stand by your work or not, Karen."

I told Mrs. Wilson I would not re-draw it. She got another classmate to do it exactly the way she wanted it.

To this day, I remain baffled. Why would she want me to be mediocre?

I asked my husband Cliff, who was a sensational teacher before he became a principal.  I have never seen him be wrong about any aspect of education.  He said, "You're trying to make sense where there is none." He told me about Harry Chapin's song, "Flowers Are Red," where a little boy drew a page of flowers and leaves in every possible color and refused to change it for the critical teacher who responded:

Well, the teacher said, "You're sassy.
There's ways that things should be.
And you'll paint flowers the way they are.
So repeat after me."

And she said, "Flowers are red, young man.
And green leaves are green.
There's no need to see flowers any other way
Than the way they always have been seen."

There really is no sense to what happened to me or to the little boy. Some things in life are not about talent or happiness or what my daughter calls "the magical rainbow universe." It's about understanding when to draw a line in the sand.

I drew mine. Mrs. Wilson drew hers. And that's the long and the short of it. 


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