Superscreamer

I might not have been as happy as my parents about our new situation initially. They nicknamed me Superscreamer. As they tell it, they had to close the windows of their tiny A-frame cottage, even in the stuffy humidity of that September, so that the neighbors wouldn't think they were beating their new baby.

My parents had waited far longer than I had, of course. Looking for the beginning of the story is like turning toward the first pages of a book and finding always more pages in between. We might start with the letters I found as an eighteen-year-old, looking through some old papers. In these carbon copies of correspondence, my parents wrote to a missionary my mother’s family knew in Korea. He had built an orphanage in Korea after finding a little girl in a dump (JS, that was the one!), and the letters to him speak of my parents’ excitement, youth, and hopefulness. Then, later, he writes, “I’m sorry some months have gone by. I could not remember whether you wanted a boy or a girl, how old, and full-blood Korean or mixed?” My parents write back immediately: “We would like a little girl, as young as possible, Korean. We even have a name picked out.” But these letters are dated three years before I was born.

Or we might start the story with my parents’ marriage after a sweet Sixties courtship; they met “cruising the Ave”—driving up and down the long street in their town as high school students did then, parking their cars in the angled spaces under the big, gentle trees to talk and flirt. My mother was with her friends, and my father was with his, and my mother’s friend liked my dad, but my dad liked my mom. They dated for a year and got engaged on the last white Christmas South Jersey saw until thirty years later, the Christmas my sister was married.

They had a pretty fall wedding, and six weeks later, on Thanksgiving day, my mother’s doctor called and told her to check herself into the hospital. Twenty years old and impetuous, she said she would do no such thing on Thanksgiving, and she arrived on Monday. She had a biopsy that suggested cancer and went back into surgery for another biopsy. While the doctor was “in there,” he did a complete hysterectomy. She awoke unable to have children, seven weeks’ married. When I was old enough to be curious but still small enough to be insensitive, I asked her, “Did you cry, Mommy?” “For weeks.” But my mother always told me that she thought the reason she had had cancer was so that she would have me and my sister—not just two daughters, but us particularly. And so I even loved to hear that story; it was the story of how we became a family.

Arrivals

When I was about two days old, I was abandoned on a street in Seoul, South Korea, and found by a passerby. (If you've heard this story from JS, you may have heard that I was found in a dump. That wasn't me. A streetcorner is much more prestigious.) The records from the adoption agency are terse on this point, leaving space for the kinds of questions that really don’t make a difference, but that spin out from such a tiny, astonishing fact. I used to wonder whether it was a populated street or a side street, as if the busy-ness of the street might signify whether they intended me to be found. I considered this question like a clue in a mystery story. When I think about that day even now (to the extent I do), I imagine a dark street at dawn, a man placing a bundle on the sidewalk and scurrying away, returning to a woman recovering from childbirth to tell her, “It’s done.” In my imagination, those moments take place in the still-dark hours of early morning, like the scenes in a movie that is actually going to be about something else, filmed in an entirely different style. After the dark, furtive preface comes an abrupt scenic shift to the bright lights and excitement of an all-American childhood, which brings the relief of the familiar and the optimistic.

As a small child, I always thought of my life as having begun five months after my birth, when I arrived at JFK International Airport in New York City. The story of that day, which I loved to hear my mother tell when I was small, goes like this: After a week of anxiously waiting “on pins and needles!” my parents and grandparents piled into the car and drove the three and a half hours to New York. Even now, I can’t imagine what that day must have been like—my experience with life-changing events has been that they seem impossibly ordinary. The photographs show a big window with a view of the tarmac, on which the long Pan American airplane had come to rest. Standing in front of the window, my mother wears a red dress and a necklace with big white beads; she says that when she held me, I put them in my mouth. My mother’s all-time favorite photograph comes from that day—it’s the one my father took as the attendant handed me to her. She is sobbing as she reaches out to take the solemn-looking infant with the lopsided head into her arms. In the next picture, my dad is wearing a brown polyester shirt with a big collar into which his long hair hangs. Looking at the pictures now, he says with wonderment in his voice, “I can’t believe they gave a baby to people who dressed like us.”

C, Plus

Continued

Vowing to destroy someone was exactly the kind of thing that C would do, as I learned the following year when our elementary schools graduated us into the same junior high.After a few months, we had somehow become friends, which meant that I witnessed a number of daring evasions, as well as the schemes that necessitated them. Once, when my mother came to pick a bunch of us up from school, all of my other friends and I clambered in and found ourselves waiting for C.Last anyone had seen him, he had been darting through the school halls, with a sizable bully in lumbering pursuit.Bored, we watched the double doors to the building, and at last they burst open to reveal C beaming triumphantly (and unharmed) from a wheelchair pushed by the school nurse, the bully fuming in impotent rage as he rolled safely past. “What is wrong with that kid?” my mother muttered exasperatedly as she started the van, and she wasn’t talking about the bully.

Another time, when a pack of us had secured our parents’ permission to go to the movies and were waiting for our show to begin, C called out (for no reason I can recall) to a much older, bigger teenager surrounded by his own friends, “Hey buddy, has science figured out a name for you yet?”It took some fast talking by another friend of ours to keep C's limbs attached to his body; specifically, I think he told the big guy that C was mentally retarded.

By far C's most successful scheme that seventh grade year was his invention of an aristocracy.One day he simply assigned titles to all of his friends—mine was Countess of Calculations.We were in Miss D’s biology class, and my lab partner, who had known and been irritated by C since infancy, was suddenly begging for a better title.Even the bully who had stood fuming by the door of the school as the wheelchair rolled by was imploring him for an improvement to his station.

The next year, he discovered the music to The Phantom of the Opera.He found in the story of the outcast virtuoso some exposition of the world he, an eighth grader at Memorial High School, inhabited.He learned the music by heart and regularly invoked its themes and phrases, his favorite of which was, “SO!It is to be war between us!”He declared war on O, a small, fretful, argumentative boy, and on various other kids at different times that year.By that time, I was, if not an ally, at least permitted my neutrality.

And so it went, with C smilingly visiting war on all those who were conventional, unreasonable, or irritatingly slow.The particular targets of his wrath were the teachers who pressed boring or pointless assignments on us. Our ninth-grade English teacher forced us to read an abridged version of A Tale of Two Cities, and when she discovered that I had in my bookbag the unabridged version (why miss out?), she held it up and said to the class, "Ohh--our book isn't good enough for Tara!" C had discovered a powder that produced green slime when hydrated, and he sprinkled it generously into the water fountain outside her classroom so that the drain erupted in slime when anyone turned it on.One day, the principal stalked the halls determined to identify the culprit, and our favorite teacher, Mrs. H., pretended not to know who it was.She enjoyed him even as she was appalled by the sagging, stained backpack full of crumpled papers into which he would reach when she asked for our history homework.I don’t know whether he did much homework that year; of course, I did all of mine, a habit he tolerated in me with a touch of sympathy, as one would regard a limp, a twitch.

I remember everything (except how we became friends, strangely enough); these moments form some of my most vivid memories from that period of my life.It may seem odd that they feature somebody else as the star actor, but I think my own character was formed against C’s in some important ways.He did things I would never do: He jumped out of his chair in geography class to declare “Busted!” when disproving an answer that our teacher had accepted from a favorite student, a giggling, blushing girl. He licked a trashcan for a dime, or for the notoriety (not one of his finer moments).Nobody knew quite what to make of him.Of all the ways we deal at that precarious age with our loneliness, the heartbreaking discovery of our separateness, his exuberant defiance seemed for many years to me dazzling, unforgettable.

Spontaneous Questioning

A hasty introductory note as I head out the door: When Julie was here this week, we talked about how I wanted to be more disciplined about a writing project I've been meaning to start. It was one of the original purposes of my blog, but I've been avoiding it, I think. Anyway, here's the first installment, to be continued:

The first time we met, C. vowed to destroy me. That he nearly succeeded years later had little to do with his original vow, way back when we were in the sixth grade and competing in a program for gifted students called Olympics of the Mind. The geeky grandiosity of the name describes the program precisely, especially in its mid-1980s incarnation. In those years, at least in our small town in South Jersey, the population served by middle-school gifted educational programs was not known for its social grace or sense of style. What distinguished us then—what probably still does, though we’ve hopefully acquired better people-skills and less obtrusive wardrobes—was our utter seriousness of purpose. Contrive for us an awkward challenge (“Create a cave drawing during a six-minute skit featuring Cro-Magnon man!”) or demand a litany of bizarre and useless “creative” answers (“List uses for a paper clip!” “Name different kids of light!”) and we would hurtle ourselves after the task, like puppies eager to prove our love for bones.

It was that latter event, called Spontaneous Questioning, that got me into trouble. I don’t remember the question from that day, but I remember the way Spontaneous Questioning always ran. I remember feeling intensely alert, holding my breath almost, as my four teammates and I entered the empty classroom and faced the two judges whose authority we knew to be absolute--even if, as we discovered, their knowledge of the rules was occasionally suspect. In retrospect, I suppose those poor adults, culled from the ranks of the willing or just the naïve, found themselves poorly equipped to deal with a bunch of hyped-up pre-adolescents, back in those days before Ritalin had achieved its current popular distribution. And so as we pricked up our ears and leaned hard against our leashes, they’d read the question haltingly, and we’d pounce.

After hearing the question, our team would have a fixed amount of time to provide as many answers as we could. The first and maybe second times your own turn came around were easy, and then if you got stuck, your team's precious seconds ticked by until you plucked something out of thin air: paperclips could be earrings; lite yogurt might count, might even win a bonus point for creativity. After all the teams had competed, the team with the most answers won the event, and the individual student with the best answers got a special prize. When C. and I shared the award that year, I think he felt cheated out of half the glory he had come to expect for himself.

Ludic

Adj: of, relating to, or characterized by play; playful

A charming word!

Lost, Found

I haven't posted in a few days because I've been very, very busy alternating between a good pace at work and completely slothful self-indulgence at home. I've decided to get up at 6:00 for the discipline, as well as the novelty of seeing that early part of the morning every day for a month (you know, the part of the day when Mr. Frank is getting 'round to his lunch).

My summer school class is going well--I have an exceedingly good-natured bunch. This morning they suffered through 90 minutes of sentence repair and were still snickering at the errors in the textbook's exercises by the end. These days have a nice rhythm (in theory at least): teaching in the mornings, and research time in the afternoons.

In my spare time--as well as some un-spare--I've been watching the TV show Lost. Because I'm one of the last two people in America who watches TV but hasn't seen Lost, I have the delight of two seasons worth of shows to catch up on and have been consuming the episodes at a rate I probably shouldn't even confess to in public.

The premise of the show involves 14 major characters and a crowd of extras who have been stranded on a tropical island following a plane crash. Because their plane had gone off its flight plan, no one came to rescue them. The characters' backstories are told through flashback, and many of them have questioned whether their suffering on the island is punishment for their past, or whether they have something they need to learn. It strikes me as interesting that even in a world where there is virtually no theological acknowledgement of God, the question of fate, free will, and punishment still surfaces.

These questions seem to come from within us, not from the Bible or from any particular theological framework, and yet when the questions emerge in a religious context, they're often met with a terrified defensiveness. When I teach the writings of the Puritans, I often find that students are put off by the Puritans' explicit discussions of their own guilt or original sin or depravity; for the students, this burden seems simply too heavy for the psyche to bear. But it seems to me that theology teaches us not that we are guilty--don't we know that ourselves, in the deep recesses of our hearts, in the backs of the closets of our minds?--but that there is an answer for our guilt. It's troubling that we've learned that to be told we are sinful is such a terrible insult, or such a damaging claim, that we can't bear to hear it, for we then can't be relieved of the hold it retains in its secret place.

Esprit d'escalier

I should have titled that last post "child labor," just to beat Lee to the pun.

Amusing Ambiguity

The New York Times today has a sentence discussing the part-time jobs a high-school student undertook to pay for a trip overseas: " To help her parents pay the $1,500 cost, she worked as a baby and a cat sitter during the school year."

I love that! When not working as a cat-sitter, she worked as a baby. [For others like me who geek out on such technicalities, it should read "as a baby- and a cat-sitter."]