Return to sender

She had spent hours making a doll for a child whom she had seen at an orphanage in Mexico. She documented the doll's making, the fabrics it was made from, the hands that made it, its first visit to the hairdresser, its passport (which she even had stamped by the passport authorities on its first trip abroad), and first encounter with its young new mother in a book.
She visited the child regularly and saved the book for years to remind herself, and eventually the child, of the significance of time in becoming aware of our ourselves and of the world around us. When she believed that the time had come - that she and the child were ready to learn from it, she brought the book to the orphange. But child was gone.
The personnel took the book (the only manuscript) and said that they would give it to the child, but since they didn't know where the child had gone, they put it in the trash. When she wrote later to find out if the child had received the book, her mail was returned.

Nunzilla revisited

Life seemed particularly secure, and exciting, that first year on Harborview Drive. He looked forward to starting at a public school, a Junior High School, and to making new friends. He also liked having his father around home more often, working together in the garden, and doing carpentry. He even began to appreciate Sunday mornings again. He liked going to the bakery after mass to pick up bear claws, a peach cobbler, or a cinnamon-almond wreath, and then sharing the thick comic section of the Sunday Chronicle. Death – including comic death - had yet to appear on his map of the world.

His sisters had recently begun to initiate him to some of the snags to expect growing up. They had told him hair-raising stories about the nuns at his old school who didn’t like boys, especially the older ones. They had warned him about women who seemed to be perfectly virtuous, but who actually took great pleasure in watching boys cry, not from physical pain, but from wounded pride. They also tried to describe some of the devious games that the nuns played to trick boys into believing that they were inferior. He didn’t really understand, but was nevertheless glad that he had managed to change schools in time, and avoid whatever torture he might have been slated to encounter.

N..... in the woodpile, con't.

His older sisters knew he was cute too. Though they would have preferred a younger sister to share in their play, they were pleased that they could count on him to pass for a younger sister. He even let hem dress him up in a skirt and a blouse, and put a scarf on his head. It was undoubtedly their indulgence and coddling that suckered him, and so he willingly went along with them when they went knocking on the neighbors’ doors. For him it was like a game of ’trick or treat’. When he was introduced as their new little sister and neighbors appeared delighted to see them, it meant that the costume in which they had decked him out had been a good choice. In their own way, or was it the way they had been taught, they were looking after him.

These games ended abruptly one night when the girls managed to hoist him out of his crib and carry him into their bedroom, to play house. The plan was to deposit him in the family heirloom cradle that was used for their dolls, but he kept trying to wriggle and squirm out. They knew that they had gone too far when it didn’t help to strap him in place, and he began to cry.

Gradually the tactic he adopted to avoid subservience was to go literally into a spin. By rapidly pirouetting with extended fists, his arms were quickly transformed into invisible blades. Anyone who ventured into the circumference of this human fan risked mutilation.

N..... in the woodpile

What is it that Anna, his daughter, sees in old photos of her father as a toddler? "He's so cute," she says.

Does he, as a young boy, remind her of her own innocence and vulnerability? His mother used to call him her “nigger in the woodpile", alluding to his dark hair, swarthiness and charm. "He's so much like his father," she used to say. Or is it that his appearance as a young boy is void of anything as devastating as the poverty and insecurity of slavery or war, the realities of the Great Depression or World War II, much less the grief over a parent's sudden death, or the burdens and responsibilities of parenthood, which generations before him had suffered? He had never really thought about it before. Is that why he cried when as he looked at them for the first time as an adult?

Perhaps the mien in these photos suddenly alerted Anna to the fact that she owed her very existence to his innocence, and naivté. Perhaps she and her father both sensed suddenly how her sustenance was dependent upon his survival, generosity and fidelity. But fidelity to what, to whom? Was it possible that his loyalties had been focused on first alleviating his mother's and then his wife's suffering? Was it possible that in order to cater to their needs he had to deny his own grief? Was it possible that this denial was a prerequisite for his self-esteem? Was it possible that what he had always thought was wisely circumspect had actually served to stump rather than stimulate his growth all these years? Was it possible that innocent people - including his own children - had suffered from his gullibility? Was it possible that he was a sucker? So many questions. So few answers.

Anna recalled the image of the orphaned fawn that her mother had once seen in the forest and was so determined to possess, as her buck. Could this cute little “nigger in the woodpile” be a plausible good ‘catch’ in her story? Why else would the vulnerabilty and innocence of this animal have to be concealed all these years, under a pile of firewood, in old photos? Anna wondered too if this pet name, "nigger in a woodpile", was an expression that everyone but she understood, like some internal joke to which she had not been privy?

"Your father would have been so proud of you" is something Anna's grandmother is purported to have said to one of her children. Suddenly Anna wondered what her grandfather would have thought of her father and her mother, or of her or her brother, had he lived to know them. "Some things are better left unsaid," was another thing her grandmother often said. What did she mean, why did she say that? Who was she trying to protect?

con't...

Construction debris – boards, nails and grey clods hardened by mortar – awaited them like land mines in unfamiliar territory. He liked the idea of a brand new house, so unlike all the old houses where they had lived before. He was proud to live in a house with modern appliances, with a chocolate brown refrigerator, and matching dishwasher, stove, and built-in oven. But he missed the tall trees, the thickets, and the wet grass around their old house in Utah.
His father was anxious to level the mound of topsoil that had been dumped in the front. Shoveling it into the wheelbarrow was something that he and his father could do together. They took turns carting the dirt around to the back yard. He liked flattening the dark soil with a garden rake and the patterns of neatness that it left. He thought about the stubborn cowlick to the right of his widows peak that refused to lie flat, even when he combed it wet.

When the monotony of the garden tasks bored him, he left to throw clods and stones, aiming for a bucket or a board on the slope behind the house. He was getting better and better at it. His father promised to buy him a new baseball mitt, and practice with him, just as soon as the yard had been landscaped.

Returning 'home'

He woud turn twelve that fall. Ever since he could remember he had learned to call San Francisco home, though he had never actually lived there. His father, who had grown up in San Francisco and left during the war, was pleased as punch to finally be returning ’home’. His mother, on the other hand, who had always been so proud of her pre-gold-rush San Francisco roots, was more reticent. Her career as a commanding officer’s wife was now over and she hadn’t even started looking for a new job. Since they were staying in a loft motel just off the bayshore freeway their first month back in California, there was no rush yet.

He and his older siblings were all happy to be there. The intimacy of family life in two small motel rooms with a kitchenette, the air conditioning, the swimming pool, coupled with the imminence of settling into a brand new house, and beginning a new school and made life seem secure, and exciting.

Nunzilla