The Hole

It happens like a looped recording that repeats itself, playing a song you can't quite make out from a house down the street, partly driving you nuts, and partly making you strain to hear it more clearly. A woman's face might bring it on, or a tv show about grandparents, or an article about a country you've always wanted to visit. Part of my inner self just opens, and when I peer inside, it's just blackness. I have tried all my life to make the hole go away.

I was adopted by my parents; the people who gave me away are not my parents, because I've never met them. The woman has no desire to know me, and she has decreed that communicating or giving me information about my biological father would be far too embarrassing for her. Obviously, her comfort level is much more important than my selfish desire to know who my father is or meet relatives who might want to know me.

Maybe I really was switched with the baby in the next bassinette. I've given birth three times, and no tie is as binding as the one you have to the people who arrived here via your body. If I had given a child up and got a letter in my 60's thanking me for her life and asking for basic information, yes, I would speak to that person. I am nothing like my "birth mother."

When I tell people I'm adopted, they ask, "what do you know about your parents," as if these strangers are my real parents. They are not!! I try to explain that these are not my REAL parents, and they say, "You mean the people who adopted you?" Their interest in my parents whom I knew until they both died is zero, and these people I don't know get all the credit. It's something that chips away at your identity and makes you defend basic information about yourself.

Try to imagine that you can not answer even one of these questions: What ethnic group or nationality is in my DNA? Which of my relatives do I most resemble? What do any of my relatives look like? Who were my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my cousins? What is the story of my birth? Who is my father? Is he dead? Did my relatives live to be old, or did they die young, and if so, what killed them?

Yes, I know. I should just be lucky to be alive and forget about it. And that's what I have tried to do, but sometimes with the slightest provocation, the hole opens up and I am once again swimming in the darkness of my unknown history. My family story began when I was placed in my parents' home, and I existed from that point on. Before that, there is nothing.

And the Rain Came Tumbling Down

Torrents have been falling on my neighborhood in sheets today, blown by nearly horizontal gusts of wind, running down the street and even cascading in a waterfall off the corner of my roof. People who live in the midwest scoff at us when we freak out over a little water coming down. I know you're expecting me to tell you how wrong they are, that California's weather can be pretty darn bad. But if I tried to make that case, I'd be lying. The folks in the corn belt are right to laugh.
I'd just arrived in Indiana a few days earlier and was taking a nap on my soon-to-be-inlaws' bed, or at least pretending to. Don was due home from work soon; this was a few days before our wedding. We agreed to stay with his parents for ten days before getting married, even though he'd rented a trailer (I can't call it a "mobile home" with a straight face) a few miles outside of town; our folks wanted us to avoid "living in sin," so we went along with that plan. We moved into that trailer the day of the wedding and stayed until it sank into a big sinkhole full of water (another weather-as-anarchist tale for later). But on this evening, Dorothy was preparing dinner after our shopping trip for my wedding dress that day. I could hear her talking to Nello from another part of the house, a place that always smelled like cookies or dinner and hummed along with just the right amount of family activity. Well, except the night of Don's bachelor party, which didn't hum along very well at all. But I digress.
It was raining outside, a bad storm, and the venetian blinds just behind the headboard of Dorothy and Nello's bed where I was laying were shut tight. I tried to close my eyes; the noise outside was so loud that I didn't want to see what was going on. But the crashing and smashing sounded as if the world was coming apart, so I finally turned around, put my chin on the window sill, lifted the blinds a few inches and peered outside.
Lightning cut through the sky and stabbed the ground like jagged spears of fire. The angry bolts fell so fast I couldn't count them, and thunder shook the house and earth beneath, bellowing and roaring worse than I ever knew it could. The field behind the house and the trees off in the distance were churning and bending and breaking as if the world might well blow away with this storm. It was the worst thing I'd ever seen. This alien state with its mild reputation and ordinary-sounding name had something to hide: it was a natural disaster in progress. I realized right then that weather is the most powerful, fearsome force of all nature, and now I was stuck here with it. No amount of time spent in California would have ever taught me this.
From that point on, weather was part of every bad thing that happened to Don and I during our year and a half spent living in the American midwest. I learned how powerless I was against it, and i suspect it used that fear against me on several occasions.

The rain has stopped here in Southern California for a while, although the weather report says we're in for a real winter storm. I for one am not worried about it.

Hello and don't forget your pants.

Hello, whoever you may be. Because audience is everything, I write this to you. I am not sure how to size you up or figure out how to approach you. You are a complete mystery and not a little bit confounding. Besides not knowing who you are, I have no idea whether you are bored, dazed, confused, angry, hungry, crying or drop dead drunk. This calls into question my first lesson in English 1C this semester, which was to explain the purpose of argument and immediately throw in audience as a pickle the writer must never forget. I don't think I'll forget you, even if I don't know who you are, but I will worry about how best to approach you. It's very much a blind date, but less awkward, because neither of us will order tacos or spaghetti or wish we'd gotten a haircut while we try to get acquainted. But I won't be able to look you in the eye, which is a problem. I can't tell if you're fidgeting in boredom, rolling your eyes, paying more attention to your phone, or if you're even sitting up. My goodness--it occurs to me that you may be naked. That is sort of creeping me out. So I beg you right now, if you are naked, just throw a towel around your private parts. Put on some pants! I can't possibly focus on what I'm trying to do here if you're undressed.