Читать книгу God Is Not a Boy’s Name - Lyn Brakeman - Страница 7

My home altar is a low table in front of which I kneel daily to whine, plead, babble, keep silence, read, and give thanks. It is covered with spiritual tchotchkes, each one carrying its own meaning. Two pictures carry special meaning for me. Both stood in places of prominence in many family homes before they got to my altar.

A three-year-old girl looks out from a small oval rose-adorned frame, her serious gaze daily reminding me to remember her under the table. Next to her stands a photo of the same girl at eight, her dark brown hair tucked behind her ears, tumbling over her shoulders. A beretta-like choir cap perches on the back of her head; bangs cascade over her forehead. Her choir robe is topped by a shoulder cape tied with a crooked bow. In her right hand she holds a tilting electric candle; her left hand, clutches sheet music; but her eyes glance to her right.

My mother cherished both photos. The small one she kept at her bedside; the other one made the living room mantel. It first appeared in the Christmas Eve edition of the New York Herald Tribune in 1946. In it I’m standing with the children’s choir on the steps of the Brick Presbyterian Church. My mother got a copy and had my father cut away the background figures so she could place me alone in a round stand-up gilt frame.

More interested in maternal pride than in church, Mom thought I was an angel. But I was no angel, just one among many child singers, all lungs for the birth of a special baby named Jesus who loved us, we knew, because the Bible said so, along with just about every hymn we sang. I wasn’t so sure about Jesus as the only son, but I’d come to believe that Jesus loved kids like God did so I sang with all the power my alto voice could summon. Sometimes I’d wish I were a soprano because they were so loud. Miss Ball, our school’s music teacher, said all voices were important and sopranos should blend. They were show-offs, I thought.

Christmas was coming and the war was over—no more black shades or bombs. I could look out of the clear windows and see city people below almost bouncing instead of trudging along. Everything was happy.

I’d seen pictures of dancers called the Rockettes in the newspaper. These lady dancers stood in a straight line and moved their legs all at once, so they looked like a string of paper dolls cut from a single piece of paper that when you shook it out there they were all strung together. The Rockettes were precision dancers, the latest big-city phenomenon. I read that they could kick over their heads and change costumes like lightning, sometimes forty times in one show. To keep up their stamina they ate chocolate and other sweets and never had to go on a diet.

“Daddy, can we go to the Rockettes?” I begged. “Look at their legs.”

“Pretty amazing,” he said.

“Yes, but can we go?” I persisted. “My legs might be like Mommy’s some day.”

“Well, we’ll see, Lynnie,” he said.

I felt pretty.

I often wondered if he suggested the Rockettes excursion to my aunt, who soon invited me to go as a Christmas treat. It was like him to do a thoughtful thing like that when he wasn’t attached to his martini glass.

Radio City Music Hall was enormous and filled with children whose usually immodest voices were hushed. You would love this, I whispered to God. We sat in row fifteen. I counted the rows to pass time, and hardly noticed the man who took the aisle seat to my left. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed his long white beard, sleek and silky—like God’s, not Santa’s. The curtain slowly slowly rose and the lights dimmed. I was spellbound. It wasn’t long before I felt the old man’s hand on my left leg. He began to caress it softly, going further up every time I took his hand away, further up under my brand-new green-and-purple dirndl skirt.

What is he doing?

I knew this was bad, but my skin tingled with pleasure. At the same time I felt paralyzed with terror. I felt as if I had no power and no voice at all. All that moved was my left hand, which like a robot removed his hand—over and over and over.

I never saw the Rockettes.

Going home in the taxi, my aunt gushed about the the show. I listened carefully so I could tell my mother all about it. I couldn’t tell her I’d missed the Rockettes, because I’d seen the bearded old man in the lobby after the show and his fierce beady eyes caught my gaze, paralyzed me the way his touch had, and gave me a message: don’t ever tell. The other reason I didn’t tell was that a new and sharp feeling clutched my gut. It was shame, not the same as hot cheeks and a blush in school if I got the wrong answer, but a full-body blush that didn’t go away.

City buses hissing and taxi horns beeping no longer had their usual lullaby effect as I tried to sleep that night. I might have had visions of lovely ladies’ legs and dreamed them right onto my grown-up dream body. Instead, I felt the old man’s touch. I tried to pray but it felt wooden. All that came out was a dutiful blessing list, then amen. My thumb was still attached so I sucked it raw and finally, finally dozed off. In the morning I no longer felt the old man’s touch but I couldn’t stop thinking about him. My mind demanded that I make sense of this horror; it searched for some place to land and found a memory. I’d overheard my mother say to my father, “What’s wrong with that child? She never says hello to the doorman, dear sweet man. Every morning she just walks on by.” My father gave no answer.

Being nasty to the poor doorman was just my way of trying to be me, and not my mother’s project—perfect and never quite right. Mom’s comment was a thing of the past by three years and nothing unusual for any frustrated parent, but my frightened and needy mind seized on it and turned it against my very soul. Something was wrong with me. It had nothing to do with the doorman, but it did have to do with the shame I felt because my body had felt something my mind didn’t want it to feel. I could no longer get God, my anchor and confidante, to tune in. My spiritual confusion hurt almost worse than self-condemnation because, you see, the old bearded man looked so exactly like my mental image of God. My mind named him the old god-man.

Rationalization is a very poor substitute for the whole truth, but what frightened eight-year-old knows that?

What happened to me? What is wrong with me?

In silence I yearned and hoped my parents would ask or guess that something had happened. I couldn’t tell God about it because God, I believed, had betrayed me. The child in the framed photo was far away. I hung my dirndl skirt in the closet where it would stay till I outgrew it. My mother never asked about it. So I focused on something else—school, especially music class.

Miss Ball, the music teacher, was tall and had a big voice. She wore her hair curled into a bun covered with an almost-invisible hairnet. I loved her with a childlike adoration verging on envy. Miss Ball had become Mrs. Davis over Christmas that year. Things happen over Christmas. But she looked the same so I was sure she would call on me, as usual, to demonstrate my “whole-throated notes.” When I got up to sing, my notes came out squished and ugly. I tried over and over, until finally Miss Ball told me I must have a sore throat and sent me back to my seat. My throat wasn’t sore, just locked. This was another humiliation—a public one. My radical voice change, I decided, must be like Miss Ball becoming Mrs. Davis over Christmas—the same person and not. After the old god-man I was the same girl—and not.

Nothing is wrong with me and I will prove it became my solemn vow, and school my ally and proof text. What mattered now was being good at things. Art was out and now music. But theater and languages, even Latin, proved vow worthy. In fact, Nadine Nash Blackwell, the red-haired drama teacher who was only a little taller than me, the shortest girl in my class, starred me in our fourth-grade pantomime play Cinderella. She coached me to evoke horror on my face so the audience would know without words that Cinderella had spilled an entire bucket of water while scrubbing and was therefore in grave danger. I could act it without feeling it. I’d rather have memorized lines. Memorization was proof of achievement. Still, I had the lead and mattered to Mrs. Blackwell and my theater buff mother.

School success and best friends kept my soul alive. We best friends felt flawless to each other. Together we were allowed to walk to the movies at RKO 86th Street. On the way home my friend Nancy and I were accosted by a group of girls who pulled our hair and snatched our scarves. We got away and ran ourselves breathless. Even after the girls had given up the chase I kept running. I felt a terror almost as keen as what I’d felt in the theater, but this time I could run, and this time I told, something I later regretted because I thought it might have been a factor in my parents’ decision to move to the suburbs, away from the city, where conditions were changing, they said.

We moved to Darien, Connecticut, by the time I turned twelve. Because of social and, I believe, class pressures, my parents also decided that we should summer in Westhampton, Long Island. Twelve is not the best age to move—my school, my city, my friends, my farm, and my pony, all gone. I bet by then I could have taught a whole course in how to mourn without dying of grief—or how to hate your parents and still love them. But I was getting to the age when I had to urgently concern myself with Project Life, which to me meant getting a boy, getting a period, getting some boobs, and getting a best friend—also not bothering God about my plans, or for that matter thinking that God, who never uttered a darn word, was any kind of savior.

I hated Darien, not so much for its social purity, or the fact that, by “gentlemen’s agreement,” Jews were excluded from buying real estate on its shore, or even because there were embarrassing jokes about “Aryans from Darien” in the Broadway play Auntie Mame, but because Darien’s country club/cocktail party culture increased Dad’s drinking, Mom’s anxiety, and my smoldering rage as a late-blooming adolescent tragedy with out-of-control parents and enrolled in a roiling junior high school with boys in it. Most of it was the times, but who knows about the “times” when they’re in the middle of those “times”?

Three things saved my life.

(1) Annie, my Darien best friend. She straightened my head out about sex, which turned out to be exactly what my mother had told me, but without barnyard animals. Annie didn’t laugh at my embarrassment. “Your mother jumped the gun”—we both thought that was impossibly hilarious— “and scared you shitless. A trauma.” I liked this new word trauma. “But it doesn’t mean you’re abnormal. I read about it.” When I went home and told my mother that Annie had told me all about sex, she turned and muttered to the air, “I don’t understand that girl. I told her about sex years ago.” I guessed my mother didn’t know much about sex herself, but at least I was unraveling the knot and could begin my sexual career. All I needed was a boy, blood, and boobs.

(2) The Holy Bible. I read it from cover to cover, night after night, though I only skimmed Leviticus. I was looking for dating advice and the holy book was a bust. God got a girl pregnant, apparently a good thing back then, but not the 1950s when getting pregnant meant scandal and exile. Biblical stories, especially in the Old Testament, were pretty juicy though. People did really bad things; God was moody, even tempermental, like a teenager, yet somehow God and people kept getting back together again, even after the worst sins, disasters, breakups, and traumas, some of them caused by God. The Bible made me laugh but there wasn’t a damn thing in there to help me get a period or boobs. I tortured my mother with dramatic laments about being deformed for life. Exasperated, she one day turned on me and almost shouted, “Lynnie, for God’s sake shut up, you come from a long line of bosoms. You’ll get them!”

(3) Bill Brakeman. I met him at a party, one of those high school, hope-soaked, loosely chaperoned events at the home of an overweight girl whose popularity was enhanced by such parties and the feasts her mother prepared for her friends. In one room a couple spent the whole evening with bodies pressed and shuffling in a movement no one could call a dance. I was in the dining room grazing on celery, longing to gorge on chocolate cake, and imagining myself fat when I saw Bill standing in the corner. He smiled. I smiled. We smiled and exchanged shy “hi’s.” Bill was swoonishly handsome with dark hair, and a look full of innocent wistfulness. My heart sprang into his.

“Are you here with Beebe?”

“I was, but . . .”

“I’m here alone,” I said.

Our conversation proceeded at its teenage halting best.

“Maybe we should hit the Driftwood Diner for a hamburger after the party,” Bill said.

“What about her?” I said.

“We’ll drop her home first. You sit up front,” he said.

Bill’s plan felt romantic, daring, even scandalous—ditching Beebe after she’d been callous toward him. I hopped into the front seat of his, yes, chartreuse Chevy convertible. We dropped Beebe off then drove to the diner. I felt sorry for her, a little.

The diner served the most succulent hamburgers I’d ever tasted. Ketchup oozed from the bun and my tongue darted out to catch it. I wasn’t embarrassed to eat in front of Bill.

“I hate it here,” I said.

“This diner?” he said.

“No, this town. I miss my city. This place makes my father drink more than ever.”

“My father too. I miss Chicago. But this burger is the best. So are you.”

Bill had great wit. His stories joined us in laughter.

“Just after we moved the school had to test me,” he told me.

“Yeah, me too,” I said.

“You should have seen my mother’s face when the test lady called to tell her that I had an IQ status of moronic. No kidding,” he said. “She wanted to know how I’d find a lost ball in a field.”

“Just head to where it landed and look,” I said.

“Of course, but the dumb woman wanted me to start at the edge of the field and circle inwards.” We split our sides laughing.

Bill and I became a couple, an “item,” to my mother, who was thrilled. I felt happy and safe with Bill, and proud of my emergent boobs. We mattered together. In the teen testing lab called high school, we joined the “middle class”—solidly friendly, not nerds or hoods or cheerleader/football greats or prom kings and queens.

“Darling, it’s you,” my mother said after we visited Smith College. Dad had lobbied for Vassar because his mother had gone there and was sure I’d get a scholarship. He lost. Mom’s support encouraged me to bare a tiny corner of my soul and tell her about the theater trauma.

“By the way, Mom, did I ever tell you what happened to me in the theater when I was eight and went with Aunt Tink to see the Rockettes?”

“No dear, what?”

“This old man molested me by putting his hand up my leg.” I stopped there and waited.

“Oh no. How awful. Well, such things happen, perverts you know,” she said, and then turned and walked into the kitchen.

My ploy for unlocking her heart hadn’t worked. I felt sad. “Such things happen” in fact helped us both avoid the pain of the old man.

At Smith College I was back with girls again. I fell passionately in love with ideas in any field including that of my own mind, and also with a few professors and the madness of weekend beer binges. I’d broken up with Bill, which infuriated my mother, but I wanted to check the pulse of my libido and to have dates at Harvard, Dartmouth, Amherst, my whole narrow little Ivy League world. My heart was set on achieving academic success, but I also worried about marriage, babies, having real sex with orgasms, Bill, and the whereabouts of God. Bill and I, never very far apart, resumed dating. Almost flippantly I suggested I accompany a good friend to Mass. She had to go, she said. Or what? I asked. Sin, she said. So I went to Mass, and bingo!—or more biblically, Behold!—there it was, my under-the-table meal the Holy Eucharist, all laid out for me to remember and relive.

I was riveted watching these worshipers—sitting, standing, making signs of the cross on themselves, walking together up the aisle to kneel at the altar rail, rubbing shoulders, sticking out their tongues to be fed like baby birds. I inhaled sweet incense, listened to murmured Latin, and watched. I noticed a woman up front, too, a statue and bad art but unmistakably female. I secretly imagined that this was how God might worship.

Communion in the Presbyterian Church where I’d grown up had felt lonely. Everyone sat motionless in their pews while trays of neatly cubed bread were passed around, followed by more trays of glass cups, each with a “jigger” of grape juice. It was tidy sacramental individualism.

I wanted my meal and oh, I craved my God.

I took instructions one summer to become Roman Catholic. My mother was so horrified that she invited the priest for dinner. It was her way of overcoming her disgust at rosary-bound piety and her own sister’s conversionary zeal. She needn’t have worried however, because it wasn’t long before I discovered that this church was male with no hope. There was the one stone virginal woman up front, yes, but no room for flesh-and-blood women up front.

Back in college for my senior year I consulted Mr. Unsworth, the handsome college chaplain whom Dad called “pipe smoking and tweedy.”

“You have some religious yearning,” he said. “I wonder why you didn’t major in religion.”

“I thought of it but I chose Spanish because I’m good at language and wanted to go deeper into Hispanic literature and culture,” I said, omitting mention of the fact that I also had a crush on one of the Spanish professors, an olive-skinned Iberian poet with huge eyes.

“Tell me about your religious background,” the chaplain said.

“I fell in love with the Catholic Mass. It was rich and sensory, not like the dryness of the Presbyterian worship I grew up with, but when I took instructions to become Catholic I found out they had too many rules and didn’t like women,” I said.

“Oh, Protestant too plain and Catholic too tight,” he said, with a grin that made me blush. “Have you tried the Episcopal Church? A blend that might suit you. There’s a parish right here in Northampton. They have Eucharist at least once a month. Try it, then go talk to their priest, to explore more. Let me know how it goes.” He rose and extended his hand. God, he was handsome.

“Thanks,” I said, excited that he’d said “priest.” This Episcopal Church had priests. How could there be a church that looked Catholic but wasn’t? I tried it; their meal was open to all baptized Christians; I qualified. Public kneeling was a first for me. I loved the feel of it. Episcopalians stuck out their cupped hands, not their tongues. Maybe here there was a chance for women who weren’t statues to be up front. I was confirmed in my senior year of college by Bishop Robert M. Hatch, who put his hands on my head and invoked the Holy Spirit. I felt small and big at once. How much the blessing of a bishop would come to signify in my life I could not know. At least I didn’t develop another crush.

My mother I’m sure was relieved, but it was Dad who was impressed by the confirmation liturgy.

“This was beautiful, Lynda,” he said. (He called me my full name when he was seriously impressed or seriously angry.) “Not sure about all the fancy robes, but the Communion all together at the altar was nice.”

“That’s what I like too Dad,” I said. “A little more dressed up than Presbyterians.”

“Our dour Scotch blood,” he said.

“Scottish, Dad, Scottish.”

“I grew up in the Episcopal Church, you know,” Mom said. “Daddy and I were married at St. Bartholomew’s in New York. This service seemed a little too fancy and Catholic for me.” Years later, by the time I was married with children, Dad chose to be confirmed in the Episcopal Church himself. I got the oddest, proudest queasy feeling that he was following me into this church.

College gave me a diploma but no requisite diamond ring. I wasn’t ready to “settle down” so I spent the summer in Spain with families in Madrid and Santander. In Spain I inhaled religion—Catholicism on steroids, but I soaked it up. The statue lady came alive. The people worshipped a woman—a woman praised as if she were God, a woman held in high holy esteem, a woman beloved. The Señora in Santander called her family to prayers daily with loud clapping, her hands like small enfleshed shofars. And always we hailed Mary. She after all did precede Jesus! I still pray the Hail Mary in Spanish, the way I learned it.

Make no mistake, patriarchy was alive and well in Spain. The women ran things at home and were emotionally dominant, but the men ran the world—and sex. I attracted the attentions of a few married men, whom I rebuffed, in bad Spanish with a flattered ego, explaining that, in las USA, women didn’t do such things, which meant that I was too scared to do such things.

Paco, the older son in my Madrid family, invited me to go to a bullfight. I feigned disapproval. Toro, toro, toro, ven, ven, guapa, he teased, waving his arms and an imaginary cape before me. I went. I was quickly drawn into the heat of the crowd. Olé sounded like hosanna. Would I have yelled “Crucify him” in the crowd that turned on Jesus, their hero? A bullfight is no barnyard event. The crowd swayed and moaned and roared as one. My God, this experience was lustful, just like religious mystics wrote about their ecstasies. Great God Almighty, I’m having a public orgasm. Please God let me have one in private, too.

In Spain I smelled holiness, dark and musty in cathedrals. I tasted the blood of ritual sacrifice—raw and unhygienic, like and unlike the sacramental meal I craved. I’d read Cervantes’s classic Don Quijote, but now its spirit was in my bones despite the fact that I could not decide if I was Don Quijote, foolishly stabbing at windmills and filled with indignation at the ills of the world he believed was transformable, or the squat lumphead peasant, Sancho Panza, loyal to the end and scared to quivering about going against just about anything.

•

The Episcopal Church had promise, but the ordination of women was like one of Quijote’s windmills. I felt spiritually enlarged being part of the 80-million-member Anglican Communion. The 2.2-million-member Episcopal Church had a governance of checks and balances, much like the US government, so power wasn’t concentrated in a central authority. It was not a dogmatized institution, yet it had a hierarchical structure and an all-male priesthood. Women could be ordained deacons but not priests. Deacons were canonically restricted to a ministry of service to church and world—which very nearly fit women’s traditional social roles.

Why, I wondered, was Eucharist the purview of men only? It was clearly a meal in which God acted like a woman—feeding a gathering around a dining table. I noted that the altar guild, ladies all, set up and cleaned up after the meal presided over by a man. I clung to my love of this meal I felt sure was somehow mine—while writing in my diary about sex and spinster fear and Bill Brakeman.

“Bill Brakeman is such a dear handsome man, don’t you think?” my mother, who had taken Bill to lunch while I was in Spain, cooed. Yes, I did think Bill was dear and handsome and I did love him. We’d had this Lindy Hop pattern to our relationship for years, swinging away from each other, nearly losing grasp, then crashing back together so hard I’d feel crushed and pull away again, because of some inner unidentifiable hesitation I didn’t understand. Letting go of the security of understanding, I became engaged to Bill. We were a ringed “item” now, quite normal. Under a Danforth fellowship, I taught Spanish at Smith for a year while Bill finished up at RPI. We married in June 1961. My overjoyed mother orchestrated a voluptuous outsized celebration at their Darien home. I wore a plain white unembellished wedding dress.

Now we were married. We could do it. It was our sexually legal debut—and we couldn’t do it. My vagina set up its own “No Admittance” sign. I cried, over-apologized, and together we downed a whole bottle of champagne. The next morning while waiting for our flight to Bermuda I called my mother. It’s true, I did.

“Mom,” I whispered, cupping my hand over the phone receiver.

“Darling, how are you two lovebirds?” she asked.

“We’re not lovebirds,” I said.

“What?” she said. “Speak up, I can’t hear you.”

“We couldn’t do it,” I hissed into the phone.

“You mean . . .” she said.

“Yes, I’m not normal.”

“Of course you are darling. Just relax. I remember when Daddy and I were married he was so nervous he poured a whole bottle of champagne down the sink by mistake and ordered a poached egg on toast for dinner in a fancy hotel . . .”

“Okay bye. Have to run catch the plane. Bye.” I hung up before she could say one word more.

I told Bill who said, “Thank God we didn’t waste our champagne.” We laughed hysterically at Mom’s perverse consolation, which nevertheless worked to relax us, so by the time we got to Bermuda we did it. I’d worry about orgasms and any other aspirations later. For now more school. You’d think I’d know who I was by now. My mother did. Bill and I moved into a one-room apartment on the Upper East Side in Manhattan where I attended Columbia University to earn a master’s in Spanish while Bill, degreed as an electronics engineer, commuted from New York to Connecticut for his job with an engineering company. My mother selected and installed the drapes for our new apartment. We looked completely normal.

I didn’t go to church but I visited some sanctuaries and stared at the magnificent altars at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and at Riverside Church. I didn’t talk to God. I just sat still and knew: an emotional distance had begun to creep into our marriage. We were both introverts, both oldest children, both had dads we loved who drank too much, and both of us were more motivated to succeed alone than together, yet we wanted to be together. We just didn’t know how to talk to each other about our fears, resentments, longings, needs, worries, much of anything, but when we drank together we shared freely—up to a point. What we’d talked about that had connected us the night before by morning had vanished. We’d learned our ways growing up in a culture and families where drinking to excess was acceptable, and feelings were less so. We were normal.

I got pregnant while completing my course work at Columbia and we moved back home to Connecticut—to Ridgefield, a town of our own. Bill’s mood began to go haywire. For example, he once couldn’t locate a book he’d been reading. He accused me of losing his book, called me an asshole, and punched through the cheap plasterboard wall with his fist. This kind of thing only had to happen once or twice before I became sure lots of things were my error or fault.

Wrapped in a blanket I piled up notes upon notes to study my compulsive brains out for comprehensive graduate exams, which I took two months before our daughter, Beverley, was born in January 1963. Bill held our baby daughter and gazed into her face with a mixture of fear and adoration. We were parents—normal.

Pregnancy and childbirth put me back in touch with God in new ways. Birthing hurt like hell, but the force of my uterus’s natural push felt downright omnipotent—pushing for life, forcing embodied life into the light. I could imagine God’s laboring to breath life into a hippo, because that’s what eight pounds thirteen ounces of slowly emergent baby girl beauty with heaps of black hair felt like. The body I’d divorced after the old god-man incident did all this. Having children reinforced my own capacity for unfathomable and impossible love, a capacity I’d thought I’d lost.

Another daughter, Jill, was born in fourteen months. In three years a boy, Robert William Brakeman III. Bill’s father, who had been orphaned at a young age, felt relieved. His name would live on. We vetoed Bobbie or Billie and his sisters’ choices, “Skippy” and “Timmy,” and called our son R. B. Then we cast a vote for the American dream and purchased our first home back in Darien, an architectural double of my parents’ house, one street over.

All around me the sixties were exploding. I felt itchy inside. But I was not the decider. Bill had a career opportunity in Anniston, Alabama, and we moved, this time far away and into a foreign land. The children adapted and developed thick drawls. I didn’t do as well. I drank too much, spent too many hours wielding my new floor waxer around the spacious black-and -white–tiled foyer, helplessly watching black flecks spinning off black tiles onto white tiles. I couldn’t remember whether the psalm said you could or could not sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land so I went church shopping and discovered the uptown Episcopal parish was segregated and the downtown one was more Baptist than Episcopal.

Bill’s boss was a tyrannical boozer who called late one night for Bill to come rescue him from a Birmingham hospital where they were “holding” him for unstoppable hiccups.

“Let the asshole hick himself to death,” I said.

“He’s my boss,” Bill said.

“Well, fire him!” I yelled as he left.

Bill imitated hiccups. We laughed and . . .

The failure of birth control for an “old and tired uterus” (quote from the doctor) brought wonders: the feeling of life moving within me once more. Life multiplies life. I am never sure how or why such paradoxical happiness mysteries happen but I suspect it is through some bright combination of divine and human co-creating. In this case, Dad, now retired after a long and successful career, invited Bill to start a business with him—in the Hartford area. We piled into our blue Chevy wagon named Roosevelt Franklin, and headed north—home. I patted my huge belly and told it to wait. John Thomas was born just three days after we arrived—another new town, another new life, another new baby, another new chance.

The 1970s could work.