It was about midnight when I got back to the hotel, but Cameron was still up. There was a party going on in the hallway right outside the door, so he couldn’t have slept even if he had wanted to. He was too worried about me anyway and wanted to hear all about my day.
We stayed up talking and did eventually fell asleep, but I woke up at about 3:00, shaking and in a panic. Is this really happening? Can my new father really be as wonderful as he seems, or is this some kind of Trojan Horse? When will the proverbial Other Shoe drop?
That morning Cameron was interviewing prospective employees for his company’s San Jose branch, so I waited anxiously for him to finish so we could pick up my father and go to lunch with Grandma Betty. By the time we got on the road, the shakes were setting in. I hadn’t had a proper breakfast, and it was after noon by the time we were on our way to Grandma’s work. We had to stop at a grocery store in Berkeley for sustenance. What a weird place. Neither the security guard nor the boxboy, both black, would look at me when I asked them for the key to the bathroom. Apparently they were not aware that I am a “sistah”. Either that, or they were offended that we were driving a vehicle which is not environmentally friendly.
We arrived at Grandma Betty’s work. Would you believe she is an 86 year-old park ranger? And, get this, she works at “Rosie the Riveter” National Park! Was this was some kind of elaborate practical joke?
Grandma appeared and started introducing me to her workmates, who obviously adore her.
“We want to be just like Betty when we grow up,” one said. Me, too! I thought. I have her genes, so I guess my chances are pretty good.
We went to lunch at Spenger’s, a restaurant my dad said they used to go to when he was a kid. A sign on the wall in the lobby said, “This is the first day of the rest of your life.” The irony did not escape me.
Dad was wearing a necklace with an unusual symbol on it.
“What does that mean?” I asked him.
“It means ‘home’,” he answered. (We found out later he was wrong; it actually meant ‘Ohm’.)
When we got back in the car, I got out my lyric book and gave him a song I had written called “Home”. Here is the first verse and chorus:
My heart’s like a child tugging at my sleeve
It’s only a feeling, but it never leaves
I ask what it wants, but it never replies
It hasn’t a mouth; how can it tell me why?
So I tell it I’m busy, and I push it away
Maybe I’ll try to deal with it tomorrow
Sometimes I think that I know what it is trying to say
Is that it wants to go home, but what it doesn’t know is
Home is nothing more than a feeling
Home is just a sense of belonging
Home is more than only a place
Are you ever really home?
“I would be honored if you would let me put this to music,” my Dad said.
“I would be honored if you would do that,” I replied.
Grandma couldn’t take it. “Ohhh, GOD!” She moaned from the back seat with a cynicism even I would be proud to own.
I wanted to see Uncle David’s gospel music shop in Berkeley, Reid’s Records, which my grandfather Mel started in 1945. As I walked around the store I had the awful realization that I had known about this store years before-I don’t remember how-but had dismissed it, probably because I thought I was looking for East Indians in Oregon.
I got to meet my cousin Kokee, and we took some group photos. Alyana and Tamaya were there. Tamaya was wearing a shirt that said, “Wishes Do Come True”. Again, the irony!
I felt so comfortable with these people. We all seem so similar. For example, mushy moments make me squirm. My dad started talking about how much he enjoys my company.
“The conversations we have,” he told David. “I would want to have even if she weren’t my daughter.”
There was a poignant pause. Then David turned and smacked one of his girls.
“When am I gonna get a ‘Conversation’?!” he demanded. We cracked up.
Like me, the family loves to dance. We arranged to meet David at 8:30 to go dancing, then we went back to Grandma’s to meet my aunt Dorrie.
Dorrie was excited to meet me and could hardly contain her words. Between the five of us, we could all barely get a word in edgewise.
We looked at pictures, and when Grandma saw my baby pictures I could see she felt sad. But like my dad, she is choosing to look at the future instead of the past. Since the women in the family tend to live past 100, I think we still have a lot of years together ahead of us.
Suddenly we looked at the time and realized we were missing our date with David at the dancehall! We raced there, and Dad changed into jeans and cowboy boots in the parking lot. We missed the dance lesson (I’ve never danced to Zydeco music before) but were still in time to dance.
Dancing with my father was the pinnacle of the whole trip. He showed me how to follow, not lead. We did the Electric Slide, Cajun style. I couldn’t wait to tell my friends, my dad is so cool! He and I felt the rhythm the same way and made perfect dance partners.
“That was weird,” he said after one dance. “It was like dancing with myself!”
As much fun as I was having, it was about 100 degrees in the room, and besides, I was exhausted. I’m normally the last to leave a dance floor, but this time I was the first to suggest we leave.
I felt complete. If this day had gotten any more amazing, my heart would have exploded. I felt like I finally got an answer to the question, “Are you ever really home?”. I have often had the feeling that I am from another planet, but I had arrived home on Planet Reid.
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June 1, 2008 at 12:06 am
Betty Reid Soskin
I’ve been reading your blog (and Bob’s) as the entries accumulate. I tend to get so used up, emotionally, that there is little left with which to respond.
It seems so personal and intimate and — though inclusive in their way — I find that my comments are neither required nor necessarily adding much. The story is yours to live and from here it appears that you’re doing quite well at doing so.
I thoroughly love the Langston Hughes poem though it is unfamiliar to me. I tend to collect and read the (black) female poets more often than not. I’ve never given it much thought, but the first poet I can recall penetrating my teenage mind was Edna St. Vincent Millay and she was certainly not black, so it must be some kind of response to the sensibility of woman. Loved (male and black) Countee Cullen’s “Crystal Stairs” poem with a passion, so that doesn’t always ring true.
It’s so weird to read your words and find myself in them; almost eerie. You, Bob, and I, share something deep having to do with self-expression whether in music, movement, or in the written word. It’s here in these blogs — and I have no other way to describe what I feel when I read them. There’s some deep genetic connection … .
I’m struck by some unlikely similarities in your life and Bob’s in growing up. When he was a child our family was as deeply involved in the creation of a church life as you are in yours. In building our home and moving to the suburbs (as difficult as that was), we left the Catholic faith and joined a small 25 family Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship that met at that time in the living room of one its its founding members. Over the years we grew that little church community from several temporary locations and ending up with a beautiful site that now holds a complex of buildings on lovely acreage in Walnut Creek. That little congregation has grown to over 500 member families. My friends have had their ashes scattered in the little Memory Garden — and I sometimes feel as if my genes are embedded in the fourth pillar on the left where the buildings connect!
Together as young couples we supported one another in the raising of our families, tended the sick, acted in unison politically in some difficult times, and only last week I attended the memorial service of one of our shrinking original church members, Yop Van Overveen, whose wife, Irene passed a year ago. It was hard. I still feel the kind of deep connection for that congregation though it has been many years and my life has changed dramatically from those earlier times. After years of birthing and marrying our young, we’re now in the process of burying our old. I’m still living out the life cycle in that little church community despite the miles between it and my current home.
Though my faith is Humanist rather than Deist, the people-connectedness is the same as what is described in your and Bob’s reports on his visit with you to your church community. It is surely why he is so open to experience the religiously-based community you’ve found for yourself. That kind of involvement is not new for him.
It will take the rest of (my?) our lifetimes to explore the commonalities in so many areas of our lives, Rosie. Religion is only one. It means long conversations about cabbages and kings and finding the places where interpretation guides understandings and outcomes.
Welcome to Planet Reid, indeed!
My best to Cameron.
June 1, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Betty Reid Soskin
I’m so loving your lyrics, Rosie!
Betty