A Little Girl on the Other Side of the World

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Prefatory Note

This essay was first written in October, 2000, following the adoption--from the People's Republic of China--of my older daughter, in the province of Hubei, in the city of Wuhan. This writing originated as just notes to myself, (really more in the form of journal entries and scribblings than of anything else at the time) to record, in some minimalistic detail, the foreign sights and sensations of a faraway land--my daughter's homeland--as well as the equally foreign territory of my own thoughts and feelings and overall impressions of the whole international adoption experience.


I didn't know what form these "scribblings," (as I call them) would take, but shortly after we returned home from the long journey (and by "we" here, I mean me, and my then-wife, and our new daughter--a family) I sat down and tried to make sense of what I had seen, and what I had done, and what I had felt.

And this essay is the result.


A lot has happened over the 15 years since I first wrote this piece--a lot has happened to the world at large and to my own little piece of it:

• Although still maintaining its staunch  and severe mask of Communism, the People's Republic of China has seen itself rather quickly (and rather inexorably) slip ever closer to the western world--economically, politically, and socially. As I write this at the end of 2015, China, as a world power, has seen itself grow wealthier (at least on paper), and its shamefully sad decades-long grip on the most profoundly harsh "social planning" experiment in the history of the 20th- and early-21st centuries--the infamous One-Child Policy--has finally loosened and seen repeal (again, at least on paper).
• On a more personal level of change, once we returned home in September, 2000 (a journey which this essay attempts to detail), my wife and I soon set in motion the paperwork to repeat the process: We wanted another daughter from China. We wanted to do it all over again. And so, in 2003, we got our wish--traveling once again to that faraway eastern land, this time to the province of Hunan, and to the city of Changsha, where we were united with our lovely younger daughter.
• One year later, in 2004, things fell apart rather dramatically (though, like everything--again, as this essay can attest--it was a process; it didn't just happen overnight). My wife and I would end our marriage, and our children, who spent the first years of their lives parentless and alone in orphanages so far away, would now be confronted with that all-American phenomena of divorce.

Again, though this essay was originally written upon the return of my first trip to China--and written to detail some of the specifics of that particular journey and of that particular adoption experience in 2000--after revisiting it and revising it (somewhat) I see it now as also speaking in general terms of the adoption of my younger daughter three years later. This essay, in a rather unique way, presages and echoes the spirit of that second adoption adventure, as well, capturing its essence and its soul in ways I never could have predicted.


I see this piece now as speaking to and for both of my daughters. I see this essay of mine as a testament to nothing else than of how they (because of reasons well beyond their control) spent the early months of their lives in state-run orphanages in a distant, communist country, and of how they lived an unintended bravery, and strength, and will to endure which I will never know.


Fifteen years later, this essay speaks to and for my daughters--both of them. In some ways, maybe, it also speaks to and for all the children around the world, parentless and alone, who are in need of rescue.

[Aside: Admittedly, this term "rescue" is a slippery creature, for in this case it would imply that I did something as noble as rescue or "save" those two precious girls stuck in Chinese orphanages. I don't look at it that way, and I never have. Instead, I've made a nuisance of myself over the years (since returning home  from my adoption-journeys in both 2000 and in 2003) by humbly and honestly proclaiming that in no way did I "rescue" my daughters. The opposite, in fact, is true and has always been true. They rescued me.]

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i.

I never gave much thought to the picture, until the end of our stay in China. The real meaning of it was lost on me up to that point. Maybe I had simply given up thinking about it or had grown so frustrated that I no longer cared whether I thought about it or not. I don't know. I just know that I didn't think much about the picture until the very end, which--in its own way, of course--was actually the beginning. But I wouldn't see that until later, either. I wouldn't see anything until later.


Which is the way most true stories happen.

ii.

My wife and I were at the Motorola Campus in Schaumburg, Illinois, filling in yet another piece of the complex adoption puzzle. It was the latest stage of our long, seemingly unending journey toward parenthood. According to state requirements, adoptive parents-in-waiting must fulfill a certain number of credit hours, taking part in classes and seminars (much like the one we were attending this day) aimed at providing the latest information on adoption and preparing us to be, at least in the eyes of the ever-watchful state, "fit parents." (Whatever that phrase might mean.)

It goes without saying, of course, that all of this--as well-intentioned as it might sound--is spectacularly unfair. As one who has gone through the adoption obstacle course, it is my observation that "the system" is grossly unbalanced, discriminatory in favor of natural parenting. Adoptive parents find themselves (either by choice or by virtue of "the luck of the draw," I guess) placed under a microscope, with every detail of their lives exposed and analyzed, held up to the bright light of scrutiny in ways that natural parents will never have to know.

And of course that's just the way it is. Fair or not. Sour grapes or not. That's just the way it is.

But it's never easy having children, no matter what approach one might take to have them. You do what you must do. You take the steps, one at a time, and you jump through the necessary hoops, and you clear the hurdles, and you clamber over the walls. Because that's the way it's done. This is true whether you find yourself having children the natural way--the old-fashioned way--or the adopted way. It doesn't matter. In that sense, it's all the same. And so, as adoptive parents-in-waiting, this is what my wife and I were doing that particular day in November, 1999. We were doing what we had been doing and what we would need to do for another nine months, still, until our time would finally come to travel overseas--in other words, we were doing what needed to be done.

We gathered, she and I, with like-minded people, all of us slowly going through the adoption maze--some already with children at home and wanting to add to the family, and some couples childless and waiting, white-knuckled, for their first chance to become a family.

It goes without saying, almost, that a day like that is a bit surreal. There we all were, all of us feeling a little sorry for ourselves--but at least with some solidarity in that shared sense of self-pity. All of us tired, and anxious, and expectant, and hopeful. All of us doing what needed to be done. Maybe not liking it, but recognizing, after all, that this is how it's done, and so doing it all the same.

The day seemed especially surreal for the two of us, since at that point in our daughter's adoption we still knew nothing about our daughter. We knew she was from China, of course, but then China is a big place, and we didn't know any specifics regarding her home province, or her home city, or  her home village. We didn't know how old she was right then, or if she had even been born yet.

[Aside: And as it would turn it, she had been born at that time--less than a month before our symposium in Schaumburg that day. A September birthday, like her adoptive mother. And, as it would coincidentally turn out three years later, also her younger sister. September birthdays, all. A houseful of Virgo. Help.]

We didn't have a picture of our daughter at the time, nor did we have a name picked out for her. Before deciding on something as important and permanent as a name, we were actually waiting for our first glimpse of her--what would eventually be a small, wallet-sized photo (a passport photo, basically) included in her dossier, mailed to us from the Chinese consulate just a matter of weeks before we would  end up making our trip overseas.

And so we waited. And we filled our time. And we dreamed of our Chinese daughter, waiting for us so far away. And we did what needed to be done, which included, at least on this November day, an overfilled meeting-hall of breakout sessions and keynote speakers, all with the intended goal of making us more aware and more cognizant of just what it was we were getting ourselves into.

During one of the afternoon intermissions, my wife and I made a slow pass around the lobby of the convention-center, where various vendors (i.e. booksellers, organizations, and agencies all having something to do with adoption in some way) had set up tables in a half-moon shape across the floor--all of them loaded down with their specific material and literature, and "hawking their wares," so to speak.

We came across the picture almost by accident. It was at the last table, with very little to draw attention to it. There wasn't much to look at. It was a framed picture, a simple, elegant drawing of a full moon set against a clear, creamy-white background. The picture was zen-like, almost, in its starkness and in its sense of quiet. At the bottom of the framed picture was written an equally simple--albeit haunting and mysterious--verse (accredited to author/artist, Mary Ann Radmacher):

"I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world."

We fell in love with the picture instantly. And so we bought it. We took it home with us later that day, at the end of the long symposium in Schaumburg (the latest of several), and we wasted no time in hanging it on the hallway wall that night, just outside the door of what we knew would someday be our daughter's bedroom. We hung the new picture there in hopes that looking at it and reading it each day would fill us with expectant joy of the journey that awaited us. We hung the picture there in hopes that looking at it and reading it each day would fill us with pride that our daughter would be from a faraway land, and that someday she would be home with us and would grow up and would see the framed picture for herself, and that she would know inside, somehow, that the picture was for her, and about her, and about her birth parents (whoever they may be), and about her adoptive parents (whoever we are), and about love, and about family, and about "home."

All of these were grand and beautiful intentions, to be sure. Very poetic. Very noble sentiments. But as time wore on during our daughter's adoption, with one bureaucratic hurdle after another, and with no apparent endgame in sight, the simplicity and the beauty of that picture hanging on the wall outside her bedroom grew slowly dimmed beneath a thin, barely perceptible layer of dust. More and more, the picture's simple message--once so poetic and so meaningful--grew mysterious to me. I would see the picture as I passed it every time on my way down the hall (after all, where it was positioned so noticeably, I couldn't help but see it.) And I would read its words near the lower outline of the frame. And I would say to myself, "Yes, well someday. Someday..."

But I had no idea, then, what the words on the picture meant.

iii.

It's important to keep in mind, I think, that the root of the word, "adoption," is "option."

I suppose in many ways it was that very idea that kept us going through the whole ordeal, whether we could verbalize it in such simple terms or not. I believe with all my heart, though, that my wife and I were meant to adopt.

But I am not so naive.

I know this idea goes against the grain of what is generally held to be true. I know, undeniably, there is a social stigma associated with such a thing as adoption. As a society that prides itself on supposedly being advanced, and cultured, and taking on a worldly view, we may not like to talk about this stigma in America. We may not like to acknowledge it or admit to it, but the stigma is there. In its muted, whispered tones, and in its sidelong glances and double-takes, and in its oh-so-easy marginalization in mindless categorical terms such as "adopted-daughter," the stigma is most definitely there.

There is, perhaps, a belief in our culture that adoption is something parents-in-waiting are forced into after all other means of having children--of having family--fall through and come to naught. There is, perhaps, the general perception that adoption is enwrapped in the sad spectacle of desperate parents-in-waiting crawling on their hands and knees, begging for a chance--any chance--to complete their empty lives with the children they have always dreamed of someday having.

[Aside: "George and Martha: Sad, sad, sad..."]

There is often a quick assumption by the general public that adoption is considered by such parents-in-waiting if and only if something is biologically "wrong," and that adoption is a last-ditch effort, a last grasp at lineage, a last attempt at happiness, and a last resort.

While in some rare and extreme instances this may be the case, in most instances such stereotyped assumptions and stigmas couldn't be further from the truth.

While it is true that as a couple, my wife and I fell into that small minority of married men and women who have difficulty conceiving, we decided rather quickly, after dipping our toes gently into the confused and swirling pool of fertility testing, that we would look for another way to go.

[Aside: Actually, there is a bit more to it than simply brushing off the experience with a cute, euphemistic "dipping of the toes." We tried the fertility route (the drugs, in-vitro, the whole works) for about one year, to be honest--the consultations with doctors in immaculate offices, the quiet room (by myself), an over-sized envelope filled with pornographic magazines that spilled atop the thin white sterilized tissue stretched like an accusing finger down the padded table in the secluded VIP-wing at the clinic, the plastic cup ("Good to the last drop!"), the liquid soap at the sink to wash one's hands before and after, the awkward exit back into the waiting room, downcast eyes, the uncertain hug, the murmured, "How did that go?" from her, a smile at her lips, the whispered, "I feel like a cigarette for some reason," from me, clumsy attempts at humor, followed (almost weirdly) by my once-in-a-lifetime chance to look through the eyes of the microscope in the lab at my "boys" swimming with great health and vigor, and pirouetting, and bouncing into one another like a drunken bacchanal...and then it's her turn, later on, with the prescribed drugs and the shots and the taking-of-temperatures and the quick and frenzied "romantic" tussle when the time is right followed by the elevation-of-hips with carefully situated pillows and the waiting, the waiting, the waiting...followed by the inevitable blood at the end of the month, and the tears, and the look of determined love in one another's eyes: "This only means we'll try again." Followed by consultations with doctors in immaculate offices, the prescribed drugs, the shots, the taking-of-temperatures, the quick and frenzied "romantic" tussle when the time is right, and the waiting, the waiting, always the waiting...]

Once we made peace with the idea that having children the old-fashioned way just wasn't in the cards for us (and, to be brutally honest, once we saw another young couple "hit the jackpot," so to speak--friends of ours, actually, who were coincidentally going through the whole fertility ordeal with us and who suddenly turned up pregnant with triplets, of all things, and who now, overnight, saw themselves staring down the barrel of a world filled with multi-seated strollers and minivans and the like) my wife and I took a good, hard look at one another, and we knew: The "other way to go" presented itself immediately. There really was no hard decision to be made.

We chose the path of adoption, we like to think, she and I. (And I really do believe it's true.) Adoption did not choose us.

Once we decided, as a couple, on the idea of adoption, we were then faced with choosing just what kind of adoption we wanted. Did we want to go the more socially acceptable route of domestic adoption and wait our turn for a clean, healthy, white baby--a baby who would, to the best of our ability, look something like us? In many ways, this certainly would have made the most sense, at least in society's eyes. (Although the wait for such a child, because of that very reason, can be interminable.) Or did we want to look into foster-care? Or did we want to take our chances looking elsewhere to the countless number of children lying in cribs and in beds in orphanages around the world?

It was time to do some research.

Obviously, we decided on international adoption. But simply stating it like that--so cavalier, so matter-of-fact--feels funny now. It feels funny and strange and somehow dishonest.

Of course, our decision wasn't simply a matter of waking up one day and magically intuiting the answer we so desperately sought. Such an attitude would have been irresponsible. But then again I can't say that our decision was one of unbearable angst and hand-wringing, either. It wasn't like that at all.

Our decision to pursue international adoption was something we took very seriously, for we knew our decision would have a ripple effect in the lives of not only the two of us but also in the lives of our extended families, our friends, and our children. If we were to adopt from another country, then we knew there was a very good possibility our children would have different skin-color from us, and different hair-color, and different eye-color, and different features altogether.

Our children would not look like us, in all probability.

[Aside: And the more we thought of this likelihood, the more the two of us--my wife and I--agreed that such a scenario might just be the best "gift" we could ever bestow on any future children of ours.]

But also this undeniably opens up a whole new set of issues for a child as she grows older and comes to the very concrete conclusion: "Hey, I don't look Mom or Dad, and I don't look like Grandma or Grandpa, and I don't look like my friends at school, and I don't look like anyone else I know!"

How would we deal with this as parents, my wife and I wondered? How would our daughters deal with this, growing up in America? How would we deal with the stares while out in public together, the double-takes, the questions--innocent in nature and well-meaning though they may be, but still sometimes unavoidably prejudiced and hurtful? How were we going to deal with all of this as parents of a little girl from another part of the world? These are serious questions to ask, and we took them very seriously before deciding that, despite the obvious challenges, international adoption was for us.

"But why China, of all places?"

We got asked that a lot, in the beginning. (And we still do, to this day. Though admittedly not as much.) From a certain way of looking at it, I suppose, it's understandable, but there is not now--nor has there ever been--an easy, all-encompassing answer to satisfy that question. Often, over the years, I have found that my best response is my gut-response:

"Why not China?"

iv.

The People's Republic of China, to put it as simply as possible, has a population problem.

[Aside: But maybe that's putting it too simply.]

China, along with its distinction of being one of the largest countries in the world--amassing a total of roughly 4 million square miles--also holds the honor of being the most populous country in the world, with an average of roughly 1.5 billion people.

[Aside: Not to waste time stating the obvious, but that is a lot of people.]

The country's population problem has some long, proud roots stretching all the way back into China's distant, dynastical past. The urge to build a strong, invincible Empire runs through the tortured, tangled history of China, re-emerging as late as 1949, with Mao Zedong's rise to power, and with his "Little Red Book," and with his assumption of the title, "Chairman Mao," and with his grand dreams of revolution and reform for the world's most massive country. With Mao's ascension to power, he ushered in a whole new age of social and political upheaval for not only the Chinese people but for the whole world. In the late 1950s and early '60s, Chairman Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, appealing to China's younger generation to enlist in his army of Red Guards and to effectively wipe the proverbial slate of history clean and to rebuild a new and culturally "pure" and strong China--stronger than the world had ever seen, he envisioned.

In this vein, Mao encouraged uninhibited procreation, so that China would forever have a booming population and a steady reserve of strength in its numbers.

[Aside: And who in the hell is not going to like the sound of that idea?]

With a great population, he predicted a great world-class economy would follow, as would a world-class military might. Before long, however, this policy became not so much the perfect dream that Mao had envisioned but instead a nightmare of crisis proportions.

China soon had too many people, with not enough housing to shelter them all, and not enough jobs to put them all to work, and not enough food to fill all the hungry stomachs, young and old.

To meet this problem, Chairman Mao's successor--Chairman Deng Xiaoping--implemented in 1980 one of the most singularly devastating family-planning policies the world has ever seen: China's now-infamous "One-Child Policy."

[Aside: And basically, this was meant to be exactly what it says it is. The name fit. Uncannily.]

From its inception, a legally married couple was legally entitled to have one child between them, and that was all. There were many loopholes with this law, as with any law, and there were many exceptions to the rules--all depending on how much money one had to pay off the local governmental offices, of course. Other children were permissible to a family, but this would always include a certain percentage of fees and taxes levied upon the couple. Needless to say, once outside the country's major urban areas, China's poor and destitute, living in the interiors of the country--in the largely rural and agrarian village settings--had no reasonable way of paying such restrictive fees.

Add to this already difficult situation the nation's firmly-ingrained traditions of patriarchy and China's history of relegating women to foot-bound servants of second-class stature, and what you've got is a disaster waiting to happen.

And so naturally that's what happened.

Because of the nation's reluctance to leave behind its patriarchal roots--with its emphasis on family names, and family prestige, and lineage, and legacy--couples tried for baby boys. Endlessly. Expectant mothers and fathers (not to mention grandmothers and grandfathers) wanted baby boys. They needed baby boys, to carry on the family's history, the family's business, the family's pride. Lots and lots and lots of little baby boys, all who would someday grow up to take over the large nation and to rule it with great sagacity and inscrutability as its leaders of business and of government.

And for millions of the not-so-lucky little girls born during the decades that the One-Child Policy held sway, they simply "disappeared," or were erased from public record, or never existed at all. For years, abortions were encouraged (or at least certainly not discouraged), along with forced sterilizations on women. Even something as unthinkable as infanticide--the killing of a newborn baby shortly following birth--(though certainly not legal nor encouraged) existed deep in the shadows as a shameful, unspoken secret in a country slowly dying of heartbreak.

Another option for these unfortunate mothers in China, of course, was abandonment--leaving their babies on the steps of a hospital, or a police station, or an orphanage, or in a public square somewhere (under a tree or by a bench, perhaps) and walking away quietly to disappear into the shadows alone. Sometimes--if the mother were to think of it in her haste--she might scrawl a small note about her baby (a name, a birthday, a place of origin) and pin it to the child's makeshift blanket, along with a favorite toy stuffed inside its folds, perhaps. Most of the time, however (and practically all of the time), there were no notes left behind. There couldn't be, for fear of arrest or recrimination. Sadly, then, very little was ever known about these babies, these abandoned daughters. Basically next to nothing.

For these little girls left alone at the hands of fate, whatever names they would end up with were provided for them later at the orphanage or at the hospital. And specific birth dates were, most often, just a best guess after a mandatory and rushed physical check-up on the baby.

Cue the music for our dramatic entrance, then, the two of us. This is where my wife and I come into the picture. But as I've tried to make clear all along, we are no heroes. We never entered into the adoption of our daughters with that kind of mindset. We never saw ourselves that way (and we still don't.) We're no better or no different than anyone else with dreams of starting a family.

We simply wanted a child.

We wanted our own family, and this is how we decided to go about it. And there are countless other parents the nation over--the world over--who make the same decisions we did and who tread the same grueling path we did when we made our journeys back in 2000 and 2003.

But while international adoption enjoyed a booming popularity during the mid- to late-'90s and the early turn of the millennium (just in the United States alone), that certainly does not mean it has ever gotten much easier. The long, cumbersome process is a marathon. From start to finish--from the day we first contacted our agency, Chinese Children Adoption International in Englewood, Colorado (an organization I will always only praise), to the day we returned home with my older daughter in September of 2000--the whole process took roughly 18 months.

[Aside: Now, I know that may not sound like much to some, and there may even be those who imagine that all we did was fill out an application and sit back and await our turn to travel. But it wasn't like that at all. Those 18 months, from beginning to end, dissolved into a maze of governmental offices, and agencies, and meetings, and home-studies, and health exams, and financial disclosures, and bureaucratic paperwork, and more paperwork, and more paperwork, and more paperwork, and more paperwork, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more....]

It was an endless uphill climb that pushed us physically and emotionally to the limit, and then it pushed us even further.

It pushed us all the way to China.

v.

What can I possibly say about China? What can I possibly say about that distant land that hasn't already been said so much better by so many better writers? What can I possibly tell you about such a place so incredibly vast, and so incredibly diverse, and so incredibly mysterious, and so different, and yet so real?

Let me just say, in short, that I loved it.

[Aside: Now, I know that had you been with me during the whole three weeks my wife and I were there to adopt our daughter, you might have thought I felt differently about the trip and about the place. But make no mistake: There were certainly those times (several of them, actually) when I didn't like China very much and when all I wanted to do was come home with  my new family intact.]

On the whole, without a doubt, I loved the country. And I loved our visit. And as I've always promised my older daughter and her younger sister, if they ever reach an age or a time in their life when they are curious about where they come from--the land of their birth, that distant land of clouds, and mountain-peaks, and panda bears, and Great Walls, and bamboo orchards, and dragons, and Lords of the Middle Kingdom--then I will find a way to take them back for a cultural visit, a brush against their touchstone, and I will see the country of their origin with them. They deserve that much.

So far, that hasn't happened. (And it admittedly may not.) But someday I would love to return to China.

Fifteen years ago, when my wife and I were first there in 2000, we certainly saw many cities, many sights, and many surprises. We visited museums, and stores, and shrines. We tasted the food. We visited with the people. We saw a side of China that, I know, most tourists don't get to see. In many ways, I feel we saw the real China, or at least a part of it. We saw the best and the worst of it. The heart and the soul of it. We mingled in the crowds. We rubbed elbows with the people. We talked with them (or we did our best to, anyway.) We communicated. We connected. We made friends. We made memories. And we brought home the greatest gift of all--our older daughter.

We first arrived in the city of Shanghai, that mythical port city on China's east-central coast, where we stayed for two days before departing by air for the city of Wuhan, 300 miles to the west in Hubei Province, along the famed Yangtze River. It is here where we spent most of our time.

[Aside: Please understand, now, that when I say "we," I'm generally referring to our travel group of twenty other couples, all parents-in-waiting of CCAI (from all corners of the United States), all of us nervous, and anxious, and tired, and all--like my wife and I--willing, quite literally, to "go the distance" and to roam to the ends of the earth to fall in love with a little girl on the other side of the world.]

It is here, in the city of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, where my family became complete and my heart grew full. It was in Wuhan where we first laid eyes on our daughter--after 18 excruciating months of waiting--and where we first held her in our arms.

And what can I tell you about that day that you probably can't already guess? It was (along with the similar sort of day three years later in the city of Changsha, just a province to the south, in Hunan, where we first met our younger daughter) one of the two greatest days of my life.

It was also one of the most heartbreaking.

I will never forget it. The morning of August 28, 2000, is burned in my mind forever. The excitement. The happiness of first laying eyes on my daughter, so happy, so playful, and so full of life.

And the gutwrenching sadness of watching her nanny--the woman entrusted to care for my daughter at the orphanage during the first year of her life--cradle my precious girl in her tanned, wiry arms for the last time, and slowly rock her, and sing to her, and say "Goodbye..." in whispered Chinese, and dissolve in tears as she slowly, reluctantly handed her over to my wife's waiting arms.

I can never forget it. I don't ever want to forget it.

We spent eight days in Wuhan, where much governmental paperwork took place in bland beige communist-style rectangular stone buildings (in need of air-conditioning), and where we secured my daughter's passport and her officially notarized documents detailing her heretofore unknown history--otherwise known as her "Abandonment Report"--and of her legal adoption by us. Once all of those papers were completed, we flew to the city of Guangzhou, in China's southeast corner, situated along the Pearl River Delta, just off the South China Sea.

This is a wonderful city, Guangzhou, with a rich and colorful history. Of course, our three-day stay here was made all the more wonderful by our accommodations at the world-famous White Swan Hotel.

[Aside: Believe me, words cannot do this place justice. It is glorious and well deserving of its reputation as one of the world's finest hotels. The Chinese definitely know how to do this stuff right.]

As it turns out, every American family adopting from China had to pass through the city of Guangzhou, for here was located the U.S. Consulate Office, which--among other things--approved the babies' visas and granted permission for the girls to travel back to the United States as legally adopted citizens. This visit to the Consulate was really the last stage of our long and arduous journey. It was to be the last corner of the maze (as well as the nail-biting experience of getting through Customs at Hong Kong International Airport, on the way out of the country) to navigate around and through while overseas--the last obstacle to overcome. And it was a joyous moment when that visit at the U.S. Consulate Office was finished.

[Aside: But unfortunately--at least in our case, anyway--we were so tired at this point it was hard to generate the kind of enthusiasm the occasion fairly deserved. We did our best, though, by taking a walk together, the three of us, that evening down the street from the hotel and to the pink neon sign of Johnny's, a faux-American '50s diner (or at least a Chinese attempt at such), where we sat down and enjoyed the Chinese version of cheeseburgers, and fries, and chocolate malts. It tasted like home--or at least sort of. And it was wonderful.]

From Guangzhou, then, we flew the short, half-hour "puddle-jump" to the city of Hong Kong. And in a word, Hong Kong was glorious. Or, at least to be fair, I guess I should say that Hong Kong International Airport (once we safely got through it and could all breathe a collective sigh of relief) was glorious, because we never actually got to see the city.

[Aside: We would get our chance to see more of this legendary city, Hong Kong, on our return trip in 2003. Then, we took our time strolling the city's streets. We toured Victoria Peak. We took a ferry tour out into one of the gleaming city's many harbors. I visited an authentic Chinese clothing store--one of thousands in the city--that specialized in men's suits, where I got measured and fitted (just to say I did it). But those are stories, perhaps, for another time...]

We stayed at the Regal Hotel, connected to the airport by a wonderful glass walkway. Even just stepping off the plane and walking through the terminal, though, you could feel it in the air immediately: Things were different here. Things moved at a different pace. The air smelled a little cleaner. You could hear the strains of English being spoken in the background. We were closer to home; we could feel it. And I don't mind telling you that at that point we were ready. We were ready for western civilization again. And that night we celebrated by eating at McDonald's in Hong Kong International Airport. Believe me, a Big Mac never tasted so good.

The next morning we took off for our 16-hour return flight, and we said goodbye to my daughter's homeland.

vi.

I cherish my memories of China. The smell of it, the sound of it, the feel of it. Images of its land and of its people and of its faces will never let me go. One of those images, in particular, came to me on our last night in Guangzhou, while I was outside walking alone along the streets--all lit up with brightly colored neon, and crowded with Chinese people taking in the evening air, like me. And there were bicycles, and cars, and motorcycles. There was noise, and combustion, and confusion--the mix I had grown comfortable with and familiar with over the past three weeks. The mix of a great Chinese city. And I loved it.

I had my camera with me this night, practicing my side-hobby of photography, trying to find some last-minute pictures before we left for Hong Kong the following morning. Strolling about the city streets with no clear destination in mind, I turned down a frontage road, away from the familiar confines of the hotel's well-lit grounds, and I chose a pathway along the Pearl River, the lights from the buildings across the water on the other shore reflecting off the outline of boats and junks which silently made a steady flow of river-traffic, day and night, along the Pearl's choppy waters. I stood there for a moment by myself, quiet, looking out at the peaceful scene and looking back at all that had happened during our stay in China.

And it was then when I noticed the moon hanging in the dark sky over the city. To be honest, this was probably my first opportunity--that I remember, anyway--to view the moon during our stay. And so I looked up at it for a long time. It was fat, and full, and glowing white, and lighting up the night sky and the darkened city and its timeless river flowing below.

And I thought of my trip to China.

I thought of everything that had happened to me along the way, all the excitement and the drama. I thought of all the things I had seen and heard, all the countless ways in which my life had changed. And I thought of everything I had gone through--everything we all three had gone through--to get to this moment now. I thought of all the time spent wondering, and wishing, and waiting.

And I thought, too, of my daughter's birth-mother and birth-father--whoever they are and wherever they might have been on this night. I wanted to tell them not to worry. I wanted to tell them that everything was going to be all right for their daughter--my daughter--and that my wife and I would do everything in our power to love this little girl, and that we would always remember, and that we would raise her to remember as well.

And I also thought of my daughter's nanny, alone this night in the orphanage, perhaps, and crying for a little girl whom she loved and was missing very much, a little girl who--very soon--would be going home to live with her new family, to a place called Chicago, in the United States of America.

A place very far away on the other side of the world.

I thought of all these things as I stood there by myself along the banks of the Pearl River looking out at the city of Guangzhou in the People's Republic of China--how the city glittered at night across the water like a chandelier catching rainbow-colored lights. And I watched the moon. For the longest time I stood there, oblivious to the noise and the crush of the busy city around me, and I watched the moon from where I stood.

And I thought of the framed picture hanging on our wall back home by the door to our daughter's new bedroom, and of its words written near the base of the frame:

"I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world."

I thought of the picture, and I smiled, for I knew now, finally, just what those words meant. 

_____________________

Emendatory Note

As I've said before in this essay--in the Preface and throughout--a lot can happen in 15 years. During the interval that I first wrote this piece, the world has changed, I have changed, and international adoption (particularly from a nation like China) has changed.

Obviously, the Tuesday morning of September 11, 2001, is a seminal event etched in collective memory that rocked not only the United States but the rest of the world. Things were different after that day. Those of us of a certain generation--like myself--can very clearly draw a mental map, demarcating finely drawn borders in our personal memories: BEFORE 9/11 and AFTER 9/11. This is not the same world that I live in now, 15 years later, as the world in which I lived and traveled then, back in 2000. Terrorism is a daily thing now--with both a tangible and intangible nature to it. It is a force and fear that we live with, as citizens of the world. Most of the time we go about our daily lives with these fears nestled comfortably somewhere in the background, but then that subconsciousness reaches the surface every time there is an attack from ISIS on the streets of Paris, or there is a shooting at a mental-health facility, or at a public school, or at a crowded cinemaplex on the opening night of the latest blockbuster film.

We live with these fears now in a very real way. We deal with these national and international "terrors" on a level that we didn't have to think about or worry about 15 years ago. And I realize, when revisiting this essay now, that my initial trip to China in August-September of 2000 was literally at the very end of that "golden" time. And, of course, I didn't know it then.

In one calendar year--from September 2000 to September 2001--everything changed. And that's really kind of amazing for me to confront, reading this essay again today.

The changes could be felt, certainly, when my ex-wife and I traveled only three years later, in 2003, to adopt our younger daughter from Changsha. It was the same kind of trip, certainly. Same goal in mind. Same adoption agency. Very similar itinerary--with some changes along the journey, of course, regarding airports and cities and hotels and the like. It was the same trip, in many ways.

But it was also a totally different trip, in many other kinds of ways. And my ex-wife and I, as well as everyone in our agency's travel-group, could feel it. It didn't have to be talked about. Traveling the world was no longer the same--it didn't matter if you were American or not. (But certainly being American made us stand out, perhaps--it made us self-conscious and self-aware in ways we didn't notice the first time around.)

Again, interesting (for me, at least) to look back on now.

Another important change over the past 15 years is in the fine details of international adoption, and of Chinese adoption in particular.

I don't talk about this in my essay (and I still chose not to when digging back into it and revising it), but some of the reasons why my ex-wife and I decided to go the route of adoption from the People's Republic of China were:

• When doing our initial research into international adoption (which we admittedly knew nothing about in the beginning, because no one really does) and when checking the websites of such agencies like CCAI, and others, and when clicking on the pictures of those little girls in the orphanages, we fell in love with them immediately. Each and every one of them. They are so beautiful.
• Again, when doing our research, we saw evidence that--statistically--the young children from Chinese orphanages seemed to have a higher percentage of good health statuses, as opposed to many children from many orphanages from many other parts of the world.
• And most selfishly, perhaps, we knew the situation in China--we knew of its oppressive communist government, and of its overwhelming population, and of its crushing One-Child Policy, and of its dehumanizing patriarchal attitudes toward women. When we put all the pieces together, we knew (or at least believed we knew) we could give our daughters better, fuller, and more "meaningful" lives than what they would ever be able to have in their given situations in their homeland. And we also knew--back then, anyway--that there would be no way a birth-mother, some 15 years later, would show up on our doorstep, rap on the door, and say, "Hi. I gave birth to your daughter. And I'd like to be a part of her life now." As selfish and ugly as it may sound, we didn't want that. We didn't want that for ourselves or for our daughters. And we knew (or, again, at least we believed we knew back then) that adopting from a country like China would prevent such a scenario from ever happening.

Terrible of us, right? Thoughtless. Heartless. Selfish.

Well...maybe. But that was a decision we made for ourselves and for our daughters, and we live with it. Right or wrong.

However, something very interesting has happened over the past decade or so. Again, things have moved on in the world rather quickly. And many things have changed. And nowadays, in the matter of international adoption and of the once-laughed-at notion of tracking down--through use of DNA investigation--individuals on opposite ends of the earth, it is possible (still extraordinarily difficult and highly unlikely but possible) for a girl who was in the first days of her life abandoned and orphaned and left alone to now find her birth-parents and to travel the length of the world to meet them.

It has happened. And I think that is amazing.

Another development that has occurred within international adoption over the past decade or so is an increased  attention to detail regarding the historical accuracy and specificity of the circumstances surrounding these children's supposed "abandonment" and "orphaning." The stories we were given in regards to our daughters' pre-histories--their "Abandonment Reports," as such backstories are officially referred to--is the similar stories most (if not all) adoptive parents are told about their orphaned children from China (and from other parts of the world).

The questions being raised today, however, are whether or not these stories are accurate or even true. The questions being raised these days in regards to international adoption involve admittedly ugly and upsetting notions such as the black-market, and the stealing and/or selling of babies immediately following birth, and of money passing hands, and of big business...

I don't mean to sound like an ostrich sticking his head in the sand, here, but I would hope that anyone reading this could understand what I mean when I say I don't prefer to think about such notions. I'm also a stubborn realist, however, and if I'm honest with myself I have to admit that such questions and notions were probably always lurking somewhere in the subconscious corners of my mind.

I don't want to think about such realities, though. I just don't. A part of me would prefer to live with the "stories" that my ex-wife and I were told about our daughters' Abandonment Reports from day one. I'm not fool enough to dismiss the world we live in. I know what kind of world it is. But I also know what kind of world I want to believe in, if not for myself than at least for my daughters--the kind of world I want to live in, and the kind of world I want them to live in.

And so we do what we do. And we do the best we can. And we move on.

[Aside: If any readers out there are interested in seeing a superb documentary film about all that I've talked about here--international adoption, Chinese adoption, changes and developments thereof, and the effect on American families and on the girls themselves as they assimilate into a culture they both find themselves belonging to and not belonging to--I recommend checking out the 2011 movie, Somewhere Between, directed by Linda Goldstein Knowlton. I simply cannot praise this film enough. http://www.somewherebetweenmovie.com/]





re: solution

This is the way of time:


Every year is made the same--
a pieced-together work
of given days
   and hours
      and minutes
         and seconds.


No more, no less.


Some will be good.
And some bad.


How I choose to see
is up to me.


How I choose to feel
is entirely in my heart.


What I choose to do
is all that I can do.


This is the way of my reality:

I Have a Good Feeling About This: The Essay About How It's Okay to Be a Star Wars Fan Again, And Why

I: What We Did to Pass the Time Before the Movie

We arrived at the Mall Cinemaplex, my daughters and I, three hours in advance of the 7:40 p.m. showing-time, as printed on our pre-purchased tickets.

There was a substantial line already forming outside the theater's entrance when we arrived, but it was for the 5:30 movie, it turns out. We were quite early; it was 4:30 in the afternoon, and we were in a mall, and we were hungry (or at least we were going to be by the time our showtime rolled around), and there were ample restaurants in the Food Court to choose from while we waited.


So...


Panera Bread, it was, we decided--our usual choice when in the mall.


No one was particularly hungry among the three of us at that time of day, but we forced a light meal down anyway--partly for whatever nourishment it could provide, I suppose, but also, admittedly, to simply pass the time.


We were in a mall, though. Passing time wasn't going to be too difficult. As we slowly strolled along the crowded walkways, with glittering storefronts flanking us and canned Christmas muzak piped in overhead--drowned amidst the noise of a Friday afternoon throng of teenagers noisily wandering parentless (faces framed in the dull glow from their cellphones) and shoppers milling amongst each other, one week before Christmas, to the day--my daughters and I chatted casually (or what passes for "casual chatter" these days, between a Dad and his two daughters--now young teens, 16 and 13), and we people-watched, and we darted into one store and then the next, pretending to look around for things we thought we might need, until we assumed we had spent enough time passing the time. And so we slowly made our way back toward the movie theater.


It was now 5:30 p.m. And as we walked up to the theater's entrance, another line was just beginning to form. As it turns out, this was the line we wanted--this line was ours, for the 7:40 p.m. showing of the new Star Wars movie--Episode VII: The Force Awakens--on the film's opening night.


We jumped at the chance, not to mention our good fortune, and established our place in line--maybe 15-20 people ahead of us already (not bad at all!) And we began the wait.

II: Interregnum and Backstory (Part I)

And this is the part of the essay that many will probably either want to skim, or scan, or skip altogether. After all, no one really cares too much to read about someone else's lifelong passion for something as seemingly trivial and insignificant as a series of films--a series of films with a markedly questionable and unequal stature, to be sure, as time has moved on. (But a lifelong passion, all the same.)

For those who are interested or just the slightest bit curious about my personal history and feelings with and toward the Star Wars saga, I can do you a favor and (rather than repeat myself verbatim or even half-ass paraphrase my own writing) refer you to another essay of mine, in which I talk about that in some detail.

[Aside: See the essay, "What Pete Townshend Seemed to Get Wrong About Dying and Growing Old." http://emptyshipoutward-bound.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-pete-townshend-seemed-to-get-wrong.html]

III: What It Means to Want Star Wars to Be Star Wars Again

We ended up, my daughters and I, snagging some choice seats (the oversized, rocking, reclining kind--they certainly don't make "going to the movies" the way they used to). We grabbed a prime spot--halfway up and in the middle--and sat down to await the previews, followed by our feature. The theater was quickly filling up. Given the size of the line that had formed behind us during the hour-and-a-half we had spent holding our place toward the queue's front, it was obvious there wouldn't be an empty seat in the house.

Which is no surprise when talking about a franchise like Star Wars. It's rather used to breaking records, after all--going all the way back to the first film's initial release so long ago in the feathered-hair and bell-bottomed days of 1977.


There was a feeling running through the movie theater before the show began--an energy, a communal sense of good nature and good will, a wishful, expectant hope (not unlike the feeling, so common this time of year, of a young child approaching the Christmas tree on Christmas morning, to see what gifts Santa Claus has brought.) Everyone was smiling--adults with their young children, adults with their grown children, teens with friends, teens and young adults on dates, young adults with their elderly parents, everyone with buckets of popcorn, and with oversized cups of soda (does anyone need that much sugar, and caramel syrup, and carbonation in one sitting?), and with stretched-thin old Star Wars T-shirts--threadbare and showing some wear but oddly retro and "in" these days--as well as new T-shirts, freshly minted, emblazoned with the familiar Star Wars logo, followed by the added improvisation, "My Childhood Awakens."


Everyone was in this together, in other words. We were all fans--old and new--and we were here, on opening night, to try to recapture a bit of the original magic, a bit of our past, perhaps, and a bit of our youth.

It wasn't as if we were making this up, though. It wasn't as if we were blindly going into this without some forethought and without some strategic "worse-case-scenario" playing in our collective minds. We knew the odds. We knew the prequel trilogy, after all. We knew Jar-Jar Binks. And Hayden Christensen. (And his immortal line, "I don't like sand.") And we were all too familiar with compelling dialogue of trade disputes, and of senate gamesmanship, and of the Force's "chosen one." And we had all learned of midi-chlorians (whatever the fuck those were). And we had sat through the insipid vapidity of Jake Lloyd (who at least had the unintended good fortune of making Mark Hamill's performance in the original film stand out, in hindsight, like Shakespeare-in-the-Park.) And we had all endured sad Natalie Portman, sleepwalking through her role in what appeared to be a drug-induced stupor, remembering the not-so-distant days back then of Leon: The Professional, and believing, in the pit of her stomach, that she was inch-by-inch, line-by-line, scene-by-scene, episode-by-episode incrementally committing career suicide...

Yes, we were all fairly aware of the odds, entering the theater this night. But we were also aware of some substantial differences this time around:

1. Three years previously, in 2012, George Lucas sold his rights/ownership of the Star Wars franchise entirely--including any future projects and/or productions--to the Disney Corporation. (A Faustian bargain, to be sure, as was assumed by a legion of old, faithful fans--the franchise was finished, we feared, swallowed by the evil Empire itself, and the future lie only in the past.)
2. With George Lucas now out of the picture (and conveniently out of the way), almost immediately--and with absolutely zero sense of ironic coincidence--Disney announced plans to resurrect the somnambulant film series, under the guidance of hot, young director J.J. Abrams, as well as the famed and beloved screenwriter of the series' Episodes V and VI, Lawerence Kasdan.
3. Rumors, and innuendo, and online theories in fan-chats across the world all worked together to feed the fire of excitement and anticipation. Months before the new film was to be in the theaters, teaser-trailers were cobbled together with available footage--edited with the artistic precision of mini-masterpieces--and released online to an explosion of enthusiasm. And within mere seconds of the trailers' release, the internet was owned by Star Wars. And talk began among fans, both of the serious kind and of the fairer-weather kind, of something good brewing. Serious talk, for the first time in a long time, that this time, finally, maybe, a new Star Wars film was going to be done right. And there was the sense, at long last, that Star Wars was back again--the way it used to be.

And as it turns out, thankfully, we were right. ("We" being the collective "we," here. The royal "we," encompassing all the loyal fans everywhere, I suppose. But more particularly that night "we" meaning myself, and my daughters, and my fellow moviegoers in theater #13 for the 7:40 p.m. showing of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.)


We were right to feel a sense of excitement that night--opening night. A sense of urgency. And a sense of hope. We were right to feel that a proverbial corner had perhaps been turned in the official canon of the Star Wars mythos.


This was going to be good, we had a sense going in. And that sense--that feeling--was communal and palpable. You could feel it in the air. We wanted to enjoy this new film. We wanted it to be as good as we had heard leaked rumors proclaiming it to be. We wanted this new film to make up for lost time, in a way, and to make up for whatever missteps may have occurred throughout the years in the series' oddly misshapen history.


We wanted the new movie to be Star Wars again.


And as soon as the previews were over, and the screen went dark, and the words appeared on the screen: "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." followed by the iconic gold logo, STAR WARS, set to the crashing chords of John Williams' legendary opening fanfare, and the crawling prologue--traditionally wordy, and overwrought, and lovely--receding slowly into a star-filled void, to disappear amidst the unfolding action in space, the sold-out movie theater (#13 at the Mall Cinemaplex) erupted in honest and heartfelt applause and cheers.


It was really pretty cool.

IV: Almost Like Church, Really

And so what happened by the end of it all? Well, roughly two-and-a-half hours later, as the film's last dramatic scene faded to black and the credits began to roll, there was more applause, followed by an almost inexplicable and reverential feeling of calm, and peace, and happiness.


Now, I'm not trying to sound too "We Are the World," here, or draw some sort of unlikely comparison to a Woodstock vibe, or anything like that.

[Aside: But when I stop to think of it, maybe the comparison to the proverbial "Woodstock vibe" isn't really all that far off the mark.]


No, what I'm getting at more than anything, I think, is that as the long-awaited film drew to its close, there was practically a sigh of relief in the theater. There was a feeling of satisfaction bordering on elation that the film turned out as good as it did, and while half of the room's viewers immediately got up to leave and to beat the crushing flow of everyone exiting at once, the other half of the room didn't move but instead remained in their seats (their comfortable seats that reclined and rocked back and forth) and did one of four things (or any combination thereof):

1. Got on their cellphones to text and/or call someone, anyone, with their immediate knee-jerk review of the film.
2. Turned and visited with friends and loved ones seated next to them, sharing reactions and responses to the film.
3. Turned and visited with complete strangers seated next to them or a seat over or in the  next row behind or in front, sharing reactions and responses to the film.
4. Sat in silence, listening to the well-known strains of John Williams' classic score, watching as the end credits scrolled by, letting it all sink in, meditatively, and finding a way, somehow, to be at one with the moment.

Those who remained behind--roughly half of the viewing audience that night--didn't need to explain why they stayed where they were. It was clear to everyone.


No one wanted to leave. No one wanted the moment to end. No one wanted the experience--the experience of their first viewing of the new Star Wars movie on opening night--to draw to a close. To do so would mean getting up from their comfortable seat, and checking their coats and pockets for all essentials--to make sure such things as wallets, and purses, and cellphones hadn't slipped out and fallen down between the theater's seating. And to do so would mean walking out of the dim lighting of the theater's auditorium and into, again, the garish neon/fluorescent glow of the cinemaplex's lobby, and further out into the mall's crowded walkways and bustling Food Court, and re-entering the world of Christmas, and of shopping, and of credit cards, and of bills, and of work, and of upcoming travel plans, and of who gets the children first for Christmas--Mom or Dad--and of exactly how many Christmases the kids are going to get this year, and of wondering if this is to be the year, by the way, that the kids stop believing in such a thing as Santa Claus altogether, no more tumbling out of bed early on a cold Christmas morning, rubbing sleep from their soft, tender eyes, and shuffling softly to the tree, to see what gifts lie below.


The magic.


Leaving the theater meant leaving the ethereal world of a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, and reemerging, once more, into the all-too-solid world of the here and now.


The real world.


And so we stayed behind, those of us who did. I hung back and visited with my daughters about the movie--fielding questions from them, trying my best to provide some sort of answers, asking them what their impressions were, laughing together, smiling together, loving the moment.


And the thing is, it wasn't just us doing that. It was everyone around us. Countless conversations. Countless smiles. Countless memories in the making. Countless people doing their best to battle loneliness, and emptiness, and sadness, and to find some sort of solace and communion--even if it was only for two-and-a-half hours at a movie, surrounded in the intimacy of a darkened room filled with strangers and loved ones sharing the same experience together.


There was a sense of reverence about the whole evening, as it played out. And when it was all over, the girls and I collected our things, and it was almost like bidding "goodbye" to close friends as we made our way down the row of seats, and down the stairs, and down the aisle, and out of the theater, and back outside, and away from the warmth of recycled air, and into the cold of a December night--our breath in front of us in three little clouds--and the quickened walk to my car, cold from 6 hours of resting in the parking lot.


"That was almost like church, really, wasn't it," I said to my daughters, sitting in the cold car, waiting for the engine's parts to get used to one another again, and for the heater inside the cabin to begin to realize its sole purpose. I had sort of half-laughed when I said it--and I recognized that I had said it not as a question but more as a statement of fact. The half of me that wasn't laughing when I said it, though, probably meant it even more than I was aware at the time.


My daughters only nodded, cold and shuddering, wanting it to be warmer faster, and said, "Yeah," in unison.

V: Interregnum and Backstory (Part II)

I am admittedly a bit of a hypocrite. I might as well come clean on that right now. I have been spending a lot of time and space extolling the virtues of the latest chapter in the Star Wars saga, filling in all the details (and more) of my perceptions and my experience attending the opening-night showing of Episode VII: The Force Awakens with my two teenage daughters, all the while mocking in a semi-disparaging tone the most recent films up to this time (written and directed by none other than Lucas himself) of the Star Wars universe--a series of films that have been and will be referred to from here on out as either: The Prequel Trilogy; Episodes I-III; or just simply "the prequels," otherwise known to the world as The Phantom Menace (1999), The Attack of the Clones (2002), and The Revenge of the Sith (2005).


Now, I remember going to the opening of Episode I: The Phantom Menace, just like all the rest of the old, traditional fans who had likewise grown up with the original trilogy back in the late-'70s and the early-'80s.


I remember, back in 1999, the palpable thrill in the air months before the release of Episode I. Granted, this was in the days just on the cusp of the internet exploding into our social and cultural consciousness, but for those of us old enough to remember a world without such contrivances as computers and the internet, it will come as no surprise to know that the word was still out on this new Star Wars movie--the first (at that time) in 16 years, since 1983's Return of the Jedi had brought to a close the first set of films, referred to from here on out as either: The Original Trilogy; Episodes IV-VI; or just simply "the classics," otherwise known to the world as A New Hope (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and, again, Return of the Jedi (1983).


This was all a long time ago, of course. And for those of us who were diehard fans from the beginning--those of us "in the know," so to speak--there had always been cryptic talk from George Lucas of his somehow telling a three-generational tale of a classic fall/redemption, broken into nine separate film-chapters. Pretty daunting stuff, really, and more than just a little ballsy of him. Of course, as time went on, his enthusiasm would wane for his original epic blueprint.


First was the issue of technology. While it is true Lucas (and his special effects company, Industrial Light & Magic) created what wasn't there in the 1970s to fill a much-needed void and to tell his early space opera in the best way possible, in the wake of the classic trilogy being told, his energy as a storyteller was spent, and the existing film technology did not make it possible for Lucas, yet, to pursue the other episodes of his grand story, and to put his vision on the large screen.


The second factor, of course, was his wanting, at that time, to pursue other interests, primarily in the role of film-producer. So, at the close of his classic trilogy, Lucas decided to take a much-needed break from the Star Wars universe, and he chose to explore other interests for a while--primarily the Indiana Jones trilogy (1981-1989) with his friend, Steven Spielberg, and other such lucrative works of art, like 1986's grand day out, Howard the Duck.


Inevitably, however, time would move on, and film technology--along the lines of digital graphics and the use of digital film--would eventually catch up with Lucas' imagination. And in turn his creative spirit would kick-start again, and the desire to re-enter the world he had already created and made legend would ignite, once more, his original vision. And so began talk of another set of films, this time (as he had supposedly always planned) to tell the story of the "before times"--the tragic story of Annakin Skywalker, who would grow up from a boy to a man, and who, in time, would evolve into the fearsome, mythic figure of Darth Vader.


And thus the prequels were born. And, as I said earlier, though it was 1999, and though the world was a more innocent world that had not yet heard of something called "social media," or YouTube, or MySpace, or Facebook,  or Twitter, talk was still circulating like mad of Lucas' return to his saga, and the excitement was pitched higher (perhaps in some ways, and in other ways not) than it is today.


And I was there in 1999, just like everyone else, caught up in the frenzy and the fun of Star Wars-mania once again. It was like the summer of 1977, in several ways. Except instead of being a 10 year-old boy (like I was when the original film was released), I was now a young man, a married man in those days--nearing 3 years married at that time, in the summer of '99 when The Phantom Menace was released. My wife and I didn't have children yet. And I was doing some teaching still. And I was 32 years-old--a young man, a young husband, not yet a father, my life so much before me, reliving the joy of my youth with talk of other Star Wars films being resurrected.


It was a fun time in my life, I remember. And words cannot adequately express how excited I was--how excited the world was--to revisit an old story in a whole new form.

VI: Where Exactly Are We, And How Exactly Did We Get Here?

If you're paying attention at all at this point, you've got to be saying to yourself something along the lines of: "How disingenuous of you, to make fun of the prequels after-the-fact, when truth be told you were thrilled beyond measure at the time of their release, much like the enthusiasm you spent the first half of this whole fucking essay describing, when you detailed your memories of opening night for the new Episode VII. What an arrogant, petulant, short-memoried, bandwagoning piece-of-shit you are."

[Aside: And that would be very insightful of you. Though...am I really petulant, do you think?]


Granted, it is disingenuous of me now, in 2015--another 16 years since the reappearance of the Star Wars films with Episode I: The Phantom Menace--to so crassly and coldly today turn my back on those three films (a series of movies which I, and countless other old-school fans, eagerly embraced upon their release).

So, what's up with that? What happened during those 16 years between Episode I and this day? What went wrong, so to speak? Where exactly are we, and how exactly did we get here?

It's very simple, really: Time moves on. I grew older. My tastes as a cineaste have evolved over the years--grown more complicated, and more refined, perhaps, and certainly more selective. I love movies. I love the art of film. I am, at heart, a movie buff from way back. Interestingly enough--and with no surprise at all--I can point to Lucas' original set of films as an integral part of my life as a movie-enthusiast and as a student of film. The classic Star Wars trilogy was and is a seminal part of my life.

[Aside: To this day, I can still remember going to the theater as a 10 year-old boy back in May, 1977, to see the original Star Wars. It is one of those moments in my life I will never forget. It's that important to me.]

But time moves on. I am not the same person I was when I was a 10 year-old boy, standing in line in 1977 to see Star Wars, (no matter how much, in many ways, I probably wish I could be.) I am not the same person I was when I was a 32 year-old young man, standing in line in 1999 to see The Phantom Menace, (no matter how much, in many ways, I probably wish I could be.)

I have changed. My life has gone in directions I could never have predicted--as everyone's does, I know. And, like everyone, over time my tastes have changed. Some things from my youth I still cherish and hold close to me. Some things I still love, and always will. And some things I do not.


I (and other lifelong Star Wars fans like me) loved The Phantom Menace when it first made its appearance on the big screen 16 years ago. We loved it because of our memories of loving the original trilogy. We loved the new movie back then because the three previous Star Wars movies--the classic trilogy--had moved us so much, and shaped us, and lifted us from our lives when we were lonely 10 year-old boys.

Star Wars fans loved The Phantom Menace because we felt, more than anything, that we had to. It was canon now, after all. This was official stuff. And though, as the films progressed and we perhaps noticed (deep inside) the stiffness and the clunkiness and the pains produced by the incomprehensible plot twists and inane characters, at times, we refused to give full voice to our frustration and unease. We said things, instead, like: "Well, this is a different sort of story that Lucas is trying to tell this time around. This one is more serious, more tragic, and so therefore more formal in its telling."

And we were okay with that. And we believed that.

[Aside: And in fact, to this day, I can still see making that argument. It makes sense in many ways. The prequels are, in fact, telling a much more serious story than the original trilogy told. The prequels are a tragedy. They are the dark and gloomy story of the fall, while the classic trilogy tells the more uplifting story of redemption. In that way, then, a very honest analogy can be made to Lucas' prequels as serving the role of the Old Testament in the Judao-Christian faith (at least of the first two books--Genesis and Exodus). The story told in the Star Wars prequels is a classic story of high-mindedness, with an overly serious-tone, and an almost didactic, "preachy" sort of style--it details, after all, the tragedy of a man, and a republic, and a galaxy all falling under the sway of evil. Just in summarizing it in that way, it certainly doesn't sound like a very "fun" story to tell, albeit a necessary and essential story to tell. But the classic trilogy, on the other hand, could almost be said to serve the role of the Gospels (the first four books of the New Testament, detailing the life and teachings of Christ)--again, according to the Judao-Christian tradition. As such, the original films tell much more of a spirited, and fast-moving, and action-packed tale, full of recognizable characters, and light and darkness, and heroes and villains, and suffering and salvation. And all of it--ultimately, finally--with a somewhat traditional, happy ending, of sorts.]

Star Wars fans were apologists for the prequel films--for years--when the prequels were all we had to look to as the continuing arc of Lucas' epic story. We were willing to overlook their many weaknesses--weaknesses which were harder to hide and grew ever more annoyingly apparent as the years wore on.

Time has not been particularly kind to Lucas' prequels, in other words, nor to the entrusted vision of his overall story.

The films' weaknesses have made themselves outrageously obvious (to me anyway) just over the course of the past month, as I dusted them off in my DVD collection and put them in to watch--a planned Star Wars marathon, to refresh my memory and to more fully prepare for the upcoming Episode VII. In all honesty, I can't remember the last time I had felt like watching the prequels. It never occurs to me these days. The urge to do so never crosses my mind. There are so many other films on my list to watch. Movies I want to see. Things I want to learn from them. And life is short, and time is precious, and... Well, you know.

Sitting down to watch Episode I: The Phantom Menace this time, I knew going into it at least two things were going to happen:

1. I was not going to like the character of Jar-Jar Binks. (But to be fair, I have never liked the character of Jar-Jar Binks. There may be, somewhere--and I'm practically certain there has to be--a fan club appreciating this asinine character, but I can't imagine why.)
2. I was going to have an averse reaction--possibly bordering on an allergic reaction these days--to the "acting" of little Jake Lloyd. And, no, it's not unfair to criticize him. There have been, throughout the long history of cinema, a number of great child-actors. (Dare I bring up again, ironically, Natalie Portman in 1994's brilliant Leon: The Professional? She was a natural in it, bordering on genius, really. I rest my case.) I'm going to put this as simply as possible: Jake Lloyd fucking sucks, and he practically single-handedly (since he is, after all, carrying what could be called the "lead character") brings the film to its knees. 

But in all fairness, there are scenes and sequences in all of the prequel films that are entertaining and solid in a refreshing and naturally "good" sort of way:

• The pod-race scene, and the climactic lightsaber duel(s) in Episode I. Fun and very well done (with some great, operatic music from Williams during the lightsaber duel--but unfortunately a case of too little and too late).
• The scenes in Episode II set on Tatooine, detailing Annakin's return home, and his search for his mother, and his sad discovery of her having been sold into bondage to the Sand People, and  his decision--really a key moment in the entire saga, actually--to slay her captors in an act of selfish anger, and fear, and retribution. This scene stands apart for me, primarily because it is so integral in the dissolution of Annakin's strong, moral Jedi-mindedness. We're watching him lose his soul, here, which is obviously what the whole prequel trilogy is about.
• And, really, Episode III is not terrible to me. It has more redeeming moments than the first two films. It is guilty of being clunky and mechanical and overweighted, yes. But at least it is not unbearable. And if I don't ever feel like watching the whole thing again, at least I know this much: The last act of Episode III--probably the last 30-40 minutes of film time--is really pretty strong, comparatively. The rise of the Emperor and of the Galactic Empire, in perfect synchrony with the fall of Annakin Skywalker to the Dark Side of the Force, is genuine Star Wars territory. And I like it. I find it pretty compelling, actually. The scenes of the final duel between Obi-Wan and Annakin are heartbreaking and (for the most part) pretty well done. Similarly, the film's closing scenes are impressive, but only so because it can't help but pluck the strings in our memory of the approaching Episode IV, and of the introduction of characters (though only babies) that we have been patiently waiting for all along.

Overall, I do not like the prequels now. I couldn't always say that before, but I can now. And I can say it now because they're not good movies.

[Aside: And when I say they're "not good movies," I don't mean merely that they're "not good Star Wars movies." I mean they are not good movies in the sense that they are quite simply terrible movies. Embarrassingly written. Unbearably acted. Unforgivably directed. Unendingly edited. They are bad movies. After my latest encounter with them, I can fairly say it may be my last full encounter with them. If I watch them again, it will be in segments, in parts only. They do not stand the test of time. They do not hold up. And they are almost entirely unwatchable.]


And, okay, this may make me disingenuous. It may make me hypocritical. But I don't think so. Not really. What it does make me, I feel--after a long time of living in denial--is honest.


As a Star Wars fan, I can say it now. And that's all right. (The first step, after all, of addressing any problem is first admitting there is a problem.)

VII: Home

Here's the deal: They're just movies. And yet they're not just movies.


Anyone who is a fan (and possibly even some non-fans out there who have very well-developed attributes in the area of empathy) can understand what I mean by this.


It's okay to be a fan of anything and of anyone. It's okay to love something beyond reason--like a movie, perhaps, or a piece of music, or a piece of writing, or a piece of art, or a beautiful gesture, a beautiful face, a beautiful act.


It's okay to love anything beyond reason, really. I know such a sentiment would never pass as an actual denotative definition of the word "love," but here it goes anyway: Maybe real love has nothing at all to do with reason. Maybe that's what it is at its root. Maybe that's all it is. Maybe to love something or someone requires you to set aside your head and rely on your emotions a little more than you normally would, a little more than you're normally comfortable doing, perhaps--that all-natural "gut instinct" that everyone talks about so much.


Maybe love has nothing to do with reason at all, and so loving something unreasonably is simply the natural order of things. The way it's meant to be. Perfectly inescapable and totally unavoidable.


The way you love another person. Or should. An act beyond explanation. Beyond a need for explaining.


The love of something and of someone goes so much further beyond simply keeping track of who did what, and of who said what, and of who was right, and of who was wrong. Love has a relaxed grip on memory--it doesn't forget the past, but it lets it go, and it doesn't regret or second-guess the letting go. Love allows mistakes, and it forgives, and it allows you to look beyond the mistakes of yesterday, and to enjoy the pleasures of today, and to look ahead, with eagerness, to the future.


I know... Too mystical, perhaps? Edging too close to that treacly "We Are the World" territory, that mythological "Woodstock vibe" I hinted at earlier? Am I still talking about a movie, after all?


Well...maybe.


But maybe there's something bigger than all that. I don't know. Something bigger lying behind the path my life has taken since I was a lonely 10 year-old boy watching a great movie in a darkened theater-auditorium with a roomful of strangers, all of us gathered together to share something we didn't even know how to put into words.


Maybe there's something bigger lying behind my divorce from my wife eleven years ago, my daughters only 5 and 2 years old at the time, respectively--another seminal moment in my life, to be sure, taking me down paths, again--some good, some not so good, I suppose--which I never could have foreseen as a younger man.


People I've loved. People who have loved me. Mistakes I've made. And mistakes they've made against me. Memories now, etched like a picture, burned like an image on a roll of film, played on an endless loop on a bare wall, like shadows of the truth.


My daughters, teenagers now, sitting with me in our comfortable seats in the darkened room of theater #13 at the Mall Cinemaplex, sharing a movie together, a moment together, a memory of opening night at the latest chapter in the ongoing Star Wars saga. A realization that, among other things, some things do live up to their hype. Some things are as good as you had hoped they would be. Second chances do exist. Second acts can happen (despite Fitzgerald's iconic and profound warning). Some dreams never die, and shouldn't. And forgiving, and forgetting, and moving on in the world is not only the way of sanity, it's the way of hope. And the comfortable, reassuring knowledge that when we come to a place and to a person that we recognize as an extension of ourselves, with all calmness of heart (like the by-now familiar and already-beloved line from a new film showing to millions of eager viewers, young and old) we can say, with all certainty: "We're home."


Am I still talking about a movie? Maybe.


And then again, maybe I never was.

November (soft ghost)



"November always seemed to me the Norway of the year... The redoubtable God! I notice where Death has been introduced, he frequently calls, making it desirable to forestall his advances... Sharper than dying is the death for the dying's sake."

-- Emily Dickinson, in a letter to Elizabeth Holland, 1864  

___________________________



Fingers go first

on cold mornings

like these--

the year almost over,

marked only by

clouds of my breath

and the steam from a first

cup of coffee,

billowing and then invisible

right in front of me.

Standing on my wooden deck,

surveying the backyard for signs of life,
I hold the cup close to my face

to feel its warmth

and to breathe in the fecund humidity
of some verdant, impenetrable green--

the genesis in Colombian forests or

hills of Bolivian backcountry

somewhere,
the sound of macaws
     and marmosets
          and masked squirrel monkeys

replaced only by the lonesome trill of a blue jay

foraging in front of a hiccupping grey-squirrel

leaping amid detritus of the fall,

brushy tail twitching at the
grey clouds and grey sky--

staring at me


across a blankness like a frozen fjord,

an emptiness floating beneath ice
I have to blink away,
but I know that when I do

it will be gone,

this breath of mine,

dissipating and

                    disappearing

in the air in front of me.

It happens that fast.

Silent as the trees,

their bark a sullen hue,

their limbs and trunks showing through

the emptiness of what once was there.

The nearest one

in my leafy brain

a woman, naked, her ochre dress

fallen to the floor by her feet in the bedroom,

silkened soft arms and breasts and legs opened to me

swaying to the sibilance of her windvoice,
dry leaves whispering in the quiet--

my name.
Her whisper, a sound so soft,

until it is

                                             lost
and once again as before,
as always,
only the morning's wind

in my ear.


And so--


A mug of hot coffee by my face

and at my lips
(her smile, her mouth, her hands--soft ghost--her legs, her laugh, her hair, her fingers)

my fingers opening and closing
wrapped around this fire,

the sting of blood returning while

breathsteam entwines like a silver thread,

falling slack, bending, looping around itself
like some slumbering "8"
(the sign of infinity tattooed in the air)
and then tightening

from some other end to

pull at me.


And I have to let it go.

Early morning

near the end of a year
like any year,
sitting alone

in the cold,

drinking coffee and breathing,

     breathing,

          just like that,

and watching it go.

meltwater: 5 views

(1)

ice and snow dissolve
a slow return to the source
sunlight caught inside


(2)

cold glass stalactites
dripping away to the earth
my ancient spirit


(3)

winter is heavy
a pane of glass cold and white
breath held in blue air


(4)

memories of loss
weighted limbs bowed and broken
sole hibernation

(5)

this dawn of new spring
sight and sound of glistening thaw
meltwater at last

Getting to Forgiveness

Imagine a place somewhere
out of the way,
a place found on a map, even,
with corners and angles and squares,
a sign on the outskirts of town
faded with age and made on barnboard, maybe,
or else new and shining under the sun
and with words of open arms.

  "Welcome to Forgiveness!"

it might read,
to let you know that you were there.
To let you know that you had reached
your destination
finally.
To let you know
that you had
made it.

I wonder sometimes
how such a trip must feel.

Traveling alone, more than likely.
A car ride, it would seem.
The loneliness of your road
stretching away from you,
reminding you not only how far
you have to go
but also how far
you have come.

Observe directions.
Pay attention to signs.

Remember what you see.
Stop when you can or must.

And if you're still afraid of getting lost,
then tear your anger
into tiny little scraps
dropped in the wind
behind you,

marking your path

for the return trip
    home,


and reminding yourself
(as if you need reminding)
that the road is there.


          Make the trip when you can.

Dharma Bummed

"Beggars should be abolished entirely...

It is annoying to give to them, and it is annoying not to give to them."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

"And that's the way this wheel

keeps working now..."

-- John Mayer

__________________________

The Exit ramp off Interstate 80--one of the many leading into Joliet--was backed up nearly to the shoulder of the highway. Green light, green arrow pointing left, allowing for a safe and legal turn onto Houbolt Road. My daughter was asleep in the passenger seat next to me, the radio playing loudly from the last station her finger had visited on the dial before tuning out herself--a habit she is wont to do--and leaving me wondering all of the sudden why I hadn't thought to change the station.

Not that I have anything against popular music of the day, actually.

[Aside: I always swore I would never become one of those kind of Dads, bemoaning the loss of the supposed "glory days" of music/film/sports/cars/culture-in-general. Rambling on and on and on about some romanticized vision of some ethereal past that probably--if push came to shove--never existed anyway. You know...that guy. The veritable "Grumpy Old Man." The buzzkill. The literal death of the party.]

I like to think of myself as championing the theory of Always-Trying-To-Do-The-Right-Thing-When-It-Needs-To-Be-Done--an example I like to set for my daughters when I can. It's a theory of open-mindedness, I like to believe. It's a theory of inclusiveness and awareness of another's feelings and attitudes and beliefs in the grand mix with mine.

And so, by surrender, that theory also extends to the music played these days in my car when my daughters--now of the pre- and full-fledged teen variety--are along for the ride with me. When they were younger, it was so much easier; I could get away--while driving them here and there--with indoctrinating them to my taste in music. It was always my radio station of choice. My personal collection of CDs played over the car's stereo. My iPod's music list plugged into the auxiliary outlet on the panel.

I was rather proud of the fact that my daughters--at the wee ages of 4 and 7--could recognize the opening chords of The Flaming Lips' "Waiting for a Superman." And not only recognize the song, but sing along with it. Flawlessly. And even request to hear it again, played on repeat ad nauseum.

I was raising some well-rounded, respectful, cultured, and open-minded young ladies.

[Aside: But after all, what were they going to do, disagree with me? I was Dad. And they were 4 and 7, for God's sake. Besides, I was getting to listen to my radio station, and my CDs, and my extensive musical library in digital storage. But that's beside the point. And anyway, that was then....]

Still, I had to wonder now, as the line of cars stacked up along the Exit ramp and slowly inched along, one by one, to the lure of the left-pointing green arrow, what sort of fog I had been in that I hadn't changed from the usual top-40 fare blaring from my car's speakers. My daughter had fallen asleep, like usual. So it was just me listening to this crap. What had I been thinking?

And it was then that I saw him. Standing on the edge of the left-turning lane, dressed in worn-out, stinky-looking clothes--long, tangled blond hair held under a greasy ball cap, an untrimmed beard, scuffed boots, torn jeans, an oversized hoodie hanging on his frame. And most notably, perhaps, a ragged rectangle of corrugated beige cardboard held between his hands just at lower-chest level--a message scrawled lightly, and apparently quickly, in black permanent marker. I was still too far away to read what was written (and probably misspelled, I assumed) on the piece of cardboard ripped randomly from some leftover box resting in the ditch, I would imagine. But then again I also assumed I knew just what the wording on the young man's homemade sign was. (Or at least a close facsimile.)

It was also at this time, not coincidentally, I began to wonder just how long a green left-turn arrow lasts.

I knew it would happen the way it happened. And so it happened. A row of red blinking turn-signals disappeared in succession, like lemmings over some God-forsaken cliff, and still the green left-turn arrow remained. Five cars ahead of me now. Four. How soon would it turn yellow, and then red? I noticed the cars ahead of me speeding up now, ever so slightly, just to make the light. A helpful ploy, for all involved. Surely the green arrow can't last much longer. Surely it won't change now, though. Nobody wants to be that car, sitting stopped, with a supposed homeless beggar weighing on their conscience off to the side of the road.

Nobody wants that.

Three cars now, each moving along nicely. Time is of the essence. Everybody being polite, after all. Everybody taking their turn. Everybody observing--to the best of his/her ingrained mannered abilities--the proverbial "rules of the road." A staple of civilization, I suppose. One of those things, like the opposable thumb, I would guess, that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. The lesser beasts of the earth. The unwashed herd. ("And speaking of 'unwashed,'" I thought...)

The green arrow suddenly paled to yellow. Who's it going to be? Two cars now. One. How fast can the remaining car ahead of me move?

[Aside: AND FOR THE SWEET LOVE OF GOD CAN'T SHE MOVE ANY FUCKING FASTER THAN THAT?!]

She couldn't.

The yellow left-turn arrow faded to red as the driver ahead of me made her casual advance, completing her turn, and speeding successfully along her way. I, on the other hand, remained behind. I was that car that didn't make the left turn. I was the car sitting at the front of the line now, waiting on the red light to change. I was the car directly next to some guy, a stranger in used clothes who looked like he hadn't had a bath or a decent meal or a full night's sleep in ages and who--for God-only-knows-what reason--had been reduced to standing alone alongside the Exit ramp, stalwart and stoic, holding a cardboard sign in front of his chest, begging for money, for a ride, for help, and waiting for someone--anyone--to acknowledge him.

"Of-fucking-course this would happen to me," I thought to myself, careful not to give voice to such frustration (even though my daughter was still asleep). "Just my luck..."

At least from this newly acquired vantage point, though, I could now make out his sign:

OUT OF WORK & OUT OF HOME

PLEASE HELP

ANY HELP APRECITED

The fact that I was right, as it turns out, about his sign being misspelled was of little satisfaction. The only reason I had finally read it was: 1.) I was now sitting comfortably in my car just mere feet from the guy, my air-conditioner blowing and the stereo blaring the latest masterpiece from Maroon 5; and 2.) I was wearing my aviator sunglasses, large enough to hide my eyes and to sneak a sideways glance at him and at his scrawled misspelled message on his pathetic piece of cardboard. I didn't want him to notice my looking, however--I didn't want him to know I was glancing at him and thereby bring down all the attendant expectations such a noticed glance could inevitably bring.

I quickly thought of all the things I could do to make it look like I was suddenly an extraordinarily busy and important person. I thought of fidgeting with the stereo--or at least pretending to. (With this thought was the presumed assumption on my part, I guess, that my car doors were, in fact, padded with some miraculous soundproof lining and that though he was poor and obviously down-on-his-luck, this meant, for some unexplainable reason, that the guy standing 4 feet away from me on the side of the road was also deaf.) I also thought of becoming inordinately interested in suddenly fishing for something under my seat--like some misplaced change, or a piece of gum, or a dropped detonator. Something like that. I thought, too, of immediately bringing my cell phone up to my ear (thank God for 21st-century technology, after all) and falling back on the old familiar standby of suddenly finding myself in a very elaborate and animated phone call.

[Aside: Who among us hasn't tried that old chestnut at least once, for various reasons of our own and with equally varying results?]

But then, as I glanced at him again out of the corner of my eyes--with his sad, bedraggled appearance and his sign and his pitiful "1,000-yard stare" (as if not wanting to make eye contact with any of the random motorists pulling up randomly alongside him, just about as much as none of us wanted to make eye contact with him) I thought of this also: That could be me out there...

I thought shamefully of the unpaid bills piling up at home, and of the mailbox full of more, always more. And I thought of past-due balances. And of overdraft notices. And of debts. And of the repeated litany of questions every month, rolling through my mind--a list of questions forcing me to prioritize my needs, like some absurd sort of financial triage: "Do I have enough money to cover these payments? How about these? And which bills are the longest overdue? Can I pay those off now? Will they accept half a payment? Which bill(s) will go unpaid this month? And what about gas? And what about groceries? How overrated is eating, really?..." And the endgame to all of that, then, of course, are the creditors calling ceaselessly, day and night, wanting to know where the money is. And can they, in any way, be of help? ("Oh, the irony," I thought suddenly, sitting comfortably in my car. "Where's my piece of cardboard?") I thought of vacations and new cars and expensive toys and top-shelf hobbies and the lifestyles all my friends seem to be living every minute of the day--if what one sees on social sites like Facebook is to be believed. Everyone seems to have found the secret, it would seem, except me.

Well...me and the young, bearded, homeless hippie standing next to me at the moment, I had to guess.

And that's when it all, in just a second's passing, came crashing down on me: That could so easily be me. Any day now. Standing on the side of the road with, yes, my own cardboard sign, in fact, held in front of me, desperately asking total strangers for help.

I looked at my daughter then, sleeping so peacefully in the seat beside me. Blissfully unaware--thank God--of the cares of the world, and of the weight of being a single Dad, and of absurd unrealities to her of such things as child-support, and health insurance, and responsibilities that reach far beyond the tangibles of paper money and paper mailings and paper guilt.

Bruno Mars was belting out his latest rehashed falsetto anthem to young, amazing love (or some such thing...) and I recalled, briefly, how just seconds ago it seemed so miraculous to me that I had not changed the radio station, when the only one who wanted to listen to this sort of music was fast asleep in the car on the drive to go shopping in Joliet. It would seem my theory of Always-Trying-To-Do-The-Right-Thing-When-It-Needs-To-Be-Done had, indeed, gotten the best of me--no pun intended. I was mindlessly mindless. Selflessly selfless. So much so that it was no longer about me--I was merely a microcosmic speck of matter in the great stew of life in this thing we call the Universe. I was matter that did not matter.

I switched off Bruno Mars' voice, then, and in the silence that followed in my car, waiting for the red light to turn so I could be about my day, I heard, instead, John Lennon's paradoxical ramble sift through the music library in my brain:

          "I am he as you are he as you are me.
           And we are all together..."

Pressing the button on the power console next to me, my driver's-side window hummed down. But only halfway. I reached behind me and felt for my wallet--thin, but... I opened it and pulled out two dollar bills.

[Aside: Two dollars? Really?...]

Upon hearing the electric motor of my window, the young man suddenly turned to me. I don't know who looked more surprised, because I obviously couldn't see my face at the moment. This was definitely out of character for me, to be sure, but of course he didn't know that. And he didn't need to know that.

I just couldn't help but think right then that it was not only the right thing to do--giving this guy some help, any help I could spare--it was the only thing to do. "I would want someone like me to do this for me if I needed it," I thought quietly, still not wanting to wake my daughter. Better she not see this, I reasoned, for some reason.

I rolled my car window down halfway and held out the two dollar bills toward him--lengthwise, like a carrot, leading him forward. Oh, the power I held in those two crisp dollar bills, I realized. His eyes turned to look at me then for the first time. To really look at me. And I cannot describe the smile that crossed his emaciated, hollowed face at that moment. He still had his teeth, I noticed. "I guess the heroin or the meth habit I'm helping finance hasn't completely ravaged him yet," I suddenly thought. This was followed by a quick rejoinder: "Shut up!" I thought to myself. "Can't you just shut up your mind for once and be in this moment? Maybe he'll get a cup of coffee with the two dollars you're passing on to him. Or maybe a candy bar. You don't know. Or maybe something sweet for a loved one--a rose for a girlfriend or a small plush toy for a child who is sick or who is out of the picture for some reason. Or maybe he'll pay it forward, giving your two dollars away, in fact, to someone other than himself who needs it even more, someone who..."

"Oh my God, dude, that is so righteous!" he said. He smiled some more at me and laughed a nice, clean, sincere laugh. "Absolutely righteous..."

I smiled back at him.

"Brother," he said, "you are absolutely a righteous man!"

And I continued to smile, feeling pretty good about the moment, actually. This was turning out better than I had anticipated. Maybe my crackpot theory of Always-Trying-To-Do-The-Right-Thing-When-It-Needs-To-Be-Done wasn't so crackpot after all. Maybe my attempts to be open-minded and all-inclusive and aware had its own sense of reward. Maybe, in its own karmic way, this was its payoff. What goes around comes around, like the dharma wheel, itself.

I had to admit, being told I was, in fact, "righteous" was good medicine for me at that particular time. It was just what I needed to hear, perhaps. An affirmation (despite all the contrary evidence) that although I had maybe neglected to pay this month's gas bill, and although I perhaps needed to start reorganizing and reprioritizing my life and start acting like the grownup I was presumed to be, and although I maybe wasn't living the life of fun and enchantment all my friends seemed to be living and inadvertently bragging about online, it could just be that maybe--just maybe--I wasn't so bad after all.

Maybe, in fact, I was even "righteous."

Righteous.

I know what that word means--"righteous." I have used it often myself, in differing times and situations. But I have certainly never used it (or even thought of using it) in regards to me. And even though I know, with a fair degree of certainty, the full denotations and connotations of that word, I couldn't help but think I wanted to look it up in the dictionary as soon as I got home, just to be sure I was right.

Just to be sure I was righteous, in fact.

"You are so righteous," I heard again, as if this young down-and-out gentleman had somehow read my mind and was confirming my obligatory crisis of self-doubt. These two dollar bills were certainly making his day, to be sure.

And then he moved toward me, and not just to retrieve his gift of two-hundred pennies, either, it would seem. He stepped toward me then with his arms unbelievably outstretched and opened wide, as if he were moving in for an embrace.

This guy--this total stranger standing on the side of an Exit ramp leading to Joliet where just a minute ago I was innocently going to do some shopping with my daughter, this dirty, unbathed, and almost-certainly stinking young beggar who was panhandling and playing on people's simple sympathies, like my own--was moving in to get close.

This guy wanted to hug me.

As it turns out, my surprise and my recoil could not have been stronger. I leaned back into my seat, further away from my half-open window, and felt with my left hand along the control panel next to me to make sure, in fact, that the doors were automatically locked and to slide my index finger into place on the power-window control button--just in case.

"Thank you, man! Thank you..." he said, noticing rather quickly, I would assume, that he wasn't going to get that hug. If he was upset, he didn't show it. He had more of a poker-face than I, probably, and he settled instead for the extended two dollars, as well as my hand in a half-hearted shake.

"You're welcome," I said. "And good luck..."

And I meant it. I was sad for him. Just as I was sad for me. He had certainly seen better times, just as I had. And though my times were evidently still better than his at the moment, if nothing else he was living proof to me--as if I needed it--that it could all slip away so quickly. And I could be him. And if my benediction of good fortune was truthfully being passed on to this stranger who asked nothing of me but "ANY HELP" that I was able to give (whether it was truthfully, on his part, "APRECITED" or not) then my words "good luck" were meant for me, as well.

[Aside: "I am he as you are he as you are me.
             And we are all together..."]

"Seriously, good luck," I said again--adding the "Seriously" this time, as if it was needed for some reason.

He looked at me and smiled again. "Thank you. Thank you, brother..."

"You're welcome. Take care."

"You too."

And that was that. How long did the whole scene actually take? I have no way of knowing. A matter of seconds, probably. How long does a red light last? A lifetime, it seems, most of the time, I know. And yet sometimes--on those rare times driving when we're not frazzled and not in a hurry to get where we're going and to get there quickly--a red light can go faster than we'd like.

I rolled my window up as the red left-turn arrow once again turned green, and I continued on my way to go shopping with my daughter, which had been my unassuming plan all along.

This was, of course, the time she decided to wake up. "Hey..." she muttered, half-intelligibly.

"Hey back." I said.

"What's happening?..." she asked.

What's happening?

I thought back to the scene just played out seconds ago. To my recognition of myself in someone else. To my joy and satisfaction at being called something like "righteous." To my automatic and instinctual fear and disgust at the thought of hugging a dirty homeless stranger who was begging for "HELP" on the side of the road. To the way I so thoughtlessly reached now for the little squeeze-bottle of handwash lotion that I keep in my glove-box--for emergencies.

"What's happening?" I say to her, repeating her question, stalling for time.

[Aside: Yes. What's happening? What just happened here?]

"Good thing you woke up," I said, deflecting for a moment. "We're almost to where we're going."

Putting back the handwash bottle in my glove-box, I reached deeper inside for my iPod, which I knew was in there somewhere. My daughter hadn't noticed yet the silence of the "no-music" sound in my car simply because she was still half asleep and it hadn't registered with her. But it would soon.

"How about listening to some of Dad's music for the last little bit of the trip?" I said. I suddenly wanted to hear a song very badly. "You don't mind, do you, honey?..."

"No, that's fine," she said, with a selfless shrug. She looked out the window at the buildings and the cars passing by.

I plugged in my iPod on the console and searched briefly for the album and song I was looking for. Still there. I hadn't deleted it: The Flaming Lips, their 1999 album, The Soft Bulletin, the 8th track-- "Waiting for a Superman." I turned up the speakers on the car's stereo. Loud. And I hit the PLAY button.

The familiar opening crash of chords was like an old friend.

          "I asked you a question.
           But I didn't need you to reply..."

It only took her a second or two to recognize the song, and she turned to me, smiling.

"We haven't listened to this in a long time," she said.

          "'Is it getting heavy?' But then I realized:
           'Is it getting heavy?'
           Well, I thought it was already
           as heavy as can be..."

I looked at her and smiled back. "I know. It's been years."

And by the time Wayne Coyne had reached the chorus, my daughter and I were singing along, matching him word for word, each one of us lost in thoughts all our own in what was left of the morning.

          "Tell everybody waiting for a Superman
           that they should just try to hold on
           the best they can.
           He hasn't dropped them,
           forgot them,
           or anything.
           It's just too heavy for a Superman to lift."