B. Walter
September 7, 1999
Autobiography: Narrative
(Updated: July 2, 2002)
O
nce upon a time (September 7, 1966 at 10:06 a. m.
PST, to be reasonably exact), in a land (Lodi, California – to be
just as exact again) far, far away from the centers of civilization,
Dorothy Walter gave birth to her third child, a son she and her husband
Fred decided to dub Brian Dale.
Two things almost immediately stood out about the newborn: (A) in
a family of enormous infants (the smallest of Dorothy’s four children
weighed 9 lbs., 4 oz. at birth), Brian was – at a full 11 lbs, 15 oz.
– easily the heftiest, and (B) his hair was visibly red (this latter trait
was noted enthusiastically by one of the delivery room nurses).
Word of the young Gargantua’s birth apparently spread
quickly through Lodi General Hospital; when Fred (“Alfred” to his
parents at birth, “Al” to some business associates, “A. P.” to certain
correspondents, “F. P.” to others, even “Alfie” to his buddies on
the track team back in high school) left the building later in the
day, he noticed, from an open window above the exit, an elderly woman
pointing him out to her companion and saying, in her sternest schoolmarm,
“That’s the man.”
Not nearly so worn out by the delivery as his wife understandably
was, Fred could hardly keep his chest from swelling almost as wide
as his grin, his strides simultaneously lengthening in an attempt to
do his colossal feat visible justice.
[2]
It wasn’t long before Brian’s height caught up with
and proportionally surpassed his weight, within a few years transforming
the butterball babe into a conventionally skinny little boy with
curly orangish-red hair and a sprinkling of freckles around his nose.
In fact, from one standpoint, the slimming process was
almost too efficient, for the shirts and pants that his older brother
Tim tried to hand down to him invariably turned out to be too big in
the chest, waist, and hips for Brian.
Skinny in his own right, Tim (who was three-and-a-half years older)
nevertheless always looked physically imposing next to his wispy
younger brother, who soon lea
rned to compensate for the physical
mismatch by kicking his brother in the shins with his cowboy boots and
then high-tailing it for his mom’s apron strings before his limping older
brother could catch him from behind. The two brothers, by the way,
long ago patched up their differences (Tim being blessedly forgetful
in these matters, Brian having given up cowboy boots).
[3]
Sadly but predictably enough, little outbursts continued
to flare up between the two brothers during their early years in
grade school. In a well-intentioned
effort to keep Tim and Brian from causing trouble in the car, Fred
and Dorothy would position their sister Lisa (a year younger than
Tim, a couple years older than Brian) between them in the back seat
– with the predictable result that she ended up with some sore spots
on her shoulders and thighs where Tim’s and Brian’s misguided punches
too often landed. Eventually,
Brian and Tim did outgrow the feckless fisticuffs stage, but they soon
found a new way to torment their sister.
In an attempt to divide household chores a bit more evenly,
Fred and Dorothy assigned post-meal clean-up duties to all three children,
instead of leaving them to Lisa alone, as had been the (unfair) arrangement
for some time. In response, Brian and Tim cooked up the embarrassing
but effective “Ineptitude Plan,” in which they would do such a lousy
job of washing the dishes when it was their turn that Lisa, in a huff,
would take the task over to see that it was done right. The plan worked
to the proverbial ‘T,’ Brian then left to rinse the dishes that Lisa
had just washed, Tim to wipe just enough of them so that the rest could
simply drip-dry in the dishrack.
This arrangement didn’t last more than a week before Lisa 
simply banished the lazy,
conniving, but perfectly content brothers from the kitchen so that she
could do the dishes up quickly and right without the distraction of
her brothers’ “help.”
[11]
Could it be mere coincidence, then, that a little over
a month later he cadged his first kiss from the woman who would one
day become his wife?
[4]
Fortunately, as Tim had done in the matter of the boot-bruised
shins, Lisa never held such peccadilloes against her little brother.
Quite the contrary, in fact, she would even occasionally
let Brian in on her own schemes and secrets.
One of his favorite childhood memories turned out to be
the time when, in the absence of the rest of the family from the
house, Lisa suggested that they two see just what the Christmas wrapping
paper concealed, a suggestion he was quite eager to comply with.
Brian watched closely as his older sister carefully unwrapped
and re-wrapped her new earrings to ensure that no one could tell
they had been tampered with – one of his first and best lessons in
covert operations (a model he would soon learn to apply with marvelous
efficiency on the alarmingly noisy cookie jar their mom had recently
purchased).
[5]
By the time of the “Gift-Unwrapping Incident,” Brian
had not, for several years, been the youngest member of the family,
that position belonging to his little sister Laurie, 
who was born three-and-a-half years after him.
Laurie’s birth completed the boy-girl, boy-girl birth
sequence in the Walter family and gave Brian someone nowhere near
his own size to pick on, which (in stereotypical male fashion), he
began to do as soon as he could get away with it.
It was so much easier for Brian (whose favorite shows, during that
phase, included Batman
, Gilligan’s Island
, and professional wrestling) to pin his little sister Laurie
than to best either of his older siblings.
(Following her older brother’s and sister’s examples, Laurie also
forgave Brian long ago, even offering the peace token of her delectable
German Chocolate pies whenever the far-flung members of the family
now get together.)
[6]
Not long after starting school, Brian discovered books,
the second great love of his life (the first being his family).
From the time he started first grade in 1972 to his
graduation from high school in 1984, Brian’s books accompanied him
through the family’s many moves (from Oregon to Ohio to Michigan to
Colorado) and his father’s job changes (from the ministry to insurance
sales to pest extermination to full-time editing and writing for church
publications).
During the early years of his schooling, Brian tried to read anything
and everything set before him, with reasonable (though hardly complete)
success. Sitting in his favorite
spot in the front pew of the Portland, Oregon Church of God (7th
Day) sanctuary, directly opposite the preaching pulpit from which
his father delivered impassioned sermons every Saturday morning for
three years, Brian’s eyes would wander frequently to the left of his dad’s
belovedly earnest face to a large, glass-covered placard on the wall –
a complete reproduction of the Ten Commandments (in the King James translation).
Long before he knew what the words really meant, then, Brian could
remind anyone who would listen that “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s
wife” (nor his ox, ass, or maidservant, for that matter).
With his parents’ active encouragement, Brian fed this
print addiction avidly, reading and re-reading his favorites, including
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House collection, the
Encyclopedia Brown and Great Brain series, the Hardy Boys mysteries,
Walter Farley’s Black Stallion
novels, football and basketball books, and, especially, J.
R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth sagas, The Hobbit
, The Lord of the Rings
, and The Silmarillion
.
[7]
Junior high and high school saw Brian developing fairly
conventional interests in movies, rock ‘n roll, sports (specifically,
basketball and football), computers, comic books, and colleges.
Together with his best friend in high school, Richard
Kondo, Brian frequented the local multiplexes, made home movies,
conducted physics experiments in deserted parking lots, pushed a shopping
cart (loaded with a third friend) through a McDonalds’ Drive-Through
Window to order some fries to go, toured planetaria and other high-technology
facilities (as vice-president and president of Thornton High School’s
Science Club), organized neighborhood football and basketball games, made
midnight runs to local donut shops, published three issues of a gleefully
fabricated rumor mill dubbed The Sleazy Slanderer ,
set up bargain-basement “laserock” shows (using a laser borrowed from school
and a small mirror strategically taped to a pulsating speaker partially
removed from its housing in a port
able cassette player), played chess and computer games, and
practiced speaking Spanish.An
exceptionally kind friend, Richard claimed that neither he nor the
1,000 other attendees of Thornton High School’s Class of 1984 graduation
could tell that Brian, alone among the four valedictorians up on the
windy stage, was making up his speech on the spot from the fragments that
his frazzled memory had been able to collect in the wake of the only written
copy’s mysterious last-minute disappearance.
(The nightmarish comedy of this particular experience no doubt
has much to do with Brian’s strict habit, in the years since, of always
carrying at least two copies of his presentations and speeches on his
person, and of usually depositing a third copy with his wife, Lynnea).
[8]
From Thornton High School in Thornton, Colorado, Brian
departed in the fall of 1984 for Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Switching just a few weeks into his freshman year from
a Math/Physics concentration to an English major to feed his old
but enduring love of reading, Brian enjoyed ample opportunity to stretch
himself in all directions at this proud bastion of free thinking (one
of many unofficial Reed mottoes: “Be an individual like everyone else”).
Soon outfitted with an improbably farcical 
moustache (one friend said it looked like he had taped two caterpillars
to his upper lip, one on each side, forgetting to make them join
in the middle), Brian ploughed through his course books and pumped
out the papers, playing basketball and football as his schedule allowed,
spending most weekends with a favorite aunt and uncle in the Willamette
Valley countryside, and happily participating (like so many college
students) in endless 3 a. m. discussions of life, the universe, and
everything with his fellow dormies.
The last couple of weeks of his undergraduate career would remain
a fog forever to Brian, as he rushed to rewrite his senior thesis (“The
Sight of a Human Creature: Reflections in Gulliver’s Travels
”) in time to graduate in early May 1988, tallying about
eight hours of sleep over the last three days and none at all the
final night before he handed it in (one day before it was actually due).
[9]
Apparently not having learned his lesson at Reed, Brian
decided that more schooling was in order, and so headed off to
the graduate program in English at Washington University in St. Louis,
Missouri in the fall of 1988.
Like most beginnings of new endeavors, Brian’s first year in graduate
school was quite memorable, but not necessarily for the most desirable
reasons. In part
because his work as a part-time salesmaker at a local Radio Shack
was diverting time and energy from his studies, Brian turned in a rather
indifferent performance in his classes the first semester, leaving
him (and his professors) to wonder whether he ought to continue with
the program past the master’s degree.
Fortunately, he did much better work during the spring semester,
eventually reassuring himself (and his professors) that he did have
a future in the field. Unfortunately,
in the mean-time, he had acquired a whole new set of concerns when
his father suffered a massive heart attack in March of 1989 while Brian
was back in Oregon visiting his family on Spring Break.
In the wake of Fred’s heart attack, Brian soon scuttled
his plans for a summer in Denver in favor of returning to Oregon to
work and be near his family.
[10]
Brian’s return to St. Louis for his second year of graduate
school in the fall of 1989 was marked by two memorable incidents.
First was his questionable decision to push on through
the night and a violent thunderstorm that covered some fifty miles
of the Kansas plains, terrific gusts of wind blowing the car this
way and that on the road (its tires being none too new or well-tractioned),
the rain lashing down with such blinding fury that even the professional
truckers were pulling over to the highway’s shoulder to wait for
its passing; Brian, with the obstinate heedlessness that perhaps only
the over-educated can muster, forged ahead into the storm, his nose
almost against the windshield in an attempt to see at least twenty feet
ahead of the car’s hood, his heart (he later realized) beating almost
as fast as his windshield wipers.
This trial passed, Brian eventually arrived at a truck stop on
the eastern outskirts of Kansas City, and there, at about 3 a. m.,
in the rather untidy lavatory, he took out his razor to commence with
the second memorable episode of this trip: the banishment of those two
reddish caterpillars from his upper lip.
By the way, if, at first glance, a simple decision to shave hardly
seems momentous enough to merit comment, please understand that, in Brian’s
case, this decision was reached only after several weeks of silent debate
with himself. In
truth, it constituted a comically desperate attempt to energize his
social life, his thinking being that maybe, just maybe, he would land
a date or two without the sparse garnish of the moustache.
Lynnea Brumbaugh had first
caught Brian’s wishful attention in their Chaucer course the previous
spring, but apart from one brief chance conversation in the library,
he had never summoned the courage actually to speak with her.
But this fall, armed with the confidence of the clean-shaven,
Brian talked himself into attending a party thrown by a fellow graduate
student in the English Dept. (also one of Brian’s football and basketball
buddies), and once there, he could hardly believe his luck when Lynnea,
who had arrived not long after he did, seated herself by him for much
of the evening, for all the world acting as if she didn’t mind spending
time talking with him.
Brian left the party that night wondering whether, in fact, Lynnea’s kind
interest had given him sufficient license to call her sometime and
inquire her interest in the old reliable dinner-and-a-movie first date.
[12]
To appreciate the unlikeliness of this meeting, you
must know a couple of things.
First, Brian is, by nature, terribly shy, avoiding most social occasions
(especially parties, even those thrown by good friends) like the proverbial
plague. In fact,
he had very nearly not shown up at this particular party
at all, having accidentally left the directions to his friend’s apartment
at home. In a quandary,
then, he called his roommate, who fortunately happened still to be
in, and asked him, none too eagerly, if he could look for the directions.
Brian ended up chatting with his roommate on the phone for
nearly an hour, and very nearly decided to just go rent a video and
return directly to his apartment when his roommate talked him into
at least stopping by the party.
Still, when Brian returned to his car, he probably would have just
skipped the party altogether if it hadn’t been pretty much right on
the way home.
[13]
The second unlikely element in this first meeting between
the future husband and wife was that Lynnea hardly lacked for suitors.
She came to the party that night with one male friend
only because her regular boyfriend had not been able to go with
her; in the ensuing months of her and Brian’s courtship, in fact,
Lynnea would field date requests from three other men.
Why she took a shine to Brian remains something of a mystery to
him to this day.
[14]
At any rate, Brian saw Lynnea several times during the
ensuing week around Duncker Hall (the home of the English Dept.),
but could never quite bring himself to ask her, either in person or
by phone, for a date. Friday
night came and went, and soon Saturday was passing.
By mid-afternoon, Brian was walking around his apartment,
phone in hand, Lynnea’s number already committed to memory as he
repeated it over and over to himself, a seven-digit incantation which
he hoped, eventually, would help him conjure the courage to actually
go ahead and dial. A
little after 5 p. m., after a good hour of this pacing, almost sure he
was too late, Brian in near-despair managed to bang out the number –
and just in time, as it turned out.
Lynnea was literally on her way out the door to a dinner sponsored
by her church. Her boyfriend
had apparently backed out of the dinner date at the last minute, so
Lynnea willingly accepted Brian as a substitute.
[15]
After dinner and a movie (the U2 concert film Rattle
and Hum ), Brian and Lynnea returned to her
apartment and talked for many hours, Brian pressed rather shyly
into one corner of Lynnea’s two-seater couch (according to her).
He learned of her upbringing in Indiana, of her trials during
her first semester of teaching, and of her survival of a violent
assault a few years earlier (among many other things).
It was after midnight when Brian, too timid to reach for the
kiss he had been thinking about all night, finally hugged Lynnea to
leave. Fortunately,
she had something additional in mind, and, at the door of her building,
relieved his anxiety as he stood hesitating at the door, with a smile
saying, “It’s okay to kiss me,” and, seeing him still hesitate, adding
quickly, “ – if you want!”
Nonplussed but happy, Brian could only reply, “Oh, good; thank
you!” as he reached over for one, and then (quickly, lest the spell
fade) a second, goodnight peck.
[16]
In the ten years or so that have passed since that night,
Brian and Lynnea have seldom been apart, never for more than a
few days at a time, and probably not for more than a few weeks in
total. Of course,
students of Shakespeare both, Brian and Lynnea probably could not
help proving the Bard’s famous saying that the course of true love never
did run smooth. For one
very difficult stretch of many months, Brian and Lynnea attempted
to see other people – but this unhappy experiment only ended in their
engagement in November 1991 and their nuptials th
e subsequent June 13, 1992, at the
First Baptist Church of Bedford, Indiana (Lynnea’s home-town and church).
Brian’s dad Fred performed the ceremony.
[17]
In those ten years, Lynnea has been with Brian through
sickness and health, through poverty and wealth, through trial and
comfort, through grief and overwhelming gladness.
On planes from Toronto to San Diego, on trains from Boston
to Portland, Oregon, and in automobiles from Ohio to Indiana to Illinois
to Missouri to Arkansas to Kansas to Oklahoma to Texas to Colorado,
Lynnea and Brian have been copilots, Lynnea often scanning the atlas carefully
to make sure that Brian was not getting them too hopelessly lost.
In hotels from western Massachusetts to Washington D. C.
to Little Rock, Arkansas, Lynnea has helped Brian figure out which
local sights they would take in the next day.
In museums from Harvard Square to Michigan Avenue to Forest
Park, Lynnea has puzzled over improbable Picassos and soaked in the
inspired El Grecos with Brian.
In concert halls and cathedrals, in grand auditoriums and modest
living rooms, Lynnea has opened her ears to all kinds of music performances
with Brian, sometimes using her fresh alto voice to balance out the soft
hum of his reticently resonant baritone.
She has read stories to him as he drove, and listened to his own
renderings of favorite tales just before she has dropped off to sleep.
She has looked up for his smile from her recovery room
bed after surgery, and been present to offer her own fresh face
as the first real vision to greet his eyes when the anesthesia finally
relaxed its hold on his consciousness.
[18]
The vows they wrote together for their wedding ceremony
barely hint at all the things she has done for Brian, all the things
she has been to and for him.
The only woman ever to share a canoe with him, Lynnea joined in
with pained enthusiasm when Brian – in near-despair as he tried to
row them across the enormous lake that (in a fit of honeymooners’
exuberance) they had decided to cross by limbpower alone – began to
sing nonsense songs at the top of his lungs, dipping his oar time after
time into the unkind waters as the seconds and minutes dragged by, their
cabin on a distant island slowly, slowly, slowly inching nearer, their
laughter frequently bursting through their singing and somehow keeping
them going until they finally reached home (their shoulders too sore
to raise their arms for an hour afterward).
Lynnea is also the only woman that Brian has ever danced fast
with, willingly cutting a rug at one wedding reception with her even
though no force of friend or nature had ever before prevailed upon
him to demonstrate his happiness so publicly or unrestrainedly.
She once commissioned a singing telegram to make him blush
in front of his whole class on Valentine’s Day, and herself crumpled
to the floor in shocked pleasure at a particularly well-planned
surprise birthday party he threw for her.
She helped him correct or improve the most embarrassing slips
and solecisms in his dissertation, and willingly tasted his most improbable
and unplanned kitchen concoctions, from his very first peanutbutter-amaretto
milkshake (almost too thick to stir), to his most recent batch of
mushroom-onion-almond curry (which was actually not too spicy to serve,
unlike some of his early attempts).
She followed him down to Clarksville, Arkansas when Brian landed
a job as an a
ssistant professor of English at
the University of the Ozarks for the fall of 1996, giving up her
own post-doctoral fellowship in St. Louis for the sake of staying
closer to and supporting Brian during the first difficult year in
his new position.
And it was Lynnea, of course, who boarded the last possible flight
with him to fly through a sky seething with tornadoes, running through
the next airport with him at top speed to make the connection, standing
patiently with him in the airline service office to describe their lost
luggage at 2 a. m., driving with him through the night, and sleeping on
a leaky air mattress with him all to help Brian face perhaps the most
difficult experience of his life – reading a eulogy at his own father’s
funeral (Lynnea keeping an extra copy in the front pew, of course).
[19] It was also Lynnea who landed a full-time teaching position with the Olin School of Business at Washington University that allowed her and Brian to move back to St. Louis in August of 1998 – to move back, in fact, to a house only a few blocks away from the apartment where they first met at the fateful party back in 1989. Adding his earnings as a lecturer in Washington University’s English Dept. to Lynnea’s business school salary, Brian now enjoys life with his wife in a wonderful old two-story grey-brick castle of a home, strategically located not only less than a mile from the Washington University campus, but also only a few blocks from Forest Park, with its museums, the zoo, the Science Center, and the Muny, and with its bike paths, ponds, trees, and many happy ducks. Brian and Lynnea also live right across the street from a MetroLink stop, affording them easy access to all the downtown St. Louis attractions, not to mention quick, traffic-less trips to the train station and the airport when their destiny takes them to destinations outside St. Louis. A short walk or an even shorter bike ride takes them to the University City Loop, with its ethnic shops and restaurants, its library and post office, and its characters of all fascinating types. A short ride in the opposite direction lands them in the Central West End, with its equally interesting assortment of curio shoppes and exotic eateries, not to mention the superb health care of Washington University’s Barnes-Jewish Medical Center and the spiritually bracing architecture of the St. Louis Cathedral. And diversity also walks Brian and Lynnea’s more immediate neighborhood, the blocks surrounding their house offering residents regular sightings of tatoos and yarmulkies, nose-rings and rosaries, the Hindu’s bindi and the Muslim’s headdress. English is only one of several languages that one can hear walking the streets of this neighborhood, for a healthy mixture of large- and medium-sized houses, duplexes, and apartment buildings set close to the university ensures a good mix of conversationalists, snatches of French, Hebrew, Mandarin, German, Russian, and Spanish to be caught on a regular basis by the attentive listener.
[20]
Into this neighborhood, and especially into their home,
Brian and Lynnea are now ready to bring a new face, a new spirit,
a new contributor to their life as a family and to the life of their
community. From
the time they first began to discuss a life together, Brian and Lynnea
always hoped and optimistically planned to have it incorporate a
child, a seedling that could grow up close enough to them to benefit
from their protecting limbs, but also far enough away to set down its
own deep roots and eventually create some sheltering shade of its own.
Plans for furnishing their home and for apportioning their
monthly budget have, for years now, included the long-range goal
of accommodating a third member of the family.
A teacher of children’s literature, Lynnea began collecting books
and videos for their child long before she and Brian married, and
the collection has, in recent years, been augmented by some of Brian’s
own favorites. They
were particularly pleased to learn that it should be possible to adopt
a girl-child during her first five months of life, so that they can
foster her developing consciousness from its early stages, helping her
discover the marvelous powers of hands and to release the life-giving
sound of laughter.
[21]
Both Brian and Lynnea are also particularly pleased
at the prospect of enriching their home with a child of the Middle
Kingdom. As their
plans for adopting a Chinese newborn have developed, they have taken
advantage of various resources to give themselves a brief primer in
Chinese culture and history.
Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou have already become two of their favorite
directors, and the hanging scrolls in the Oriental art rooms of the
St. Louis Art Museum have provided them with ideas for clothing the
walls of their own home. In recent
months, they have also developed a close friendship with Manling Luo,
a graduate student from Peking University, who has provided and will
continue to provide them with her invaluable personal knowledge of life
in China, knowledge that Brian and Lynnea in turn hope to make available
to their daughter. In fact, Brian
and Lynnea have already discussed possible arrangements with Manling for
attending to their child during some parts of the week when they must be
at work, and for providing her with Chinese language instruction at the
same time. With the further
help of Manling’s many friends in Washington University’s Chinese Student
Association (some thirty of whom filled Brian’s and Lynnea’s home last
winter for a Chinese New Year party arranged by Manling), Brian and Lynnea
plan to keep their daughter in touch with the voices and faces of her native
land even as she grows up in the midst of America’s vast cultural resources.
[22]
Brian and Lynnea will also draw on the resources of
a fully-developed support network in the raising of their child.
Many of their closest friends are parents of some of
their daughter’s future playmates, children whom Brian and Lynnea
have frequently and happily baby-sat for.
Brian’s and Lynnea’s families are also thrilled at the prospect of
seeing a new sprig sprouting from the top of the family tree.
Lynnea’s and Brian’s families will take every bit as much
interest in the new child’s development as they took in Brian’s and
Lynnea’s themselves – providing a welcome source of instruction and
delight to their great-granddaughter’s, granddaughter’s, niece’s,
or cousin’s experience of the world.
Their own values so helpfully shaped by their families,
Lynnea and Brian will gladly draw on their families’ help to provide
their own daughter with a similar introduction to the benefits of honesty,
the value of discipline, and the overarching importance of love.
Blessed with loving fathers and thoughtful, caring,
generous mothers, Brian and Lynnea have superb examples to draw
on in their preparation for the joyous tasks of parenting – innumerable
examples of mother and father working in tandem to say “No” when it
is necessary and to say “Yes” whenever it is possible, to encourage,
boost, and gently push reluctance, to restrain, let down, and gently
dissipate over-eagerness.
Drawing heavily on their own experiences, Brian and Lynnea will
especially urge their daughter to discuss her concerns with them
as frankly and eagerly as she tells them of her joys, to foster a relationship
with her based on trust, mutual respect, and – most of all – unquestioning
love.
[23]
Though she could not know it, Brian and Lynnea’s daughter
has been a part of their life for quite some time already.
They gave her a name long ago, and in recent months,
as the adoption process has finally gotten underway, her name has
been on their lips almost as frequently as each other’s.
Harper will be named in part for Gladys Harper, Lynnea’s
beloved Granny and Harper’s future great-grandmother.
“Harper” is also a harp-player, one who lifts sweet music
from the strings, weaving a tune in and among the glad tones of
a singing voice.
[24]
Now that the time for Harper’s arrival is drawing near,
Brian and Lynnea cannot help anticipating the wealth of memories
that will soon be added to their mutual store.
Finding her tickle-spots as Harper learns to giggle.
Teaching her to lift a small clump of 
rice between two precariously-balanced chopsticks.
Helping her locate middle-C on the piano, and clapping
with delight at her first two-finger composition.
Demonstrating to her the wonders of buttons and zippers.
Explaining to her that the kitten makes that low throaty
hum when it is too happy for her to stop petting it just yet.
Giving her her first piggy-back ride in the park.
Showing her how to write her name in both English and
Chinese characters.
Encouraging her to share her toys with her friends.
Guiding her on her first trip down the rabbit-hole into
Wonderland with Alice. Holding
her hand as her first scraped knee is disinfected or as her arm receives
its first needle, wiping her tears afterward and reassuring her that
the sting will soon go away and she will feel better.
Singing “Silent Night” for her a second and a third and
a fourth time so that she can learn the words and join in.
Skipping off down the Yellow Brick Road with her, Dorothy,
the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and Toto to see
the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Buckling up the chin strap of her bike helmet just before buckling
up the straps of their own.
Putting the foot-stool close to the counter so that she can stir her
first batch of blueberry pancake batter on a Sunday morning.
Reassuring her that all tears are healthy, especially
those shed at a funeral.
Bath-time and bed-time and quiet-time.
Watching the smile of recognition start up in her eyes the first time
she hears the words
Gil-galad was an Elven-king.
Of him the harpers sadly sing.
[25]
Though she cannot know this either, Harper has already
been a great help to Brian.
A veteran of hundreds of pieces of writing, of thousands of pages
of rough drafts, Harper’s future father nevertheless recently found
himself faced with a writing assignment that he just could not figure
out how to begin: an autobiography.
Brian has never liked to be the center of attention, even in
a piece of prose, so the idea of narrating his own life was downright
daunting. But Lynnea
(who was also facing this task) fortunately reminded him that the
audience for this piece of writing would eventually include their
daughter herself, someday in the future.
Thinking of Harper as his reader made things much easier
for Brian, for he had always looked forward to telling their child
stories of his and Lynnea’s lives, the kinds of stories he had loved
as a child, the kinds of stories he had always asked his parents and
grandparents and uncles and aunts to tell him, stories of those long-ago
days when they were children too, when the world seemed too fresh and
vital for words, when life was a never-ending series of adventures.
So, he finally decided, why not narrate his own life as
a bed-time story, a tale that Harper could drift off to sleep to?
O
nce upon a time (September 7, 1966 at 10:06 a. m.
PST, to be reasonably exact) . . .
An “Oops” Adoption
(July 2,
2002)
How time flies when you can hardly keep up with it.
A mere twenty-one months have passed since Brian finished
his breathless bed-time story for Harper, and now he and Lynnea
are making plans to bring home a brother for her to play and laugh
and sing and delight with.
Already when they ask her, “Who is Vladimir?”, she replies “Di di”
– Mandarin (more or less) for ‘little brother.’
As Lynnea has pointed out, Harper has apparently decided
that she’s going to be big sister to any new child brought into the
home (even if he is five-and-a-half years older than she).
Harper has turned out to be every bit as vital and loving and
passionate as her parents could have dreamed.
A little dynamo of a child, she just goes and goes and
goes: dancing around the living room, demanding
(and always winning) “Ring-around-the-rosey” partners,
delivering impromptu sermons at bed-time, petting and kissing the
cats whenever they will hold still long enough, energetically sharing
her bath-water with the rest of the bathroom, launching herself
down playground slides, mimicking the speech of dogs and cows and
bears and cats and trains, hopping into the bike-buggy for weekly
trips to the zoo or the Science Center, scrunching up her eyes at nap-time
when instructed to go to sleep, soaring her voice to match notes with
Julie Andrews’ rendition of “The hills are alive/ With the sound of music,”
finding a way to climb to the top of her changing table when left just
a moment alone in her room, bouncing along on Brian’s shoulders as they
skip their way through the neighborhood, patting Mommy and Daddy on the
back when the thunder and lightning are scary, asking “What’s that?” a
hundred times a day, taking down the over-sized illustrated edition of
The Hobbit from the
bookshelf and opening it to her favorite passages to have Brian give
her his throatiest, most resonant rendition of a goblin chorus and his
screechiest, most unhinged Gollum riddling poor lost Bilbo, waking
up happy and refreshed and ready to take on the world.
Brian has pointed out to friends that Harper has persuaded
him to spend more time on the floor (the best place to play) in the
19 months since returning from China than he had in the previous nineteen
years of his life.
And now Brian, Lynnea, and Harper are eagerly anticipating
the day that Vladimir will arrive to enrich their home with his smile
and presence.Brian and Lynnea
have taken to calling it an “oops” adoption – not because it is in
any way a mistake, but because (like an “oops pregnancy”) it’s a complete
surprise, one that will provide happiness for the rest of their lives.
Brian and Lynnea had for some time been hoping that
a child with special needs would one day come and enrich their
home, but the plan was to wait another year or two before heading
to Guatemala or perhaps Vietnam to match smiles and hearts with Harper’s
new baby sister or brother.
But then the latest issue of the Children’s Hope International
newsletter arrived, and everything changed.
After making the happy mistake of looking too closely at
Vladimir’s paintings – so full of delight and love – they actually
allowed themselves to read the accompanying story, where they learned
that this “sociable, active, sympathetic, hardworking, and inquisitive”
8-year-old with malformed forearms would need full medical attention
for his scoliosis very soon, and, moreover, that he would be moved
at the end of summer to an orphanage that could not minister as well
to his special needs. Finally, then, they made the fateful,
life-giving decision to open their eyes to his smile and sense the
joy that must be bubbling inside this child.
After that, the telephone fairly dialed itself.
The cosmic ironies in this family convergence are striking.
Young Vladimir’s birthday just happens to be April 9,
one day* before that of the Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov
– who also just happens to have been the subject of Brian’s dissertation.
As a result of many years spent studying, writing about,
and teaching Nabokov’s work (not to mention that of numerous other
Russian writers – Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Isaac
Babel, Nadezhda Mandelstam, even Tatyana Tolstaya), Brian has a decent
grounding already in modern Russian history and literary culture.
In fact, he had always figured that he would one day travel
to Russia to better acquaint himself with Vladimir (but now it will
be Ryzhov, not Nabokov).
Nabokov loved to point out that the only thing to separate the cosmic
from the comic is a single ‘s’ (or ‘sibiliant,’ as the incorrigible sesquipedalianist
preferred to put it); the universe, in Nabokov’s view, has a terrific
sense of humor, a warm, tender, loving impulse to enfold its human
charges in smiles, to engulf them in laughter.
This series of marvelous coincidences
that will bring yet another Vladimir
to America seems to offer compelling evidence for Nabokov’s
cosmology. How else
to explain (as one friend did upon hearing the news) that the English
counterpart of “Vladimir” just happens to be “Walter”?
(Of course, as Brian replied to this friend, this new
Vladimir will also finally take away his last excuse for not yet
having learned Russian.)
Speaking of language pleasantries, Brian will be pleased to call
on the aid of Milica Banjanin, chair of Washington University’s Russian
Department and a personal friend of the family, to help communicate
with Vladimir while he’s learning English.
Milica’s colleague in the Russian Dept., Mikhail Palatnik
(Brian’s instructor for the one semester of Russian he audited several
years ago and another personal friend), will gladly serve as translator
whenever called upon, and Milica has already volunteered Mikhail’s
wife, who used to work in the medical profession in Russia, to translate
for Vladimir with all the appropriate medical vocabulary when the family
is seeking treatment for his scoliosis.
Finally, Harper’s favorite babysitter, Katie Pryor, has been studying
Russian for more than a year now (Mikhail is Katie’s teacher too), and
she is almost as breathless with anticipation of Vladimir’s joining
the family as are his future parents.
So even as he’s learning English (and re-teaching his father
the rudiments of his native tongue), Vladimir will enjoy plenty of contact
with fellow scions and students of Russia’s language and culture.
The Russian speakers among Brian’s friends are just a few of Vladimir’s
future pals and supportive family.
Brian’s mom already has some of her other grandchildren
busy preparing gifts for their future cousin from Russia, and many
of Brian’s students (both former and current) have delighted over
the news and are counting on shaking his hand soon after his arrival
in the U. S. One cousin
of Brian’s, a terrific landscape photographer in her own right, has
apparently already cleared a spot on her refrigerator for one of Vladimir’s
paintings, which immediately caught her eye for their warm, bright,
many-colored vitality.
So Brian’s, Lynnea’s, and Harper’s are just a few of the arms that
will open wide to greet Vladimir in his new home.
If it seemed almost accidental that Brian and Lynnea began talking
about this adoption, it now seems natural, inevitable even; to Brian,
in fact, it already seems like Vladimir is a member of the family.
He often wonders what Vladimir will know about his future
family, whether he will have had a chance to look at the web-page
that Brian has set up about Vladimir, whether someone in Vladimir’s orphanage
can translate some of the excitement and joy that he and Lynnea tried
to convey in their description of their future son.
Brian wonders if Vladimir will worry about adapting to a
new home, a new language, and a new country, and looks forward to reassuring
him that he will be loved and supported and helped as much as possible.
Most of all, he looks forward just to doing things with
him: picking out a bicycle with extended handlebars, concocting
a stir-fry dinner, spelling “hobbit” in Cyrillic characters, loading
the dishwasher while trading Russian and English words for the utensils,
settling back into their chairs as the theater lights go down and the
curtain goes up, petting the cats while they eat and purr, listening
to Irina Mikhailova’s haunting compilation Russian Twilight,
going for walks through the neighborhood, poring over thickly-illustrated
books about Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Kandinsky, sitting down all four
together to watch Harper’s favorite movie Edward Scissorhands
on a Saturday night, positioning the step-ladder so
Vladimir can turn the crank on the popcorn popper, teaching and
learning favorite poems to and from each other in English and in
Russian, devising impromptu dance-steps to keep up with Harper,
returning again and again to his favorite galleries in the St. Louis
Art Museum, reassuring him that the person in the white coat who is
touching his back is going to help him grow up straight and strong,
telling him stories of Brian’s one-armed mathematician friend out in
California (one of the best basketball players Brian ever played with),
giving him piggy-back rides in the park, practicing the correct Russian
pronunciation of “father,” “son,” “love,” and “thank you,” struggling
with tears of joy the first time they meet.
O
nce again
upon a time (September 7, 1966 at 10:06 a. m. PST, to be reasonably
exact) . . .
