Author: dannrobertjohnson

What Are You Driving At, Anyway?

WHOOSH. Woosh. Woosh. WHOOSH whoosh whoosh whoosh WHOOSH tinkle clatter Crash.

The scene in my rearview mirror.

Somehow I’d ended up down a lane clearly not meant for driving. One second it was a road, the next it was outdoor cafés. Fancy umbrella-ed tables with silverware and wine glasses.

My wife and I are traveling in Italy right now. It’s our 20th wedding anniversary, and that’s the only reason a whole week went by last week with no updates to this blog (for the first time––not likely the last). It has been a special privilege indeed to enjoy a vacation without kids (thanks to my folks and Ruth, the kids’ Xi’an auntie). At the moment I’m typing on a train somewhere between Florence and Venice, which is just about as lovely as it sounds.

For three days we had a rental car, which we took from Rome to the Tuscan countryside to the sea and then back to Florence. While in the charming city of Siena, we found ourselves between ancient stone buildings on an ancient stone street: lots of people but no cars. Except ours. The people were huddled around their guides, or looking at maps or in our windows as we crept through their midst. The shops were selling gelato and postcards and trinkets. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a way out, and the road wound ever downwards, everything in the bowl funneling us to old city Centro. Every time I tried a turn, it seemed to be a road that was only more inappropriate.

Finally, the warning signs informed me the next pass between stone was only 2.0 meters. I longed for a digital option where the sign told me how wide my car was. At last, around the next bend there was a teeny garbage truck, a handicap parking space, and “P” signs. I wasn’t crazy. “Parking” up ahead. We emerged, blinking, into a large open square surrounded by churches. I saw the green-and-white-striped marble monstrosity on a postcard later.

Off to the side was a pile of compact cars like ours. I pulled up to the bumper of the last one in a row, the final “space” they’d formed in between the two rows of real spaces. At last I felt lucky, and we got out ready to walk around a bit.

I noticed a lady in a nametag watching us. She wasn’t wearing any kind of uniform, but she came towards us a few steps to scrutinize my license plate. “Blah blah blah blassio?” she asked in what I assume was perfect Italiano. “Um…no?” I replied in flawless English.

Thankfully she spoke English, too, and she kindly told me that not only was this resident parking only, but that driving within the city walls of all the cities in the whole region was illegal. Only residents and those with hotel reservations inside the wall.

“Oh.”

“There are cameras everywhere; they will put a €150 fine on the credit card connected to this rental car.”

Oh, my. This wasn’t even my first violation, then. Tickets surpassing our restaurant bills for two weeks was not my idea of a priceless vacation. We thanked her for the information and hightailed it out of there.

That’s when the WHOOSH story came back to me. The WHOOSH story didn’t happen on this trip. But the WHOOSH (an umbrella around a restaurant table spinning and spinning until it fell) story did happen in Italy. I’ve been here once before. For one night. 1994. One year before getting married. Only that time while driving, I’d found myself so deep into old stone roads that I’d left them altogether with only restaurants as far as the eye could see. Plus, that time it hadn’t been a Fiat 500C I’d been driving, it had been a diesel camping van. Six-sleeper.

Like on the current trip, then I had long been stressfully looking for an escape route. At the moment of my umbrella disaster, I’d actually judged the space wide enough, but…I’d forgotten about the double bed cannister above, extending out wider than the driver’s cab. That’s what swiped the umbrella.

It was bad enough to see a couple of Italian waiters running out into the street waving their arms and shouting, even though I got out and even though they told me not to worry. It was far worse, 100 meters later when the road truly became impassable, to have to throw the camper into reverse and go by them again backwards while they covered their mouths in a weak attempt to conceal their laughing.

Did the “beep beep beep” that day really sound like “I.Di.Ot” or is that just my memory?

Here’s what I will say: if those ticket violations from this trip really do show up on my visa card? For my next trip to Italy (which, if things follow the current pattern, I guess will fall in 2036) I’ll stick to trains.

 

Lily Was the Valley Excerpt: Screaming

No one told us about the screaming.

In the early stages, still filling out paperwork, I thought the hard part would be simply accomplishing this thing called adoption. But paperwork proved to be nothing to the war our daughter brought into the house. Struggle personified itself in the wiry body of a screaming girl who launched a campaign to take over our world.

I had taken no courses and done little reading. My realm had been the paperwork, and I plowed through it with due diligence and left the nurture stuff to my wife. I judged myself prepared—I was hardly a candidate for a class on how to be a dad; I was not in the “clueless new parent” category—but I was mistaken.

Nothing debilitates quite like being clueless about your own cluelessness. Somehow I missed the memo that adoption difficulties often stretch for years beyond finalization. Somehow I hadn’t learned that negligible touch and scant nurture in the first year of life can affect the human brain. I had never heard the words sensory, processing, and disorder together in one sentence. I’d had no reason to think about neurotransmitters or synapses since college biology. I had not one clue that the cerebral health of our new little family member might be something I should concern myself with.

Our difficulties with paperwork and waiting would fade to nostalgia.

I never dreamed there could be significant differences in rearing adopted versus biological children, but even once those differences had walloped me over the head, I was still ignorant about what to do about them. Doors onto life-giving adoptive theory were only opened to us years later when we got involved in our second adoption. Meanwhile, our first three months of adoptive life were difficult beyond expectation—exponentially so. Those three months got seared into memory. Having been a dad three times already counted for almost nothing.

The screams were bloodcurdling. Three hours, every night. I hear them still. They could start at seven and finish at ten, or start at nine and finish at midnight. Occasionally it seemed wiser to keep her up later to tire her. In reality it only meant starting at eleven and finishing at two, so we tried it seldom. There were no days off: seven nights each week, three hours each night, like clockwork.

And being down, we decided we might as well give ourselves a swift kick: cleft palate surgery. There was no mad rush, but we’d already booked it one month after our daughter’s homecoming. Now we wouldn’t only have an inconsolable child unable to receive comfort, we would have an inconsolable child in physical pain unable to receive comfort…

 

So begins Chapter Three.

If I happen to be unavailable for thinking and writing on a particular week (and I’m not available this week because my parents have just arrived from Chicago for a visit!), I might stick in a short book excerpt from time to time rather than leave this space un-updated.

Hope you enjoyed it. 🙂

He Has a Name!

“For pity’s sake, let’s stay away from ‘E’ and ‘H’ names…” I said to my wife.

All of our kids’ names start with E or H.

We didn’t do it on purpose.

Especially with the names that came latest, Eden and Hope, it was total happenstance.

We’d always rather been against “doing a pattern.”

So I wasn’t about to force things with our new son, though “Ephraim” topped Tammy’s list of favorites for quite awhile.

Ephraim, you’ll recall, was one of Joseph’s two sons, and became, like his older brother Manasseh, one of the twelve tribes of Israel. He was, as the younger brother, placed on the left when Joseph presented his sons to be blessed by their grandfather, Jacob. Jacob, however, crossed his right and left hands and gave the greater blessing to Ephraim. “Ephraim” carries the meanings of “fruitful,” “two-fold increase,” “I am twice fruitful,” etc.

But I personally didn’t really care for the name for our son.

We kept thinking.

“What about Everett?” I said one day, perched on the same couch I sit on now, writing this post.

Odd, since “E” names were the opposite of what I’d been trying to think of.

“Everett” just came out.

“Hmm!…” Tammy liked it.

We put it on the list.

And looked it up, finding that it carries the meanings of “strong” and “brave” and also shares common origins with the name “Everest” (though both are more common as last names.) The tie-in to Mt. Everest is cool, as our city is one of the jumping-off points for people headed to Lhasa, and then on to Everest. (I’ve got my own dreams for visiting Base Camp next year, in fact.)

After mulling “Everett” over for a few days, we took a family Sunday drive to the mountains just south of us. We’ve gone there before, but never on a day as clear as this one. As soon as we got on the expressway headed south, we saw snowcaps.

And Tammy said: “That’s it! His name’s Everett.” 

Not that we were seeing Mt. Everest, far from it. But the mountains were truly inspiring seen so suddenly, when most of the time pollution and buildings prevent us from seeing them at all.

Everett

Everett. We all agreed it was perfect.

But that’s not the goose bump part.

On this blog, I’ve referred several times to the book I’ve been writing for the past couple of years, an adoption memoir. Lily’s story. But I’ve never revealed the title.

Until now. 

I find I’m sort of stuck, and have to reveal it now if I’m to tell the rest of this Everett story. So…in a sort of back-door, no drum-roll announcement, here’s my book’s working title:

Lily Was the Valley.

It was birthed pretty early on in the process, and I’ll have to admit I’ve grown rather fond of it. Though I know if I ever get a publisher other than Yours Truly Sweat & Tears, retaining titling rights is not a given. But I can still fight for it, right?

I have also recently shared on this blog the story of a pain of Tammy’s (and mine) linked to another story linked to the chorus containing the line “He can move the mountains.” (Read that here if you haven’t yet.)

So anyway, as we continued driving towards those snowcaps, saying our new son’s name over and again to get used to it…

Enoch, playing off the title of my book, said from the back seat:

“Everett Was the Mountain.”

Boom. In that moment God put his finger on Tammy’s heart, on exactly that spot of pain, and healed her in a way she’d never known there. We shared a teary look, then turned ahead to watch the mountains grow nearer.

Certainly we have had our share of unanswered questions in this journey called Adoption. But how great on that day to have him be so clear:

“I see you. When you walked your valley, I saw then, too: I felt what you felt. And way back then, I saw this boy. I knew that I would one day put him into your family even though you insisted you could not, and never would, adopt an older child. That was a mountain.

“So was his fear no family would ever choose him. That was a mountain.

“I still move mountains.”

If I ever write a memoir sequel to Lily Was the Valley, I may have to credit Enoch with coming up with one cool title.

 

[If you have a word of Welcome for Everett Ephraim Johnson, would you leave it in the comment section? We will read/translate it for him as soon as he comes home. And save it up for him to have for himself once he learns English.]