The sun is beating down, and we’re sitting on the cement back steps of my dad’s rock house, a sprawling structure one mile off Highway 50 and 60 miles west of Austin in central Nevada. Zach reads to me from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams. Adams, best known for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, dedicated this book to his mother who liked the science-fiction mystery for “the bit about the horse.”
When the kids were young, life moved so quickly that my time for self-contemplation and reflection only lasted as long as a child’s nap, an unaccompanied birthday party or a swim lesson. Then I’d hear, “Momma, momma!” and I once again was embracing a little one and my role as a young mother.
Standing in the checkout line with a cart full of groceries at Pacific Ocean Marketplace, my 5-year-old daughter Madison tugged at my shirt. Pointing at the grey-haired couple chatting in front of us, she asked, “Mom, what are they saying?” I told her they were speaking Vietnamese and thought they were from Vietnam, a country halfway around the world where I was born.
Was my life a total failure? This question blindsided me in a high school gymnasium during a graduation ceremony. My niece, Caitlin, was up on stage about to make her salutatory address. That’s when it hit me.
Fourteen years ago, on June 23, 1996, my husband and I got married under a Jewish wedding canopy, known as a huppah, surrounded by friends and family in the hills above Berkeley, Calif. It was a perfect day of singing and celebration.
In high school I used to say I was going to lead a revolution in education, although I didn’t know what exactly it would look like. As a senior in high school I didn’t even know how to apply for college or what the SAT was. No one in my family had ever attended college.
A Hermes knockoff in shades of navy, gold and orange. It was that last hue, its brilliant carroty oranginess, that stirred my memory, taking me back to spring of 1987 when I was 21, finishing up a semester abroad in Paris and about to embark on a three-week trip with my mother and sister.
