Congratulations

 

Graduate and Proud Sister

Vienna, Austria, 1991. In the middle of our sixth Foreign Service posting, sixteen years after signing on, we realized just how close we were to empty-nest-time. From Voluntary Nomads, Part Seven: Austria Adventures, Chapter 29:

Congratulations

Dakota went to Turkey on his senior class trip in May and returned mere days before graduation.  High school graduation. Where had the time gone? I recalled our photo of not-quite-two-year-old Dakota in Washington, DC, all dressed up in his new Winnie-the-Pooh outfit, ready to fly to Tehran in 1975. Now in 1991 our handsome eighteen-year-old son stood at the beginning of a new path to his own future.

More interested in music than in academics, Dakota decided to stay with us in Vienna for a year of study at the American Institute of Music (AIM). To fill the time between graduation and the start of classes at AIM, he signed up for the summer work program at the embassy. The personnel office did their best to create jobs for teens, gave them a courtesy security clearance based on their parent's background investigation, and paid them to help the gardeners and caretakers or function as security escorts for workmen in unclassified areas of the embassy. Before Dakota got a job through that program, I had a brainstorm: he could do my job while I went on home leave. My boss and the Brookhaven Lab accountants approved the plan.

I wrote glossaries to automate the correspondence that Dakota would have to generate and streamlined the daily routine as much as possible. The story had a perfect ending. Dakota did great work, and I still had a job when I got back. And Dakota survived his two-month bachelor experience as well.

Meanwhile, Tina flew to Washington, DC to spend time with her girlfriend Alex Asselin from Dominican Republic days. Fred and I rode the train to Frankfurt where we could catch a direct flight to Dallas. This was our first time on a night train and our first experience in a sleeping compartment. Novels always describe the wheel clicking rhythm and rocking motion as soothing and dream promoting. But it reminded me of my father pushing on my shoulder to get me up for school, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up.

In the middle of the night, Fred got up to pee. Being a considerate guy he didn't turn on the light. He groped in the dark to find the floor-level cupboard that held the urinal, a quart-sized vessel with a handle at one end and a spout at the other. After using the urinal, the traveler was supposed to return it to the cupboard where the angle of the shelf would automatically tip the contents (onto the tracks below, I'm guessing).

Fred fumbled the cupboard door open, removed and used the urinal. Bumping and clunking noises followed.

"What the hell?" He flicked on the light. "Damn."

The overhead light glared upon perplexed Fred holding one of his shoes. I watched him pour the contents of his shoe into the urinal. And I giggled. Giggles escalated into belly laughs that disintegrated into hiccupy guffaws. Fred laughed then too, although he didn't seem quite as amused as I was; maybe he wasn't quite as loopy from sleep deprivation, or he envisioned putting his foot into a damp shoe in the morning.

In Dallas we launched our visit to Fred's sisters who lived within the Texas Triangle, as we called La Porte (Laura), Conroe (Pat), and Austin (Beth). Party, party, party. The Austin segment included a side trip to Port Aransas where I got the second worst sunburn of my life, blistering my calves, during a long walk with Fred up and down the beach.

After our whirlwind tour of the Texas Triangle, we flew to Albuquerque and met up with Tina for our visits to my dad and his wife Bea in Los Lunas and to Fred's parents in Roswell. Tina toured the UNM campus, one of her options for college. She also got her driver's license and practiced driving in my dad's Goldie, a venerable Pontiac sedan. Fred spent the whole vacation feeling sick. We wondered if it might be a recurrence of dengue fever that had first infected him in Somalia and then again in the Dominican Republic. He felt better by the time we topped off the home leave experience with five days in DC getting physicals and taking care of other business.

When we arrived back in Vienna on that August day, home never looked so good. It would have been perfect if our suitcases had arrived with us, but international travel is not all wine and roses after all. Our bags showed up two days later. ###

Read a review of Voluntary Nomads at Story Circle Book Reviews and purchase your copy at popular online retail outlets. E-book formats are available at Smashwords.com and Outskirts Press



Story Circle Book Reviews

The New Beirut

Tina and Nancy in New Mexico 1974

Voluntary Nomads excerpt "The New Beirut" comes from Chapter 1 of Part One: New Mexico Genesis:

The call came in November 1974, six months after Fred submitted his application, even though it seemed like at least a year had gone by. Fred mouthed the words "State Department" and held the phone up so I could hear too. 

"Congratulations, your application for the position of Communications and Records Officer has been approved and you are assigned to Tehran, Iran." 

Fred's polite response didn't register with me. The expression on his face asked, "What did she say?" 

The woman's voice chirped with good cheer. "Tehran is a marvelous first assignment. You might not know that Beirut used to be considered the Paris of the Middle East, but since the threat of civil war escalated in Lebanon, everyone has been calling Tehran the new Beirut. I've heard that caviar is so plentiful, you'll be spreading it on bread like peanut butter." 

Tehran-Beirut-Paris-Lebanese civil war-Iranian caviar. It was too much to absorb all at once. Fred grabbed my hands and whirled me around the living room in a crazy victory dance. We flopped down on the sway-backed sofa and Fred picked up our tattered National Geographic World Atlas from the coffee table. He opened it to the map of Iran and poked the circled star symbol indicating the capital, Tehran. 

"There it is. That's where we're going -- where we'll be for the next two years." 

Of course our trip didn't follow a straight line. No, our journey from Los Lunas, New Mexico to Tehran, Iran included some hurdles, a couple of detours and several stops along the way. 

A few days after the phone call announcing Fred's assignment we received a hefty packet in the mail giving us guidance on the mechanics of becoming a Foreign Service family. Once we sorted out our belongings into sea freight, airfreight, and storage categories, we had to decide how to get to Washington, DC for Fred's eight-week orientation and training course. We could fly or we could drive. Both choices had advantages and disadvantages, but we chose to drive, in order to have our own car in Washington rather than a rental. With the help of our parents we financed a shiny black 1967 Volkswagen beetle. We loved our new car. It was an incredible improvement over the rattle-trap Plymouth. 

On departure day, Fred folded down the back seat of the VW and I spread out two well-worn flannel-lined sleeping bags. First in, our son Dakota, aged 20 months, followed by our daughter Tina, not quite one year old. They babbled, cooed, gnawed on their teething toys, and took frequent naps. The highway hum and car motion lulled them into a relaxed state that allowed Fred and me to have wonderful long conversations. When Tina wanted to nurse, I swung her into the front seat with me. Dakota snacked on unfiltered apple juice and graham crackers in the backseat play-lounge. Even though a road trip with two toddlers might not be everybody's ideal, it worked for us, and the ease of our maiden voyage foretold the spirit of twenty-odd years of travel to come. 

Somewhere in East Texas, early in the morning of the third travel day, with the rising sun bright in our eyes, I leaned back to see if the glare bothered the babies. They were fine, but I noticed a small empty space on the sleeping bag. For the past hour I'd had that nagging feeling that I'd forgotten something, and now I knew what it was. 

"Oh, dammit, Fred, you have to pull over." 

"What's wrong?" 

"I don't see Baby-Kinsey. You know how Dakota is about his Baby-Kinsey." 

Fred stopped the car on the shoulder and we searched for Dakota's lovey, a baby pillow covered in the soft birds-eye diaper material that he always rubbed across his lips when he was sleepy. I went through everything in the back seat while Fred looked in the suitcases. 

"We must have left her in the motel room," I said. "We have to go back." 

"Are you sure? We'll have to backtrack eighty miles or more." 

Fred closed his eyes for a second, then looked at Dakota and smiled. I nodded. We piled back in the car and Fred made a U-turn for the rescue of Baby Kinsey.