PHAYVANH LUEKHAMHAN

The idea is to write something every day, in remembrance. The idea is to never forget. But I am torn between wanting to remember and wanting to get on with it. I worked a full shift at the cafe today, and I am tired.

One of my customers recently lost a girl. My heart goes out to him and his family. But I can’t bring myself to tell him that I know and that I care (I do). Because I’m always afraid. That my own grief will explode. And I need to be calm at work.

I am drowning myself in my martini. And waiting for my boyfriend to wake from his nap so I can have someone to talk to–about anything else.

I have not had the deep swirl into depression as last year so far. Probably because I have been planing this Vigil for months now. But now that it’s actually happening, I have run out of things to write about.

I have run out of what to say. But to remind myself, I am reprinting this, a first draft of a poem I wrote addressed to Death:

modus mortem

you took your hand to my daughter’s heart and jerked it shut
you pinned her against the bed so she could not move
you pressed your thumbs to her neck where it purpled, and her feet
your palm cupped her breath, clipped her spine
your fingers hurried to rush the traffic in her veins
you fanned them against her face, hiding yours
you twisted your knuckles into her thighs and shot her lungs
you crumpled them as she thrashed
you ripped her free of bones and then of meat
you flogged her cheeks till they crimson bled
your nails tore up hungry trails on her welted back
you thrust your wrist into, collapsed her ribs
you fisted her brow, cracked her skull
you foisted your body into her, all of it

Sometimes we need time to breathe — to do SOMETHING (just one thing) that diverts us from our grieving. Today I went to breakfast by myself and journaled. This while Dan slept in. It was a wonderfully bright and bracing day, as often winter is. I walk down those streets every day. In the time it took to walk down a city block, I remembered spring time and the dogwoods in bloom, the children sprawled out on the library lawn in summer and the brilliant falling leaves of autumn.

Here’s the first draft of the poem I wrote after I attended the first bereaved parents support group last year.

In that room

Where the hollowed out parents meet
The heater clicks and whirs to soothe their shivering
In that bare echoing room in the library basement,
The mothers and fathers crowd around conference tables pushed together
And huddle about their aborted jobs
Of seeing to adulthood those once bright hopes that were theirs
Their children, taken from them
Too young–always too young, whatever the age.
Someone passes the Kleenex around the table.
Another offers a tattered photo album
And between the sniffles and the heartache,
The stories. Of the now dead. Graduations,
Beliefs, desires. And too, the coping.

They hug and shake hands, strangers come together
To find out who else among the living share their scars.
Now banded together by their grief, the rise and exit the room
Which held them, warm and into the bracing endless night.

Sometime in January of last year, I had noticed a flyer on a community billboard looking for bereaved parents to form a support group. I tore off the number and held it in my pocket for a month. Found it, lost it again. The gold colored stub wrinkling and softening in my pocket. I had not had the courage or the wherewithal I had been looking at these little scraps of paper for the last decade. Numbers of people to call and “talk” to, locations of the local Hospice or Compassionate Friends meetings. Nothing the I came across Nothing called out to me. This was not any different, except that I’d been tired of carrying this secret around. And I thought, what harm could it do? It was probably time to get on with my life anyway.

Then the floodgates opened up for me when her birthday came around. I was, as usual, unprepared for it. And so I put off calling the group. I didn’t want anyone to see me in this mess. So I called the number later that month, told the woman my name and situation and attended my first ever bereaved parents support group in March. It was held in the spacious basement meeting room of the local library. The parents were gathered around a long conference table and the place echoed when we spoke and the heat registers clanked in the background. I arrived fifteen minutes late. Everyone had already introduced themselves. Someone was the woman I had spoken to over the telephone introduced herself and asked me a little bit about me. And I told them, I don’t know where to begin I said. I think they asked me questions.

I know it was not long before I started blubbering and hiccupping through my sentences. And this is where I always end up when “talking” about it. And talking is what most compassionate friends ask from me. “If you ever need to talk, call me.” “Here’s my number. Call me if you need anything.” “Do you want to talk?” “Maybe you need someone to talk to.”

It’s not fair that I didn’t know what “talking” meant. In my family, it was taboo to “talk” about our problems outside of the family. But we’d also never talked within the family either. I don’t fault anyone for this. It was what it was. By the time I started junior high, I’d started talking to school counselors. By the time I was done with high school, I’d been scolded over and over again for “talking” to them.

If I’d have had a blog when I was still living under their roof, I can’t imagine the grief I would have gotten. But since my family no longer holds as much power over me as they did then, I will tell you: I loved them, and I wanted so much to talk to them. Openly. I wanted to hurt. I wanted them to witness my hurt.

For reasons unrelated to Akira’s death, my family broke apart and went their own ways. I ended up in San Francisco a year afterwards and many times walked the streets in search for something that “called” to me, that “spoke”. Something that fulfilled the emptiness.

The two agents of relief I found were these: The weekly Friends Meeting and the San Francisco Public Library. The Friends Meeting was held in an unassuming building in the Mission (I think) and was filled every Sunday with professionals of every stripe on the padded chairs that we later folded up to make way for the noontime potluck. I never stayed for the social. I cried through every meeting. I never introduced myself. And I never was moved enough to speak. But I sat in the stillness and felt. At meeting, I was allowed to feel and felt protected in that space. I felt mostly sadness and despair. And I cried. And when Meeting was over, I shook hands with everyone, gathered my things and left. I remember one man reached out to me and asked me to volunteer a night’s service in the soup kitchen, which I gladly agreed to.

And the SF library, once I found my way around, was the most fantastic wonderful, magical place in the whole universe! Books, upon books. Hundreds of people reading books and looking for books. And here is where I found the authors I never knew I was looking for: Kerouac, Baldwin, Hurston, among many others. I lived at the library. And every free moment I had was spent riding the bus there so I could walk the floors and look over the balconies onto the patrons below. And discover books.

But running away to a beautiful and carefree city like San Francisco was still running away. And so here I am back in Vermont, not “talking about it”, not knowing how.

After my rapid spin into grief last February and my lack of composure at the bereaved parents meeting the following month, I resolved to be more aggressive in my “coming out”. It’s what I wanted all this time really, to have my experience as a mother validated in some way. I have no other children and am still fairly youthful looking. And most people assume that I have never had children, that I am not a mother, much less a mother of a dead child. But I’m not looking for sympathy. I’m tired of hiding a fact that is so integral to who I am. Perhaps in a future post I will tell you how I could never be the wonderfully contented and happy person that I am, if not for this experience. Later.

I will tell you that this summer, at my last year at the Kundiman Emerging Asian American Poets’ Retreat on the University of Virginia campus, our workshop with Staceyann Chin took a turn towards the tightly held secrets of our past. She asked us, in regards to our families, what we were really grateful for, and what we is our most painful relationship and why. She required that we skirt the excuses and apologies and tell the heart of it.

So there I was, in this maroon carpeted room crying onto the conference table. Telling my fellow poets that I didn’t want sympathy. That I simply wanted to honor Akira by no longer being shy about her birth or her death. And this was my greatest sorrow. Not knowing how to do it.

I read a poem at our last salon about Akira. Something I wrote in that afternoon, as an exercise to illustrate a new form that my friends and I invented—the freeTouplet. Somehow, admitting it to a roomful of peers was a first small step in building her into my history. Here’s the first draft, below (unformatted, since I do not know how to do that on the blog ).

Phaylynn Akira Luekhamhan 1996
You are nine days. A shadow on the moon. You are swaddled. Buried. Swallowed. My sandwich meat. Scalpeled. Baby, you are engineer of my grief. You, shadow on the far side of my belief.
Say it.
Dead. You are dead. Dead.
You refuse.
Alive as fire,
you are bed.
You are coal.
You began, begun
My undoing
I am
Instead
Of without
I am
Intent
I am
Instead
Of collapsed
Revived

You my bedside.

My advocate.

Reader daughter.

Become my risk.

My give/take.

little gypsy

my reel

I bought a menorah. It’s a gleaming petite silver bridge of small cups, and this one is devoid of the Star of David, a dreidel, Hebrew glyphs, or anything else “Jewish” about it—discounting the thing itself. And this is not a celebration of light, but rather a different kind of struggle. This is why I’m lighting my first candle today.

Once, a long time ago, I was

In my youth, naïveté, I got pregnant when I was 20, with

I keep finding it hard to write it and keep I t one the page. I got pregnant. I had a baby. We named her Akira. She’s dead now. 14 years ago. I keep crossing and uncrossing these words. Writing and rewriting them. This is my big secret that I want to share. But even the words, as I write them. They don’t seem enough. Or right. They I feel trapped by them. Or I don’t want to let them out. Come back to haunt me or make me remember.

But I am a writer. And words are my tools, but they are such blunt and dull and inappropriate instruments today.

Back to the menorah. And this Vigil for Akira. The need to commemorate. Need? Commemorate? I feel that I

Last year, was a at this time, I was running a grief marathon, thirteen years after Akira’s death. It was early February and I had felt walked around was going about my days with a dissociative feeling that I’d forgotten something. What was it? Keys? Wallet? Important meeting? I was doing something mundane—folding the laundry, let’s say—when I felt an immense sadness fall on top of me. Stunned, and hardly breathing, my tears came on hot and steadily. I wailed.

How could I have forgotten that my baby’s birthday? The day The hours I spent in the hospital faded blue room, meditating through my contractions, walking the wide halls in my robe and johnny. I’d forgotten? I’d forgotten how it snowed that night and how the falling flakes glittered in the yellow halos of street lamps outside my window. I’d forgotten that Erik, Papa-to-be, sat came and went from the room, as much as his comfort would allow. I’d forgotten that.

The forgetting is not usually hard. Most Februarys, I am Akira’s birth and death anniversaries come and go as easily as blinking dreaming, sometimes a chore, but not usually. And I , the echoes of which haunt but do not control my waking life. The nine days when I was a mother to Akira and I were in the same world together seem like another lifetime away. I was a different person then. I’ve got a good and happy life without her. I’m moving on. I am more than this death.

So why last year did it hit me so hard? I checked the calendar during the initial crying spell. Akira would have been 13 years old that day. The hardest thing about remembering my dead child’s birthday is that it will always be joined with remembering her death day. Can’t have one without the other.

Dan came home from work and found me in an emotional mess. When I cry, I go all out hurricane mode: snot, tears, wet cheeks, soaking shirt. Uncontrollable. I had probably abandoned the wash and curled into a little ball on the futon, until he came home, after which I felt better, but far from normal.

I’d forgotten it—the mess of tubing and electrode wire that had connected her to the machines behind her. The days of blipping oxygen machines and green monitors. The gentle-speaking nurses on their rounds. Who can forget the city-within-a-city feeling of Dartmouth’s Medical Center, and that I walked so hard every day up and down those stairs that I, in a moment of weakness, used the elevator to the third floor of David’s House, to the room we lived out of? I have not forgotten I’ve forgotten the green and cream striped wallpaper and the wing chair and the canopied bed. I’d forgotten until then that I rocked her solid and stiff body in the nursery, after we’d disconnected her. That the light was yellow and dim. I remember that the Doctor cried as he told me the news. And that I The blonde nurse who was tending Akira once reminded me to eat and gave me her package of peanut butter and crackers and I’ve forgotten how it feels to force yourself to swallow. It’s okay that I’d forgotten the ugly parts, rights? I don’t want to continually remember this. But I do. I don’t. But I do.

And so I bought the menorah

The next day after my complete and utter breakdown, I went to work in an unusually fragile state. I considered telling my co-worker, a mother herself, what was going on. Actually, I’d wanted to tell her for a long time, but never found a way to slip it into conversation, nor the courage. But I knew she would understand and feel for me. I could trust her with my feelings. But whenever I’m faced with coming out as a bereaved parent, I always chicken out. I did that day too. I put on my best, most cheerful smile and greeted the customers as best I could. I handed them their coffees and their change. I tried to act normal. I felt like a fake. And I took frequent bathroom breaks to collect myself, and to give the tears the privacy they deserved.

I got through the day without incident and trudged home to cry without interruption. Dan, once home from the office, calmed my nerves and offered himself up to my abuse and amusement. I mean that in all goodness. I cry on his shoulder and vent about what’s bothering me. And he, in his own sweet way, brings me out of the cloud of despair with his humor and gentleness.

I didn’t know Dan when Akira was born. I wouldn’t know him for another seven years. Because, frankly, it took me that long to pull myself out of grief enough to join in with the regular world again. Start joining clubs and taking classes. Make friends and date again. I couldn’t have asked for anyone as kind and forgiving as he. And in my 14th year of bereavement, and he takes my sorrow and spins it into sunshine.

Erik, the My baby’s father and I broke up. Usual story. Though it wasn’t because of Akira. We had been on and off and we’d both decided it was better to call it quits—before we knew we were pregnant. He’s grown up in a broken home, and mine as actively breaking. We decided to stick together for the baby’s sake, and rented an apartment and made a stab at giving our kid the normal upbringing that neither of us had. We probably stayed together for about another month after she passed. Both of us grieved in our own way, separately, and didn’t know how to support one another.

I moved out to my own apartment and have been on my own ever since, until I started dating again.

As much as I write, I don’t know that it will all get said. This is just a little bit—an introduction. My plan is to light a candle for every day she took a breath (assisted or not), during her anniversary dates. So if this series of posts seems a little like too much information for you, please check back in after Valentine’s Day, when I’ll have moved on with myself. But for those of you who are reading, please know that this is all a part of my healing process. And that I am writing right now because I can’t tell you directly. This is the truth. I simply can’t talk about it. So if you’re reading and would like to acknowledge it in some way, please simply say “I’m reading your Vigil for Akira. Thanks (please keep writing, etc.)” or something like that. Make it short. Because I can really only handle a small cursory glance over the whole subject. Any more than that would be too much. But you do not have to acknowledge or respond. I am doing this for my own sake. If you’d like to pass along this blog post and share it, I’d fine with that too. I think it’s a necessary part of my “coming out”.

Just to make a long blog post a little longer, here’s a little poem I wrote during a writing generation workshop with Jan Frazier, to whom I am greatly indebted. I’d attended a month-long poetry retreat at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT in 2004 and presented this along with some other poems for a manuscript critique with Richard Jackson. He said this was the strongest poem of the bunch. It’s not changed much and was published by bakkamagazine.com in April 2008. I wrote it for my friend Vada, who was bedside with me for some of the worst times.

ICU

my fingers clutched
in futility the flesh
we cursed the blood
that would not flow there
your toes the size
of dime-store pearls
were fat with fluid
and black as the night
I birthed you
we talked I recall
of everyday things—
as if you were already
barefoot on the porch
brushing a doll and
I was squat shelling peas

About Workshop Poems: These are drafts I’m revising. One a month. Please feel free to comment. And check back in throughout the month to see how I’ve progressed with it.

February 2010 draft:

And then it rains

The birds do not sing into closed windows nor do they
They part the air in flight when it rains

If everything stopped what it was doing just to listen,
Would you hear the sun drawing to a close?

But when it rains, all day, drumming
Into the ground as if to right it

Nothing fights back nor shirks away, just me
In my house, looking out

Working revision copy:

And then it rains

The birds do not sing, but instead gulp air the wind,
as if hungry into closed windows nor do they
They part the air in flight when it rains

If everything stopped what it was doing just to and listened,
Would Could you hear the sun drawing to a close?

But when it It rains, all day, drumming slapping
Into the The ground as if to right it

Nothing fights back nor shirks away, just me
In my house, looking out

Next draft:

[check back later]

Hardball by Sara Paretsky


My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I won one of the Goodreads giveaways and received an advance copy of Hardball in the mail in September–my first Sara Paretsky novel! I still consider myself new to the mystery genre (most of it limited to Agatha Christie books), and so was not familiar with the V.I. Warshawski series.

This book is a good introduction, since Vic makes sure to strew background info throughout the narrative. It’s done pretty matter-of-factly, and sometimes gave me the impression that the author (or narrator) was aware of the need to catch new readers up to speed. But do we really need to know that she’s divorced? It doesn’t further the plot any.

The plot was intricate, and unfolded with a fine pacing, the way a movie version might play out. The people in this book are all kinds–street bums and politicians, artists and racists. It is one the pleasures about this book–the many people who are involved. That, and the deeper underlying story of the lives of Chicago blacks during a riotous time of racial conflict. I wished that had been explored more deeply. But as the narrator was only 9 then, and a child of a cop, there was only so much she knew. The story of Lamont Gadsden, the missing teenager, was infinitely more interesting and real than anything Vic was doing.

But at times, Vic acts as tour guide to her city, going on about the slowness of traffic on the highway, and where things used to be, how they used to be. It’s too much distraction for a book already crammed full of unnecessaries: the vacation to Italy, a blockhead cousin, her PDAs and Apple computers. I sensed the story was trying very hard to be modern, by telling us what brand this or that is–none of which serves to illustrate anything about the story or people. There are several mentions (but no reflections)of Barak Obama as President, which is annoying in a book about race relations, and it only serves to date the book.

What kept me up all night reading it was the chase–once Petra’s gone, and the bad guys have Vic on the run, then it’s full-tilt suspense–through to the end.

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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer


My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Unfortunately, I did not fall in love with Juliet, our protagonist, as most everyone else in this book did, and I cannot find her love for these people genuine. Fascination, yes. The historical chapter the islanders lived through–and readily told to Juliet–is fascinating, and the smaller stories within it also add depth to a common history.

What bothers me the most is that Juliet is so taken by the life of Elizabeth,(founder of the Society, and who was forced off the island) that she not only finds many similarities in their lives, but assumes her life completely in the end: adopting her daughter, living in her house, even being loved by the same man. No one on the island thought this was weird? Or uncomfortable?

Aside from all of Juliet’s many character flaws, this book does not convince me that she is a good writer. Throughout, she excuses the success of the Izzy columns as conforming to the publisher’s request, and not what she’s capable of writing. Her letters though (the only writing we ever get to read of hers) are as flippant, self-centered, gossipy, and contrived as I imagine the published columns were. As the reader, we are not treated to any excerpts of the Bronte biography, or the Times article, though the islanders apparently were allowed to read them. There is no evidence Juliet is capable of greater things.

This I fault mostly to the writers, and their lack of artistry. A better writer would have given us everything–or at least made Juliet’s letters an exquisite pleasure to read (she is a writer after all). Isola’s journal inclusion at the end was a cop-out. It wouldn’t have done to have Juliet write a long letter to her dearest childhood friends (whom she’s been corresponding with this whole time) about something so important?

I get it, though. Guernsey is supposed to be a little paradise. Where no one suffers from PTSD, and all the folks are friendly as can be. Storybook. A place outsiders fall in love with and want for themselves.

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About Workshop Poems: These are drafts I’m revising. One a month. Please feel free to comment. And check back in throughout the month to see how I’ve progressed with it.

January 2010 original:

Brother(s)

We had our separate twin beds, sharing the room
with purple plush bears and the thundering monsters
we named from under our covers at night.
With satisfied stomachs of rice, my voice carried the both of us
into scarlet, clovered dreaming.

( I did not know)

Through our window, the dual aroma of lilac and mint slippered in
as firebugs fall down, petite stars
gilding the dusk of our game, between blue pine
and heaven, between
(I give up) and ollie oxen.

(what have we got to get her?)(we got a name.)

Yet I knew. The cinema’s flickering told it this way:
hearts will cleave in half (or thirds),
portions of which are no longer ours to hold.
I knew it this way: teddy bears grow up, fall apart.
The tales you asked from me ended like this: Together.

(we determine the inkblot’s fold)

Namesharing, our last halves equal (beginning the same).
I hurled my books at you and still you broke no ribs.
I abandoned you to the streets, yet homeward still.
Still. Homeward still. Still, my heart
is cleaving.

Working revision copy:

Brother(s)

We had our separate twin beds, sharing the room
with purple plush bears and the thundering monsters
we named from under our covers at night.
With satisfied stomachs of rice, my voice carried the both of us
into scarlet, clovered dreaming.

( I did not know)

Through our window, the dual aroma of lilac and mint slippered in
as firebugs fall fell down, petite stars
gildinggilded the dusk of our game, between blue pine
and heaven, between
(I give up) and ollie oxen.

(what have we got to get her?)(we got a name.)

Yet I knew. The cinema’s flickering told it this way:
hearts will cleave in half (or thirds),
portions of which are no longer ours to hold.
I knew it this way: teddy bears grow up, fall apart.
The tales you asked from me ended like this: Together.

(we determine the inkblot’s fold)

Namesharing, our last halves equal (beginning the same).
I hurled my books at you and still you broke no ribs.
I abandoned you to the streets, yet homeward still.
Still. Homeward still. Still, my heart
is cleaving.

New Version:

[check back later]

Let’s look back through the dream diary of this year and see what the common themes are…

The modes of transportation have been mostly walking, running, or car/bus.  Usually, I’ve been going to meet someone, and come to a fork in the road, and/or get separated.  My travels are rarely fulfilled.  Once I crashed a semi into a stone church.  I did once find a time-travel portal (which I have found before), but did not use it.  It was protected by an alligator-type creature.

Themes of oppression still manifest as Nazi imprisonment and slavery of the American 1800s.  In both situations, I have tried to escape, but awoke before I succeeded.  A new kind of imprisonment took place recently, as I toiled away in a human refugee work camp on some alien planet.  This time, escape was very real.  We rose up through our collective power and we were allowed to board a diplomatic plane.  I don’t remember us getting off the ground, though.

Alligators have only shown themselves in a few dreams, though they have been quite fierce, even killing one of my companions.   They are usually very large and dinosaur-like.  Otherwise, the animals in my dreams are often small black canine and feline strays.   I have encountered poisonous frogs and scorpions which grow in proportion to their anger.  Once I got chased down by the neighbor’s yak, which spied my futile attempts to escape notice.  Another time, three spit-roasted pigs came back to life.

As for literature-related adventures, I have been in woodsy settings inspired by the Narnia chronicles, I entered a passionate affair with Ernest Hemingway in Spain, and witnessed Beouwolf and Grendl tossing jokes like old friends, as they spirited down a winding dirt path.

I attended an early-morning book group where we drank martinis, a literature festival on the Keene State Campus, and suffered my usual mind-blanks onstage during poetry slams.

The books that exist only in my dream world include Jan Frazier’s beautiful poetry book, decorated with victorian-style florals.  It was priced at $104, published by Marlowe & Co., or M__ & Marlowe.  Jon Barlow also self-published a small collection of picture books when he was a young boy.  His brother, my boyfriend, presented him with a scrapbook collection of them on his 18th birthday.  Titles included “I Like Being a _____ (animal?), But Not When it’s _____ Hunting Time”, and “War”, published by The Last Press.  There’s also a new-ish Garry Trudeau book I had been trying to find.

New this year: I have a few near-death occassions, including being bludgeoned in a Quidditch game, after which I snapped to lucidity.  Once, I was diagnosed with life-threatening cancer.  All this is to say that my dreams are getting scarier.

Another unexpected theme is underground tunnels or mazes.  In my dream of an impending monster attack (a repeat), we live in a warren-type settlement.  In some dreams, they are traps, but mostly they are domestic places, either long abandoned or rediscovered.

Lastly, a few nonsense quotes, names, and other quizzical things:

• “Render for me the gorgeousness of Brattleboro, as I do for you.  Come on town, Wake up!” — Bob Peed
• www._____.umcom.
• “Sunday they don’t call me / Monday they call me to school /” — lyric from a Gospel song.
• Characters names: Mee-Moon, White Star, Connie Delgado, and Bananaman

How does one forget 30 years’ time?  It happened to me.  During a recent conversation, I realized that my family had been in the US for 30 years now, as of this winter.  As of Thanksgiving, actually.  I have no recollection of our arrival in America, which city we landed in, how long we waited in lines, or who met us at the airport.  How strange it must have felt, scanning the metal and concrete buildings for something familiar: a scent of greenness, sun-warmed wood, broad brown faces and dark, tender eyes.  Maybe my parents we listening for a few words they might understand.  I have no memory of any of this.  I imagine I was probably either fast asleep or crying.  Crying in my sleep, perhaps.

What I know from others is that it was a very cold winter.  There was already snow on the ground.  Snow.  The world must have unzipped itself in my parents’ minds when they stepped into the icy air outside.  To grow up all your life in a tropical village you’ve never dreamed of leaving, then muck through the detritus of war to end up in a crowded refugee camp.  So many bodies, so many lives on hold.  And then to make the impossible decision: to leave, possibly forever.  This haunts me when I think about it.  The pain of making such a choice.

But soon we were flying like a bird through the air.  And then landed at the noisy airport, some Americans coming towards us, trying to pronounce our names.  And probably somebody bowed.  And then perhaps someone said, “Sabaidee.”  And a new life began.  The world expanded all around us.

from The Brattleboro Reformer, copyright may apply.

Our sponsors tried their best to teach us English, show us how to work the light switches, the faucets and toilets.  The stove.  They helped arrange jobs for my parents–a janitorial position for Dad, and a bakery job for Mom.  They also gave us our first Christmas.  I wish I remembered it.  Perhaps someday it will all flood back.  But for now, all I have is this newspaper photo of Dad with a box in his hand.  I think the spine says “Monster Puzzle”.  Maybe it’s for my brother or myself.  My mother is letting Dad choose and open the gifts.  My brother and I are on the floor, waiting for something.  What?  Our small tree is leaning under the weight of handmade ornaments.  Hanspeter, one of our sponsors, leans in, elbow on the table.

I gather it was a joyous party, our family the honored guests.  There was probably cider and cookies, nuts and cheese.  Some coffee.  I’m sure it exhausted us, and confounded us.  We’d been in America for a month.  We were the only Laotian refugees in Brattleboro, though that would soon change.  And though we were far from our family, we’d found ourselves in a close group of people who seemed to love one another.  They didn’t speak our language (except for a few) and they had no reason to love us.

I suppose that was the greatest gift we received.  Love.  Welcome.  Hope.  Kindness.  A Future.  All those new friends we’d made in the early 80’s were so generous.  Beyond the gifts of clothes and toys.  Beyond what we can touch.  They gave us their hearts.  I speak for my entire family when I say we are truly grateful.