From my point of view:

Walking through the yard, I see an ant hill so I stop and watch them to see what they do.  Thinking that ant hill looks awfully small for so many ants, I decide to build them a bigger one.  I gather all the dirt I can carry, and in the process find an earth worm, so I stop and watch him to see what he does.  He likes dirt too, so I also gather as many earth worms as I can find to put in my ant hill.  Once I get the dirt in a pile, it won’t stick together as well as I like, so I decide to wet it down.  Not wanting to get my clothes and shoes dirty and get in trouble, I take them off and lay them nearby out of the way and continue in my underwear.  Then I go over to the side of the house and drag over the garden hose.

From his point of view:

Dad is on the phone in the house, watching me out the window as I play in the yard.  I crouch down to look at something for a while, then get a bucket from the garden and start filling it with dirt.  I pile it in one spot, take off all my clothes and then go get the garden hose.  At this point, my dad tells the person he is talking to, “Um..I have to go,” and runs out to ask me what I’m doing.  I look up with a big smile and say, “I”m making an ant hill, Daddy!”

From my point of view:

My doll needs a new dress.  I can’t sew, but I know Dad has some white T shirts that are just about the right length.  I get one of them and a pair of scissors and cut off the sleeves, fashioning one into a belt, and one into a headband.  Then I get blueberries out of the fridge, mash them up into a paste and use that for a dye to fingerpaint a pattern onto my new dress.

From his point of view:

“Daddy, can I use the scissors?”  Knowing this could go anywhere, he asks why.  “And can I have these blueberries?”  Now both concerned and curious, he comes into the room with me and asks what I am doing with scissors and blueberries.  With a big proud smile, I tell him, “I’m making a dress for my doll!”

I am sure he would have been my favorite playmate, because he would never be able to leave me alone.  It would have been an interesting thing to watch, father and daughter building an ant hill together or making a doll dress.  I think the stories I tell now from my childhood would have been more interesting if he had been there then!  But there is no doubt, he would have been way ahead of me because he has the same curious, head strong and inventive streak and he would have seen these things coming.  An advantage like that would have been helpful to my adoptive parents, who had no IDEA what got into my head to make me do some of these things!

Dad, it would have been an adventure, for both of us.  And from my mother’s point of view:

“Dick, you need to go get your daughter!  She’s headed into the woods with a bird cage and a piece of bologna!”

I am going to tell you several stories today, so get a cup of coffee and curl up in your favorite chair. This is not a dash to the grocery store for bread, this is a long country cruise on a tree shaded, sun dappled winding road.

The things I believe are not founded in dogma or other people’s teachings, but in my own experiences. Sometimes what is true to you comes up behind you to touch you on the shoulder, other times it smacks you in the face with a wet rag. Sometimes, it just lays down in your path like a shiny stone, waiting for you to either step over it, or stop and pick it up and turn it over, considering all the chinks and colors you see there.

The stories I am going to tell you about are the times when I picked up the stone and let it change my path.

I was widowed when I was 37 years old. My husband had no life insurance, and after taking care of him at home for 2 years, I had nothing left. No money, no job, no car, and since the house we shared was up for sale, soon nowhere to live. At the burial, a friend of his asked me what I was going to do, and I told him I had no idea. He offered to show me a little house that had come up for rent just that week, and took me there after the burial service ended. Today, I own that little house and have lived here for almost 13 years. It was the beginning of a new life with things that, for the first time, were not ‘ours’, but mine.

Five years later, after rebuilding my life from scratch, tiny bit by tiny bit, my sister-in-law suggested I apply for a second job in an in-bound call center where she worked. People would call me to sign up for a pay-by-phone option on their credit card, and if I had a problem helping them, I could send them up to what was known as Assist Gate. Occasionally, we would be ‘gated’ to one person in Assist Gate, meaning we would get that person every time we called, instead of a random rotation.

Seven months into my job there, I was gated to a guy named Bob. In a room full of surly call center employees who normally hated their jobs, Bob was cheerful and helpful, and this got my attention. In the five years since my husband’s death, no one had caused me to raise my antennae to notice them. I was not dating, not interested. Bob repeatedly answered my calls, even joking with me, lifting my mood considerably. I began to wonder which of the cubicles this ‘Bob’ occupied. By the end of the day, we had become a strange, anonymous form of friends. Today, I have been happily and miraculously married to Bob for almost 9 years.

If you’ve been reading this blog at all, you may know this story already, but it bears a summary here. In my current job, I needed a Chauffeur’s license to transport clients, which required me to get a copy of my birth certificate. I tried many various ways to get my state of birth, Nebraska, to send that copy to me electronically or even via snail mail, but I had no luck. Finally, I had no choice but to drive up to Lincoln to present myself in person with photo ID and get the copy myself.

As I was standing at the counter, beside me was a stack of forms. They were an alternate application, for adopted children over the age of 18 who wanted to apply for the original birth certificate issued before they were adopted. I am an adopted child now grown, who has tossed the idea of searching around for the last 3 decades and repeatedly dismissed it. Now, holding one of these forms in my hand, on a complete whim, I paid the extra twelve bucks and filled it out.

The lady behind the counter returned, handing me the amended one that I came here for. Then, to my utter shock, she handed me my original as well. She explained that in the twenty years she worked there, she had never been able to give this information to anyone because none of the birth parents had ever signed the consent form allowing it to be released. But my birth mother had! She also gave me a copy of the consent form, giving her last known address and phone number. Other office people were gathering behind her, with their hands over their mouths and tears in their eyes, witnessing my moment of miracle.

This led me on a roller coaster ride, the excitement dashed by finding out my birth mother had passed away before we could find each other. However, within a month I had met my mother’s sister and her family, gotten genealogy information dating as far back as the 1600’s, and a year later she introduced me to my birth father, who is still alive and living in Omaha.

He and I have now built up a truly indescribable relationship, like two mirrors where we see ourselves every time we look at each other. I have never been as close to, as trusting of, or as safe with another human being in my life, and it has changed my entire life. We have discovered that both of us play the guitar, both of us have a Savior Complex, and among many other things, both of us are writers. This caused me to send him a small, three page story about a cabin he had told me he always wanted to build for himself.

This next Wednesday, the 13th of June, will mark one year since I emailed him my little story, my gift to him of his cabin in our imagination. In that year, it has blossomed into our story, how we met, what we have learned, how we have gone from mysterious strangers to a father and daughter, a Dad and his Kid. It is the arc of our story, compressed into one year and set in this fictional cabin where our personalities are laid open and displayed unlike anywhere else in the real world. We have learned so much in the writing of this epic, now over 140,000 words and 600 pages long, so much about each other, so much about ourselves, and about the world in which we have always swum upstream. It has grown so large we have now split it into two books, and it has taken on a life of its own.

This is where I wax my philosophical surfboard. Got that coffee refilled?

My friend Stan was at my husband’s burial for a reason. It was not chance that this little house came available in the very week I was given notice to move, the very day of the burial. This little shiny rock was laid down in my path, and because I stopped moving and picked it up, it altered my path. It brought me here, despite all my own intentions of driving my own bus.

I was gated to Bob for a reason. I had worked there 7 months and he had worked there a year, the building was not that big and the lunch room was not that easy to be isolated away from your coworkers. And yet we had never met. The day I was gated to him, he had been out of a previous relationship for a month and had finally accepted it was over. He wasn’t ready until that time to meet anyone, and when he became ready, I was gated to him. We hit it off so well that he told me later by our third date, he knew he could marry me. That was in March, and by May we were living together. We married in December of the following year, and to date have never had a single argument. We are happy together in a way that makes other wives swat their husbands at restaurants and ask, “Why don’t you ever do those things for me?” and makes married men stop and comment to me that Bob is a lucky man to have a wife who will talk him into buying a motorcycle.

I was given the red tape runaround and forced to come to Lincoln for a reason. I would never have seen those forms if I hadn’t been there in person, and if I had never been confronted with them, I wouldn’t have found my father and had this amazing relationship that has transcended all other relationships in my life. Of his four children, I am the only one that looks like him, the only one that thinks like him, the only one that carries the gene that made us loners, musicians and poets.

It is my belief that my little story has grown into this Opus for a reason. There is something being done here, just like being gated to Bob and being driven to Lincoln, that is bigger than me. I don’t have a name for it, although many will give it their own names according to their beliefs. But something is at work through us, and it wants to be known. It wants to be heard. Whatever happens to this story, we will not decide. Some little shiny stone, somewhere in our path, will present itself and we will have the wisdom and trust to stop and pick it up, and let it take us where we are meant to go.

The point of telling you all of this is to remind myself, and hopefully to illustrate to you, that the best things in my life have come from that trust. My belief in something bigger than me is based in, cemented in, that experience of setting down all my stubborn determination to go my own way, stopping to listen to that other voice, look through that other door, explore than other winding path.

To notice that shiny stone, and to trust the guidance of whatever put it there.

My father and I have spent the last two years building up a powerful, trusting relationship like none I have ever had with anyone before.  All the same threads in me that come from him bind us together, but the choices we make when confronted with our differences have also forged new bonds.  We are father and daughter by heredity, but what we have become is based on heredity, but not sustained only by that.  With every step from the starting gate, we choose where we will take this, especially when confronted with mountains to climb.

With every parent and child, there are usually histories of love and battle scars, intense emotion and old wounds, some forgiven and some just buried.  I have no history with my father except these two years, so we have nothing to overcome, to forgive, to survive.  We can create that adult relationship without the mine field of childhood to cross.  In some ways, that makes it easier because we both have the wisdom of years and mileage behind us, the judgment and experience of past relationships.  When I was born, he was not much more than a child himself, and neither of us would have had the maturity to know how to arrive here without cultivating our own minefield.  On the other hand, we must cram a lifetime of things we missed out on into just a few short years.  That void will never be filled, but every moment and every memory now makes it feel just a little bit smaller.

It’s a Faustian deal in a way.  You may either have a lifetime together, or you may have the amazing, unique and purified relationship we have now.  I’m glad the choice between them was made for me at 3 months old, because knowing what I know now, I don’t think I could choose.

Watching this relationship develop from the sidelines has caused problems for others in my birth family.  For some of his other children, it is hard to realize the either/or of this Faustian bargain.  From across their own minefield, they see the unique blamelessness and purity that only comes with having no history.  They long for that kind of painless acceptance, the ease and freedom of attention and love, and struggle to be supportive while wrestling with the voices that helped create the minefield between him and them.  But if confronted with the deal, not having all the years they’ve shared with him, all the lifetime of their memories, to have what I have now…would they make that bargain?

I stand on my side of their minefield, waving them across and longing for them to be here with me, with him.  I know that if they could make it across, they have the chance to build a new relationship with him that I could never have.  I also know that no matter how much I do now, no matter how much time I spend or how many memories I build, I will never be able to have what they have now, in all it’s flawed glory.  He never rocked me to sleep, never saw me graduate, never walked me down the aisle.  All those years with him are lost to me forever.

This puts me between a rock and a hard place with these two people who I have come to love so much.  I would never hurt either of them by choice.  But my actions will hurt someone no matter who I attempt to protect.  Pursuing this joyous and amazing relationship with my father, I know, will unavoidably cause pain for those who watch this unfold.  But to protect them, I either have to hide this from them, which will only make them feel more isolated….or do the unthinkable and stop.  That is beyond my capability.  There is nothing I can do to protect them, without destroying myself.

My relationship with my father is his and mine, and we both have a right to make it as glorious and wonderful as it can possibly become.  I have a right to be happy about that, and enjoy every moment I am blessed with.  I cannot go back now, and I would not even if that were a choice.  I know that despite the pain they are feeling, in their heart they wish this happiness for me too.  We will all continue to struggle with that gap between my relationship with him and their relationship with him.  I want them here, for the three of us to be one, to close that gap and bring us together.

But I also realize that I can only be responsible for what I build with my father, and what I build with them.  What they build with each other is out of my control.

We have also decided that this is only one part of the whole story, which will arc through an entire year.  Once we get this part done, we will write between 4 and 6 more to make a complete work.  We have the basic plot line through the end of that work, but right now we are only focusing on completing this first chapter.  This is going to be a huge thing when we get done.

However, this has awakened my old passion for writing in ways I never imagined.  I used to think that I had a story in me, something I would write someday….not the Great American Novel necessarily, but something worthwhile.  I even had plots picked out, stories I thought would make a really great read, but somehow I never got started.  It didn’t seem to ‘flow’.  This is another ball of twine altogether.

I write early in the morning when no one is up yet, or late at night when no one is up anymore.  I like to be alone, in the solitude of my house, with nothing but the thought of my story rolling around in my head.  I think about it when I drive, I think about it when I am doing dishes, I think of phrases and metaphors that would work and weigh one word over another to nail down just the perfect adjective to paint the picture in my head.  Tonight, Dad and I got together to go over the first edit, to squabble about adding this in, or taking that out, to ferret out repetitions and nitpick punctuation.  He asked me once we were done if I got frustrated with him.  Are you kidding?  I LIVE for this!

I didn’t realize how much passion I have for the process of writing until this project took off.  I’ve played with it, but never did anything until now.  But I believe that once we are done, this project could really be something.  I think because it’s real and it’s coming from both of us, from our own reality and our story of meeting each other and having this amazing relationship, it will be unique and appreciated.  It’s a true story set in a fictional place, with a set of fictional events, but will all the truth about what this has done to us and how we built this father/daughter relationship out of thin air.  Everything we say and feel and write in the story is real.

Doing this with someone who is equally as passionate and serious about writing as I am is even more fun.  What he thinks will frustrate me only gets my adrenaline flowing.  The editing process for me is similar to him talking to a really close buddy about the proper rifle to use under these hunting conditions.  They may disagree, and they may try new things, and sometimes they may argue the point and other times concede just so they don’t argue.  But they enjoy the whole thing because it’s something they both love.  No matter which rifle ends up at the top of the list, it’s the conversation that is treasured between them, the camaraderie they felt and the understanding they have despite their differences.  Working together on something we both treasure and take seriously, and taking each other seriously in the process, is a lot of fun no matter what we decide to do with that extra ‘and’.  We’re writing.  That’s wonderful!

We have a long way to go before we have the second draft finished, and then we have to write all the other pieces that will follow it and go through the same process. But I know this:  Something in me is fully awake and thriving on this.  Nothing has made me this happy, and that’s saying a lot after everything I’ve been blessed with in the past few years.

Originally, I posted those segments of the story as they came through, thinking this was all for fun and that you would like to read them.  However, now they have take on a life of their own and the story has gotten quite involved.  We have decided there may come a day when we want to do something with it seriously, and putting it into a blog brings issues of public domain into the picture.  At his request, I have removed the story from this blog, at least until we can figure out what we are going to do with it.

I know there are those who were following along and would have enjoyed reading the rest of the story, and I apologize for leaving you with no ending.  One of you in particular is encouraged to contact me personally if they want to read more of the story off the record.  I hope you will understand that for copyright protection, I just can’t publish it in a blog.

Thanks for reading it anyway, and I hope you will enjoy the other things I will write about here.  I enjoy wrting and it helps to know that someone likes what I do.  Thanks again.

It’s been my lifelong dream to learn to play the piano.  I always felt a familiarity with it, as if when I laid my fingers on the keys, they had done this before…and in the words of that old standard….”but who knows where, or when?”  My heart felt a connection my brain could not remember.  I know why…now.  My birth mother played the piano, and I have her long thin fingers….and her heart.  Thanks to my aunt Bev, her sister, I also now have her keyboard…..so there are no excuses now.

And for all these years, what stopped me?

Myself.  I played the guitar, not well, but I understood music to some degree.  However, I never learned how to read music, sheet music that is.  I took one look at the complicated lines of multiple notes stacked one on top of the other, linked by mysterious curved lines and symbols that may as well have been the work of an ancient Egyptian scribe for all the sense they made to me.  It was daunting, and this was the key to learning how to play a piano.  One must know how to read this series of dots, and translate that into music.

Also, my left hand was as dumb as a post.  I may as well have strapped it behind my back and tried to play with my elbows as teach that left hand how to keep up with my right.  With my brilliant right hand, I could pick out any melody by ear, and learn to play it beautifully in a day or two.  My right hand had the ‘knack’ for this.  My left hand laid there, limp…forlorn and useless.

For 40 years, I told myself I would need a teacher to show this magical skill to me, someone patient enough to work with me and my dumb left hand and my ignorance of that convoluted page of dots and scratches.  Teachers were expensive.  This was going to take years.  Years and years. And for years and years, I talked myself right out of trying. Then one day, about a week ago, I had a thought.  Pretty soon it was followed by another one…and together they changed my entire view of this challenge.

The first thought was that sheet music was a written language. Those dots translated into letters, just like a foreign language does.  Those letters represent sounds, just like language.  I used to be good at languages!  Language was my thing.  In high school, I majored in English and took 3 years of Spanish where there was only a 2 year program.  My SAT’s allowed me to test out of English entirely in college.  And this written language only had 9 letters.  Every Good Boy Does Fine, and FACE.  That’s it!  Suddenly, this didn’t seem so completely out of my reach.

But what about that dumb left hand?  I held it up in front of my face and felt its stupidity in the very sinews.  How could I ever teach it to work alongside my bright, clever, witty right hand?  For a moment, all seemed lost….and then it occurred to me.  I can type.  I taught that stupid left hand to type 80 words a minute, to work in tandem with my right hand, and to keep the pace and carry its own weight.  If I can type on a computer keyboard with both hands, why can’t I play on a piano keyboard with both hands??

The answer is….I can.

Those are powerful words.  I CAN.  The problem had never been that I was incapable, or that it was so complicated that it was beyond me.  The problem was that I kept tacking a T on the end of that simple statement of affirmation.  I had been lying to myself all these years, telling myself I CAN’T when indeed, I CAN.  If I can learn a language, and I can learn to type, I can learn to play the piano!

Last weekend, I went to the bookstore and found a book of piano chords.  I found two books with old standard jazz and classics that I love.  And I found a book called “Play Piano in a Day” that taught the fundamentals of reading sheet music and understanding how to relay that language into sounds.  I took my stash home and refused to lie to myself again.  I was going to leaarn at 51 what I should have learned at 5…but I was going to approach it with the fearlessness and faith of that 5 year old, not the cynicism and doubt of this 51 year old.

I started Monday.  In the first 3 hours after opening that book, I could read both treble and bass clef lines of sheet music.  I almost fell out of my chair!  Do you mean to tell me all this time, it was that easy?  I wasted all those years telling myself how impossible it was…when I did it in 3 hours? I kicked myself all over the living room, and then I got back to the keyboard and started practicing.

As with typing, my left hand wanted to lay its lazy self on the sidelines and watch, but I said no.  I told my left hand…YOU CAN.  And I worked on it until it could.  By the end of the first day, I was able to play Mary Had a Little Lamb by reading the language of those dots and playing with both hands in unison….harmonious, cooperative, capable unison.  By the end of the second day the unwieldy staccato of my fingers stabbing at the keys began to smooth out, my touch rolling across them,  turning the practice notes into actual music.  I had started with seeing the notes, but now I began to feel them.

When I heard a small practice exercise called “Under the Shade Tree” become fluid, ringing with that whole note that carried the melody as it walked down below it, I realized that yes indeed.  I can play the piano.  I CAN.

I will play the piano.  I’m not going to become a classical pianist, but I am going to play the piano.  Now that I know this is possible, there is nothing that can talk me out of it anymore.  I am not going to lie to myself anymore.  I am going to save all the Discouraging Words for those times when I think about giving up.  That’s the only time I will allow myself to say, I CAN’T.

There was one other time I allowed myself to talk me out of doing something I wanted to do.  For years, I thought about searching for my birth family.  I told myself it would be expensive.  I told myself it would be time-consuming.  i told myself it would be extremely frustrating, and there was a good chance I could end up with nothing in the end.  I told myself I didn’t really need to, that I didn’t really want to.  I told myself I was fine without it.  I lied to myself, and the first time I decided to try and I plunked down my $12 and asked for the information, it was handed to me without a fight.  If I had only known!

You never know what you are capable of unless you stop talking yourself out of trying!

I love Omaha.  Growing up in Plattsmouth made me love Omaha even more, and I went there every chance I could.  Anything to get out of Plattsmouth!

My husband and I went up to see my Dad again, this time to bring him his early Father’s Day present.  He has been struggling with a 12 year-old 28 Gig Hard Drive desktop computer that was so loaded he couldn’t even download a picture anymore, and I just couldn’t stand to see that.  So we talked it over and decided to find him a new computer.   I ended up getting a name brand 500 Gig HD, 3 G RAM, dual core processor with an upgraded 20″ monitor for less than $500, taxes included.  I was pretty happy.

Dad was a bit nervous about letting me do this for him, thinking it was too much, worrying it would put a financial burden on us.  He isn’t used to anyone doing things for him, he is more comfortable being the one doing things for other people.  I had to remind him that I am my father’s daughter and I am also more comfortable being the one doing things for other people, so he needed to indulge me now.  He consented, after much reassurance.  We brought it up on Monday, and my darling husband installed it for him and I got the programs up and running for him.  I introduced him to the wonders of the Google homepage, and he was impressed.

We spent the night in our secret hotel with a King suite for $58 right around the corner from his house, and I met him for breakfast the next morning before he went to work.  My husband had to stay in the room with our little dog, who decided to bark if we left him alone in the room for another day!  We had a great talk about all the things he will be able to do now, since he has been brought into the 21st Century, and all our plans for further genealogy research and future trips to Friend and the surrounding area.  We have so much to do!

After breakfast, Dad went on to work and I went back to the hotel to pack up and collect my darling husband and naughty little dog.  On our way out of town, we decided to stop at the downtown riverwalk (a new addition since I’ve moved away) to see if we could get any pictures.  The sun was out, the clouds were fluffy and white, and it was a beautiful day.  I found a park bench, newly installed that day, and waited with the dog while my darling husband walked all around the mall taking photos.  He loves his new camera!

Right across from my bench, there was an island in the middle of the ‘river’ with two swans.  The mother swan was nesting while the father swan patrolled up and down the waters, watching children who got to close to the rock walled banks…and keeping a suspicious eye on my little dog, who paid no attention to the swan at all.  The mother came down for a quick bath, rolled herself almost upside down in the water, rubbed her face into the fluff of her wings, then went back up onto the island and settled herself down on her nest again.  Father was still cruising around the island, protecting her and their island domain.

It was a great day, and we spent the whole afternoon down there in the sunshine and warmth, enjoying the day together.  That’s something we rarely get to do anymore, and it was fun.  He found lots of beautiful things to photograph, and we wandered all around the area.  This was one of the nicest trips up there we have taken together.  We both said we will need to come back again to spend a whole day, and also at night when the fountain lights up and turns colors.  It’s a very nice park, and all the people there seemed to enjoy it on a sunny Tuesday afternoon.

Omaha has always been one of my favorite places to go.  There is so much to see there, and now with this new Riverwalk, it’s even more beautiful.  People I’ve known from the east or west coast have often wondered if we weren’t still some little frontier town, and I laughed at how easily the midwest is misunderstood.  I told them we don’t live in sod houses anymore, we actually have paved roads and airports and everything!

The Old Market has changed since my youth.  Back in the 70′s, it was a haven for little bohemian hippie shops full of silver jewelry and handmade crafts, tie dye and the occasional head shop.  You could pick lovely things up pretty cheap and have a very interesting conversation at the same time.  In the 80′s, it got run down and more dangerous, but in the 90′s they cleaned it up and ran off all the crime and now it’s a booming art center with lots of good food and fun shops and interesting conversations again.  With the addition of the Riverwalk, it’s quite a place to enjoy and I’m glad for Omaha.  This is an example of how to redo your downtown right.  Check it out sometime.

And don’t forget your camera.  Say hello to the swans for me.

Norma Jean, I never knew you and I regret so much that I didn’t search for you sooner.  I am so sorry you never got to know your only daughter, and how much of you I carry in me.  I am so sorry I wasn’t there when you were sick, to take care of you and give you comfort in those last two years.  I’m so sorry we never got to be a family, and I never got to call you Mom.  I’m sorry I never spent a birthday with you, or was able to take you for a Mother’s Day dinner.  I’m sorry I waited too long and missed the only chance we had to be together before you were gone.  But I am thankful too.  You only held me for a brief moment in our lives, but you gave me so much and it has lasted me a lifetime.

Thank you for that loving, gentle, happy nature.  Thank you for the ability to see the good in anything, and find some joy in the most mundane things.  Thank you for the determination to keep going even though things stack up against me.  Thank you for the bravery to try something new.  Thank you for the love of children and the ability to be a great Aunt.  Thank you for giving me that spirit, that wide open heart, that deep well of love that is the trademark of a Wyant Girl.

Thank you for being strong enough to give birth to me, even though it was so hard on you.  Thank you for having the strength to give me a chance in life with another family, even though it hurt you terribly for the rest of your life.  Thank you for that selflessness, and for putting my needs first.  Thank you for loving me for the rest of your life, even though you never saw me again.  Thank you for being so strong.

Thank you for giving me a love and appreciation for music.  Thank you for that intrinsic connection to the piano, to lay my hands on the keys and feel something inside me respond.  Thank you for your hands, your long thin fingers, and your gestures and nervous fidgeting with them that everyone recognizes as you.  Thank you for giving me a voice to sing, and an affinity for those old torch songs and ragtime jazz from the 20′s and 30′s.  Thank you for leaving me a natural bond to you, through music.

Thank you for giving me a wonderful Aunt Bev.  She has loved you all her life, and loves me the same way, as if I had always been in your family.  Thank you for loving my father, and for making me a love child between you and him.  Thank you for choosing such a wonderful man, and giving me this amazing Dad.  Thank you for looking for me, and for signing the paper that gave me your permission to find you.  Thank you for opening the door that brought me to this whole new family where I belong.

Thank you for being the sweet, loving and happy lady you were.  Thank you for leaving a wake of people who loved you, who can now tell me all about you with tears in their eyes.  Thank you for passing onto me that softness that tempers the McCormick side of me with perfect balance.  Thank you for being a part of me all my life, as a Wyant Girl myself.

Thank you for being my mom.

Thank you for all the love you gave me when I was a child.  Thank you for demanding the best for me, and from me.  Thank you for all the matching dresses and all the little white gloves and purses, for taking us to church every Sunday and fixing fried egg sandwiches when we walked home from school for lunch.  Thank you for cutting them into quarters for me.

Thank you for giving me the best grandma in the world.  Thank you for letting me spend so much time with her and create so many memories that I treasure now.  Thank you for driving us to the skating rink several times a week, and being so impressive to my friends.  Thank you for sending me to summer camp where there were horses to ride.

Thank you for sticking up for me when I was being picked on, and cracking down on me when I was being a brat.  Thank you for teaching me how to be a good wife, how to have a happy marriage and how to be a true partner.  Thank you for showing me the meaning of ‘happily ever after’ and ‘until death do you part’.

Thank you for all the school lunches you packed and all the jackets you made me wear, and all the new school clothes that were actually in fashion.  Thank you for putting up with all the loud music and all the backtalk and all the rolled eyes  and sighs of exasperation in my teen years.  Thank you for making a big deal out of every holiday, for teaching me how to drive when Dad’s patience wore thin, and for keeping secrets that would have upset him.

And when everything changed between us after Dad died, thank you for giving me the peace to have a good life.  Thank you for teaching me how to let go.  Thank you for the opportunity to search for my birth parents.  I’m thinking about you today, and the mother I had as a child.  I hope you remember all those times as warmly as I do.  You were a good mother.

Thank you.

I met Doc in the most unusual way.

I was 18, out of high school and working at the State Hospital in Glenwood, Iowa.  By the end of the week, none of us who worked there were sure if we were patient or staff anymore.  So every Friday night, ‘the girls’ and I would go down to the local neighborhood bar and shoot pool and pump the jukebox and wind down after work.  Most everyone there got to know us, and for a bunch of young women, we were left in relative peace and safety under the protection of the bartender and bouncer.

One night, in the midst of a tight competition for the 8 ball, a group of bikers wandered in.  All of us girls looked at each other nervously, not sure whether we should be worried about this or not.  They sat in the back and stayed to themselves, under the seeming direction of one very large personage in their number.  We continued to play, and no one bothered us.  When the game was won, we paid our tab and headed out the door to make our various ways home.  But as soon as I stepped outside, I laid eyes by the most beautiful Harley Davidson I had ever seen, and was stopped in my tracks.

I love motorcycles.  I always have.  I had ridden several with friends, and attempted to own one until my father found out and immediately sold it for me.  But this!  This was a work of art.  I don’t know the model, but it was huge, black metallic, old school and had tons of chrome.  It had been customized, tricked out with every conceivable asset, and it sparkled under the streetlight like as if it had been sprinkled in stardust.  I was in love.

I walked a slow circle around it.  “Isn’t it beautiful?”  My friends rolled their eyes at me, but I kept on staring.  I could imagine what it would sound like, how it would ride, the sheer power you would feel wrapping your hand around the throttle and pulling.  “It’s just…beautiful.”  When I looked up at my friends, they had stopped rolling their eyes and stood there, transfixed.  I thought for a second they caught my fevered appreciation, but what I saw in their eyes was fear.  Then, from behind me, I heard a deep, resonant and distinctly male voice say, “Wanna ride?”

I turned slowly to face this voice, and stared directly into the chest of the biggest biker dude I had ever seen in my life.  I’m 6′ 3″, and so he had to be at least 6′ 5″ or more.  He was about 35 years old, in full leather regalia, with a weathered face and sparkly blue eyes, and he was smiling.  Despite all my friends’ furious shaking of heads to say no, something in those eyes told me I was perfectly safe.  I looked directly into them and smiled in return, and said, “Sure!”

His smile went from amused to surprised, and he reached behind me and shoved a helmet onto my head, grinning ear to ear.  He got on, I got behind him, and he revved up that gorgeous motor into a full throaty roar, and to the horror of my friends, we pulled out and rode away.  Wrapping my arms around his waist and my legs around that machine, it was the craziest thing I had ever done, and it felt completely right and completely wonderful.

He took me into Council Bluffs and we rode all night long.  We stopped for breakfast at a Village Inn and talked about everything, and nothing, for hours.  I found out he was called Doc, because he was the master fix-it guy and if anything went wrong with a bike, he was the man.  He was smart, funny and a perfect gentleman to me.  I also found out that the only reason those bikers had left a troupe of unattached young women alone that night was because Doc had told them they were not to bother us.  Apparently, he had that kind of pull with them.  Considerable pull.

With a subtle mix of amusement and true curiosity, he asked me why I hadn’t been afraid to get on the bike with him.  I shrugged and told him I knew I could trust him.  He asked me how I knew that, and I told him it was in his eyes.  He raised his eyebrow to question me on that, and I held out my hands and said, “I was right, wasn’t I?” and he laughed out loud.  He seemed so charmed by me, by everything I did and said, and that was a whole new experience for a dork like me.  And I was right…I was safer with him than anywhere else I could have been.  With Doc, no one was going to bother me.

We rode all over Council Bluffs, had the whole town to ourselves as if we were the only people in the world.  When the first nebulous light crept into the sky, he turned south and headed back to Glenwood to take me home.  I laid my head on the wide spread of his shoulders and I could almost feel him smiling at the intimacy of that small act.  He pulled up in front of my apartment just as the sun popped a golden eye over the horizon, and quieted that gorgeous throaty growl to say goodnight.  I pulled off the helmet and shook out my hair, and he ran his gloved fingers over my head and down the length of it in back.  I leaned in and kissed him and thanked him for a great night.  He looked at me earnestly with those brilliant blue eyes and told me he would be back in town in a few more weeks if I wanted to ride again.  I gave him my number and went inside, watching him from my front window as he roared off and disappeared in the distance.  I smiled, knowing I would never see him again, and went to bed.

A few weeks later, after I had related my adventure to my extremely nervous and then vastly relieved friends, I still thought about Doc.  I knew so little about him, and yet I knew so much about him.  I relegated him to the part of my mind where my favorite secret things lie, the unfinished parts of my life, the wonders that would never be solved.  One day, the phone rang and when I picked it up, I heard this deep voice.  “Wanna ride?”

Doc came around every few weeks for almost a year.  Whatever I was doing when I heard that voice could wait, and I shoved my head into his helmet and slung my leg over his rider’s seat and wrapped my arms around him and he took me flying.  We talked about everything, and nothing, and we camped out together with nothing more than sleeping bags and starlight.  We came to love each other, in a way that neither of us had ever done before, I am sure.  It was not a romantic love, and it was not a father and child love, and it was not a friend’s love, but yet it was all of those.  Nothing ever happened between us, but we had a physical intimacy that had nothing to do with gender.  He sat with his back against a tree, facing the camp fire, and I sat with my back against his chest and his great big arms wrapped around me, and we talked.  We slept, each in our own sleeping bag, with my back against his chest and his arm over me protectively, wrapped in the warmth of his body.  I never felt safer.  I’ve never been safer.

At some point, the weeks between his visits stretched into months, and then one day he stopped coming altogether.  I never knew why, and I never asked.  We always understood that he had a life, and I had a life, and what we were doing together was outside of those lives.  We never deluded ourselves that we were going anywhere.  We lived in the moment we had, and we never thought any further into it.  There was a wild freedom in being together under those terms, no expectations and no disappointments…just him and me and right now.  And of course, that black and chrome flying carpet of his.

I told my Dad about Doc.  At first, he thought Doc sounded like the kind of guy he would have liked to have met.  I told him he might not have been too keen on the idea knowing it was his 18 year old daughter getting on the back of a Harley belonging to a 35 year old guy she didn’t even know.  He smiled that enigmatic smile of his and said that he would still have liked to meet him…. but he would have made sure Doc understood that if he hurt me, as tough as he thought he was, he was not tougher than a .45.  I smiled and said Doc would have nodded and appreciated that completely.

I still think about Doc now and then.  He knew me when I was young and limber and strong, when I was still wild and apt to throw off my life and wander off into the woods.  There is a part of me that will always hearken to that time, that will want to feel that deep rumbling vibration down to my bones, that smooth glide onto the road, and that throaty roar that just sounds like freedom.  Whenever I get the smell of the night air and the sparkle of stars, I lay my cheek against his shoulders in my mind, and I can still feel that smile rise up in him.  He gave me the world on a chrome platter, and took me away with him.

I wonder where he is now…and if he remembers me.  Sitting at a picnic table in a state park, so far away from Glenwood, Iowa…I look down at the carving in front of me and wonder.  Doc…were you here?