| OCR Text |
Show Overseas Six weeks after I was born, my parents moved to Fairmont, Minnesota. A difficult baby by all accounts, wrapped in an elaborate sling that kept my broken collarbone in place, I slept, ate, or screamed. My father says, I mostly screamed. One of the nurses who attended my traumatic birth must have known what lie ahead for my parents. She told my mother as she handed me to her at the hospital curb that it was okay to let me cry in the crib. Check her diaper, look for pins that might be poking her, make sure she is fed and then leave the house she said. Walk around the block and then walk around again. Which is what they were doing, in a way, a warm summer evening at the start of summer. My parents had just finished dinner and I was asleep, so a moment of quiet in day that offered little silence. They lived in a duplex in Fairmont, a town where snow grew past the rooflines and cars needed to be heated by electric cables in order to start in the morning. The house had white siding and concrete steps flanked by a wrought iron railing. While the outside looked like any other house, the inside highlighted the differences between them and their neighbors. Beautiful wooden furniture from Asia dominated their living room, a tall cabinet designed by my mother built from her drawings held their reel-to-reel track. Matching speakers with grills carved in dark wood thin enough to be lace flanked both sides. In front of the couch sat a wooden coffee table inlaid with a ponderous slab of green marble. A six-foot-high picture of the Buddha hung on the wall, and, in other rooms, framed temple rubbings from Thailand sat above end tables holding carved spittoons meant for the Betel nut juice men in India commonly spat. 33 |
