Monday, January 26, 2009

Year of the Ox

Chinese Dolls

It is New Year's Day for over one quarter of the world's population. My mother-in-law just couldn't understand why the girls went to school and her son had to work. There should have been fireworks and food and family from all over China. But this is America. Though we had fish last night and a feast with friends from church the night before, I know she misses the two weeks of festivities and friends. She'll want to burn paper money to honor her deceased mother, give red packets of money to her oldest granddaughter, eat vegetables from her garden, hope for a good planting season.

She is out of her element here in our home and she is not used to sitting indoors. I show her pictures of when I visited her home for Chinese New Year (ten years ago) and wonder if it will only make her sigh more deeply.

During the feast with friends we met a seventy-nine year old woman visiting from China. Her father was a Chinese minister before the revolution yet she went to Nanjing University in the early fifties. I asked her how she was able to survive the red guards during the sixties and her eyes welled up. It was too painful to discuss, she said in halting English. Her mother was a westerner from California, she said, as she hugged me and asked for my address. I hope she writes to me in this year of the ox.

Monday, January 19, 2009

Frozen out of Time




If you haven't noticed, our family is just a little gaga about rocks. The six and seven-year old girls think dirt and pebbles trump divas of pop so when we surprised them with a visit to an auction house in downtown Dallas for a peek at museum quality bones and gems for sale, they were ecstatic. We didn't make the dinosaur bone give-away (though they were promised one would come in the mail) but we got a whole month's worth of eye-candy in one hour. On the first floor were crystals, ores, and gemstones worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many of them were found in China, including the stunning silver formation called "The Dragon". Many were found on farms in the corn-belt or in the mountains of Utah. We couldn't stop staring and drooling but finally left as the crush of grade-schoolers standing in line for the giveaway began to press in. But several floors above was where the real treasures were kept.


Prehistoric fossils lined the walls and floors. Trilobites swarmed encrusted in silt. A fish nibbled on a tiny dinosaur.
Mastadon hair nestled near an aborted dinosaur egg. Psychodelic images, formed through aeons of pressure and mass, were now table-tops and wall-art. But oh, didn't I covet them for my home decor. There is no art more sublime than what God creates and then frames, frozen out of time.









Friday, January 16, 2009

What if...

The eyes clenched it. Peering up from the grainy Facebook photo of a young college student were my father's eyes. He had my last name, so rare, that a google search only turns up what I've posted on the web and a few odds and ends posts from family members or the cemetery plots of deceased grandparents.

I sent the guy a note and he added me to his list of friends: college girlfriends, drinking buddies, classmates, and me. I listed the names of his paternal ancestors and asked if they were his dad and his grandfather. Stunned, he wrote back, "Yeah, how'd you know??"


A long time ago my grandfather, groomed to be a priest, instead married your great-grandmother and if they'd stayed together, as good catholics should, I wouldn't be here, my children wouldn't be here, my entire family would still be dust.

George had two sons in Pennsylvania and neither knew the other existed until one day, on a baseball field, someone yelled out their last name and both boys yelled back, "What?" They never saw one another again, though years later my dad tried to make contact. And so we knew how the generations grew.

George was a drinking man of German stock. During the war he dropped a vowel in his name to avoid nasty associations with Hitler's Germany. He worked primarily in the tobacco industry and finished his career as a foreman for the Tampa Bay cigar factory. Retiring to a swampy, cypress-shrouded acre in Land-O-Lakes, he and Lois fished for Bass, killed water moccasins, and sat on the picnic table every evening with a six-pack of Budweiser.

I spent the summer of my senior year helping them take care of their one daughter, a mentally retarded adult, as they prepared for the inevitable. George and Lois died within one month of each other - one from bone cancer, the other from lung cancer.

I was at my grandfather's side minutes before he died when he confused me with one of his sisters. And I responded as though I was. Excommunicated from the church for his divorce, and told by the Baptists on his doorstep that Catholics were evil, he eschewed religion. When he learned he was dying of cancer, he gave me his rosary. On his death-bed, I gave it back.

My father had no sons and when he dies, this line of Miedrichs will desist. I look again at the eyes in that grainy photo. The future is now yours.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Eulogy for a Fish


There's not much you can say about a fish. But T-Maxx was our first pet and when I told the girls he had died, Bethany quietly said, "Mom, we were so happy the day we brought him home." True. We all had pet lust so bad last summer that we would go and visit the SPCA and the local pet stores just to hold the animals. We looked at turtles, rabbits, snakes, and birds yet in the end we agreed a fish was best. We bought a vivid red beta.

Theodore Maxwell, or T-Maxx to his family, loved listening to music. He swam in circles in his little round bowl on the bookshelf in the bedroom. Hannah pressed her nose against the glass and He looked her in the eye and flared his fin but he didn't swim away. He also loved the color yellow. The fact that his food came in a bright yellow box only increased his excitement at mealtime.

Pillow, the calico cat, came to live with us a month later and they bonded quickly - a little too quickly. So I changed the wide-mouth bowl to a tall narrow mouthed vase so she wouldn't wash her paws and scare T-Maxx. But he was always a gracious host and allowed the cat to hug him through the glass.




Nai Nai came to visit us in September and she wanted to know why T-Maxx wasn't growing and when he got big enough, would we feed him to the cat? Perhaps she fed him on the sly. Perhaps that is why the water fouled so quickly every week.

T-Maxx got a fungus. He rested on the bottom of the vase and wouldn't eat. I misdiagnosed his symptoms for the Ich and waited too long to treat his illness. He was a patient fish and not easily flustered. He minded his business, but got along well with the rest of the family. When I took him out of the water for his burial, Pillow seemed distressed. She looked for the bowl and nudged my elbow.

The girls have given him a Christian burial. They used masking tape to form a cross with two sticks. They were reverent and solemn.

My husband has forbidden me to get another. Perhaps he doesn't want the trauma of bonding with another fish so quickly after this one passed. Perhaps he thinks I'm silly to like a fish.

Friday, January 09, 2009

Galveston, Oh Galveston



The old year finished in the perfect place - a place in recovery, buffeted by calamity, yet hopeful. Galveston is a favorite retreat of ours, anchored by old friends from Houston. We mourned to see the wreckage of so many homes, the upending of so many boats; we rejoiced that our friends' home survived, though bruised. On the first day of the new year, we walked along the sea wall and I began collecting rusted rebar, flic-flac, and such things that no one else would want: pieces of our memories left on the jetty.





The kids joined in, filled their hands with fishing line and other bits, and a curious Russian stopped us with his thick accent and inquiries. "Why do you do this thing?" he said, standing on the seawall in front of our car. "I make things," I said, doing such injustice to all the times we'd spent there building sandcastles, watching dolphins, catching crabs and fist-sized dragonflies, while all around us the wounds from hurricane Ike lay exposed and in decay. Why do I do this? My Chinese mother-in-law struggles to understand why I pick up rusted trash on our walks at home but give away useful clothes and shoes. Why do I find such beauty in rust, and peeling paint, and heaps of discarded metal? Why does Wayne like cardboard and Allison like broken dolls? Why do my children love rocks and dirt?

Back at the house on Tiki Island, the other guests, a Chinese family attending seminary in St Louis, turns soft floury dough into thin discs for dumplings. They are from Beijing, where the people love to laugh and talk and the conversation is spirited and loud. I settle in the warmth of these friends new and old. Outside, the balmy breeze echoes distant sounds of reconstruction and a new year is born.





What the end of the jetty used to look like (03/07)