1) At the very back of the very bottom of the pantry was a narrow three-foot-long package wrapped in thick brown paper. Unwrapped, it revealed something I’d occasionally wondered where it had gone: a three-tiered tea table I bought on my first overseas trip in 1980, on a work camp with my church to Haiti. And that suddenly made me remember what a watershed summer that was for me. So much happened.
1a) Now I know what you’re thinking: teenage boy + tea table purchased on vacation = gay gay gay gay gay. And you’d be right. I wish I’d figured all that out at the time!
1b) That tea table was broken on the return flight from Haiti, and Daddy got a friend of his to repair it. It got broken again when it was shipped up here in 2003, and is still broken. They obviously built it for the tourist trade.
2) Five big events took place in the three months of that summer. The first was a multi-state tour of our church youth choir that took about two weeks. I cannot say I have pleasant memories of it, but I did convince one Texas preacher that I was English. After the performance at his church someone told me the look on his face when I began speaking in my real voice was one of priceless consternation.
3) The second was the work camp in Haiti. One of the missing things from Mother’s house was the diary with photos that I made of that trip. It was memorable and emotional for a lot of different reasons, but I remember the squalor of Port au Prince, the missionary hotel where we stayed (surrounded by a high wall topped with broken glass), the beachside spectacle of a local removing sea urchin spines from the foot of someone with my church using nothing but limes and a safety pin, hearing one of our counselors and the proprietor of the hotel sight-reading Vivaldi piano duets on two highly-polished spinets in his private sitting room, and weeping uncontrollably in first love on the veranda of a tiny hotel in Cap Haitien that doubled as the Danish consulate. Then there was the trip up to the Citadel . . .
4) I think it was after this that my family took a two week vacation to Our Nation’s Capital, where we got to tour the White House for the first time. Along the way we stayed with cousins in Bay St. Louis, Atlanta to see my aunt and uncle, visited Charleston, and toured Kenmore (home of my slave-owning ancestor Fielding Lewis, a hero of the Revolution). In Washington, we stayed with a high school friend of Mother and Daddy’s and his second wife, who had danced in New York with a prominent company in the 1950s. Besides the White House, we toured all the Smithsonians, the National Gallery, saw the Gower Champion revival of 42nd Street at the Kennedy Center before it went to New York (and therefore just before Champion died), and were guests at a military tattoo. At that time tours of the WH were still guided, and I’m afraid I was a bit of a nuisance to ours because I answered all his questions correctly, and then asked where the portrait of Caroline Scott Harrison was hanging. When you’re sixteen . . .
Uncle Clinton, Aunt Eleanor, me, and Daddy, in their back yard outside Atlanta. Aunt Eleanor and I read The Thorn Birds together in 1977.
5) So you’d think that would be enough for one summer, but not long after we returned home, I had all four of my impacted wisdom teeth taken out. Mother drove me to the surgical center early in the morning. I was wheeled into the operating room, heard the nice words from Dr. dela******** before he finally put me under, and then I came to lying on my side, feeling ice cold and drooling blood. As it happened, another boy from my school and church was lying on the other side of the room, having just had his wisdom teeth removed by the same dentist! And there we were, both trying to talk while our heads were packed in with icepacks! The next thing I knew I was watching the tall tops of the pine trees spin past while lying on the back seat as Mother drove me home.
Outside the Jefferson Memorial with Daddy. Surgical scrubs were still en vogue. My cousin Terri had gotten me that shirt.
6) And then a week later, an enormous white envelope appeared in the mailbox, from Interlochen, with my acceptance into the Class of 1982, and my life truly changed forever, for the better. The mailman Mr. Ney always came to our house during the noon hour or a whisper after, and from the time we came home from Washington I had been using the front door peephole overtime to see when the mail had come - and been disappointed every day. And then that day came that delivered me from disappointment. My father is the one who made it possible, who had the idea in the first place. I’ll always be grateful.
7) The rest of that summer passed in a blur of school preparations: buying towels with Mother at Muller’s, letting different groups of people know that I would be away that fall, and then loading everything into the Ford Fairmont to drive to Michigan with Mother and Daddy. In all my life, I don’t think there was as eventful a summer as that one.