hey now, hey now my boyfriend’s back!
I collected Jeremy from Oakland last night with inhuman precision, leaving Burlingame (and Ada in floods of tears at Claire’s departure) on the spot of 9.30, pulling into the airport parking lot at 10.10, checking the arrivals in Terminal 2 to see that his flight had not yet landed, then checking the arrivals in Terminal 1 to see that it had.
Claire ran up and down a red stripe in the carpet, for practice, and when our party appeared she hurtled towards her respected sire with loud, glad cries of “Daddy!”, and crash-tackled him around the knees.
He had good stories. Knoa hadn’t bothered to remember anyone’s name, so the Jeremy in the next camp along was “the guy with the same name as” (pointing) “him” and the seven-year-old girl, “…my older friend.” Jeremy said she always included the pause.
A hippie climbed a tree to offer a kite to the tree spirit, and when he fell he lay on the ground vocalizing in low, even tones. His friends asked if he needed any help, but he waved them away, and since he was the kind of hippie who would lie on the ground at 3am toning under ordinary circumstances, they went to bed. In the morning he was still toning, but requested a medic. He compressed a vertebra and broke his wrist. He’ll be okay.
The last story is, as Jeremy says, amazing and tragic. He spoke to a Korean man who remembers, at five years old, going to the bus station in his grandmother’s village and catching a bus to Seoul to find his parents, who were doing up a house. He ended up on the streets of Seoul at 10pm, not knowing his grandmother’s name or village or his parent’s address.
They never found him.
He lived in an orphanage for a year before being adopted by an American couple. Now he’s in his thirties and working for Microsoft Research.
The sorrow of his birth family is hard to think about.
