The ruins of Tikal include some three thousand structures, including palaces, temples, platforms, ball courts, plazas, and terraces, built over a period of six hundred years. Thus, some sections are significantly older than others, and it’s possible to observe the changing architecture of the Maya, which enables archaeologists to accurately date other Mayan sites throughout Central America and Mexico.
It was the sacrificial stones, however, that intrigued my brother. These were the stones upon which people had been killed as offerings to the gods. Our Maya guide was proudly discussing the historical and cultural reasons for the stones when Micah leaned over and whispered, “Have someone get a picture of me lying on the stone, while you pretend to stab me. Wouldn’t that be cool?”
Actually, I found the thought a little morbid, but I reluctantly agreed. I handed over the camera and we got ourselves into position. Just as the picture was about to be taken, the guide came rushing over, waving his arms to stop us.
“No, no!” he was shouting, his face reddening. “You can’t lie on the stones and take pictures! They have great religious significance!”
“I know,” Micah countered, “that’s why I want the picture.”
“It’s not allowed!”
“Just one picture.”
“No!”
“Aw,” he said, winking. “Just one. We won’t tell anyone.”
Though I laughed, the guide glowered. He was Maya, as were most Guatemalans who lived in the area, and I’m sure he thought we were insulting him or his culture. When he didn’t crack a smile, Micah reluctantly got up from the stone. As we began trailing after the group, I shook my head.
“Where do you come up with these ideas?” I asked in disbelief.
Micah laughed. “He didn’t like that much, did he?”
I shook my head. “He looked pretty mad, and so did the people running the tour. You’re insulting their culture. You’re going to get us in trouble.”
“Ah, they’ll get over it. They won’t even remember it.”
They did, of course. An hour later, one of the people who worked for TCS sidled up to us as we were walking. She was maybe a dozen years older than we were and had worked on numerous tours. She was well versed in the art of sizing people up quickly.
“You two are going to cause trouble on this trip, aren’t you?” she observed.
We walked along what was once the main boulevard entering Tikal, touring the ruins of a palace while howler monkeys screeched their warnings overhead. From there, we moved on to the main plaza.
Two pyramids lie at either end of Tikal’s main plaza. They are among the most photographed of all Mayan pyramids, and while one of the pyramids is off-limits to climbers, we were allowed to scale the second one.
At the top, the view was breathtaking. Micah finally reached Christine, and when he was finished with the call, we sat on the edge of the pyramid, our feet dangling beneath us. The ground was hundreds of feet below, and we could see other members of the tour, clustered in small groups throughout the ancient plaza. Since only a few wanted to make the climb, we had the place to ourselves.
“So how’s Christine?” I asked.
“She’s all right. Says she misses me.”
“How’s life on the home front so far?”
He smiled. “She’s going a little crazy. Unlike Cat, she isn’t used to me being gone. She kept talking about how busy she was—she hasn’t stopped since I went to the airport. She said it’s been four days of hell, and that she’s going to call Cathy for moral support.”
I smiled. “Tell her to call while the older kids are in school. Otherwise, Cat won’t have a chance to talk to her. Once all five are home, the house goes crazy. Especially between five and nine. We call those the witching hours. That’s when the little ones get tired, the older ones groan about having to do their homework, she starts cooking dinner—and still somehow manages to run the kids from one practice to the next. After that comes bath time, and if you’ve ever tried to get five kids tubbing and showering at once, you know it’s not exactly relaxing. She’s got such a good attitude about it. She’s a great wife, but she’s a genius as a mother.”
Micah put his arm around me. “We married well, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, we did,” I admitted. “I think that’s what we learned from mom. What to look for when we got married, I mean. We both married smart women with big hearts, who adore their children unequivocally. That’s what mom taught us.”
“Are you saying I essentially married my mother?”
“We both did.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “What did we learn from dad?”
“Anger management?” I cracked. “You know, the tongue thing?”
He laughed. “Yeah, that was something, wasn’t it? Man, he looked pretty scary when he did that. It still gives me nightmares.” He glanced at me. “Did I tell you I did that to Alli once? Just to see how she’d react?”
“And?”
“She ran away screaming and wouldn’t come out of her room.”
I laughed. “No, what I think we got from dad was our love of learning,” I said after a moment.
“I think so, too. Growing up, I thought mom was smart. Very smart. But dad . . . he was in his own league.”
“They were quite a pair, weren’t they?”
“Yeah,” he said. “And they balanced each other out. Who knows how we would have turned out had they not gotten back together after our stint in Grand Island?”
On December 1, 1974, our family was reunited in Fair Oaks, California, a suburb just northeast of Sacramento. Within minutes of our arrival, my dad turned on the television to watch Kolchak: The Night Stalker, a campy, though utterly watchable, horror series that was far and away my dad’s favorite. Soon, the three of us were seated beside my dad on the couch, eating popcorn and watching something scary on TV, almost believing that we’d never been away from him at all.
Our house—another rental, of course—had four bedrooms, an almost unfathomable luxury in our young minds, yet I couldn’t help but notice that my father had claimed one of the bedrooms as his office. With the master bedroom obviously taken, that left two bedrooms for the three of us kids, and my mom quickly announced that my sister would be the one to have her own room, the reason being, “She’s a girl.”
Because it was so late in the first term, our parents held us out of school until after the new year, when the new term started. My parents also bought a dog, a Doberman pinscher named Brandy, and as we always did in new places, my brother and I set out to explore, this time with our dog in tow. Our street dead-ended a few houses up, bordering on what seemed like wilderness, and our first instinct was to “learn the terrain.” Nowadays, Fair Oaks is almost completely developed, but back then, there were wide-open fields and hills, an abandoned house, and climbing trees—everything young boys need to have fun. Even better, we weren’t the only kids our age on the street. Almost all of our neighbors had led a nomadic lifestyle, similar to ours, so it wasn’t as if we were the only new kids on the block. In the afternoons, they would play on the street outside, and gradually my brother and I got to know them. And, as had happened in Nebraska, my brother soon began leaving me behind, preferring the company of his newfound friends.
Despite the fact that my parents had reunited, they continued to lead largely separate lives. My mom, who had taken another job as an optometrist’s assistant, would rise with us and get us off to school while my father slept; after she got off work, she’d come home to an empty house two or three evenings a week, since my father sometimes had to teach at night. On those evenings he didn’t have to teach, my dad would either grade papers and exams, or read, hoping to keep abreast in his chosen field of study. Like all professors, he was also pressed to publish, and he could frequently be heard typing in his office. Occasionally, my mom and dad would bump into each other in the kitchen, but in general they seemed to spend little time together.
While it would be easy to surmise that they di
dn’t enjoy each other’s company—neither one seemed to go out of the way to visit with the other, after all—they had a comfort-able relationship. They joked and laughed at the kitchen table over dinner; I sometimes even caught my dad nuzzling the back of my mom’s neck when they didn’t realize I was watching. While they weren’t overtly affectionate most of the time, they weren’t needy, possessive, or jealous either. I never heard either of them say something negative about the other, and I seldom heard them argue anymore. They’d put the past behind them more successfully than most, and seemed to be exactly what the other one needed.
To that point, they’d lived a life of sacrifice, and I think that united them as well. Neither, after all, was living the life of their dreams. My dad wanted a life with less pressure and fewer financial worries; while he didn’t desire great wealth, he was frequently discouraged by the daily struggle of keeping the family afloat. Nor could he envision any change in the future, and that weighed on him as well. My mom was no different. Once I found her crying in the bedroom, and the discovery terrified me. It was so unlike her that I began to tear up as well, and my mom pulled me close.
“I was just thinking how nice it would be to live in the country with horses like I did when I was little,” she said. “Maybe with a little house, where we could go riding on the weekends . . . it would just be so wonderful. I wish we would have been able to give that kind of life to you kids.”
Dreams are always crushing when they don’t come true. But it’s the simple dreams that are often the most painful because they seem so personal, so reasonable, so attainable. You’re always close enough to touch, but never quite close enough to hold, and it’s enough to break your heart.
As for Micah and me, our lives over the next four years fell into a relatively distinct pattern. My brother continued to spread his wings and found new friends easily. My sister made good friends as well, and one of them quickly became like a sister to her. I, on the other hand, had less luck in maintaining friendships, not because there was anything wrong with me per se (at least I like to think so) but rather because of simple bad luck.
My best friend in third grade was Tim; in the fourth grade, he transferred to the parochial school and our paths seldom crossed again. My best friend in fourth grade was Andy; in the fifth grade, he transferred to the parochial school as well, and I didn’t see him again either. In fifth grade, my best friend was Warren; in the sixth grade, he moved to Australia. In sixth grade, my best friend was Kevin; when we went off to middle school the following year, we never had a single class together.
My brother, on the other hand, was much more fortunate, and the friendships he made grew only stronger over the years. None of the kids ever moved away, none ever transferred to a different school. Like Micah, his friends tended to be adventurous, and afternoons and weekends were spent either in the fields near our house, or at the American River a few miles away.
Meanwhile, I began to find more and more pleasure in the solitary act of reading. Because we couldn’t afford to buy books and the town library was extremely small with relatively few titles, there wasn’t much to choose from except for the set of Encyclopaedia Britannica at home. With no other options, I began with the first volume, and over the next two years I read through the entire set of twenty-six volumes, one miscellaneous entry at a time. When I finished, I read them all again. Then, I read the Bible from cover to cover.
This isn’t to say I read all the time, or even most of the time. Because we were latchkey kids (again), the outside world was always beckoning, and there were even times that Micah’s group of friends would get together with my friends, when it almost felt like old times.
We used to enjoy playing with the BB guns our parents got us for Christmas one year. While I suppose this is common for boys our age, what wasn’t common was what we did with them. Essentially, my brother and I—along with whoever else was stupid enough to join us—quickly learned that it was less exciting to shoot at targets than at each other, and the game we developed was simple. Someone shouted “Go,” we’d all scramble through the woods or into the abandoned house, then hunt each other down. There were no teams—it was every man for himself—and there was no real end to the game either. You simply kept hiding and hunting and shooting each other until dinnertime, when everyone had to go home. There were only two rules: no shooting in the face, and you could only pump the BB gun twice (which limited the velocity somewhat); but even those were more “guidelines” than strictly enforced rules. Consequently, everyone cheated. There was a perverse joy in shooting at someone, hearing them scream, and watching them dance in circles holding the wound, trying to get rid of the sting. Of course, what goes around comes around, and I spent years with welts all over my body. On more occasions than I can remember, each of us had to push out a BB that had embedded itself into our skin.
Micah, though, always seemed to suffer injuries worse than any of us. Part of it was because he was always pushing, always trying to do more. Once when he was playing with his BB gun in a garbage-strewn abandoned house, he thought it would be fun to kick out the rest of a window that had long since been broken. I suppose he was imitating what he saw people do on television, but no one told him that on TV they use special glass that doesn’t shatter. Anyway, after kicking out the window and shooting someone circling the house, he knew it was time to find the next hiding place, and started to leave.
The next thing he knew, he heard a squishing noise coming from his shoe. Figuring that he must have stepped in a puddle of some unknown liquid, he kept going, trying to ignore it.
As he put it, “But I realized the squishing only seemed to be growing louder. When I looked down at my shoe, I noticed that my sock was turning pink, and my shoe was soaked. Obviously, I told myself, I’d stepped in some wine left behind by some teenagers. So there I was, step, squish, step, squish. And I could feel my foot getting slimier, and then I suddenly realized that I must have cut myself on the glass. So I sat down and took off my shoe. My sock and shoe were soaked in blood, and all of a sudden, the blood spurts from a cut over my ankle like water from a drinking fountain. It spurted high with every heartbeat. Looking back, I must have cut—or at least nicked—an artery, because it was really spurting.”
He yelled for his friend, who came running. Using the bloody sock, they put a tourniquet on the ankle, and with his friend’s help my brother hobbled home and called for my mom.
Because it was a weekend, she happened to be at home and she examined his ankle as it spurted blood all over the kitchen linoleum.
“Looks pretty bad,” she said succinctly. And as always, she knew exactly what to do.
She stuck a Band-Aid on it.
Then she told Micah to put his hand over the Band-Aid, and told him he might want to rest it for a while before he went outside to play again.
As wild as we were, my mom always made it a point to bring us to church every Sunday, and that continued in California. My brother and I were often bored and would poke each other. The challenge, however, was that the other wasn’t allowed to flinch, and the poker couldn’t appear to be moving, so that our mother wouldn’t catch us.
Dana didn’t like this particular game very much, and while my mother didn’t know what was going on, my sister certainly did. She took church very seriously—because our mom did, I suppose, and she wanted to be just like her—and in between her prayers, she would frown at us, trying to get us to stop.
Dana loved to pray. She prayed in the morning, she prayed at night. She asked God to bless everyone she knew, one at a time. She prayed for relatives and friends and strangers, dogs and cats and animals at the zoo. She prayed to become kinder and more patient, despite the fact that she didn’t need help in either department. She seemed completely at ease with the world, and had a way of making others comfortable around her. In her own gentle way, my sister had quietly become the rock that my brother and I began to cling to whenever misfortune befell us.
But as much as Dana loved c
hurch and praying, it was her fault that we never arrived at Mass on time. Usually we rolled in about ten minutes late, and always after the rest of the congregation was seated. I didn’t mind coming late (as I said, I was frequently bored), but I didn’t like the way everyone would turn to watch us as we tried to find a seat. And in moments like those, I wished my sister would be a little more like my brother and me, at least in one respect.
Dana, despite her other wonderful qualities, was not a fast mover. When she woke up in the morning, she never got out of bed right away. Instead, she would sit cross-legged on the mattress and simply stare into space, looking dreamy and disoriented. She would stay in that position for twenty minutes—“Waking up” as she described it—and would only then begin getting ready to go. And even then, everything was slow. She ate slowly, she dressed slowly, she brushed her hair slowly. Where our mom could tell Micah and me to get ready and we’d be dressed within minutes, my sister took her time. My brother and I had to walk to school, but more often than not, my mom would have to drive my sister in, so that she wouldn’t be late. It made us crazy at times, but she never let our complaints bother her.
“People are just different,” Dana used to observe serenely, whenever we’d tease her about it. And my mom never let my sister’s lateness bother her. As she explained it to us, “She just needs a little more time to get ready.”
“Why?” Micah or I would ask.
“Because she’s a girl.”
Oh.
Still, Dana had the occasional wild impulse. On our one and only cross-country vacation in the summer of 1976, the family loaded into our Volkswagen van—the only car we had from 1974 to 1982—and spent a few weeks traveling around the west. We visited the Painted Desert and Taos, New Mexico, before finally arriving at the Grand Canyon. It was, of course, one of the greatest sights in the world, but as children we didn’t much appreciate it. Instead, on my sister’s suggestion, we decided it would be much more fun to slip behind the viewing ropes and approach the unstable, cordoned-off edge of the canyon while our parents were buying us lunch. There, we discovered a small ledge, maybe three feet down.
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