After my CIA childhood, I’d spend a lot of my life underground in one way or another. And truth would seem wavery, to dwell in the hidden. At parties, I’d slip away.
My mobile Foreign Service life would bequest to me a taste for adventure, an eternal restlessness. Hand me a plane ticket to another culture and I’m on the plane the same day. As Somerset Maugham wrote in his autobiography, The Summing Up, “I never felt entirely myself until I had put at least the Channel between my native country and me.”
For a long time after my childhood, I’d be best at beginnings. I would never stay anywhere long enough for things to evolve. I would unconsciously subscribe to the CIA tactic: vary routes and times. I would glorify travel and, at the same time, I would be on an eternal search for home. I craved something enduring—a place, a person, a trajectory. It would take me a long time to know nothing stays the same—unless you refuse to grow or let in the world.
I would spend years missing the diplomatic corps—the formal rhythms and rigid civility unique to that culture—my culture. Too, I’d miss the era, the time in history that formed the backdrop to my childhood.
Place is important. Countries are different: of that, my childhood has made me sure. Some places suit better than others. Some supply stimulation, some frustration, some peace. I would spend inordinate amounts of time in my young adulthood trying to find the ultimate place. I was ever restless. No place had all of the landmarks I needed to feel like I was at home. Only the wide world would ever be able to provide that.
On the other hand, being a stranger means you can be at home in many places: I would feel at home at a desolate Patagonian ranch inhabited by two wizened Basques when I was thirty-one; in a bedraggled, nondescript village in France set in a heart-stopping, sere landscape shot with sun when I was in my mid-forties.
Maybe a sense of belonging isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It requires choosing this over that, leaving others out—unless your reference group is the human race, which doesn’t feel very chummy. Nevertheless, perhaps the most radical and deepest sense of belonging is that of belonging to the world.
For years following my flitting childhood, sometimes it would seem like I was still hauling around those thirteen pieces of luggage (including airline bags), only now they were full of stones of loss and everyone else was traveling luggage-free.
Marooned early, as the child of an ever-moving spy, I was bequeathed young a finely developed sense of vanishing—left with a keen sense that people disappear, and that we are all ultimately alone. I received, too, a piercing sense of time passing, of all the lives one could—and wouldn’t get to—live. Moving around makes a kid an existentialist and a Buddhist. Carpe diem is the CIA kid’s password.
The gypsy traipsing of my childhood left me tentative about love. Touch it, and like spun cotton candy, it might dissolve. And, too, it left me with a spy’s outlook: if they find me out they’ll vanish.
What of all those different girls? The girl in Taiwan, riding in her crystal coach, trapped between awe and pity of the poor, trying to choose between smocked dresses and the enticements of dragons? The gum-chewing girl who worshipped marines? The girl who adored Holland and yet felt most potently and fiercely American on the Dutch streets? The fourteen-year-old who gorged on war news and grieved both for GIs and Vietnamese children? The sixteen-year-old plopped in Borneo and thunder-struck by its wild and intricate fecundity? And what now of the seventeen-year-old, tempered by lightning and troubled by her father’s troubles, who both loves and hates her country and wants the world?
What did it all mean: all these girls, America, the bewildering, mixed-up, contradictory nature of it all? Perhaps a Zen koan with its sense of the world as a many-shaded, intriguing puzzle, says it best:
Two monks were watching a flag flapping in the wind. One said to the other, “The flag is moving”
The other replied, “The wind is moving”
Huineng overheard this: He said, “Not the flag, not the wind; mind is moving.”
Close to the end of the year, when I would return to America and college, I met with Dr. Cohen, and all I did was cry.
After all the partings of my childhood, I was laden. I was a sloshing bucket of loss, always missing somewhere. And a treasurer: cupping memories in my hands like alms.
But Dr. Cohen taught me that there was room at the dance for the one who carries the bucket of tears. And he made me realize that I carried, on the other end of my Taiwanese yoke, a pail of brimming, sparkling delight.
Dr. Cohen sent me off with these parting words: “Just water your ability to feel what you feel and you’ll be okay.” And he handed me a big going-away present, a foot-by-foot-and-a-half book, The Whole Earth Catalogue.
I wandered in a moss garden. Trickling lanes of grey stones wended among islands of shapely, gnarled pines and romping pillows of moss. I touched the rough stones with my fingertips, then placed my palm on a mushroom-top of soft green. There was a beauty-drenched stillness. The high, wistful notes of a shakuhachi flute reached through in the air. Beauty: the dependable pleasure and solace.
My father shouldered his rucksack and I shouldered mine. The red tulips of the Netherlands, the white lotuses of Taiwan, the blue iris of Japan—all the sweet-sad things: I was lifting them with me to America.
Waters overlap in me. The waters of converging rivers, the tides of different oceans. I am a delta, an Antarctica, a place where oceans meet.
When I landed in California, and stood in a field of rattlesnake grass laced with poppies overlooking the sea, I bowed before the blasting beauty of America.
The majesty of the world.
OF TRUTH
Truth never dies. The ages come and go.
The mountains wear away, the stars retire.
Destruction lays earth’s mighty cities low;
And empires, states and dynasties expire;
But caught and handed onward by the wise,
Truth never dies.
Though unreceived and scoffed at through the years,
Though made the butt of ridicule and jest,
Though held aloft for mockery and jeers,
Denied by those of transient power possessed,
Insulted by the insolence of lies,
Truth never dies.
It answers not. It does not take offense,
But with a mighty silence bides its time,
As some great cliff that braves the elements
And lifts through all the storms its head sublime,
It ever stands, uplifted by the wise,
And never dies.
As rests the Sphinx amid Egyptian sands;
As looms on high the snowy peak and crest:
As firm and patient as Gibraltar stands,
So truth, unwearied, waits the era blest
When men shall turn to it with great surprise.
Truth never dies.
—FRANCIS BACON,1625
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sara Mansfield Taber was born in Japan and spent her childhood traveling from country to country with her family, as her father, a covert intelligence officer for the CIA, was transferred from post to post. After earning her BA from Carleton College and MSW from the University of Washington, she worked as a psychiatric social worker with troubled families in Massachusetts and California. At Harvard University, where she earned her doctorate, she specialized in cross-cultural human development. Thereafter, as a faculty member of the University of Minnesota, she conducted ethnographic research in Argentina, Spain, and among immigrants to the United States. In 1991 she began a new career as a writer of literary nonfiction. She has published literary journalism, personal essays, memoir, opinion, and travel pieces in literary magazines and newspapers, and had her work produced for public radio. She is the author of Dusk on the Campo: A Journey in Patagonia, Bread of Three Rivers: The Story of a French Loaf, and Of Many Lands: Journal of a Traveling Childhood, a writing guide. She teaches writing and mentors writers in the United St
ates and abroad, and lives just outside Washington, D.C., in Maryland.
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