Margaret, like the boy, found solace in places of quiet and simplicity. Yet what was a natural ebbing for someone of her age and place in the life cycle was an altogether different dynamic for a boy such as Amir. Margaret’s withdrawal might have been analogous to a recession—the retreat, over time, of a natural feature or its process. For the boy, the same tendency to withdraw had the danger of becoming a regression—a reversal of direction in what should have been a process of growth and understanding in his life’s journey.
She would sometimes find herself fretting over Amir’s progress, worrying that her attachment to the boy was doing more to impede his development than to help it. She chastised herself when her doubts overcame her common sense, but she still had little control over the small anxieties that set about her like vexing flies. Added to that, Amir had begun to act out in small ways. He was beginning to feel secure enough in their relationship that he could be less than perfect and still feel loved. She watched with a sense of both relief and trepidation as the boy’s personality slowly began to emerge, the form of the man he would soon become beginning to show itself. He was cautiously beginning to make his way into the world: staying over at friends’ houses and attending school and social events with more frequency. Margaret tried to introduce the idea of an allowance to Amir, but his rural agrarian roots couldn’t grasp the concept of being paid to do the shared work of maintaining his own household. He was happy to work. He liked it. Earning his own money would be good, he acknowledged. But he would feel bad getting paid by Margaret to do work he considered his responsibility. So in addition to his chores at home, he began working for a neighbor, mowing the lawn, and then another asked for him to help stack firewood for winter, and soon Amir needed to open a bank account, the small box he kept his earnings in not large enough to hold all of the money he stored inside of it.
Spring and summer seemed to sail by so quickly that year that Margaret barely noticed their passing. The time would have remained remarkable in memory only for the comfort of the weather if not for two announcements, one bringing forth the other. The first of these came from Margaret’s daughter, Alice, and her husband, Paul, who, while joining her and Amir on their summer vacation again, broke the news that they were expecting a child.
Profoundly happy at the prospect of finally having a grandchild, Margaret prepared a celebratory dinner. It was when mother and daughter were alone in the kitchen, while Amir and Paul were outside attending the grill, that a casual remark from Alice awoke an awareness within Margaret that would lead to an announcement of her own several weeks later: “Amir certainly seems excited at the prospect of becoming an uncle,” Alice had commented.
Her daughter’s reference to her foster son as the future “uncle” lingered in Margaret’s mind through the rest of the evening and only grew stronger in the succeeding days. The ring of its truth slowly began to reverberate through her. She realized she was going to make a life-changing decision. Not wanting to diminish the excitement of the news of her daughter’s pregnancy, Margaret waited until after the vacation ended and they had all returned home before speaking with Amir about her thoughts.
“Amir, do you have a minute? I want to talk to you about something that’s been on my mind.”
“Yeah, of course.”
“It’s such a nice day…let’s sit out on the patio and enjoy this last little bit of summer.”
“OK,” Amir agreed, his expression showing the curiosity he felt at his foster mother’s request.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you about something. It’s been two years now since you came to live here. It’s been a very happy time for me.”
Amir returned his foster mother’s gaze and smiled, secure in the intimate knowledge of her mind and in the depth of their emotional bond. The confidence had no more than breathed its presence, however, before another emotion intruded upon his thoughts, one not as calm and trusting as the first, but panicked and doubtful, ready to hear the worst. Was she going to say it had all been good, but she had grown weary and could no longer handle the responsibility of raising a child? This is it, the frightened voice said. I knew this time was bound to come.
“What I wanted to say is that I’ve come to feel as though you are truly my son.”
Amir’s eyes held his foster mother’s and smiled silently back. “Yeah, I feel like that too,” he said in a timid voice.
“How would you feel if we formalized that relationship?” Margaret asked.
“What does this ‘formalize’ mean? I don’t understand.”
“It means I would like to adopt you, to legally make you my son. Just like Alice is my daughter.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really,” Margaret replied, smiling, the two of them embracing.
After their arms had loosened from around each other, Margaret cautioned Amir that the legal proceedings to adopt him would be much more than just a simple formality, but she reassured him that his home and hers would always be one, even as he grew old enough to have his own.
The lawyer she hired had told Margaret that the adoption would be a difficult and protracted process. A specialist in international adoptions, he informed her it would be an expensive, emotionally wrenching ordeal. The Bosnian government allowed foreign adoptions only in exceptional cases. She would, therefore, have to make a petition to the responsible government ministry based on special circumstances and, in addition, conduct an exhaustive search for any of Amir’s relatives in Bosnia, even distant ones, who might be willing to take the boy into their home.
“You’ll have to be prepared,” the lawyer advised, “to keep your fingers crossed and your checkbook open. This process will be neither easy nor inexpensive. We’ll have to partner with an attorney in Bosnia to deal with the appropriate governmental agencies there, if, after the chaos of the war, they are even functional enough to be able to process the request.”
Putting the warnings of failure from mind, Margaret knew there could be no going back for her now. The questions—What if the adoption petition were denied? What if some distant relative in Bosnia was found and wanted to take Amir in? What if peace in Bosnia was suddenly declared and it was deemed safe enough to repatriate Amir to his homeland?—had to be put from mind.
Nearly a year to the day after she applied to adopt her foster son, Margaret received good news from her lawyer. With the war ended, and the governmental agencies in Bosnia now resuming their duties, her petition had been accepted by the responsible bureaucratic agencies both there and in the US. That it happened at all, given all of the obstacles that stood in the way, was a minor miracle. Had the war not devastated the country and Amir already been living outside of Bosnia, the adoption petition would have been rejected. Even given those circumstances, the lawyer later admitted, he’d had little hope for success. But the Sarajevo attorney he’d worked with had strong connections within the government. That, and the fact that Amir’s official file listed him as handicapped—a designation that was one of the few exceptions allowed for foreign adoptions—had made all the difference.
It would take almost another year to finalize the adoption. In the meantime Margaret settled into the role of not only mother, but also grandmother, Alice having given birth to a baby girl, Emily. Not long after the birth of her first child, Alice announced that she was pregnant again. By the time Amir entered his first year of high school, a second daughter, Abigail, had been born. In the course of just a few years, Margaret’s life had changed dramatically. There was now the sense that their small family circle might enter a larger arena—one where at future family gatherings, chairs might have to be gathered from other rooms to be squeezed in around the dining room table, where conversation zigzagged between the participants in random flow rather than following the smooth, linear conversations of a smaller, more orderly assemblage.
Margaret’s life was full, and she felt a deep contentment even as she began to feel age claim more and more of her physical and emotional stamina. The practical w
ork of motherhood itself was simple enough and weighed little on her. It was the emotional aspect of that relationship where she felt the weight: the unconditional investment of oneself to another…the identification and intertwining of one’s being with that of a child; the trying and the tedious that came along with the moments of extraordinary reward; the unavoidable assemblage of the good and the bad, the difficult and the joyous that parenthood brought to one’s life.
Slowly but surely Amir found his way into the current of normal teenage existence, easing much of the anxiety Margaret had felt as he’d entered his adolescence. His English had progressed to the point of native fluency, without the hint of an accent. His mannerisms, his clothing, and the subjects of his conversation all reflected, if not the mainstream or the cool, a recognizable strain of the society’s youth culture. He even joined his high school soccer team, in time earning a starting position on the varsity team. His friendships, if not of large number, grew and broadened to include a small group of classmates of diverse nature and interest. Among them were several girls, though Margaret could detect no kindling of any romantic interest from her son. Even as his social skills developed, Amir remained shy.
In the spring of his junior year in high school, Amir finally found something that really brought forth a passion in him. Alice had given Amir an inexpensive camera for his birthday the year before. Seeing how much he enjoyed taking photos, she had followed up with a video camera on his next birthday. Amir took to the device immediately. He began disappearing for hours at a time into the woods to shoot scenes of wildlife and nature and would then come home and get lost in editing the scenes he shot, making short movies. He joined the video club at his high school and became a constant presence in its editing room. Margaret, who could imagine him making documentaries for PBS or employed in some similar fashion that would combine his love of nature and filming, breathed a sigh of relief at the thought that he had found a place of stability and hope.
Margaret understood that Amir’s life would take the course it would, whether that would be filming for PBS or becoming involved in some other profession. What was important was that, after the traumatic experiences of his childhood, the boy she’d come to love as her own should find a measure of peace and fulfillment in his life.
Chapter 19
Margaret dabbed the tears that puddled in tiny pools at the corners of her eyes, as gravity caused them to fall down her cheek, breaking the perfect round of their form. Alice held her handkerchief to her eyes as well, and her husband, Paul, found himself sneaking a cuff against the few tears that managed to escape the cordons of his mental dictate that insisted men shouldn’t cry in sentimental display. Amir’s two nieces, Emily and Abigail, sat in the grass at the feet of their parents and grandmother, the joy of the crowd gathered at the high school graduation and the beautiful summer day creating a happy backdrop for their play.
As her son stepped onto the dais to receive his diploma, a profound sense of happiness spread outward from Margaret’s chest to fill her limbs. Her body felt pulled to the earth while her consciousness seemed to float up in the air above her, looking down upon the crowd.
Margaret’s contentment was tinged with a wistful, pensive air. She had experienced so many small, ordinary cycles of life revolve beginning to end that at this stage of her life, her appreciation of the moments marking their completion took on a sense of even greater importance. Looking at her son, she saw the boy he once was now clothed in the body of a young man. He wore his hair shorter now, his face was fuller, and shaving had become almost part of his daily routine. He had gone through several growth spurts during his high school years. He was no longer one of the smaller boys in his class, and now stood at average height. His thinness remained, but was carried with strength, a physique built of sinewy muscles grown from athletics and outdoor work.
Finding glimpses of the past in the present caused Margaret to glance in her daughter’s direction. She too had changed. Streaks of gray had begun to appear in her hair. Her body was a bit heavier yet still spoke of an active, healthy lifestyle. Some few, small wrinkles that had begun to form in her early thirties were now more prominent. But there inside her daughter’s adult body Margaret could still clearly see her little girl.
Letting her eyes pass briefly down upon her own body, a smile tinged in irony briefly appeared on Margaret’s face. She could find no glimpses of the past in reflection on her present physical self, the body that now held her seeming to belong to a totally different person. Directing her eyes back to the stage where her son stood with his classmates, she quickly put the thought out of mind.
“Do you have a grandchild graduating?” a woman standing at her side asked Margaret. They stood looking upon the graduating seniors spread in a semicircle on the stage in front of them. “No,” Margaret answered without any falter of voice, “a son. He is in the second row, third in from the left.” And later, after the ceremony had ended, when the graduates came to embrace their loved ones, a classmate’s mother congratulated Alice on her son’s graduation. It was Amir who corrected her, introducing Alice as his sister and saying, “This is my mom” as he wrapped his arm around Margaret’s shoulder, his smile broad, clear, and as bright as the summer day.
If her son’s graduation from high school brought with it bittersweet feelings of his imminent departure from home, it was mitigated by the fact that he would not be moving far away. When Amir began his college search, his list of choices had been made easy because he had limited them to geographical locations within a close commuting distance of home. Margaret worried that Amir was staying close to home because of her. The idea was of tremendous solace, even though the entirety of her belief structure, which held self-sufficiency of the highest value, was loath to admit it. She didn’t want Amir to limit his options because of her, and it was only after repeated assurances by him that staying close to home was what he needed that she could accept the truth of it.
Margaret was not surprised that her son’s other major criteria in choosing a school was that it have a good film department. Since having first taken up videography, it seemed to Margaret that not a day had gone by when she hadn’t seen Amir either with a camera in hand or sitting in front of an editing machine to work on what he had filmed. There were five colleges within easy driving distance of the Morgan home, two of which had very strong film departments: one was a state university, and the other was a well-respected liberal arts college. Accepted to both schools, Amir chose to attend the alternative-minded liberal arts college over the larger state university for the smaller classes it offered and the greater flexibility in designing his own academic program.
Franklin College was built on the grounds of a former dairy farm and encompassed over six hundred acres of field and woods. The school buildings and dormitories that comprised the nucleus of the college’s campus were of modern design but built of brick, giving the college the air of a more traditional school. Sitting on the outskirts of a town that boasted three other schools of higher education, Franklin College provided Amir both the peaceful environment of nature and a social infrastructure that would help stimulate his creative drive in filmmaking. But amidst settling into his dorm, getting to know the campus, and fulfilling required courses, Amir had little opportunity to fully engage his chosen major. It wasn’t until the spring semester that he was able to embark upon the shooting of his first assigned project in film studies. The assignment’s parameters had been simple. It was to be shot in documentary style, five to ten minutes in length, in either video or film, on a subject of the student’s choosing.
A number of budding documentarists among Amir’s classmates viewed documentary filmmaking as one of the principal paths they might take in order to ultimately earn a living in their profession. But there was little thought in Amir’s mind as to possible futures, images of self that he might wear into adulthood to define his identity. He didn’t see filmmaking as a means to an end, a way to support himself when he entered the adult wor
ld and had to make a living. Rather, he’d been captivated by the process itself, by the sense that through the medium of film he could reflect his own experience of the world. He wanted to find a way to link things of seemingly distinct relation, to travel to places of disparate sources and find a means of uniting them, the instances of his own life narrowed and isolated into singular scenes, an impossibility from which he might find a way to understand his past.
Amir titled his project Trees, and it was not so named as a device, metaphor, or symbol. The title of his film was, for Amir, the only explanation necessary to understand his work. It was a short piece, lasting barely five minutes, and on the surface one that most would consider a mood film of experimental nature.
With the help of a few classmates, Amir hoisted cameras up into trees, tied back branches, and filmed random episodes of action and inaction while precariously balanced on branches overhanging the ground. At first Amir’s fellow film students couldn’t understand what his documentary was supposed to be about. But Amir’s enthusiasm for it quickly won them over despite the opaqueness of its story. Amir the filmmaker was different from Amir the student: while still soft-voiced, he was firm and clear in his considerations, more willing to speak out, to express his ideas. His excitement for being up in the trees, edging out onto branches with his camera on his arm, was contagious. The animation with which he explained the idea that the film could show the viewer a differing perspective from that of a person as being the center of all things awoke his classmates to an awareness of their own anthropocentric views.
The Solace of Trees Page 19