How to be a Good Little Orphan III, Part the First: Bears, Wrestling, Looming Untimely Death

I am forever bound to a tall male nurse with a honeyed voice -- not because of our time together in speech and theater, or because I care even one whit for his beloved Cubs (I do not), or even because he was with me for my mother's death, but because he understands me without interrogation and conjecture; I am an open book to my friend Mark in part because Mark is also adopted. At the time I met Mark in a gym-class softball game, I was only fifteen; I had no idea he too was adopted, and that he would ease me through my mother's death -- and who else out there in the wide world lived under continual interrogation and conjecture.

In 1997 -- while I was moving and Chloe was beginning and Tracey was returning and Beck was marrying -- Mark was living in an apartment at Irving Park Road and Halsted. Mark was not long out of the Army, and tended bar at the Dave and Buster's near the Newberry Library. I lived on his couch for a few days when I relocated north from Carbondale. Before winter set in, our lives just got too busy. We talked not enough. We drank Red Stripe at Exedeus II not enough. Soon I was getting remarried, buying a house, moving my re-wife and my re-life back to Lansing, preparing for Chloe's arrival. Soon, Mark moved to an apartment at Sheffield and Waveland; although his apartment was in the basement, he was still entitled to his spot on the rooftop and the view into Wrigley Field across Waveland.

My mother's name was Waveland -- as far as anybody ever knew. My mother's name was actually Wavelene, although no one ever called her that. She was most often called Waveland, Waverly, or Maybelline. My mother hated bastardizations of her name -- with the exception that she used the truncation Wave, going so far in her last years as to sketch (rather than write) her name as a series of pointed squiggles such as a child might draw to indicate the surface of a body of water.

Chloe was drawing near. or Edmund. Tracey and I really thought that Chloe would be Edmund. Edmund if it were a boy and Bellatrix if it were a girl -- later, Chloe Bellatrix if it were a girl. It were a girl. It was EdBell while it was still gender-neutral to us. While Tracey was ready to drop EdBell, Michael Jordan and the fellas were wrapping up the double three-peat. This big straight bear -- sports hater and all-around anti-athlete -- had to wrestle with the pandemic of Bulls Fever, but eventually I succumbed to my inevitable infection. It had happened with pro-basketball before -- with Dr. J and the ABA.

I was just a little feller when the ABA was around. The Harlem Globetrotters were popular with us kiddies in the 1970s, and the ABA looked like a whole league of Globetrotters. Dr. J made the finger roll and the slam dunk look like astronaut moves on a spacewalk. These were the Apollo program days at NASA: everything -- even professional basketball -- was better with a touch of outer space. The end of the ABA brought an end to my interest in pro basketball until Jordan and Pippen. I never had any interest in the college basketball that was and is such heroin to my Dad. I was always more interested in outer space.

I would escape monotonous winter evenings of UK Wildcats basketball by literally staring off in to space with my favorite volume of the Childcraft Encyclopedia to guide me around the circumpolar sky. On the top floor of my childhood home on Locust St. was a north-facing window; it stood unshaded next to the top of the upper stairs, like a giant's peephole onto I-80 and Chicago beyond, like an eye on the Great Bear chasing the Little Bear around the the top of night.

Night after night I would stare up at Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Cassiopeia, and Cepheus. My mythology was a little fuzzy when I was young, but I knew that Cassiopeia and/or Cepheus pissed off the powers that be and were pressured to give away their kid, Andromeda, to the Kraken (Cetus). I suppose that means Children's Home and Aid Society is the Kraken. The natural extensions of metaphor seem obvious, except that there was a consonant in the ointment.

W.

No, not Dubya. W.

The constellation Cassiopeia looks like a big W. W for Wavelene. So, Mom was Cassiopeia which meant Dad was Cepheus. I was indeed Andromeda. That rock in Jaffa Harbor (to which Andromeda was chained) was my upbringing as an adoptee. Cetus/the Kraken is the wide world and its attitudes about and toward adoptees. So, who are those two bears right in the middle of this Ray Harrihausen movie? The Big Dipper or Ursa Major was my birthfather. My birthmother was Ursa Minor, the Little Dipper -- stuck in one place, anchored to the north celestial pole by Polaris, the Guiding Light.

Somewhere out there beneath the pale moonlight

The level of sticky-sweet sentimentality is so staggering here even Don Bluth would go into insulin shock. If he were here, my friend Mark would make some non-verbal "Mah" grunt of not-havin'-any-of-it. Mark's voice is very smooth and low, with just a tad of the Charlie in a Box from the Island of Misfit Toys - easy to listen to, hard to dismiss. Mark turned some GI Bill funding into school and more school and finally into nursing. Meanwhile, I was wage slaving for this young family I had made. Over the next decade, Mark and I, our world's diverged and our infrequent contact became less frequent still.

Simultaneously, my birthfamily and I stopped speaking so much. After we all survived Y2K unscathed, contact dwindled. God knows what meanings were ascribed to those silences. If the members of my birthfamily are something like me -- and some of them are more than something like me -- those silences were seldom interpreted favorably.

My Mom, my adoptive mother, Wave, was interpreting nothing favorably thanks to her prescription-induced personality disorder. I will never be certain how much of the problem was due to the side-effects of the drugs, but I am going to blame the meds anyway. We had relocated back to Lansing, in part, to give my ailing mother aid and comfort; Mom now made it difficult to be around her for longer any amount of time.

By the summer of 2007 and inordinate amount of time had passed since I has spoken to anyone in my birthfamily. Every relationship there had been dependent on the relationship between me and my birthmother. Naturally. I thought I should contact her first. I remembered when her birthday is in late July. A simple birthday card would be a nice re-entry. A card would parallel how the original reunion process through Children's Home and Aid Society was conducted mostly through the mail.

Next time: watch the orphan wrestle the bear.