Still Crazy After All These Years

My favorite story in the whole entire world is the one about how my father proposed to my mother. My parents met around 1964, when they were both thirteen, and my father had the locker on top of my mother's at school, or maybe my mother had the locker on top of my father's, I don't remember, but there were definitely lockers involved. They hung out in the same crowds and had the same friends and moved in the same circles and, as far as I can tell---because, come on, no-one wants to delve that deeply into their parents' dating histories---saw each other on-and-off between seeing other people, until, in late 1974, my dad drove over to my grandma's house, where my mother was living, and proposed.

And the best part of all of this is that my mother was wearing a green face mask when it happened. That's the way she opened the front door, with bright green gloop smeared across her skin, totally clueless to any kind of imminent proposal, and my dad said that when he saw her, he almost made up some excuse and drove away in the other direction. But instead he didn't. Instead he said "I've been offered a job in America and I have to leave. Will you come with me? Will you marry me?"

My dad was twenty-three and had been asked to relocate to Detroit, and all the children in our family still get a huge kick out of recalling the way in which he left his old job in England, which is to say he told his boss that he wouldn't be in on Monday because he had a dentist's appointment, and then he left the country. He confessed recently that the story had actually been greatly exaggerated over the years, and that obviously he wouldn't have been quite so irresponsible when it came to leaving an old job for a new one. And even though internally I breathed a huge sigh of relief that any potential employers who found my site and read that story wouldn't then take it as some sort of gene-related background check and make assumptions about apples and trees, I have to admit to a sort of disappointment on par with finding out the truth about Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy.

So my parents were married and moved to Michigan, where they began a love affair with America that, in turn, made its way into my own DNA. They loved the vastness of everything, the boat-sized cars, the enormous grocery stores, the huge open spaces, the expansive smiles, the exuberant welcomes. They loved being told to have a nice day. The first time my father took my mother to McDonalds, she marveled at the freedom with which hamburgers were being gobbled---I doubt they had made an appearance yet into British cuisine, and if they had, they were doubtless shriveled and dry and only available at outdoor gatherings in summer---and, upon spying a Big Mac, excitedly told my father that she wanted "a hamburger." Clueless, he got her one of those normal little burgers, the kind with one just one thin gray piece of meat instead of three, the kind without the pomp and circumstance of lettuce and mayo and tomatoes and cheese. And she was hugely disappointed. America had promised her more than that. McDonalds had promised her more than that.

My mother worked in the British consulate in Detroit and my father worked somewhere in the city too, and all their friends commuted back and forth from Ypsilanti, where they were living, and when my mother was homesick for England, she'd pop over into Canada in her lunch break and wander around looking at the red post boxes until she felt a little better. In the evenings, from what I can tell, they threw raucous parties in their apartment, with many bearded American men playing the guitar and lounging on the shag rug and jumping off the orange coffee table and passing out with beer bottles in their hands. In short, they threw exactly the kind of parties I like to go to now. On July 4, 1976, while Sean was quietly being born 800 miles across the country in Connecticut, my twentysomething parents celebrated the Bicentennial of the country they'd come to call home by hanging a huge British flag out of the window that read "Happy Birthday, Colonists!"

These days, my parents are talking about retiring to Michigan, to going back to where they lived in the 70s before they had all these kids, all this furniture, all these stories, before they'd moved their life's possessions from England to Paris to Holland to the Middle East to Singapore to Hong Kong, to England again, to Connecticut, and back again to Singapore. Perhaps they want wide open spaces again, the feeling of being invincible, the thrill of a freeway, the novelty of a Dairy Queen. Perhaps they just want to go back to America, land of opportunity, land of reinvention, land of hope and possibility, where you can get anything you want in Target, even on a Sunday night.

I've had that photo at the top of the page, taken in their apartment in Michigan, stuck on my refrigerator for the last four years, and it's been yellowed and aged by the Charleston sun until the only thing distinguishing it as a photo from the 1970s---as opposed to, say, a photo from the 1870s---is that my father is wearing a pair of bellbottom trousers, and those weren't big in the Victorian era, or so I've heard. And even now, even when it's barely more than a faint, blurry ghost of an image, every time I look at it, I say a silent little thank you to whoever's listening for making my father the kind of man who would never let an unexpected green face mask stand in the way of his plans.