Eureka in Iowa
It is vacation time and I have reached the point in this blog of how I decided to actively contemplate becoming a writer. It all has to do with a vacation during which I revisited my childhood friends and an adolescent home away from home. Places that took me back to an environment rampant with all of the horrible behaviors I’ve spent my adulthood distancing myself from—showing off my assets because I’m insecure, making fun of strangers to bond with friends and choosing the bitter truth over people’s feelings. A place where one of my most vivid memories is the restaurant grade non-automatic carpet sweeper.
Three days into my vacation, I awoke in a bedroom I’d known from age four to adolescence. The one where we played matchbox cars and Barbies, a space that allowed the fresh Iowa breeze to drop a chill over us on fall weekend mornings after staying up too late making prank phone calls. I woke up rejuvenated and childless. My two and a half year old daughter who was sleeping with me had left our room for the television and non-blood related cousins downstairs. I grabbed my recharged cell phone and was prepared to listen to the aging voicemail I’d received from my brother, Mitch on the first day of my visit.
The message, it turned out, was not from him, it was from his wife—we had never spoken. Mitch had had a massive heart attack and was in Intensive Care. Seventeen minutes had passed before they revived him. The specialists were unsure he would survive. If he did, they couldn’t guarantee he wouldn’t be a vegetable. I called her back. She told me not to travel to see him. There was nothing I could do. To make matters worse, our parents were unreachable in Wales.
I walked into the white kitchen now recoiled by my memory into a salmon pink room of yesteryear. Sat around the thick, circular wooden breakfast nook table with my friend’s parents and regurgitated the previous half hour. I wore my heart on my face in front of them, cried uncontrollably about my brother and the discernible fate affecting my family. They had no advice, just listened and asked questions.
They kind-of knew Mitch as my foster brother They didn’t know his story. It wasn’t one that came out often, so I started from what I thought was the beginning. He was kidnapped when he was 14 and traveled non-stop across the world one summer. His grandmother who kidnapped him died when they were in a luxury hotel in Amsterdam. He was on the front page of the newspaper in Cleveland for a week, was even written-up in Playboy and TIME Magazine. He was a wealthy Jewish kid who was placed in foster care, my parents took him in while my dad was getting his PhD, and when he was 18, inherited today’s equivalent of $3million dollars and spent it all in six months—renting lear jets, chartering planes to Chicago to get pizza, buying cars there and then leaving them vacant in restaurant parking lots. Yes, this story was part of my polyanna family. They were as awed by hearing it as I was by telling his story.
My surrogate Iowa family whom I had not seen for over two decades nurtured me in the absence of my parents—the sounding board to much of what occurs in my life. Somehow the combination of the distance of time and the primordial connection guided me toward reflection and self actualization about my current situation—not just that of my brother, but of my career, my children, my evolving marital family and my definition of success. That moment was a eureka moment. One that connected the facets of my life via intrinsic motivation. I determined how to respond, dusted myself off from my emotional fall and decided Mitch’s story needed to be placed on paper. I was strong enough to meet the challenge of bringing his story, his quest for love, his fear of money to light for others. I would become a writer.
Now, all I had to do was follow through.
