Steve from Mendocino
I hate children. They’re noisy and messy and, above all, inconvenient. I had a vasectomy at 24 years old and never regretted it.
In my late forties, as a gift to my wife who really loves and wanted children, I offered to get a vasectomy reversal. Nothing happened, despite our enthusiastic attempts, so I flew to St. Luis for a second reversal by a doctor who had the reputation as the best in the country for reversals. Nothing happened, so we decided to adopt. After a mountain of paperwork for both the American and Chinese governments, we boarded a plane for a two week stay in China dedicated to retrieving the child selected for us by the Chinese government, resolving any medical issues that might crop up, and finalizing paperwork for the Chinese and the American governments.
We changed planes in Beijing and landed in the afternoon at Wuhan (yes, that Wuhan), where the group of prospective parents ate a nice lunch and then prepared to pick up the 10 or 12 babies that had been designated for us. The babies were ferried from orphanages around that part of China to this central location because some busy-body American wrote an article about the appalling conditions in the orphanages without noting that China was a poor country that genuinely loves children but has to get by with far less than Americans are accustomed to.
At 7:00 o’clock in the evening, the new parents gathered at the elevator landing of our floor and waited with eyes glued on the elevator movements. The doors finally opened and out came a flock of orphanage workers carrying bewildered and squalling babies. The name of our assigned baby was called out (in Chinese, of course), and my wife stepped forward, took our daughter, and was promptly peed on. We whisked her off to our room to clean up, and my wife set to reassuring our terrified and outraged daughter who’d just been kidnapped by strange looking aliens. That only made matters worse, of course, so we gave her space on the bed and I started playing a game of I would look away when she looked at me and she would look away when I looked at her. She was glued to my chest for the next two weeks.
Three years later, we got pregnant, of course, and finished our family making. Over the course of the following years, I discovered that, in addition to being loud and messy and inconvenient, kids have magic and joy and charm and love. Who could have known?
At Thanksgiving of 2014 my wife, my younger daughter, and I drove to Reed College to visit our elder daughter. Reed is interesting for a number of reasons, not least of which is that there are fewer than 1,500 students total. It’s small and odd and, yes, persistently radical in its politics. While my daughter found this last quality tedious, the education is excellent and respected.
My tour of the campus lasted roughly 20 minutes but I came back with quite a few nice pictures. It was one of those rainy days where the sun pops out periodically and casts incredible patches of light on the late fall leaves. Those conditions are special.
This is the ODB (old dorm block), which, I understand, was one of the original 3 Reed buildings. Now it’s just one dorm of several.
On The Road – Steve from Mendocino – Reed CollegePost + Comments (33)