Just me and my Dad
Dateline: SWA flight from Providence to Chicago, 29 May 2004
Heading to my hometown (Boscobel, WI) with my eldest son Kevin. It’s always a great treat to travel with one of your children—just one. Spending that sort of time alone—just the two of you—is so amazingly important in parenting. My own warmest memories of my Dad center around the times we’d spend alone doing two things: 1) Dad throwing me football passes as I ran various routes (down-and-out, down-and-in, button-hook, short-post, long-post, and bomb) on our front lawn; and 2) whenever my Dad took me to the “country club” that was a 9-hole golf course in the middle of corn fields between Boscobel and Fennimore. The latter case was far better, because the nine holes would drag on for quite some time, meaning lots of time for talking, plus Dad would always take me to the bar at the club afterwards and treat me with a 7-Up (with one of those candied cherries on a swizzle stick) and a bag of Fritos.
In a family of nine where Friday nights were special because you got a can of grape soda, that was major-league fun.
But, of course, the real fun was simply spending time alone with my Dad. With six siblings, hanging out alone with Dad was fairly rare. So when I think of my Dad and the best memories I have of him, I can almost feel myself dragging that big damn golf bag up all those hills at Hickory Grove, chomping on a stick of Dentene, which Dad always carried.
I try to do similar things with my kids—those special events alone. That’s the prime reason I bought two season tickets at Lambeau Field: I knew I’d want to bring one of my kids each time I went. One ticket would be pointless, and three wouldn’t have been quite the same (Who am I kidding? I would have taken the third in a heartbeat!).
Right now I have three games a year to attend. I take my oldest two kids to one each, and then use the third on a relative or close friend. Eventually, my third child (Jerry, now four) will demand to go, then I’ll be full up for several years. My oldest kid, Emily, is now 12, and by the time she’s off to college and probably out of the going-to-Lambeau gig, I’ll have a new addition to the rotation: our fourth child Vonne Mei, whom my wife and I will pick up in rural China sometime around Labor Day this year. She was probably born near the beginning of this year, abandoned a couple of months later, and now is entering her fourth month in an orphanage.
When Emily heads off to college, Vonne Mei will be seven years old and sitting in Seat 11, Row 1, Section 246—right in front of me in Seat 11, Row 2, Section 246. I will spend most of the game leaning over and yelling into her right ear about what’s going on down on the field, explaining to her the seemingly odd rule sets of the game.
I hold that image of my yet-unseen-daughter in my head as my wife prods me to read yet another book about China, trans-racial adoption, or the lives of women in the Middle Kingdom. Our Vonne Mei will bring all that baggage/heritage/promise/challenges with her, but no matter how she changes our lives and we fundamentally alter hers, she will be sitting there in Lambeau sometime in the 2011 season, wearing a foam cheesehead and a tiny Nick Barnett jersey (#56), trying to warm her cold little fingers with a cup of hot chocolate.
I can almost hear her shriek at the opening kickoff.
Kevin and I go to Boscobel for Memorial Day for three key reasons: 1) to see our old dog Boswell, who now lives with my Mom and keeps her company; 2) to see Grandma herself, of course, and 3) to hear my Dad’s name read at the Memorial Day American Legion ceremony at Blaine Gym.
Every year on Memorial Day the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars hold a ceremony to remember those who died, either as a veteran or on active duty service, over the previous year. For my entire childhood, the man who MC’d the event and read the list each year was my Dad, John Barnett, veteran of WWII (Navy). Before that, his dad, my Grandpa J.E., performed the same role. J.E. was in the Marines in WWI and the Army in WWII. In 1983, my Dad read aloud the name of his own father.
On Monday, some veteran will read out my Dad’s name, and I wanted to be there to hear it, along with my Mom and several of my siblings. Other than masses at Immaculate Conception, this will probably be the last time his name is mentioned in this town in any formal ceremony—other than when my family buries his ashes sometime this summer.
I brought Kevin along as the eldest male child in my family, to remember both his Grandpa John and to think about his cousin Daniel, currently serving somewhere in Southwest Asia with the Navy. These are important people and important sacrifices to remember, so we make this journey together—just Kevin and his dad.
While we are in Boscobel, we will spend time with my niece, Ally, also adopted from China by my sister. This is an added treat, obviously. Being around my niece is like staring at the future, one that I can only guess at in terms of difference, but one whose similarities I cannot wait to reacquire (e.g., the baby who sleeps in your arms, the toddler who rides in the backpack, the three-year-old who sits on your hip).
I am mere weeks away from becoming a father for the fourth time. With the book out and about and my life settling into something other than obsessing on it full time, I find myself increasingly focused on all things China. As anyone who reads this blog knows, to think strategically about global change and globalization is to constantly bump up against the whirlwind of development that is China, but that remains a big abstraction compared to the journey I will take with my spouse weeks from now, because when we return from China in the fall, our family will become part-Chinese—just like that.
I worry now and then that people will think my views on China are somehow distorted by this adoption, when in reality my views on China were many years in the making. This adoption brought us to China because my wife and I felt strongly about reaching abroad for a new sense of connectivity with the world at large. Because my sister had already adopted from China, our growing knowledge of the challenges of trans-racial adoption told us it made a lot of sense that our Chinese-American daughter should have someone else in her extended family who looked like her, and that—by making this choice—our niece Ally would be similarly rewarded.
As for myself, this adoption will form the back half of my high-low mix of education on all things Chinese: while my work will remain high-end and big-picture on China as a force of global change, my personal life will become intimately low-end and small-picture on China as a force of familial change.
I needed a trip like this after all the running around connected with the book over the past month. I needed something that connected me to my hometown past, my continuing present, and the future just looming ahead: just me and my Dad, just me and my son, just me and my daughter-to-be.