It was November 26, 2008, the day before Thanksgiving. School had let out early that day and I left my Jersey City classroom with a melange of trepidation and anticipation. I wound my way through the bumper-to-bumper afternoon traffic across the Pulaski Skyway and up the Garden State Parkway to the Plaza Diner on Route 23 in Pompton Plains, New Jersey. The day was overcast, drizzly, and the neon sign that welcomed me to one of the hundreds of Greek-owned eateries that dot the State of New Jersey gave me a sense of secure familiarity. I was there to meet a special person, a young woman whom I had not seen since she was three, twenty-four years earlier. Hardly a day had passed in all that time that I had not thought of her, prayed for her and for the chance to see her again. And the Lord had answered that prayer when Rosemary and I connected a few months earlier via a well-known social network. "E-mail me your phone number and a convenient time to call" read the message which had made my heart skip a proverbial beat when I spotted her name. I did so and when she called from California a few days later, we arranged to meet during a pending trip to New Jersey.
My waitress and I chatted while I sipped my hot tea. I told her a bit of why I was there: My wife and I, newlyweds at the time, had taken the eighteen-month-old Rosie into our home in Verona. Her mother, a former student in one of my high school French classes whom I had not seen in five years, visited us out of the blue during the summer of 1982, telling us a hair-raising tale of having been recently deprogrammed from a religious cult. She wanted to get her life together, she claimed, and as she had the promise of a job and an apartment in Miami, she needed someone to watch Rosie for about a month. I was very reluctant to take on the responsibility of a restless toddler (she fussed constantly and even broke a vase during one of their visits), but Alane convinced me to "help the girl out." It was thus, then, that Alane and I became parents for the next year and a half.
The door to the diner opened and in strode a slim, lovely young woman who, but for her eyes, would have been all but unrecognizable to me. I stood up as she half ran to where I was and fell into my arms. As we embraced, I could think of only one thing to say as I blurted out the phrase "The prayer of a righteous man availeth much." During this time, my waitress had obviously related to several of her co-workers what all the fuss was about. In response to the scene she was witnessing, one of the woman had tears streaming down her cheeks, which made it all that much harder for me to hold back mine. After a bite to eat, I took Rosie to Verona to show her the apartment building at 810 Bloomfield Avenue where we lived during her time with us. We drove to Verona Park and walked around the lake where Alane and I had taken her rowboating many times. I related to her minute details about her toddlerhood in an attempt to jar whatever memories she may have retained from her early years. She surprised me with her many accurate descriptions of places she had visited and incidents that had taken place before her third birthday, but then I was reminded that the results of a test she took during a court-ordered bonding study back in 1984 showed she had an IQ of 144. The examiner informed us that he had stopped testing her at that point. "She's off the chart," he said.
Rosie and I discussed many things that fall afternoon, all except how it came to be that she left us so abruptly. That discussion, in all its painful details, would come later.
My waitress and I chatted while I sipped my hot tea. I told her a bit of why I was there: My wife and I, newlyweds at the time, had taken the eighteen-month-old Rosie into our home in Verona. Her mother, a former student in one of my high school French classes whom I had not seen in five years, visited us out of the blue during the summer of 1982, telling us a hair-raising tale of having been recently deprogrammed from a religious cult. She wanted to get her life together, she claimed, and as she had the promise of a job and an apartment in Miami, she needed someone to watch Rosie for about a month. I was very reluctant to take on the responsibility of a restless toddler (she fussed constantly and even broke a vase during one of their visits), but Alane convinced me to "help the girl out." It was thus, then, that Alane and I became parents for the next year and a half.
The door to the diner opened and in strode a slim, lovely young woman who, but for her eyes, would have been all but unrecognizable to me. I stood up as she half ran to where I was and fell into my arms. As we embraced, I could think of only one thing to say as I blurted out the phrase "The prayer of a righteous man availeth much." During this time, my waitress had obviously related to several of her co-workers what all the fuss was about. In response to the scene she was witnessing, one of the woman had tears streaming down her cheeks, which made it all that much harder for me to hold back mine. After a bite to eat, I took Rosie to Verona to show her the apartment building at 810 Bloomfield Avenue where we lived during her time with us. We drove to Verona Park and walked around the lake where Alane and I had taken her rowboating many times. I related to her minute details about her toddlerhood in an attempt to jar whatever memories she may have retained from her early years. She surprised me with her many accurate descriptions of places she had visited and incidents that had taken place before her third birthday, but then I was reminded that the results of a test she took during a court-ordered bonding study back in 1984 showed she had an IQ of 144. The examiner informed us that he had stopped testing her at that point. "She's off the chart," he said.
Rosie and I discussed many things that fall afternoon, all except how it came to be that she left us so abruptly. That discussion, in all its painful details, would come later.
No comments:
Post a Comment