# 99 Daddy I'm scared

​When the phone rang at 5 am that morning my first thought was – it’s Mim.  Hoped in fact it was her.  If it was Brenda calling from North Carolina it would have been some unpleasant emergency.
  But with Mim, who knew.

“Daddy, I am so, so scared.”  She said again, and her voice quivered as if she was cold.

“You OK, Mim?  Where are you?  What’s going on?”

“I’m scared, Daddy, and I don’t know how to get home.”
​
​"Where are you?"

Mim

“I’m under a bridge I think and it’s dark.”

“WHAT?  Do you see lights anywhere?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

I switched on the bedside light and sat up.

“Down there.”

“OK, I want you to walk towards the light.  Don’t worry, I’m right here.”

“OK.”

“You’re still in LA, right.”

“Yes… it is so dark, Daddy.”

“How far to the lights?”

“There are cars, taxis… there’s a taxi.  Stopped.”

“OK, go up to the taxi driver, if he’s stopped, and hand him the phone…. “

There is sound of Mim walking unsteady, as if from side to side.   Stumbling at times.  Once the footfalls stopped and then started again.

“Mim, you OK?  You can walk?”

“I’m alright, here’s the taxi driver.”

“Sir…”

“Yea…”

“That’s my daughter there outside your taxi.  Can you take her home?”


“Where does… (And then away from the phone)  Where do you live, girl?”

(In distance amid the noise of passing cars.)  “In Burbank, Sessmon Street, number 7077.”
(the taxi driver to me on the phone), “Going to be around $80.00?”

“OK, let me talk with my daughter again. …”  Then a pause.

“Yes,” Mim’s voice was still strained, weak.

“How much money you got, I’ve got a credit card if you don’t have money.  But you need about a hundred dollars.”

“I don’t want to go home, Daddy.  There could be people there waiting for me.  Inside.  Daddy I’m scared.”

Away from the phone there is the sound of a child crying.

“What’s that sound?  Who are you with?”

“Tristan.”

“YOU HAVE YOUR SON WITH YOU???  OUR GRANDSON???”

“Yes,”

“IT’S, IT’S 2 O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING THERE, YOU’RE OUT UNDER SOME BRIDGE, AND YOU HAVE TRISTAN WITH YOU?”

I had stood up and was aware I was almost shouting.

“Yes….”

“Is he OK?”

“He’s fine.”

"Get home.  How much money you have?  You got a hundred dollars.”

“Yes”

“OK, get in the taxi.  Go home.  Keep the cell phone on…  I’m with you… and Tristan.”

“Daddddddyyyy…”

“It’s OK, we’re going to get you home. It’s OK. It’s OK.”

“Don’t leave me.”  Background noise as she opens a door and then noises like she’s settling in and a door shuts.  Taxi engine noise.

“Daddy?”

“Yea, I’m here.”

“OK, I’m goin’ to put the phone down in my lap beside Tristan…”

Soon there’s the sound of her sleeping, and more faintly the sounds of someone else, maybe a baby breathing deep.

With the telephone to my ear I go into the kitchenette, make coffee and sit at the small apartment table.  I had begun work again with the CIA after 9/11 and had rented an apartment near Langley, the CIA Hqs.

Waiting at the kitchen table for this to play out, I think back about Mim.

                                                                       ******

Brenda and I adopted our son, Joseph, in Udorn, Thailand in February 1972.  He was one of what seemed like a hundred children at the Catholic orphanage when we visited Christmas Day 1971, but he caught Brenda’s eye and with just a few visit, they had bonded.  I had never seen love like I saw it on the face of that little runt once when we went to pick him up, and he saw Brenda coming around the corner into his orphanage nursery.  He wasn’t two years old, had been sickly all of his young life – they hadn’t expected him to live – but there he was, standing up in his crib, and coming towards him was this tall woman who was there to see just him.  No one else, and he loved her so much for her attention, and maybe her smile, and that day for the way she was sort of crying running in to pick him up.  He just beamed love.

Through connections at the Province Chief’s office we adopted Joseph without much problem.  We had to find the mother, and take her to meet with the Province Chief where she said that yes she was giving him up for adoption and probably he’d be leaving Thailand and she’d never see him again.  And she said she understood, and left the district offices.  My Thai interpreter, Boon, suggested that I give her taxi money home, that’s all.  And I did, asking the interpreter to tell the mother that we would give Joseph a good home, and that he would be happy.  She never made eye contact with me, but nodded to Boon when he finished, took the taxi fare and left.

I’m not sure Joseph’s feet every hit the floor that first day.  He was on Brenda’s hip from the moment we got home, until he went to sleep that night, drifting off laying at Brenda’s side of the bed.

On Sunday afternoon, two days after we adopted Joe, there was a knock at the front door of our bungalow. A tall, elderly American man–a stranger-was standing on the porch. He introduced himself as John Weston (alias). He said that he was with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and was preparing to return to the United States. I stuck my head out the door to see if anyone else was around, possibly explaining why this man was on our porch.

I invited him inside.

Standing just inside the door, Weston told me that he had heard about our success with the province chief in adopting our son and that was the reason he was here. About a year ago, he had met a beautiful Thai girl in a bar and within the month they were living together in his large USAID-provided house. She had a daughter by a previous common-law arrangement with an American soldier at the air force base and asked if she could bring her daughter to live with them. Of course, said Weston. The next morning, a beautiful blond-haired child came into his life. She was the most intelligent, the most energetic, and the most affectionate child he had ever known.

His voice softened as he said this.

She was almost three, but the man said she soon acted like the lady of the house. He enjoyed his role as surrogate father. He loved coming home to that little girl more than anything else in his life.
“Her name is Mary,” Weston said, “but we call her Mim.”

After a fight one night, Mim’s mother moved out and left the little girl behind. The mother still came by periodically, but Mim had lived in Weston’s house as his daughter now for so long, it was her home.

Weston said that he had expected to stay in Thailand for the foreseeable future. His transfer back to the United States was sudden and unexpected. He loved the little girl and was intent in finding a loving, caring situation for her. He said he had a family in the States and could not adopt her himself. He asked if we would be interested.

“What about the mother?” Brenda asked.

Weston thought she had moved to Bangkok.   She had told his housekeepers that she planned to move two months ago, the last time she came to see Mim. Weston said the mother was an exotic beauty but was very focused on her own life. She looked on Mim as competition, perhaps, or something that aged her.  Their last big fight, in fact, had been because the mother thought the man thought more of Mim than her.

Though it was a bit bizarre that an elderly gentleman had come to our house in an effort to give away a little girl he loved, we honestly were excited as we put Joseph in the car and followed Weston to his house.

When Mim was escorted into the living room by the maid she ran to Weston and hugged his leg.
Her incredible beauty was startling. Holding onto the man’s leg, she looked at us in an appraising manner – first Brenda, then Joseph, then me. And then she smiled and the room lit up. As we tried to talk with her, she toyed with us – running behind the furniture and peeking out, smiling, laughing. She didn’t speak English and couldn’t understand our poor Thai.

I loved that child. She had that about her, to make people love her on sight. She had a magnetic presence and appeared mature and intelligent for her age. When she wasn’t running around, she looked boldly at us. She welcomed our attention, as if it were her due, as if she had been looked at with awe all her life. She was an extraordinary three-year-old child/woman.

The next day, I asked my old Thai interpreter, Boon, to meet me at an off-post restaurant after work, which he did. I told him what had happened the previous day and about our interest in adopting Mim, but first I had to find the mother. On his suggestion, we went to Weston’s house. While I played with Mim, Boon talked with the house servants. They said the mother frequently made reference to a downtown bar. Possibly, someone there knew where she was.

On the way to the bar, I wondered if Mim was aware of her tenuous situation and that her future was being decided by strangers. She was so precocious that it occurred to me to ask her what she wanted. But she was only three, what did she know?

One of the bar customers told us the mother was at the restaurant next door and described what she was wearing. Boon rolled his eyes and said I lived a charmed life.

Next door, we sat down at the table where Mim’s mother was eating noodles. She and Boon talked for a few minutes, and then she turned to me. “Are you taking my baby away?” she asked.

“Not if you don’t want me to,” I answered.

“I don’t.”

"I don’t.”

I was not put off. I had Boon tell her how much love and attention we would give Mim – good schools, travel. She would have the very best. The girl seemed to soften but said as she got up to leave, “No, no, no, a thousand no’s.”

Brenda  was disappointed  that  night  when  I  got  home, but I told her there was nothing I could do this time.

On Wednesday night, Weston reappeared at our front door. He said he was leaving in a week and wondered what we were going to do about Mim. When I told him about talking with Mim’s mother in the restaurant, he said the mother hadn’t been by, and he was at a loss.

“She didn’t come by after Jim talked with her on Monday?” Brenda asked. “Not that night, or the next day or the next night? Knowing that you are leaving the country? That is irresponsible.”

She turned to me, “Do something.”

The next morning on the way to work, I went by the orphanage to see the sisters and ask for their suggestions. One sister said they would discuss my situation during the day and they would pray.

She told me to come by that evening.

Later that morning, Brenda came to the office and called me out to the reception area. She was standing beside a young Catholic priest, an American. He said he administered a church some distance away in the country. When he came into town this morning on routine church business, the sisters had told him about Mim. He wondered if he might do some good by talking with the mother.

I stuck my head in Jim G.’s office and told him that I had some personal business to attend to. When the priest and I arrived at the bar, Mim’s mother was sitting outside. She and the priest, who spoke fluent Thai, talked for some time.

At one point, she turned to me and in English said, “What if your wife has a child? Maybe you no love Mim as much.”

I said my wife cannot have children.

Finally, the priest said that, God’s will be done, the mother had agreed. She would meet Brenda and me at the province chief’s office the next morning at nine.

We were standing In the front of the province administration building with Boon the next morning, but nine o’clock came and went and there was no sign of the mother. At nine-thirty, a taxi pulled up and the Mother and the priest got out. He said that he thought she might forget or would need moral support, so he had gone to the bar and picked her up.

Within an hour, we had completed the procedures and Mim was ours. As we left, I told the province chief that I would not be seeing him again, but we were forever grateful.​

A week after we adopted Mim, two weeks after Joseph

 I had relived this significant short period in our lives many, many times before.  I knew every turn, every comment, every sight, every emotion.  Like a movie I saw it in my mind’s eye in just a matter of seconds.

Then I heard on the telephone the taxi driver saying, “Miss.  Miss. What’s the Sessmon address again.   Miss.  Wake up.”

Loudly near the phone from Mim.  “STOP, STOP.  Stop.  Here.  Stop.”  Then noise as if she is paying.
Shortly, “Daddy, Daddy, I don’t want to go inside.  I don’t know who’s there.”  Tristan starts crying in the background.

“LISTEN TO ME.  YOU GET YOUR KEY NOW.  YOU GET IT IN YOUR HAND.  AND YOU GO TO YOUR DOOR AND YOU OPEN IT.”

“I’m down the block. My apartment is down the block.  It’s dark.  Don’t yell at me.”

“GET YOUR KEY, NOW.  AND TELL ME WHEN YOU HAVE IT IN YOUR HAND.”

Shortly, “OK… I’m walking toward the apartment… (away from the phone)  Please Tristan stop crying.”

“OK, I’m at the door.”

“Open it.  Go inside.”

“OK I’m inside.  I’m scared.  Scared.  OK.  OK.  OK. I’ve turned on the lights.  It’s OK.  I’m home.  Safe…. Thanks,  Daddy.”

And she hung up without further word.

                                                                                  ******
 
And it was suddenly very quiet in my apartment.

The sun was just coming up and the lights in the parking lot outside began to switch themselves off.  My coffee cup sat with its second refill in front of me getting cold.

My arm hurt from holding the phone to my ear for so long and I placed the receiver on the table, picked up my cigarettes and went out on the balcony.

It was too early to call Brenda in North Carolina.  Too late to go back to bed, and beside I wasn’t sleepy.

Mim, I thought; once my greatest joy, now one of my most hurtful things… most probably stoned on drugs… downtown Los Angeles.  Middle of the night there.  With our grandchild.

I looked at my watch.  It was barely after 6 and thoughts of the pain and suffering… from Mim…  over the years…  had not yet begun in the movie theater of my mind.

Waiting I went over the details again as I added this latest early morning telephone call to the rest.  I began again at the Province Chief’s office with Mim’s Mom February 1972

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Mim’s Mom told the priest that she was going by Weston’s to tell Mim good-by.  As they were talking I was collecting my thoughts about what I wanted to say to her and when the priest turned to me we started talking at the same.  He dominate and after he finished telling me what the woman had said, I asked him to tell her that Mim would want for nothing and she would be happy… but the woman had hailed a taxi and was moving away from us.

The priest shouted out something in Thai to the departing woman and then turning to us, wished us well but cautioned us about the mother. He said she was unpredictable – one of God’s beautiful children trying to make the best for herself outside an US Air Force base. We assured the priest that we would be the best parents we could to Mim and thanked him.

I decided that we could not let one of Weston’s maids bring Mim over to our house because we did not want the mother to know where we lived. Boon volunteered to get her, but I said I would.  It was going to be a family affair.

When I arrived at Weston’s house in the early afternoon, he said that Mim’s mother had come by and had told him that we were adopting her daughter. She was crying, he said, and he did not know what she told Mim.  They were together for some time alone.

He asked how I planned to get her home. I explained why we didn’t want one of the maids to come, which he understood, and that I would be taking her alone. He told the maids to get Mim’s clothes and toys together, and they filled up the backseat of my car.

Mim kept her distance from me when I arrived.

She was against having her things put in my car and then she clearly became scared.

She was crying when Weston hugged her good-bye. As each maid said good-bye, she began to cry harder. When they tried to lead her to the car, she began screaming and grabbed at things to keep from being put inside. She was almost hysterical when I got behind the wheel and we pulled away. She pawed at the windows and screamed. In that small car, I was also traumatized and thought a thousand times that we should have done it differently.

Mim was exhausted by the time we arrived home, though it was only a 10 minute drive.  Udorn was a small town. She fell into the arms of our maid when I opened the door. At supper that evening, however, she sat at the table with Brenda, Joseph, and me.  But she was skittish, and still scared.

In three or four days however, she and Joseph settled in. They come to understand that their new situation was not altogether that bad, although it was different and they had to make some adjustments.

For as long as Mim could remember, she had been a privileged child. She knew she was beautiful; she had been told that every day of her life. Also, she had been told that she was special, an American Asian. Although she was only three, for almost eight months she had been the woman of her house – it had been her kingdom. If a maid’s child was playing with a toy Mim wanted, she walked over and got it. The child knew Mim could do that, and Mim knew she could do that. She probably did it sometimes just because she could.​

Joseph, on the other hand, grew up in an orphanage where the rules of the jungle prevailed. Might made right. If he was lucky enough to get a stick to play with in his bassinet and an older kid wanted it, then that was simply okay by Joe; the bigger kid got it. Made sense to him.

We bought toys for both kids at the Udorn Base Exchange and gave them out evenly. When Mim suddenly became interested in one of Joe’s toys and walked over and ripped it out of his hands, Brenda told her to give it back to her brother. Initially, this confused both children. Joe looked just like all the other little Thai kids that Mim had always dominated. Why did she have to give in to him? As for Joseph, Mim was larger and acted like she knew what she was doing. Why did he suddenly have the right to a toy that she wanted?

Joe picked up on the nature of the new rules probably before Mim, and he began to fight loudly to keep his toys. Mim always acted as if this was unseemly behavior on his part. She thought him ill-mannered.

By the end of the first week, when I came home and unlocked the gate, Mim ran out and hugging my leg, welcoming me home. I tossed her in the air and squeezed her.  I had worried that I had complete blotched Mim’s move into Parkerville, and it was so re-assuring that she had found her place in the family, and was as happy – it seemed – as she had been when we first met her.​

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And we became a team in the family.  Mim and I.  Joe and Brenda were for all times locked in a holy bond.  Mim and I closed ranks.  Going out anywhere, Joe would reach for Brenda’s hand, Mim would reach for mine.  Crossing a street downtown Udorn, Brenda would look around for Joe’s hand, I would find Mim’s.  Joe sat next to Brenda at the table in the house and at restaurants and Mim sat next to me.  And meals turned into joke sessions.  Silly stuff, playing with food almost, because the kid’s English was very basis.

                                            ******
 Within a couple of months of adopting the kids, I was transferred from Udorn upcountry to Long Tieng, Laos and Brenda decided to move to Vientiane, Laos, to be closer to me, and to put some distance between us and Mim’s mother, who we assumed still lived on the economy downtown Udorn.

When I would come in from upcountry, Brenda would know about when and she and the kids had a routine to turn on all the lights in the house she has rented  in Vientiane – that included the light in the refrigerator – and they would put Walt Disney musicals on the reel to reel tape player and they would dance around, like this was some big deal… and when I actually walked in the door, there would be cheers – and always Mim was the first to me, jumping in my arms.  And when I put her down, she’d pull me to the couch and there take off my boots, never commenting on the fact that my upcountry clothes might be dirty or covered with blood from people we had med-evaced late in the day.  Sometimes she would race into our bedroom after pulling off my socks and bring back fingernail polish, and redo my toes.  For almost two years – maybe from a month after we adopted her, until we left in the fall of 1973, my toenails were painted a variety of colors by Mim.​

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And we became a team in the family.  Mim and I.  Joe and Brenda were for all times locked in a holy bond.  Mim and I closed ranks.  Going out anywhere, Joe would reach for Brenda’s hand, Mim would reach for mine.  Crossing a street downtown Udorn, Brenda would look around for Joe’s hand, I would find Mim’s.  Joe sat next to Brenda at the table in the house and at restaurants and Mim sat next to me.  And meals turned into joke sessions.  Silly stuff, playing with food almost, because the kid’s English was very basis.

                                      ******
 Within a couple of months of adopting the kids, I was transferred from Udorn upcountry to Long Tieng, Laos and Brenda decided to move to Vientiane, Laos, to be closer to me, and to put some distance between us and Mim’s mother, who we assumed still lived on the economy downtown Udorn.

When I would come in from upcountry, Brenda would know about when and she and the kids had a routine to turn on all the lights in the house she has rented  in Vientiane – that included the light in the refrigerator – and they would put Walt Disney musicals on the reel to reel tape player and they would dance around, like this was some big deal… and when I actually walked in the door, there would be cheers – and always Mim was the first to me, jumping in my arms.  And when I put her down, she’d pull me to the couch and there take off my boots, never commenting on the fact that my upcountry clothes might be dirty or covered with blood from people we had med-evaced late in the day.  Sometimes she would race into our bedroom after pulling off my socks and bring back fingernail polish, and redo my toes.  For almost two years – maybe from a month after we adopted her, until we left in the fall of 1973, my toenails were painted a variety of colors by Mim.​

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On the way back to the states from Laos we stopped at the Kahala Hilton in Hawaii, as fancy a hotel as there was on Oahu, and Mim and Joseph went out on the beach and in the hotel and made friends by the dozens, using their butchered English as a cuteness multiplier.  Mim took great joy in bringing her new friends back to where Brenda and I were lounging by the pool, to show off my toenails she had painted.​

After a mandatory stop at Disenyworld in California it was home to North Carolina for Christmas and Mim and Joe melded into the family scene.  Often in family setting she would come and sit on my lap… it was her default location at the Denton’s and Parker’s.

We went back to the Far East, to Washington, DC, to Africa, to a domestic assignment in the US, back to the Far East – Mim growing from a cute little 3 year old to a precocious little 13 year old.  I know we must have had fights, there must have been times when she pissed me off, or when she got tired of me… must have been… but I couldn’t remember a single incident.  On the balcony that morning, I tried to remember some incident that wasn’t all cutesy and nice those ten years.

  Couldn’t.  And it wasn’t like she was spoiled, well maybe it was… but she wasn’t obnoxious and loud.  She was just clever the way she was able to get her way.  But this is a world class beautiful little girl we’re talking about here.

When she was ten years old I read William Goldman’s Princess Bride to her and although she didn’t take to this being read to as something she was big on initially… she did come around and sometime after supper would remind me that it was time for my reading lesson…

When Mim was eleven years old and we were back in the states, I took her to an audition for kid models.  There was a long line stretching out of the audition room down a hall.  Once we got there I felt Mim hadn’t prepared herself enough because all the other kids were dressed to the nines, in party dresses and cheerleader outfits.

And lewd face make-up!!  It was caked on – eye brows, lipstick, eye liner.  And there were some very expensive, very big hair dos on these little girls.  All the adults with the kids were women.   I told Mim that she and I looked out of place.  But we stayed and finally reached a desk where we were given a number on a paper placard to be bobby pinned to Mim’s back.

There was interesting interplay among the Mothers in line as they sized each other up and then sized up each other’s kid.  Step out from the rest for a moment and everywhere you looked were these women with seriously hostile appraising looks.

The line moved slowly down the hall.  But then one of the talent agency people came out of the room, maybe to use the bathroom or go for a smoke, or whatever, but as she approached us, she saw Mim and went, “Oh, my God” and pulled us out of the line, into the audition room where she interrupted a woman behind a table who was directing kids in walks up and down an elevated gangway.   The woman was smitten and she took Mim aside, took Polaroid’s of her, asked her to turn one way and then other, asking all the time about Mim’s background and Mim said, “Well, I was born in Thailand, but we’ve lived around the world, you know.  ‘Across both ponds’ as my Dad would say.”  Mim was the center of attention and she absolutely glowed.
​
I was so proud and I looked around to see if anyone else noticed and saw a room full of unpleasant mothers glaring at us.​

Mim got the job, of course, and modeled in a dozen different fashion shows.  Once at the fashion exposition in Atlanta, the governor of Georgia was sitting at the end of the runway and I had my eyes on him as Mim came out modeling some kids clothing.  She had her hair done in pigtails and looked very cute in the spotlight, which followed her down the walk-way towards the Governor.  There at the end she turned one way and the other, looking out towards the audience, ignoring the state’s first officer, obviously ignoring him because she looked to one side of where he was sitting and then quickly to the other and then back out towards the audience and he was sitting there with the most solicitous grin on his face, desperately wanting to have eye contact with the beautiful child, and he leaned forward trying to will her to look at him and Mim gazed around the room and then as she turned, she quickly looked him straight in the eye, smiled and left.

              Mim on the runway at a fashion show on the east coast

An eleven year old master of this smiling-at-strangers thing; she had put together a very impressive thirty seconds toying with a powerful public figure.  I’m thinking, that’s my girl.

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Mim on location in Tokyo

In 1982, when Mim was 13 years old, I got an assignment back to SE Asia, and Mim got a photo shoot in Tokyo arranged through her modeling agency.  She and I flew out ahead of Brenda and Joe.  We stayed at the apartment of a friend of mine from the American Embassy. Mim went through four days of modeling, both in still photography and a few videos for commercials.  Around her were mostly Eurasian girls, who liked to go to McDonald’s mid-day, in full make up.  Crowds of Japanese followed them.
​
Mim had been paid by the hour, but my friend said her image was on Tokyo billboards and TV for years.
​

In SEA we were assigned upcountry and Mim was one of two people in her 8th grade class in the local missionary school… and got almost a tutorial education that year… she’d say sometime after supper at night, “Got to study… no place to hide tomorrow.”
​
This year was our golden period as a family.  We hung close, entertained ourselves at night, knew pretty much what everyone in the family was doing all the time.  We spent more time with each other than anyone else.  Well with Boon Sai too (pls see my Rants and Yarns # 29), who would usually go into Mim’s room after supper and brush her hair as she studied.
​

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I asked Mim there is she was interested at all in going back to Udorn to look for her biological mother, and she no, she was OK with everything the way it was.

As the next school year approached we had to decide where Mim was going.  The missionary school only went to the 8th grade.  We had the world to choose from. She could stay with relatives in North Carolina, or go to boarding school in Switzerland, or Malaysia, or Hawaii… but really there was no debate. Since we had had six years in the Far East and had stopped in Hawaii each time, coming and going – including mid-tour trips home… Mim wanted Hawaii and was accepted in short order to Hawaii Prep on the big island.​

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​It was a game changer, this going away to school as a 14 year old.  For me in particular because of the tandem team we had made.  She and I – Joe and Brenda.  Now pretty much it was me – Joe and Brenda.  But we made our adjustments.  I wasn’t like Mim was gone forever.

Mim would write me early on that she was home sick and wanted me to call her.  And I would.   I’d be upbeat in my weekly letters, once I wrote on toilet paper.  She came home for Christmas – a great, great time – and Easter.  Then it was summer and I had a new assignment that would allow the family to live in Bangkok, so for Mim it was Hawaii, NC and then back to Thailand, where the end of August she entered the American International School of Bangkok with Joseph, her brother.
​
I was away for two and three weeks at a time and at first it was a perfect world.  Brenda was back working for the CIA in the Embassy, the kids were going to a first rate school, where the fact they were Thai or half Thai was a plus.  Their biological countrymen were part of the landed gentry… only very rich local Thai kids attended… and Mim and Joe.  Plus Mim had developed this singing voice, and she played the lead in the fall running of a school musical.

But then our perfect world began to develop cracks.  Mim and Brenda would lock horns occasionally when I wasn’t around.  It was if I was her parent, and Brenda had another role in the family, something less, something near Joe’s.  Mim wanted to do what she wanted to do, whether it was to go to bed at a certain time or what to wear to school.  After the third or fourth visit in, a real crisis erupted… Brenda did not like the fact that I would come in, listen to her side of whatever it was, then go listen to Mim’s and mediate… she said she was not going to negotiate parenting prerogatives with her… and she was not going to give me the claim of head of household because I wasn’t there to head the household most of the time.

Unbeknownst to us at the time Brenda had contracted a deadly tropical virus and her health began to fail… which stopped the bickering when I was away because Mim was called on to tend her mother, who had to quit her job at the Embassy, a job she loved.

Brenda was eventually evacuated to the states, but soon returned recovered after a stint at the Georgetown hospital.  For the rest of that first year and the second, all was cool.

In 1986 we returned as a family to McLean, Virginia for Mim to finish her senior year in high school, Joe his junior year… a family reunited.

And there wasn’t a moment’s peace.  Mim had met some shanky out of high school boy while we stayed in temp quarters waiting for our house to be painted… he didn’t make eye contact, talked to me in mono-syllables; I didn’t know if he had a job, or what… and Mim clung to him.

Then there was the night she said she was going to the library to do some studying and didn’t come in at all that night.  Didn’t call.  Didn’t offer any explanation, other than she stayed at a girl friend’s house.

She went on a chaperoned girl’s trip to the beach on the Jersey shore that turned into a nightmare because of some boy-thing… challenged by the girls who had invited her, she took some pills and they had to call 911 for the medics to come pump her stomach.  The girls called her a “drama queen.”

  I had to go pick her up.

Back home every day there seemed to be more distance between us.  She and Brenda had nothing to do with one another.  She and I would sit and talk, but nothing was said… I tried to get her to make a commitment or re-commitment to the family.  That got a limp response.  We wrote out what we expected of each other… her’s made no sense.

But there were throw back moments when we laughed and seemed to enjoy time together, not just she and me, Brenda and Joe too.  We took a family trip to the Shenandoah Valley Conservatory and Mim audition for a singing scholarship – and she was good… and the Shenandoah staff said as much.
She was accept into the dance and voice department for the next year, and the dean of students said she had real natural talent… she could hit the high notes.

But then the next week-end she left on a date Friday night and came back Sunday.

This was so radical, so disobedient that we were just astonished.  How could our daughter be so rebellious? It was as if something had taken over her soul and our Mim had been replaced with this monster child.

The week after graduating high school she and Brenda got into a shouting match in the house at home, Mim hit Brenda in the face with a powerful uppercut and she walked out.

I got a call from Brenda within minutes, rushed home, but Mim had disappeared in the neighborhood.  Maybe there were friends waiting for her, I don’t know.

What could have possibly taken over her mind?  Not that fixing blame made things right, but whose fault was all this?  Ours?  Mine?  What exactly explained the changes in my girl?  Something was broke.  What?  Friends advised us to hang in there, that she was strong willed, going through a phase; she’d be back, more loving than ever.

A friend of a friend called early one morning and told us Mim was sleeping in the basement of a girlfriend’s parent’s house, and I went there to find Mim, hung over, or spaced out, wrapped in blankets on the basement carpet.  She said she wasn’t coming home… and she just looked at me, not talking any more.  Just looking out of the soiled blankets with spooky, un-Mim eyes.  So I left her there.

Unrelated to anything with Mim, I fell off a porch that Joe and I were building off the back of our house and broke my ankle.  A couple of weeks later we got another call from a friend of Mim who told us that Mim would be at a club in Georgetown at a particular time a couple of days in the future.
I got there early, about the time Mim was arriving and she saw me down the block and turn and walked away.  I tried to catch her on my crutches, but couldn’t.

Again another friend told us that Mim had established a relationship with a “street minister” in Georgetown, a young lady in her twenties.  We found her telephone number and made arrangements to meet at a restaurant in Georgetown.  There we were not afforded much respect by the young lady, who said that Mim had told her that Brenda beat her, almost all her life, and I had sexually molested her, that was the reason she left as soon as she could…  we were speechless.

  Thunderstruck…

“That isn’t true… not true…. not at all… Mim’s…”

A waitress came by to tell the lady that she had a telephone call and she left us to take the call… which we surmised was from Mim or about Mim, because she came back soon and said there was an emergency and she had to leave… never to agree to meet us again.

The father of a friend of Mim’s called me one night to say his daughter had told him a little bit about what was going on…  I didn’t know the guy and felt uncomfortable, giving mostly short answers to his questions, rarely acknowledging other things he was saying.
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Not deterred he said it may be something beyond all our ability to change – even Mim’s – but the best person to assess the situation was a child psychologist, and he knew the best one in Georgetown.  His daughter could maybe set up a session between the fellow and Mim, if I could make arrangements with the Doctor.

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Made sense.  I got the doctor’s name, telephone number and the caller’s telephone number, and in two days met with the doctor in his Washington, DC office.  If he was the best, he wasn’t spending money he made on his place of work, because his office was in a grimy office building, and there was no receptionist.  I went in the door with his name on it, and there he was.

In 30 minutes I had explained the situation as best I could.  The doctor sitting behind his desk, took notes without many questions, and at the end, said that I shouldn’t worry too much, because it was a situation like he had heard often before.  He said he’d like to talk with Mim and times he was available were discussed, and then his fee…. And holy mother of god, he asked a ton of money an hour.   I hoped my insurance would cover it, which he said didn’t often happen, but whatever the cost, here seemed something that could get Mim back, so I agreed.

That night I called the father of Mim’s friend and gave him the times the Doctor would be available… he called back the next morning to say Mim would be at the Doctor’s office at such and such a time.
I thanked him, called the Doctor the reserve the time, and set back waiting for something to happen.
What happened first was that the insurance company said they would not pay.  And Brenda said we would take money from our savings.  This was important.

There was no call from the doctor after the meeting with Mim, though Brenda and I waited breathlessly.  A couple of days went by and I finally called him.  He said the session had gone well and in fact they had a follow up session the previous day, and had one schedule this week and another early next week.  I made arrangements to come by his office the middle of that next week.

Like before when I showed up he greeted me inside  his office and rather than offer me a seat in front of his desk, he motioned first to his couch and then to a pair of easy chairs in a conversation cove near a window.  I motioned towards the desk, like we sat before and he went behind his desk, clasp his hands together on his desk, looked at me and smiled what I thought was a sickly smile, almost a smirk.

I asked him for an update and he said he couldn’t discuss anything shared with Mim due doctor/patient confidence… and allowed as how it would take many more session to get specifically at Mim’s problems… no, he said get at our “family” problems.

And then he asked for payment for the four sessions with Mim and the prelim with me, making a stupid point that there was no charge for today.  And the number he put out was staggering… and I said what do I get for this… and he said the knowledge that it was the best thing we could be doing…

More sessions to come and it was a “family” problem?  And we weren’t working this together?  And he never asked if the things Mim might have said were true or not?  And he was coming across as a smug ass-hole.

These last few months had been very hard on me. And Brenda.   And Joe… and probably Mim, but really hard on me and Brenda, because we just did not know what had happened… and we certainly were not guilty of beating her or molesting her as she had claimed to others.  It gave me a dirty feeling to think she could be saying that to anyone, it was so far from the truth.  So filthy.  I did not like paying the freight for this psychologist – who came to me unsolicited from some strange man on the telephone.  And I did not like getting no understanding or respect or sympathy or satisfaction.

I told him to send me a bill.  He asked about scheduling more sessions with Mim and I told him if she wanted to pay for it and I left, feeling that I had been scammed… although in checking there really was a child psychologist by his name with an office in that building.

Brenda and I came to realize that Mim was pretty much gone.  For whatever reason… because of the way she was initially dragooned to our house in Udorn – maybe something her Mother had said in her good-byes – maybe she didn’t receive the princess treatment at McLean high school like she had had overseas, or that she had gotten into drugs or with the wrong crowd.. Or maybe we just didn’t know how to parent.  That I had spoiled her.

She had come back home once when we weren’t there to get some clothes.  Another time a boyfriend in dental school who she had lived with for a short time, who desperately wanted to marry her, came by to drop off some of her things.  Mim had moved on from her relation with him, much to his sorry, and he had come to realize that we could not possible be as horrible as Mim made us out to be, no one could.  He was the one who had brought Mim back that time to pick up clothes and the family pictures throughout the house seem to tell another story from the one Mim told him about her upbringing.

I had a standing invitation at work to take a Chief of Station job in the field, that I had twice turned down because I thought I needed to be here in case Mim came to her senses… or we had the opportunity to talk on some mutual ground… but since Brenda and I decided that that wasn’t goin’ to happen… that Mim wasn’t by all acc’ts having trouble out there making her way – didn’t have the heart ache we did – and wasn’t coming back home.   So I took the job and Brenda, Joe and I sold our McLean house and moved far away.

Mim did stay in touch with Joe and he occasionally gave us updates on where she was and what she was doing.

Joe graduated high school and joined the US Army.  He stayed in contact with everyone and through him Mim arranged a visit with us… she came with her new boyfriend.  The visit was awkward because Mim wanted to pick up as if nothing had happened, and she acted with this new guy like we had had the best of time traveling the world… she said “me and my Dad…” did this and that 50 times during the visit.

Twice after that we tried to get her to come back by herself, once she took the money we wired for airfare and spent it on something else, and was broke come travel time.  Another time she just didn’t show up to get the ticket at the airport terminal.

Then she called Brenda to say that she had moved from Washington, DC to Los Angles to pursue an acting and singing career.  As coincidental as it may seem, we had travel through Los Angeles planned in a couple of months, and Mim met us at the airport and we spent the day with her… just the three of us.

Like the last time we had met with her boyfriend, she acted like nothing had happened in the family.  It was just her Mom and Dad coming for a visit.  She had a magnificent apartment near where OJ Simpson lived.  Very uptown.  And the apartment was richly furnished.

While she avoided telling us then how all this came about, she told us a year or so later that she had always wanted to try Hollywood.  It was always there.  She had just “outlived” Washington and wanted either LA or Hawaii.   She was working as a make-up artist at a TV station in Washington, or she did make up for one or two programs in particular… it was never clear… Whatever, Jessie Jackson was a regular guest on one of the programs and in one after-hours moment in the studio he groped her boobs… in full view of several others.

It was his hush money that got her a one way ticket to the west coast and the cash for the furniture and rent deposit.  Or that’s what she said.  She had lived her own life out on the streets, this exotic beauty, and Brenda and I had the impression her reality was not always like ours.  Her truth was sometimes different from anyone else’s.  There is no question the Jessie Jackson story is what she told us, the question would be what part could be believe…. Though the easiest thing was just to go with it.  Questions made things uncomfortable.  Maybe she could be held more responsible if this re-contact lasted and we were able to mend our relations.

We sent time that day driving around the movie star area of Hollywood, and it seemed that Mim knew someone, or had been to a party, in houses on most every block.

She looked fantastic.  Her clothes were classy.  Her personality was bubbling.

And for a few years, that’s the way it went.  Mim did come back to North Carolina after we retired in 1992; she helped Brenda furnish our retirement home. She was pleasant with relatives… in the here and now it was good.  Questions about the time she had been away went mostly unanswered.  About the future, hard to tell.  She had a Hollywood agent, a PR person.  Was doing some modeling.  Paying the rent.  Had a couple of good chances to get movie parts.   Always when she visited in North Carolina she was on the telephone talking to LA contacts.  Sometime leaving the room to take calls.  Always it seemed she would have to return to LA sooner than we had planned.  She had struck up a friendship with Robert Evans, a movie producer and there were many stories of meeting famous people at his parties.  She said everyone did drugs.  It was part of Hollywood after dark.  Not to worry, it just went with that scene.  It was a gorilla she could handle.

There was little in common between her life there and our lives in the retirement community of Pinehurst, NC.  But there were good moments.  And then whole days it seemed she was on the telephone talking to Hollywood people, sometimes laughing loudly, sometimes talking low.

She had boyfriends, but they came and went pretty fast… and then she got married.  He was a big handsome Belgium, a personal body guard to the stars, including Liz Taylor.  Mim met him when he was working after hours, handling the red rope at some exclusive night club.  Two/three days they knew each other and they just took off, went to Vegas and got hitched.

They had their first big fight within a week.

But they flew out to see us in NC and made a commitment to us to make this thing work.  Yes sir.  And they did make a handsome couple.

In fact they flew back to California and packed their stuff and moved to North Carolina to get away from Hollywood temptations.  Stayed maybe two months and after a big fight he went back to California, leaving his stuff behind.  In a couple of weeks Mim followed. They made up… and then…
Mim became pregnant.  And you would have thought it was the most wonderful thing ever to happen to Brenda.  She said she had dreamed about Mim getting pregnant, prayed she would, because she was sure as a mother Mim would revert to the loving caring person we knew as she grew up.  The whole world was goin’ to be made right.

Only Mim and her husband could not make ends meet.  There were always calls about needing a “loan” to get to the end of the month, before this, that or the other was going to happen, which would produce big bucks.

When Mim was 7 month into the pregnancy, Brenda flew out and found they had no money to buy any baby things.  So Brenda underwrote the cost of fixing up the baby room.  And she went back when Mim was 8 months because things began to look like it would be an early delivery, or something.​

But she was not there when Tristan was born.  She went the following day or so.  Every month she flew cross country, back and forth, back and forth to see Mim and Tristan … and the husband who was hard to like… though to be honest he was very proud of his son…​

When Tristan – our only grandchild – was about one year old, Mim walked out of the marriage.  She had no money, no car, no credit, no place to stay, no plans other than to leave her husband – she and Tristan – and go out to make a life for themselves.

Mim didn’t tell us what she had done for a week or so; time enough to get ensconced in the guest house of a local businessman… maybe a love interest… we were never sure.

Brenda flew out and found the house to be very, very chic.  The place reeked of money.  She met the man of the big house, who was a real estate investor… Brenda didn’t notice any sparks between them… though of course she was all focused on Tristan, and in fact was happy to see Mim take off to do chores during the day, go to casting calls and interview for jobs.  She and Tristan were just fine, the two of them.

I did not know at the time; how we had become tied inexorably to the sometimes wacky world of Mim… because Brenda would never, ever turn her back on whatever Tristan – and incidentally – Mim needed.

I began to get the impression that Mim was aware of this too.

And it was like our bank acc’t had suddenly sprung a leak.  Then it became a flood as Mim and Brenda engaged lawyers to work out divorce and child custody issues.  You’ve never had sticker shock unless you’ve had to hire a Burbank, California divorce lawyer… when you or your daughter was the one asking for a divorce.

It was like that Washington DC child psychologist had charged minimum wages.

Mim’s stay at the guest house of the real estate developer until that arrangement had run it course.  Brenda co-signed an apartment lease with Mim and helped her get a car and a job at Macy’s.  The best that could be done lawyer-wise was joint custody of Tristan… so it seemed Brenda was making cross country trips almost every other time Mim had Tristan for her 10 day period.

Life was crazy… made even more complicated by the fact that I was back working for the CIA and Brenda was flying back on forth to California, seeing more of them than me.

Then this early morning call.  Mim had taken a ride on the drug express when Brenda was back in North Carolina, it seemed pretty clear to me.  I didn’t know if doing drugs big-time made you paranoid, but that was the way she acted.  And what was it she was doin’ under the bridge with Tristan?  At 2 o’clock in the morning.

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I called Brenda a 7:30 in North Carolina and she was on a plane to California by 11:30…

She took a taxi from the airport to the over-garage apartment Mim was now renting.

As I suspected Mim was coming down from a drug trip.  That’s what Brenda said when she called; that Mim was spacey, although Tristan seemed to be OK and looked after.  Mim went to bed soon after Brenda arrived, which was just fine, because Tristan was wide awake and there was nothing Brenda liked more than spending time with that boy.  They fell asleep on a pallet on the floor.

Early the next morning there was a pounding on the front door, near where Brenda and Tristan lay.  Brenda got up and opened the door to a deputy sheriff who said that Mim was being evicted, she had not paid rent in six months – as long as she had stayed there, in fact.  Deputy said everyone had just an hour to get out.  He was boarding the door in an hour’s time.  Brenda read the papers he offered, though she didn’t have her glasses on and just guessed that they were in order and Mim was 6 months behind in rent… but she pleaded for more than an hour’s time to get all their stuff out. 

Deputy gave her until 12 o’clock.  Mid-day and he said there was no wiggle room beyond that.  Not a minute.

Mim was lying in bed listening when Brenda came running back from the front door.   As was her want, she never denied or admitted anything, it was just the way things were working out.

First Brenda called the ex-husband and asked if he’d pick up Tristan for the day, or two days and he said he’d be right over.  Then she got dressed and was pushing Mim to get dressed and feed Tristan before his father got there… and then she started throwing things of Mim in trash bags Mim had in the kitchen.

The ex-husband arrived;  Brenda gave him Tristan with a promise to pick him up in a day or two.
She went back inside called a taxi and when it arrived went to the closest U-Haul to rent a truck.  She hired three Mexicans standing across the street and the four of them sitting in the cab of the truck drove back to Mim’s apartment.

Mim was not there, when they arrived… but the clock was still ticking.  They packed the apartment up and as they moved things to the back of the truck parked at the curb, Mim came walking down a hill towards them, and yelled that they were handling a cupboard  too rough, and to put it down.  She walked by them into the house with a blank look on her face.  She said something to Brenda, Brenda yelled at her to do something, she yelled back, picked up one of the last boxes and carried it out to the truck, never explaining where she had been, never thanking Brenda for bailing her out, again.

The next year 2003, we sold our North Carolina retirement home and moved to Las Vegas, driven by Brenda’s interest in being there for Tristan, helping Mim keep her life on track and away from whatever attracted her to that bridge that night.  We didn’t want to move to California, that was too close; Las Vegas was just 4 hours away on I-15, an easy morning drive.  Beside they played poker in Las Vegas, and I play a little poker.​

For 7 years Brenda kept up her steady mothering and grandmothering of Mim and Tristan in California.  Then she had a stroke, that left the left side of her body paralyzed, and without support the tenuous situation in California with Mim began to come apart.

By 2013 Tristan said he could no longer live with his mom and her unstable habits.  He asked the courts to allow him to return to live with his father and step-mother and because Mim put up no defense, they won.  We found this out after the fact.

It is June 2014 now and we have not seen Tristan since.  He called Brenda for a few months after returning to his father’s house, but then apparently his father found out about that, and it stopped.

Mim is in her mid-40s.  She’s long since aged out of the Hollywood scene.  Her telephone doesn’t ring any more; she’s not invited to the glizey places.  As of mid 2915 we don't much about her life.

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And that’s it.

All things that glitter are not gold.

Not all stories have happy endings.  Not all stories having endings.  Like this one.  Some things happen just to remind us…. that life can be a mean ol’ possum. 

Our hope is that when Tristan reaches his majority, he’ll come back for a long visit.

For now, it's January 2017 as I write this, we haven't heard from Tristan for a couple of years.  We are back in contact with Mim and she came over to spend Christmas 2016 with us.  And it was good.  The visit. We enjoyed each other and did not mention the past.  Not a word. 

Some time you gotta create your own reality, and live in the here and now.