Erik’s our miracle child. The Lord intended that he become part of our family: we see no way to believe otherwise. Nor will you, I think, after you’ve heard the story. Maybe He knew that we would otherwise not learn as much about hell as we have since been taught.
As mentioned earlier, we adopted Erik in 1968, when a couple of miscarriages and some medical poking-around had led us to expect that
Rick might otherwise remain an only child. We’d been doing foster care for the New England Home for Little Wanderers (long everybody’s favorite Boston-area charity), largely to sop up the puddles of excess motherliness that tended to surround my Valerie (and sometimes still do). They warned us (the Wanderers did) that if we decided to adopt, we’d be ineligible to keep anybody we’d fostered, so that we wouldn’t get our hopes up about little Maura, or
Sheila, and develop an inappropriate long-term attachment. So, one day, we told ’em we were ready to get in line for adoption, and they stopped the flow of fosters. Also said that we wouldn’t have to serve the usual nine months’ waiting period, ’cause they’d already done all the necessary studies and judged us worthy. So, we started getting everything ready to welcome a new baby among us to stay.
1Forty-eight years later, Valerie and I were visiting with her sisters, Karen and Crystal, at the latter’s home in Los Altos. While the ladies went off to share the mysteries of quilting and other arcanities, Crystal’s husband Ron Packard proposed very kindly to try out some new video equipment, in order to contribute to this personal history. He sat me down in front of a bookcase and invited me to recount some of what happened in 1968. Click for one of the resulting videos; the other is on the next page:
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