When I was eight years old, I flew
to New York alone by mistake. I was
spending the summer in Atlanta with my grandparents, aunt, uncle, and cousins,
and my dad was at a psychologists’ convention in New York. The mistake came as a result of a long
distance telephone call from my dad. We
all knew that a long distance phone call cost thousands and thousands of
dollars, especially if it went on longer than three minutes. So we tried to listen real fast, the way my
dad talked, even though he was a southerner, and southerners usually talk
slowly. They don’t talk slowly when it
costs thousands and thousands of dollars.
Also, one of my dad’s guiding principles was that money wasn’t meant to
be spent. He’d go out of the city to get
day old bread—enough to last a week. And
when he recycled paper towels, that didn’t mean putting them in the recycling
bin. It meant drying them out and using
them again. So knowing how expensive
this call was, we all gathered around the phone in a panic, and my grandmother
bravely took the call. She said three things during that three minute
conversation: Hello. Okay.
And “Love ya too.” And at the end
of the conversation she paced around the living room trying to decide just what
it was my dad had said. Was it, “Don’t
send Noelie to New York tomorrow” or was it “Send Noelie to New York
tomorrow.” (My real name is Noelie, and
relatives have a way of hanging on to your real name longer than other people
do.) After quite a bit of pacing, Grandmother decided it was “Send,” so they
got me on a plane and sent me to New York.
Of course, my dad didn’t know I was
coming, so when I arrived there was no one to meet me, but the New Yorkers were
very friendly and warm. I’d been told
never to get kidnapped or molested, which I think they explained as playing
doctor with grown ups, and my parents advised me that people might offer me candy, so I’d made
a mental note: Don’t get kidnapped. Don’t get molested. Hold out for the people with the candy. So when I arrived in New York, and there was
no one to meet me, I got my suitcase and sat down on it and began the business
of not getting kidnapped or molested.
Nobody offered me candy. But
people kept coming by and saying, “Little girl, where are your mommy and
daddy?” And I kept saying, “My daddy will be here any minute.”
And finally he was.
What happened is that my
grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins had had the foresight to send a
telegram because even though they were pretty sure that my dad had said “Send
Noelie tomorrow” rather than “Don’t send Noelie tomorrow,” he hadn’t specified
a time tomorrow. So they sent a telegram
with the flight number and the arrival time, and my dad finally got the
telegram announcing my arrival time, which was an hour or so before he got the
telegram. So my dad—the man who didn’t
believe that money was meant to be spent, the man who went out of the city to
get a week’s supply of day-old bread, the man who dried out paper towels so we
could use them again—this man took a taxi to get me. And of course, if a three minute telephone
call costs thousands of dollars, a taxi ride went into the millions. But he was very heroic about it. He told me that grandmother had
misunderstood. He was in the middle of
all the sessions now. He had wanted me
to come to NY later. But he also told me
not to tell my grandmother about her mistake because he didn’t want her to feel
bad. Then he turned me over to the wife
of another psychologist, a native New Yorker,
who showed me all around that incredible city, and every one I met was
friendly and warm, and nobody kidnapped or molested me, though some people did
offer me candy.
So it worked
out beautifully. My father had the
chance to be heroic. I got to love New
York. And I had the chance to do some
thinking: If my grandmother had made a
mistake, it was the right mistake. And if I were like my grandmother, as some
people said I was, and I’d inherited the prone to error gene, as some people said I had, then I wasn’t
going to worry about making mistakes as I traveled through life. I was going to focus on making the right
mistakes. And I think I’ve made a lot of
the right mistakes.
But the point here is that Daddy as heroic. And tomorrow--even before I share the 40 messages it took to get a group of five friends together, I'm sharing part 2 of Daddy's heroism.
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