On the Road

I’m currently traveling with a group of people from Malaysia, playing tour guide as we go from city to city, incubator to incubator. Our first stop was in San Francisco, which I’ve always heard is a fun city, but unfortunately I didn’t have a chance to explore much beyond a few blocks from our hotel. However, I was lucky enough to be staying in a corner room on the 19th floor of the hotel, so I was able to see the bay and watch the cable cars traveling up and down the road below.

For the most part, my days have been fairly boring – I’ve been sitting in the back of the room while the Malaysians listen to presenters talk about working with biotechnology entrepreneurs. In fact, that’s what I’m doing as I type this post. The trip has had its interesting moments, though, or else I wouldn’t even bother to write about it.

On my first evening in San Francisco, I met up with M, an old friend I met while I was working in Houston six years ago. She was a weekly evening volunteer at the foster home, so I got to know her fairly well during the hours we spent chatting while holding the infants and interacting with the toddlers. M was a single woman in her early thirties, and toward the end of my year in Houston, she started thinking about adopting one of the babies who had come to us when he was just under two months old. His name was Ricky in those days, and he was and adorable baby boy with big brown eyes and the most infectious laugh I’ve ever heard in an infant. After much soul searching, M decided to begin the long adoption process.

M and I kept up sporadically for a while, and I was thrilled when I heard the adoption had been finalized. I loved seeing pictures of Ricky (though M renamed him) as he grew. However, we lost touch after a couple of years. On a whim, I recently searched for M on Facebook and found her profile. As it turned out, she’s living in the Bay Area, and when she heard I was going to be in San Francisco this week, she suggested we get together. I jumped at the chance, and we met up for dinner on Monday evening.

Seeing “Ricky” after all these years was a special treat. I bonded with the babies in our house, and those are the kind of connections that don’t just disappear. I’ve often wondered how the children are doing now. Ricky is obviously quite a bit bigger and he wears a very trendy pair of glasses now, but his face is almost exactly the same as it was when he was a baby. His personality is also much the same – interacting with him felt so familiar. M had told him about our history, and warned me that he might have some questions for me. About half-way through dinner he asked me if I still lived at the house for babies. I told him I’d moved away, and now I wish I’d talked to him more about what the house was like. Now, I’m thinking about writing him a letter so he’ll have something of his infancy to save.

Otherwise, I enjoyed catching up with M, although I always feel like something of a joy-kill when I give people the update on my life. In this situation, I also had sad news to share about the others M knew at our organization in Houston – Ann is going through a divorce, and Amee recently lost a long battle with cancer. I guess that’s the way life is sometimes, though, and M was comfortable talking about the difficulties of the last year. I’m always glad to be able to talk openly – I’d rather have everything out on the table than feel like people are tiptoeing around the topic of grief in an attempt to spare my feelings (though more likely they’re trying to spare themselves any discomfort).

I have more to report from my trip in general, but this is getting fairly long, so I’ll wrap it up now with a “to be continued…”