Friday Morning, for Ada and Kevin
One January day during my third grade year, Mrs. Mackenzie marched us outside and lined us up against the cool brick wall facing the playground. A Polaroid camera hung from her neck, and one by one, she asked us to smile. Flash! Slide. Out popped a photograph, which she gave us to hold and shake dry. I remember I wore my red teddy bear sweater and my hair in two pigtails sticking straight out the side of my head. We slipped these photos inside a letter to an unknown student our age. I remember my letter, too, word for word as if it were yesterday.
Dear Pen Pal,
My name is Birdie. I like dogs. I don't like math. My left thumb has a double joint. I have four sisters. My dad is a teacher. What does your dad do?
Sincerely Yours,
Birdie
Mrs. Mackenzie sent these letters to an inner city school in Baltimore. And one day late in the Spring she opened a large manilla envelope and passed each of us a response. I still have that first letter from Ada. I keep it framed near my desk.
Dear Birdie,
I never heard that name before. My name is Ada. I live with a foster family. This is my third family. I like dogs too. I want to be your friend.
love,
Ada
I didn't know what a foster family was. I asked Mrs. Mackenzie but she didn't give me a straight answer. Ada's face stared at me through huge brown eyes in the photo she enclosed in the letter. She wore a yellow dress with a white princess collar, and her hair frizzed around her face in a natural afro.
I wrote back to Ada. I told her about my dog and my sisters. I told her about Mrs. Mackenzie, too, how she had a round wart on the back of her neck and the way she made us listen to classical music before class began every morning. I told her to write to me at home over the summer, and gave her my address. She wrote back a few weeks later, and I read about her favorite city park and how much she wished she had sisters, too.
Those four small letters turned into many years of friendship. I followed her heartache as she moved from foster family to foster family. I grew up poor, but my life was so cushy and forgetful next to Ada's. I had a mom and dad and sisters and dog and cat and lived in a real house with a backyard and we took driving vacations every summer. Ada didn't know month to month who her guardians would be, and she never took one true vacation growing up. Her father was serving a life sentence in a Virginia prison for shooting her mother. I wanted to visit her but my parents said no. I wanted her to visit me, but she had no way to purchase a bus ticket to a destination many states north. So we wrote. And wrote.
I ran away from home, got pregnant, married young. Ada got pregnant too, but her boyfriend ran off with some other woman and she raised her son alone. She named him Kevin, and she promised me and him she'd be a teacher one day and help girls like her. She did, too, attending community college to get a GED and then undergraduate classes in subjects like education and remedial reading skills. She earned a teacher's certificate and started substitute teaching somewhere around the time I left my first husband.
Life, it was life we shared, some kind of strange life of fits and starts and stop signs and green lights, just two women doing the best they can in a world of messy uncertainty. Ada bought a city condo in New York and I bought a suburban house, and we planned our first reunion on the phone, a celebration to congratulate Kevin on the successful culmination of his high school years. I flew to the big city and ate chicken and corn and biscuits with Ada and Kevin and their friends, and though I was the only white person at the table I felt as much a part of the family as I did at any of my own family reunions.
Kevin introduced me to his three best buddies, each of them a wearing the uniform of an army soldier. Kevin wore one, too. He joined the service so that he could get an education, and he would soon fly to Iraq on a mission to find and keep the peace. I watched them drink beer and reminisce about the women they loved and lost, and saw so much of myself and Ada and our unending dreams inside each of them. I left them laughing on the balcony and walked to the kitchen to give Ada a hug.
"Dang it, girl. I don't like seeing all those beautiful boys in the service. Your son is a wonder. He looks so much like you, and he has that same underlying quiet that you have."
Ada's eyes filled with tears, and she hugged me in return. She didn't say anything, but I knew she worried about Kevin and didn't want to see him hurt. I got his overseas address that fall and started sending him a weekly care package filled with snacks and deodorant and batteries and magazines. I stood in line at the convenience store in my town buying Playboys and Penthouses and plunked down my money on the counter like it was nobody's business. I didn't like the way those books objectified women but this was Kevin I was helping. He wrote to me many times telling me how much those silly magazines meant to him and the other men. I got to know his troop-mates, and stuffed little personal notes to each of them inside the box. They knew I was some nutty liberal hippy California mother friend of Kevin's mom, so they sent me letters in return about the Iraqi children they met or the way they knew - just knew - that their efforts were bringing the world to a better place.
One day last year my phone rang. It was Ada.
"Kevin's dead." She hung up, left me holding the receiver to my ear, my heart skipping beats in unrelenting grief.
Ada died, too, three months later when the grief overcame her, became who she was. She lay in bed, a bottle of pills by her side, never to wake. I attended both funerals, left flowers and notes at graveside, cried for that little afro girl with the yellow dress. I miss her so much.
It's almost a year later, and life goes on. And because it's Friday, I'm packing more girly magazines and cologne and shaving supplies and fig newtons into brown cardboard boxes and stuffing a handful of personal notes inside. I don't believe in war, in any kind of conflict that results in harm. I'm just a nutty hippy mother. But I believe in Kevin, and Ada, and all those sweet boys with guns, and I'm not going to let them down.
11:11:21 AM 
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