Before we knew it, it was time to go home for Christmas. First we flew to Dallas/Ft. Worth, since Arlington, Texas, where Jane had family and connections, lay halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth, or right smack dab in the middle of the Dallas-Ft. Worth megapolis, however you wanted to look at it. Once again, we were terrorized by the speed of everything, particularly the traffic. Everyone drove huge, gas-guzzling automobiles that contained explosively powerful engines, in addition to radar detectors installed on the dashboard. This way, drivers could know when to slam on their brakes so that the rest of the time they could drive thirty mph over the speed limit, which was fifty mph faster than we were used to going in Costa Rica. It was like being in Driver’s Ed all over again, venturing out in the school’s vehicle after having just watched one of those gory, blood-and-guts-spattered cautionary films about the dangers of speeding—you know, those ones filled with dead, maimed, and vegetable-ized (for life, of course) teenagers. After viewing one of those cinematic gems, driving five mph with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake seemed just about right.

 

The boutique show in which we had a booth turned out to be the Arlington, Texas Junior League’s boutique show. I had never attended a Junior League function in Texas. For that matter, I had never attended a Junior League function anywhere. Texas at this time was dripping with money, oozing with it, wallowing in it. The recession in the early eighties that had hit the rest of the United States so hard didn’t even look Texas’s way, and since Texas always likes to do everything in a big way, Texans were spending their money in a big way.

 

This is probably why Paul and Richard’s offerings didn’t fare so well here. Everything they had on display was not only ethnic-looking, it was homespun and rustic. And to be honest, the delightful Ticos, who would be trillionaires if they could export Pura Vida, just weren’t obsessive-compulsive enough to produce the kind of crafts that these buyers wanted. One lady at the boutique show had some exquisite Afghani gowns that weighed about thirty pounds from all the beadwork on them and they sold briskly. Another woman had brought clothes and textiles from Guatemala, and as everyone knows, the fabrics produced by the Maya are some of the finest and most beautiful on the planet.

 

But the wooden products from Costa Rica were not kiln-dried, and as soon as they left their tropical clime, they began to warp and crack. The leather goods, not properly cured, began to smell very much like a dead animal after a short time. The dyes in the fabrics were not set, so they ran terribly when they got wet (once, when watching the Costa Rican soccer team playing in the Olympics on TV, we noticed that all the players’ arms and legs were streaked by the bright red and yellow dyes of their uniforms, which bled copiously as they as the players began to perspire). And bamboo furniture just didn’t seem to make the right sort of fashion statement for Texas. Later, when we started giving away some of these products, we found out that all the cute little decorative bamboo covers for boxes of tissues were just a tiny bit too small, too, and wouldn’t fit over any U.S. Kleenex boxes. So it’s probably just as well that we didn’t sell any of those.  

 

We sold a few napkins and tablecloths, but it was discouraging. And we didn’t find out until later, but the lukewarm response to these goods sounded the death knell for the import-export company—especially since Paul was doing so well personally and cleaning up his act, which was actually the main purpose of Richard’s presence and the formulation of this particular company. Right now, though, we enjoyed the bliss of ignorance as we flew here and there on our holiday rounds. We stopped by Little Rock to see Dick, who, three months after Kackie’s death, wasn’t doing very well, poor guy. Dick is the kind of man who definitely fares better with a woman in his life and he was still feeling traumatized. In an effort to cheer him up, I made French toast one morning but got so nervous trying to follow in Kackie’s culinary footsteps that I made some of the worst French toast I’ve ever cooked in my life, plunging my poor father-in-law into an even greater depression.

 

After a few days in Little Rock, we flew to Kansas City to spend Christmas with my parents. Kansas City, for anyone who’s never been there, is a particularly beautiful city. Non-midwesterners tend to think that the entire middle of the county is as flat as the surface of water, but in fact, a great deal of it is composed of lovely, undulating, rolling hills, like in my home town. It’s a very green city, too, dotted with parks and graced with a bounty of lush, leafy hardwoods. When I was a child, mature elm trees lined many of the neighborhood streets, their limbs reaching up and meeting overhead in a graceful, classic arch so that riding my bike down them, I always felt as if I were gliding through an emerald cathedral. Sadly, Dutch elm disease killed just about every single elm tree in Kansas City, but the arboreally-minded civic leaders replanted locust trees, a hardy if not nearly as pretty a species; and maples, oaks, birches, dogwoods, tulip magnolias, smoke trees, and poplars grow everywhere—in people’s yards, in parks, along the tops of rounded, cream-colored limestone bluffs that always look to me like the earth’s teeth. Builders from earlier times used a lot of this stone in Kansas City’s handsome neighborhoods, either for entire houses, or just for the massive covered porch.

 

 

Perhaps this is why, when the city grew, it grew to the south.

 

This Christmas, Aunt Connie was coming to spend the holidays with us, and we had coordinated our flight times with hers as best we could so that my parents wouldn’t have to make an extra trip to the airport. We arrived first, and her flight was due in another couple of hours, so my mom and dad decided it would be fun to have dinner at the restaurant of a nearby hotel while waiting for her. Connie was going to eat on the plane.

 

When we landed and debarked, my mom was there waiting for us outside the gate, while my dad made lazy circles around the terminal, cruising by the loading zone every few minutes so that he would be right there when we emerged. My dad enjoyed driving because when he was in a car, despite the fact that he used a hand brake and accelerator, he was pretty much the same as anyone else. But actually, more than his paralysis, the handicap my dad suffered that most affected his driving ability was the fact that he had only one eye. He had put the other one out in a terrible accident during his childhood when he was four years old, trying to cut a slice off of a watermelon, and the knife slipped. It meant that he didn’t have much depth perception. Most of his life, my dad was a good driver, and his lack of depth perception never concerned me. I never even really thought about it. But lately, now that he was aging, we had all noticed that he was slipping some in the driving category, bouncing over the occasional curb, taking a nip at the occasional traffic island.

 

After we retrieved our luggage, we walked outside where my dad was waiting, then piled our bags around his wheelchair in the tailgate of the station wagon. For some reason, my mom decided that I should sit in the front next to my dad while she would get in back with Richard. In retrospect, I can’t help but wonder if she was subconsciously throwing me to the wolves—she had never relinquished that seat in my memory—but I thought hopefully at the time that she offered it to me because it was the nicest one.

 

My dad pulled out smoothly from the curb, while I knocked the snow off my boots so that it wouldn’t soak through and chill my feet. Kansas City has very cold and often snowy winters, something I wasn’t prepared for at all, having just spent the last year in the tropics. Fortunately, my dad had the car all warmed up and toasty, so I snuggled my feet forward to get them as close to the heater as possible. My dad accelerated smoothly onto the highway, too. That was his driving style, a smooth, unhurried one.

 

Part of the reason that he had developed this style, I believe, was because he was a space cadet who seemed to leave his body with regularity, particularly when he was driving. So it’s probably not surprising that he sailed past the exit we needed to take in order to go to the restaurant they had selected, his face blissed out from some spiritual realm that I imagined he traveled, a wisp of a glassy smile frozen on his lips.

 

“Lynn!” my mother snapped from the back seat. “You just drove past the exit!”

 

Up, up swam my dad’s consciousness from the depths of the limpid pool it had been occupying. He turned his head to the right, registered that indeed, this was the exit he wanted, and although he was yards past the turn-off, he smoothly swung the car over toward it, plowing through the snow on the shoulder, and headed straight for one of those gargantuan green-and-white highway signs. I watched in fatalistic horror as the large, thick, heavy steel post that held up one side of the sign loomed ahead of us. My dad was braking, but we were skidding on the snow, careening closer and closer and closer to this enormous metal post that was pretty much lined up directly to cave in the windshield and crush whoever was sitting beneath it—namely, me.

 

“Oh, shit!” blurted my prim, prudish mother, who had never cussed any more strongly than whooping out an occasional “Hot damn!” or “Hells bells!” during a baseball game. “Oh, shit!” she yelped again, gripping the back of the seat so hard my head rolled into the indentation.

 

There was nothing anyone could do. I braced myself, we slid serenely and inexorably toward the post, and, yes, smashed into it head-on. But the post simply broke away from the ground and the sign swung gently back and forth on the remaining intact post. It was some new design that was conceived for exactly this circumstance. “A break-away post,” said the highway patrolman who stopped to help us and make sure that we were all right. Everyone was okay, but I’ll bet if someone could have harvested the adrenalin generated in that car, it would have been enough to power the space shuttle off-planet. Only my dad seemed to have been unaffected by the whole event. When he decided to back out onto the highway (no one is entirely sure what he was trying to do—still make the exit perhaps?), my mother lunged over the front seat and told him in no uncertain terms that Richard was going to take over driving.

 

Dad scooted over to the passenger’s side without a word, I got in back with my mom, and Richard managed to take over the wheel in a way that was comforting to my father, not demeaning. As we always did in my family, we pretended afterward that nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

 

So we went to the restaurant and ate dinner and then returned to the airport to pick up Aunt Connie, who of course was dressed to travel in a dapper oatmeal-colored suit, everything packed expertly and pragmatically into one carry-on bag that had wheels attached to it. Her presents she had mailed ahead of her so that she wouldn’t have to carry them.

 

Christmas proceeded pleasantly and uneventfully after that and then we flew out to California to see Kathleen and Joe and Patrick. Soon, it was time to fly back to Costa Rica, which we did on New Year’s Eve, a terrific time to fly, as a matter of fact, since planes are practically empty and even the coach passengers get free champagne. Richard and I cuddled up together in our seats, and I guess we radiated such contentment that the steward remarked to us at one point that we sure looked happy.

 

Well, we felt lucky, that was certain. This entire last year had renewed my faith in the universe, which had been badly shaken by the previous year when we couldn’t find work and everything looked so bleak. As always, however, the universe likes to shake things up; and in a few short months, our sojourn in paradise was going to be over. But for now, we toasted each other with champagne and reveled in our good fortune.

 

 

 

*Intro:

 

At the end of 1982, both Richard and I had been out of work for a year, despite constant looking, and the best we had been able to come up with was scrounging for odd jobs. It was an economic climate much like the one we’re in now, and we were feeling both dejected and panicked about what the future might hold for us. We certainly could never have imagined what happened next: a dream job in a dream country for a dream boss.

 

This is Chapter 31 of the memoir I wrote about the year-and-a-half that Richard and I spent living in Costa Rica. It was quite the adventure, living with a an eccentric and flamboyant heiress** from Dallas, her elegant and erudite husband who wrote Westerns, and their handsome, bad boy son, whom Richard used to babysit. Oh, yeah, and next door resided the safe house for Eden Pastora, aka “Commander Zero,” leader of the Contras who were waging a civil war with the Sandanistas in Nicaragua at that time.

 

This was a particularly golden era in Costa Rica’s history, before it became “discovered,” even before the introduction of television there, really (it started coming in during the time we lived there). It was wild and exotic and magical and amazing.

 

 

**Jane, sadly, passed away not long ago, but she left a legacy as colorful as she was. In 1984, she commissioned one of the largest environmental sculptures in the Western Hemisphere, a set of standing stones in Arlington, Texas that were designed and built by sculptor Norm Hines. Caelum Moor has been a source of enormous controversy over the years, which I’ll write about one of these days. In the meantime, feel free to Google “Caelum Moor” and see what turns up. It’s fascinating.