Richard’s parents arrived next, and they brought with them a very different energy than my parents. Richard’s family had always fascinated me, ever since I met Kathleen in college. For one thing, they had all these great names! Richard’s and Kathleen’s grandmother on their mother’s side was known to absolutely everyone as “Mama Kitty.” Her husband, their grandfather, was called by his wife’s pet names, “Honey Dear” or “Pappy Dear.” Even the guys he worked with at the tire store called him Pappy Dear. Mama Kitty was a five-foot-two, 100 lb. spitfire, a true Southern matriarch who ruled the family. Honey Dear, as his name implies, was a total sweetheart, one of the kindest, gentlest, most playful men I’ve ever met. (Richard must have inherited a lot of genes from Pappy Dear.) Mama Kitty’s brothers and their wives and children had terrific names, too: Dootsie, Mugs, Money, Dit, Peewee, Jumps, Pearl, Willard Mac, and Wilna Mae, to name just a choice few. These people were warm-hearted, down-to-earth, unpretentious souls who made their home in Louisiana.

 

One of Richard’s favorite stories about his extended family took place in San Francisco. We met Richard’s Uncle Billy and his wife Jumps, son Willard Mac and daughters Wilna Mae and Paula there one time while Billy attended a Marine convention. They invited us out to a Chinese restaurant and we took them to one that Kackie had ferreted out during one of her gastroanthropological surveys. After we were seated, the waiter filled our cups with green tea, and Richard’s relatives all poured about three heaping tablespoons of sugar into their tiny little tea cups.

 

“By the way,” remarked Paula, “do y’all like that chino coffee?”

 

Richard and I looked at each other, puzzled. Since we were in a Chinese restaurant, we thought that perhaps it was some type of Chinese coffee. “I’m not sure,” he replied. “I don’t think we’ve had chino coffee.”

 

Paula sighed and took a sip from her cup, then decided to add a little more sugar. “Well, we went to an Italian restaurant for lunch today, and they served us a cup of chino coffee.” She pronounced it “cuppa chino” and for the first time, a light went on in our heads.

 

“Ohhh, cappuccino?” I asked.

 

She nodded. “That’s what they called it, a cuppa chino. Anyway, we didn’t like it. It tasted burnt!”

 

You know, she’s right! It does taste burnt.

 

Mama Kitty’s children, Kackie, Arline, and Bubba, all took a different life path, however, than Mama Kitty’s siblings and their children, many of whom stayed in Louisiana and worked the oil fields. Both Kackie and Arlene married ministers, while Bubba also became a minister. They represented a fairly distinguished crew, as Bubba obtained his Ph.D. in Theology from Princeton University, and Arline’s husband Randy (Randolph Taylor, a direct descendant of John Randolph, the famous colonial statesman from Virginia) served as the first Moderator of the Presbyterian church when the northern and southern churches reunited in 1983 after splitting apart in The Civil War. Richard’s father, Dick, also held a Ph.D., and Richard treasures memories of scholarly theologians such as Marcus Barth, the son of the famous Karl Barth, holding spirited discussions in his family’s den when they came to visit. Dick also marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, a choice which made his family a target for harassment. Richard remembers hearing a ruckus outside his home one night and looking out the window to see a burning cross planted in their yard, one of the most terrifying experiences of his life.

 

Oh, but I don’t want to forget the story of Mammy and Big Daddy! Mammy was Richard’s great-grandmother, Mama Kitty’s mother, and she was by all accounts one of the dearest, sweetest women who ever walked this planet. However, she married young and unwisely, and her husband, a dandy from a wealthy plantation family, turned out to be a creep. He continually ran off with what were referred to as “honky-tonk women,” returning home just long enough to get his wife pregnant and then taking off again. When he was finally too broke and fat and old to snare any more honky-tonk women, he returned permanently to Mammy’s family home where she lived with her sisters. She spent the next twenty years pretending that he didn’t exist. She would look right through him if their paths crossed, and Kathleen told me that she never once heard her say a word to Big Daddy.

 

He was scary, too, she said, because he had put an eye out in a brawl. One day when he was working in the garden, he removed his glass eye and set it on a fence post where a crow came along and snatched it up. He never did get it back and he couldn’t afford a new one. So he just had his bad eye sewn up. And it was leaky, Kathleen confided to me with a shudder. It was suppurating and weepy and horrible. And she always had to go kiss Big Daddy on the cheek when she arrived with her family for a visit.

 

The family tragedy, though, was Bubba’s untimely death at age forty from melanoma. I never met Bubba, as he died before Richard and I met, but from all accounts, he was a charmer and a character. He frequently boasted that he had champagne tastes on a beer budget, and he loved to make everyone laugh. His motto was “Celebrate life.” It would be hard to find a more popular guy, it seemed— everyone loved him, his parents, his sisters, his wife, his daughters, his nieces and nephew, his congregation and his many friends. So when he died (when Richard was twenty-one), it devastated the entire extended family and left a huge, gaping hole that never filled in.

 

At any rate, Dick and Kackie’s visit turned out to be much more comfortable than my parents’ visit. This derived partially from the fact that Dick and Kackie were two of Jane and Horace’s closest friends, but also from the fact that Kackie had the personality of a true anthropologist. She didn’t speak Spanish, but we often discovered her in the kitchen with Lijia and Ana, giggling up a storm and somehow managing to swap recipes.

 

I found Kackie, in particular, to be fascinating, so it was disappointing to me that although she had embraced me enthusiastically as Kathleen’s best friend, she became much more emotionally distant when I began going out with her son. I don’t know that anyone could have been good enough for Richard in her eyes. And I’m afraid that I might have been perceived as something of a rival. As I wasn’t close to my own mom, I had hoped to strike up an affectionate mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship; but apparently that wasn’t in the cards.

 

Their visit passed rather uneventfully, actually, since they got along so well with the household staff and they were flexible people. We went to the language school once again so that they could meet our instructors and we went to Lancaster Gardens, an orchid preserve outside of San José that had thousands of orchids from the big, showy variety favored for corsages to teeny weeny, subtly colored orchids that looked a little bit like gnats. We took trips to the summits of the Poaz and Irazú volcanoes and we visited Cartago to see the two famous cathedrals, one that lay in ruins from an earthquake during colonial times, the other the current main cathedral for the country. Both Kackie and Dick enjoyed historical outings. Alan even came to San José from Monteverde in order to see Kackie, and it was touching to see them walking companionably together during an outing we made to a park outside of San José. Alan clearly loved Kackie and regarded her as a second mother.

 

We learned later, however, that beneath her cheerful exterior, Kackie was trying trying to manage a great deal of rage. For years, she had struggled with resentment that stemmed from feeling she came second to her husband’s church and lately, she felt she had been treated rather shabbily by the university where she taught. She had opted for tenure over a raise at one point in their early history as a university, so they couldn’t fire her, but as the faculty became more distinguished, it seemed the administration became more dismissive and antagonistic toward her because she didn’t have a Ph.D., perhaps hoping to force her out. Ironically, she was an enormously popular teacher, but this never seems to impress university administrators, who prefer high-powered researchers who can bring more money into the school coffers. Perhaps, too, she had never really recovered from her brother’s death.

 

Her struggles didn’t surface during this trip, however, and after they left, a childhood friend of Richard’s and the Keltons’ came for a visit, bringing more wonderful Southern energy. Fred’s family presented as a truly classic Faulknerian family as far as names went—one in which the names weren’t quite so colorful, but they were all the same. They named successive generations after themselves and their ancestors, using surnames as first names, too, and generally creating a great deal of confusion for the uninitiated.

 

I received an interesting initiation to Fred’s family myself. Richard and I had spent our honeymoon in the Pacific Northwest where I had unexpectedly encountered pollen to which I was terribly allergic, triggering a rather scary asthma attack in Eugene, Oregon. Richard knew that Fred had an aunt living in the Seattle area, so we took the bus there in order to see a physician and have a place to stay. Fred’s aunt turned out to be a tall, regal-looking but affectionate woman who took us in like family. As an additional treat, Fred’s grandmother, Grandmother Gray, was visiting her daughter. Like Mama Kitty, Grandmother Gray (I was expected to call her Grandmother Gray, not Mrs. Gray), was a tiny bird of a woman, but you could tell that she ruled the family with an iron fist. She held court in a chaise-lounge out on the deck—a deck which had an incredible view of Lake Washington, the steep, soaring sides of which bristled thickly with every manner of conifer imaginable: cedar, pine, yew, juniper, fir, spruce, and hemlock. Whenever we went out to join Grandmother Gray, she would start in on family lore, telling us about four generations of Grays. There were four Freds and four Lavonas, but she never distinguished which generation she was referring to. The family name of Berry also made an appearance, and as I mentioned, they took to using surnames as first names, so there was a Berry Gray and a Gray Berry. There was no Berry Berry, though, much to my disappointment.

 

Throughout all of her stories, she kept referring to “the recent unpleasantness.” I assumed she was talking about some rift in the family, but I couldn’t begin to imagine what might have happened. So at one point, I drew Richard aside and asked him, “What’s the recent unpleasantness? She keeps mentioning ‘the recent unpleasantness.’”

 

He smiled wryly. “She’s talking about the Civil War.”

 

“No way!” I exclaimed. I refused to believe this. I figured he was either pulling my leg or didn’t know what I was talking about. However, as I continued to listen carefully to her stories about all the Freds, Lavonas, Grays, and Berrys, I realized that he was right!

 

At any rate, Fred had been friends with Richard ever since Richard was a toddler. His parents attended Richard’s church, the children went to the same high school, and they lived in nearby neighborhoods. Fred, sadly, lost his dad to an unexpected, instantly fatal heart attack when he was a boy, but fortunately, Fred’s mother, a gorgeous, elegant woman, had remarried a lovely man who vied for Biggest Sweetheart Award with Pappy Dear. Fred and Richard had double-dated together in high school and gone on trips together and even worked together on his uncle’s mink ranch in Washington. Fred is one of the most pleasant, solid, emotionally even persons I’ve ever known. Just being around him is relaxing. He brought with him his new girlfriend, Toni, who was originally from Tyler, Texas, and a real hoot. A story about Fred and Toni that I always enjoyed involved their early courtship. Toni, as many Southern girls do, kept her childhood stuffed animals (two dachshunds named Wink and Dink) on her bed even after she graduated from college. When Fred spent the night, he would unceremoniously toss Wink and Dink off the bed to tease Toni, who would, of course, scoop them up indignantly and glower at Fred.

 

“Fred!” she would scold him. “You’re going to hurt their feelings!”

 

“Who? Dink and Donk?”

 

“Their names are Wink and Dink!” she chided. They loved this game.

 

 

After Fred and Toni left, we didn’t have any visitors for a while, but that was okay. We had plenty to keep us occupied. Richard and Paul were visiting craft centers all over the country to choose wares for their company, I was working hard on my novel and on my artwork, and we were exploring the country on our own. By now, we had created a life for ourselves in paradise, and we were even starting to make some good friends.

 

 

*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 19 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.