Slides 20, 44, 45 and 64

The Top Photo: Mickey Mouse and me

The Date: Early July, 1965

The Photographer: My cousin Peter

I went with my Californian cousins to Disneyland. I may have been the first in my town to go there—maybe the first in all of Northern Pennsylvania. People from our parts didn’t travel much. A trip to Disneyland was a big deal in 1965. I suppose it still is but back then Disneyworld was six years from opening and Disneyland, Walt’s original dream, was still one of a kind. Walt himself kept a little apartment on the second floor of the fire station, just inside the main gate, and it was not unusual to see him strolling down Main Street greeting his guests. Like most American kids, I watched Walt Disney Presents every Sunday night so I was familiar with many scenes around the park. What I’d not seen I imagined well.

I was twelve years old, only days from turning thirteen as evidenced by the slides in the carousel. In one I stand in my madress hat with Mickey Mouse, shaking his white glove, feeling a little silly knowing I might be too old for my level of excitement. In another, two mermaids lay sunning on the rocks of a serene lagoon, apparently unaware that I am photographing their alluring, scaly forms from The Sky Ride gondola floating high above. I remember viewing the processed slide for the first time and being disappointed that the mermaids appear so far away. I recalled capturing them in my viewfinder. I remembered focusing the lens so carefully. Believe me, I had 'em! They were right there! I rode The Sky Ride a lot that day. The ticket taker knew my name.

On one of my flights I was stunned to find the mermaids gone. I peered deep into the coral green. A fleet of grey submarines followed a rail around the lagoon. There! Right beside a sub, I saw one swimming porpoise like only more attractive than any porpoise I’d envisioned. Even from so high I could see she was beautiful. I had to get on that sub for a closer look. My cousin Peter rode the gondola in the seat across from me. He was a year younger. He stretched his chubby frame to look over the hand rail dangling spit from his lips. It was a game he’d nearly perfected. The idea was to let the spit stretch toward the ground a few inches—maybe as many as four or five—and then suck it back in before it fell on the tourists below. Unsuccessful in his last attempt he jerked his head back in the gondola and slunk down as far as the safety bar would allow.

“Oh Sheesh,” he said, howling in laughter, “I think I got that lady bad.”

“Hey, you wanna try that submarine ride?” I said casually.

“Naw. Look at the line. It’s clear over to the Matterhorn. Let’s do this some more.”

So we took another ride across. This time from a distance I could see the creatures were back, tail fins flapping playfully, bodies glistening in the late afternoon sun. When we were directly above them, the gondola stopped for about a minute swinging slowly back and forth. I did not know for certain that it was an answer to prayer. It may have been a coincidence. Either way, I took the opportunity to snap a picture. I looked at my cousin. He was about year away from sharing my interest.

“I think I’ll try that sub,” I suggested again. “I always wanted to ride one. You comin’ or not?"

We stood for a little over an hour and as we neared the front of the line I peered toward the outcropping of rock where the mermaids lived. They were gone. This either meant they’d punched their time cards and blended into the mostly human park populace or perhaps they were back in the water. At the front of the line, we squeezed through the turn style and descended the stairs into one of the eight subs circling the lagoon. Ours was called Nautilus. I grabbed the first tiny seat, flipped it down and peered out my porthole into a coral reef possessing beauty only Disney and God could create. Slowly the sub began to move. We heard loud sonar pings and the voice of our captain. ”Let me be the first to welcome you to the port of Rainbow Ridge, the gateway to the wonderland of the sea. Please keep your hands and arms inside the submarine. The fish get mighty hungry!”

My cousin looking through his own window said, “Oh cool, look at that big fish. It looks almost real.”

I hardly heard their words. I shoved my nose against the tiny window and tried to look right or left, my breath condensing on the cold glass. Crabs, spiny lobster, a large grouper, a giant squid and then more sonar pings.

“Now ahead of us, folks, is a seaweed forest. The submarine’s pressurized atmosphere sometimes get to you, and makes tangles of seaweed take on strange shapes like fish and maybe even mermaids.” I shoved my face against the glass. No mermaids.

The captain droned on, “Now we’re going deep into the ocean to view a dazzling maritime graveyard.” A mournful sound filled the submarine echoing my fading hopes. “There my friends is the saddest sound of the ocean,” the captain said. “That is the song of the hump-backed whale.”

He talked the entire time but peering deeply into the ocean depths, beneath polar caps and past Neptune’s sputtering paint pots, I heard little. After seven or eight minutes he said, “Well I can see we’re once again approaching Rainbow Ridge and we’ll now begin our ascent. You may need to pop your ears.” I’d seen the subs from the sky so I knew we’d not descended but now my heart sunk deeply. This was our last day. My cousin would never agree to wait in line again and we couldn’t stay on for another ride. We’d tried that twice at Pirates of the Caribbean and been told by a human pirate that we ought not try it again if we hoped to live another day. He let out a laugh and a loud arghhh. Then leaning near our faces with a distinctly southern Californian accent he whispered menacingly, “You - really - do - not - want - to - mess - with - me. You understand don’t you?” That seemed a bit harsh for one of Walt’s employees but yes… we understood.

I was about to pull away from my porthole when I saw a splash of bubbles and something swimming toward me. I cupped my hands goggle like around my eyes and tight against the glass. Yes! It was a mermaid! She swam to my window, reoriented her body vertically, smiled and blew me a kiss. Graceful bubbles escaped her lovely lips as I felt my face flush. She was an exquisite specimen. Her scales, glimmering rainbow colors in the refracted coral light, modestly covered her partially human form. She ascended slowly toward the surface and I took her in fully—thick flowing hair, tanned human skin, dark eyes, two large frustratingly effective clamshells and luminescent scales flashing tiny dots of light on the palms of my hands. She was only inches beyond my face. Then with one flip of her impossibly long fin she was gone.

My camera hung around my neck but I never thought to take a picture. Instead I experienced the moment. The sub stopped and the captain thanked us. “I hope you’ve enjoyed your trip into the wonderland of the sea. Please lift your seat as a courtesy to our next guests.”

My cousin said, “Cool.” I looked at him and realized he not seen her. The portholes were too small, the glass too thick and of course there was that oddity of refracted light. Only I’d seen her smile, felt her kiss and gazed upon her lithe sparkling form. She was mine alone.

Twenty years later and three thousand miles away, I sat around a New England meal with my wife Judy and our closest friends. I shared my siren tale. Laughing, my buddy said, “What a great picture of that peculiar passage from boyhood to being a man. And… it sure rings true. Our son turned thirteen last week. I opened his dresser drawer the other day. On one side were his Legos and on the other side his shaving cream and razor.”

Ah yes. I suspect it was something like that for us all. For me it was Mickey on one slide and mermaids on the other.

Slides 95, 96, 97, 98, 6 and 4

The Slide: Judy and me in Sweden

The Date: June of '75

The Photographer: My father

My paternal grandfather grew up in the province of Smaland in southern Sweden. It is to this day a beautiful land of misty white birch, fields of buttercups and stonewalls everywhere. The walls are not decorative like those in New England. The walls in Smaland are big, five feet tall, six feet across the top, stretching field after field and longer every year.

Each spring the fields yield an abundance of new boulders. The farmers gather this crop they did not sow and pile it higher along the walls preparing for a more fruitful harvest. This hard land was my grandfather's home.

Barely more than a boy, he embraced his mom and dad for the last time and left those rocky fields of tiny potatoes, dreaming of deeper, darker, American soil. The fields he envisioned were probably in Minnesota, where I now live, but he had no idea how vast his new country was. By the time he reached western Pennsylvania, years had passed. He now knew the love of a wife who spoke his language. He knew the joy and worrisome responsibility of young children. He knew the hopeless monotony of American factories and the sweat of the oil fields. And he knew the ache in an immigrant's heart—an ache for which there was no remedy.

One day he saw something that filled him with joy. A "For Sale" sign stood in a field by a farm nestled on a hillside. The farmhouse didn't look like much and was far too small for his growing family, but it was every bit as good as what he'd known in Sweden, maybe better. There was plenty of lumber to build a barn. The few fields were dark soil, and most wonderfully, there were boulders everywhere. He was finally "home" in America.

My father grew up on that poor farm, sharing the tiny house with his mom, his dad and five siblings. It was a tough life but joy nestled on that rocky hillside. My father's mother, my grandmother, had not met her husband's family in Sweden but she wrote to his sisters faithfully, for sixty years, nearly every week.

In 1966, my grandfather died. My father felt terribly sad that Grandpa never made it back to Sweden. "I should have taken him for a visit," he said. "I could have made it happen." So for his mom, he did make it happen. In June of '75, my father, mother and younger sister Ingrid drove to the farm, picked up my grandmother and began a long journey back to the homeland. There she would meet her beloved sisters in law, Anna and Ruth, to whom she had written most of her life.

During the same weeks, Judy and I traveled back from Africa where we spent our first year of marriage. The chance to meet my family in Sweden was serendipitous. We had planned to spend another year in Zaire but due to Judy's continual struggle with tropical disease, we decided to come home early. She'd had a tough time. From the moment we stepped off the plane, she suffered from the heat and humidity, which by comparison made most American cities—Miami for example—seem brisk and invigorating. It's safe to say her first year of marriage was less romantic than she'd anticipated.

Within three weeks of our arrival I was flat on my back with malaria. It's a scary disease. As the missionaries say, "The first week you hurt so bad you're afraid you might die. But by the second week, you feel so much worse you're afraid you might not." Judy was just nineteen and spent the first month of marriage playing nurse to a delirious husband, crawling on all fours to and from the bathroom and eating through a straw. To make things worse, most of our new friends were missionaries who had long ago made the tough cultural adjustments and didn't seem to remember our novice fears. I believe missionaries are the most forgetful people I've ever known. Let me explain.

The first week we were there, the deacons at our church organized seven consecutive suppers in missionary homes. Each evening the stories began over salads and fresh garden vegetables and continued through chicken mwamba (a delicious combination of chicken, palm oil and peanut butter gravy over white rice). The dish is surprisingly tasty, though not recommended for seven consecutive evenings. At some point during the meal, our host would say, "So, are you starting to learn your way around?"

"Well, no," I'd reply. "Actually, we're still waiting for our drivers' licenses. Until they come, we're stuck at home."

"Well, praise God for that!" our hostess would say. Then with a little laugh, "Believe me, the longer you're stuck at home, the safer you are. Most of the drivers out there are little kids! Arthur, tell them what happened to Mary."

Each evening the names changed, but the stories remained much the same. Mary was back-ended by a ten-year-old cabby whose uncle, a government official, demanded a payoff or Mary's family would be kicked out of the country.

A guy named Jim stopped his car with the front bumper two inches over the crosswalk and was thrown in jail. Of course the phones didn't work, so no one in the church knew where he was. It took three days to find him. In Africa, prisoners are fed by their families, but Jim was single, so Jim "fasted".

The name Verner Pauls remained consistent through all seven evenings. Poor Verner's car was slammed from the side and shoved into a crowd of people. Verner wasn't hurt, but apparently someone in the crowd was. When he attempted to help them, a mob over turned his Fiat, set it on fire, and beat Verner within a breath of his life. He flew back to Goshen, Indiana, and no one expected him to return very soon. Usually, following a fairly detailed description of Verner's battered body, someone sensitively noticed Judy's tension. Trying to steer the conversation in a more pleasant direction they'd ask, "Seen any big snakes yet?"

This would lead us into Green Mamba territory.

"Oh, yeah, deadliest snake in the world," our host would warn. "Why, they can kill a horse in three minutes!" Since I'd seen no horses, I was surprised everybody seemed so fixated on that three-minute equestrian statistic. " 'Course, if it bit you, you'd be lucky to last thirty seconds. Did you hear 'bout that Bower girl who got bit last Christmas?"

Well… yes. We had heard but that didn't matter. They'd tell us anyway about little Lori, who would have been dead if she hadn't been bit in the fatty part of her bum and if her dad hadn't had serum right in the fridge and if the houseboy hadn't chopped the Mamba's long green head off in mid-flight just before it bit her again. The conversation usually ended with our hostess saying, "More dessert anyone?"

I don't know why this behavior surprised me. I suppose it did because one would expect loving Christian people to be more sensitive. On the other hand these were not just loving Christian people. These were missionaries and they are a different breed. I remember their type coming to our church when I was a kid. I endured many long slide shows. Most of the pictures were of church buildings, hospitals, maybe a baptismal service in some muddy river—fairly calm stuff. But always mixed in the middle was a shot of the smiling missionary standing with a painted tribal chief, mud red, holding a long spear, sporting a belt of monkey skulls and always… always someone's femur bone stuck through his nose.

"This is my dear friend Chief Bonsongungu," they'd say. "He comes Wednesdays for tea."

In truth, I believe missionaries are remarkable people. And, who knows, we might have joined their ranks had Judy not contracted malaria, typhoid fever, shigellosis, amoebic dysentery and a lovely orphaned family of tapeworms—all in the first six months. On our way home, stopping in Sweden to meet our family, Judy was down twenty ill affordable pounds and I didn't look too beefy myself.

We made our way to my parent's hotel having not seen them in a year. Needless to say they were shocked by our appearance. Their daughter in law was still beautiful but rail thin and their son looked like an indigent. I'd not touched my hair or beard since our wedding day.

For the next week we traveled with the family and my grandmother nearly wore us out. She was the first one up in the morning—ready to go. Stockholm, Goteborg, Malmo and then over to Copenhagen for a day or two at Tivoli Gardens and an evening with the Danish Circus—my grandmother's first circus. She loved it all. Finally the big day arrived, the reason for her journey, the day she would meet Ruth and Anna.

It was a sunny summer morning. We drove our van to the small village of Nybro and then headed out of town into the countryside. My grandmother translated aloud the directions she'd received from Anna while my mother compared each tiny farm to a black and white photo she held in her hand. "Okay, I think we may have found it," my mother said glancing back and forth between picture and landscape. "Bob," she said to my father, "turn here. This is it."

For a hundred yards, we followed a dirt drive—a high wall of boulders on the right, white birch and pine on the left and at the end a farmhouse the color of dandelions. As we approached, an old man rose from a porch swing yelling to those inside. We pulled up in front of the house. I slid the van door open. Two old women shuffled through the screen door. My grandmother saw them and uttered a soft sound. I helped her step from the van as the women made their way down from the porch. All three laughed aloud with outstretched arms before meeting in the middle of the dusty drive where they wrapped themselves together and wept.

Other distant cousins quietly appeared standing with us in a circle around the old women. No one spoke. It was a holy moment. Later formal introductions were made in a joyous blend of languages.

Over the next couple days more cousins arrived, many meals were prepared and eaten, hundreds of photo snapped and then sadly it was time to go. Of course there were more tears. For my grandmother, Anna and Ruth this was a final goodbye. "Okay ladies," my father said, "one more shot." They stood together—Anna, my little grandmother Gerda and Ruth. My father snapped their picture.

The reunion was the highlight of our trip but not the highlight of the eventual slide show. My father had taken most every picture. My mother made it clear that unless my father was in the shot, he would be taking it. Judy and I didn't help much because we used our own camera—a tiny Kodak 110 that we'd carried through Africa. I bought it because I loved its' compact size and because the salesman assured me that everything was going that way. "In the next ten years," he said, "the 110 will become the camera of choice. " Unfortunately, that meant I had no choice about buying the tiny 110 projector since the slides were half the size of my father's more common, supposedly soon to be obsolete 35mm.

Several weeks later, back in the States, all our relatives gathered at my parent's for an evening of slides. They were excited to hear all about Grandma's trip and vicariously meet their Swedish family. Judy and I were there too. Earlier in the day I had organized the slides, discarding the really bad ones and placing the others chronologically in the carousels. My father had returned to work that week so he appreciated my help never questioning my motive. But I had one. Though he did know, he had not taken all the slides. I took one.

We were in a Swedish village. My mother needed something in the drugstore so while my father ran into to get it, my mother stayed in the van with my grandmother. My sister and Judy and I got out to stretch our legs and it was then we saw the advertisement. It was on a large column right in the center of the street. It was unlike any ad I'd seen in modern 1970s America. For that matter, it was unlike any ad I'd seen anywhere. Ingrid commented first, "Sheesh! You won't see that back home."

"No kidding," Judy said. And then laughing, "In fact Bob, I don't think I want you even looking at it."

But I did look at it and I thought to myself, "This advertisement is quite beautiful. It is quintessentially Swedish and I think Dad needs to share it with the family back home."

"Mom," I said through her open window, "give me the camera." I removed the cover, set the shutter speed as quickly as I could and snapped the picture. My father exited the store. We climbed in the van and drove away.

Weeks later, our living room was filled with extended family and a few close church friends. About 9:30, we all agreed it was dark enough and I began the show. My grandmother commented throughout, particularly delighting in the shots of Tivoli and the Danish Circus. "I couldn't believe it," she said, "These crazy elephants sat on stools and this young lady drove her motorcycle on a tight wire right over my head. It was so loud. Oy yoy yoy!" Then she added,

"The lady wasn't wearing very much either." Everyone laughed.

Toward the end of the evening came the slides of the reunion, the moment the three "sisters" met and the litany of relatives—who was who and how we were all related. Finally the three old women appeared on the screen posing at their final goodbye.

The room fell quiet.

The projector fan hummed.

No one spoke.

"You know Dad, " I said, "these are beautiful slides."

"Well… thanks," he said softly.

I turned to my uncle. "Don't you agree Carl?"

"I sure do Bobby," he said, "I think they're really something. Makes me so sad I couldn't be there too. They're beautiful. Really great."

I turned back to my father. "I mean it Dad. You really did capture the experience through these images. We can see your heart.

More silent agreement…

Oh look," I said, pretending to fuss with the projector. "I think there's one more." I pushed "forward" on the remote and an image appeared. It was taken in the center of a tiny Swedish village. There was a moment of quiet and then laughter—loud and long laughter. When my father was able to breathe he offered his stammering disclaimer but no one accepted it.

My uncle Glenn, beautifully dead pan said, "I'm disgusted. Come on Martha we're going home."

More laughter.

I had anticipated this moment for over three weeks. It was worth the wait.

Slides 16 and 71

Slide 71: Me on the couch

The Date: December 1971

The Photographer: Unknown

The photo shows me at age twenty, home from college for the Christmas holiday. It could be Easter but camouflaged in the lower right hand corner is one red Poinsettia. It's Christmas time.

I'm slouching comfortably in the corner of our old sofa having found my sweet spot. The soft fabric is printed with early Americana but the design screams 1970s, as does the orange wall behind. The wall wasn't always orange. The previous summer it was a lovely understated mossy green that my family enjoyed for years… so I painted it orange.

For several winters we had ice problems on our roof and the resultant leaking caused cracks in the living room ceiling. I had a couple free weeks between the end of my freshman year and my summer job so my father hired me to Spackle and repaint the ceiling. "And while you're at it," he said, "you might as well go ahead and repaint the walls."

"Yeah, I could do that," I said, "but you know Dad you might want to change it up a bit—maybe paint one of the walls in a complementary color."

"What exactly does that mean?" he asked.

I had just decided to major in art and was anxious to answer the question. "Complementary colors are colors that complement one another," I explained. "They are two parts that create a whole. One color makes the other appear more vibrant. Red with green. Blue with orange. Purple with yellow. With this particular green I say we go with a bright yet soothing reddish orange. What do you say?"

"Well," he said tentatively, "I don't know. I wouldn't want a big change. I've always liked how calm and peaceful this room feels."

"Calm and peaceful are good," I said, "but I've learned some things in my art classes that could really improve the design of this room. I think we could make it pop a bit." My father didn't respond which seemed oddly condescending and I felt an unfamiliar irritation rising in my chest—maybe because this was the first time that I thought I knew something he didn't. I shrugged defensively. "Hey, it's your room Dad. You want green, I'll paint it green. No big deal to me. I don't live here anymore."

He seemed uncertain. "I don't want to be closed to something more attractive," he said. "It's just… I wouldn't want to… I'm just a little concerned that… Explain to me again what you were envisioning."

"Well Dad," I said, "I know you love the autumn and that's all about complementary colors. If the leaves were all red or all orange it would be beautiful but when you mix in that touch of green pine and that blue sky it really pops. Doesn’t it? That's the power of complementary colors."

My father stared at his wall. He seemed to not be getting it. "And you're thinking that would work in our living room?" he asked.

"Yes I am," I said passionately. "Dad, if my college courses have taught me anything it's that complementary colors work. One color makes the other even more beautiful. That's why we say they complement each other."

"I don't know," he said. "I think we'll stay with the green."

"And I agree," I shot back. "I think you should stay with the green… on one wall. But why not complement it with another wall of subtle orange?"

"Because I don't know if I've ever seen a subtle orange," he said. "It seems to me that orange is sort of an unsubtle color."

I threw my arms upward gesturing in wild frustration. "Hey that's fine Dad! We should probably forget about it then. Jeesh!" My father, surprised by my reaction, stared at me saying nothing so I continued gaining speed and volume. "Your lack of confidence is irritating because I just studied this stuff for an entire ten week trimester and as you know I got an A plus for the first time in my life which is why Stu Carlson my Art professor told me I'm good at this so I think I know how complementary colors are suppose to work but if you want to stay with peaceful calm soothing subtle mossy green boredom I'm fine with that… really."

He was smiling—maybe on the edge of laughter though I couldn't be sure. "You okay?" he asked.

"Of course I'm okay," I said way too loudly.

He paused staring at the wall, then at me, then back at the wall.

I waited.

"Okay," he said. "You go buy the paint tomorrow and I'll see you after work."

The next morning I stood in the hardware store seconds after the clerk unlocked the front door. I was determined to prove to my father that I could deliver on my promise. I would create a calm yet vibrant living space. This was important to me because I was at the age when I needed to choose a potential career.

A year earlier, when I went off to college, I knew I wanted to be some kind of performer. I was writing music, playing guitar and singing songs. I was telling stories. I was trying to make people laugh whenever I had the chance and often when I didn't. None of it applied to my college curriculum. I could have chosen to study music but I'd never learned to read notes and it was a tough major. Coming off a less than exemplary high school career I was afraid to attempt that tract.

The next and most logical choice was theater. My freshman year, I auditioned and was chosen for a play. I enjoyed it and thought I did well. Unfortunately the director did not share my feelings and worse yet never thought to tell me his. So one day I stood excitedly outside his opened office door and rapped a knuckle on the glass. He glanced up wincing and waved me in. He sat behind his desk piled high with scripts and blue book essays. He slouched nearly horizontally in his chair with one hand flayed across his brow massaging his temples— headache. With his other hand, he pointed toward a stool and mumbled, "Mr. Stromberg what can I do for you?"

"My advisor told me I should stop by and tell you that I'd like to major in theater," I said.

"Oh she did huh? And why would she advice that?"

"Well, I told her I’d like to become some type of performer and we thought the theater program might be a good place to start." He leaned further back and turned slightly toward the wall. Both hands massaged his eyes now. He had a bad headache.

Then he said slowly, "You don't have it Bob."

"I beg your pardon."

"You don't… have… it."

I was confused. "I don't have what?"

"You don't have the temperament to make it in the arts. This is no place for fun and games. Honestly, I think you should go into nursing. Hospitals need happy guys like you but we don't need you here. And furthermore…”

I don't remember everything he said though he didn’t say much. He had a really bad headache. It was clear he didn’t know me well and the little he knew he didn’t like. I left his office confused, red faced—so embarrassed. I stood in the hallway for a long time staring at an audition board knowing my name was not welcome there. He could not technically keep me out of the program but he directed every play. My chances of getting on stage were not good.

Spring term I enrolled in Art 101 and met Professor Stu Carlson. He saw something in me. He appreciated my work and that changed my life. I knew someday I'd find a way on to a stage but until then I was an art major.

A few weeks later I stood at the counter in the hardware store back in my hometown. "What can I do for you?" the clerk asked.

"I need a gallon of orange paint," I said.

He reached beneath the counter retrieving a large book of tiny color samples. "What color orange are you lookin' for?" he said. "Do you have a name or a number?

I was unprepared for the question. Staring at two pages of orange squares, one barely discernable from the next I said, "I need an orange that will complement a wall and go with a couch."

"We can mix pretty much any shade you need," he said. "Maybe you could bring in something and we could match the color for you."

And that's what I did. I ran home and got a couch cushion. I figured that way I'd tie the couch color into the orange wall, which would then complement the green wall and carpet creating a well integrated, calm yet vibrant design.

I finished painting in the late afternoon and had just enough time to pick up the drop cloths, wash my hands and return the furniture before my parents pulled in the driveway. I was excited. I thought the room looked great though optically the color created a slight tickling sensation. I grabbed a magazine and sat casually on the couch. I heard my folks pull into the basement garage... then footsteps and conversation up the stairs. The door opened. They looked toward me and their jaws dropped. For a moment, speechless, they did not move. Then my mother said, "My glory!!! That's really… orange!!!" And then, "I hope it's not too bright. Do you think it might be a little bright? Maybe?"

"No, no, I don't think so," I said quickly, "These are complementary colors that's why they seem to kind of….."

My father completed my sentence. "They vibrate don't they? Is that an optical illusion or is the room bouncing around a bit? And Lucielle," he said to my mother, "Look at you. You almost look like you're tipping."

"I am tipping," she said sitting awkwardly on the ottoman. "I feel little queasy too. Do you guys feel that?"

"No," my father said, "doesn't really bother my stomach but I am a little short of breath."

I tried to remain calm, which was difficult with the room pulsing so. "Well," I said, "autumn can take your breath away too. Let's give it a few hours. It may dry a little calmer."

And it did…but not by much. It was a terrible color choice that really only looked somewhat natural from mid October through Halloween. The rest of the year, the orange was far too dominant to integrate with seasonal décor like red Poinsettias. Christmas time was an interior designer's nightmare.

I look now at the photo of myself sitting against the orange wall. I remember my clothes—the favorite brown buckle shoes that I bought for a high school dance and still wore two and a half years later. I loved those shoes. I loved them so much that I bought them a half size too big mistakenly thinking my feet were still growing. I wore two pairs of socks. I remember my favorite light grey denims with the dark pinstripe that I got at the Jeans Boutique on Lawrence Avenue in Chicago. I remember my favorite sweater, my hairstyle and my beard that was finally coming in fully. This was a good time in my life.

And there I sat at Christmas time, my skin reflecting that awful orange. The wall was a failure. But, and here's the point, I was not. I was not a failure or at least never felt like one because for a decade my parents delighted in that awful wall. I'm not suggesting they liked it but they delighted in it decorating it with my equally amateurish paintings. They delighted in the wall simply because it was mine.

Slide 16 on the carousel shows my folks around 1967. They're standing together by the kitchen sink in my grandparent's home. My mom washes. My father dries. At that time my grandparents lived next door and we shared all our evening meals—one day at our house, the next at theirs.

In the photo they are smiling.

This is what I saw most everyday of my life. Oh, I remember many other expressions but if I had to choose one that exemplified who they were and how they looked upon their children, this is the one. We were loved unconditionally which meant we could fail without being a failure.

I remember a conversation. My wife Judy and I had just returned from Africa. We spent our first year of marriage there on the Christian mission field. It was during this time that we decided I had to give performing a try and we formulated a plan. Back home again we sat around the kitchen table with my folks.

"Okay you two," my mother said excitedly, "we are dying to know. What are your plans?"

I was a little nervous to answer. It's not as if we'd been able to calculate our risks but clearly the stakes were high. We had no money and owned little more than our clothes. But… my mother asked so I answered. I said, "I have decided to become a mime."

My mother said, "What's a mime?"

"Well," I said, "It's a kind of actor that usually doesn't talk but that probably won't work so well for me. Still I want to learn how to move like they do. I want to understand the power of gesture. I want to add that to my stories and songs and comedy just to see what happens."

My father looked serious. "Where do you go for something like that?" he said. "And how do you make a living?"

I knew these questions were coming and answered with my rehearsed response. "I found a little theater school in the state of Maine," I said. "We thought we'd move to New England—somewhere near the middle. There are lots of people there and I figure where there are lots of people there are lots of schools. I was thinking I could go to those schools and ask them if they need an assembly program. If they do, they can pay me some money and then we'll pay our bills."

Even as I spoke I felt my confidence waning. "Why?" I thought. "Why had I not chosen graduate school like my friends? I considered seminary. Why didn't I stay with that? Would any schools hire me? Could I find enough work to pay our bills? Could we ever buy a car let alone a house? And we want to start a family! Am I out of my mind? " It was a crazy idea like the bright orange wall right behind me in the other room.

I looked at my hands. I played with my cup. My finger traced a pattern on the tablecloth. No one spoke. I looked at Judy for help. She sat to my left her expression mirroring my own. We looked across the table at my parents.

They were smiling.

They were both smiling that smile.

"Oh you two," my mother said, "it's perfect."

As it turns out, it was. It was perfect, or nearly so, and it began an adventure continuing to this day—an adventure I might have feared, perhaps fled, had I not known the freedom to fail. What a gift that is.

I am not my parent’s only child so I will not speak for my sisters—though I doubt they disagree. They can tell the stories of their lives and are more than welcome to a carousel or ten of their own. As for me…

My parents smiled on my orange wall.

They smiled on me.

They are smiling still.

Those smiles have, in a big way, empowered and sweetened every step of the journey.