From Canton to N.W. 23rd Avenue - Kerry

My godmother is Chinese. She had a stroke a few days ago. Now she cannot speak. Obviously, I hope this is a temporary situation. This occurrence leaves a palpable silence in my heart.

I have helped her write countless invitations for anniversary parties, Chinese New Year Banquets and gala events at her oriental antique shop in Northwest Portland while we sat at the ornate teak wood table her father carved in Canton in the 1940's, surrounded by seven-foot high ancient urns and jade plants. Now she cannot write.

She is not easily silenced. Her work ethic, combined with her courage and confidence, propelled her to millionaire status at age forty and venerable positions for various Chinese associations at age sixty.

"I never complain, because that brings bad luck." she once told me.

Scenes from her life flash through my memory. Her story is a vivid kaleidoscope filled with lush scenes often only seen in movies. She arrived in the United States on a freightliner with her merchant marine husband, who her family had decided she needed to marry. She was only fourteen, but she told American officials, including her husband, that she was eighteen. Her family had sewn money into the lining of her jacket. As the freightliner pulled out of Hong Kong harbor, she tried to jump off the railing of the top deck. A crewman restrained her.

She came to our wedding in 1995 in her boxy silver Cadillac, dressed in a fur coat in the middle of July (in her mind weddings and funerals merited fur, despite the season). Neither the weather or a slight fender bender two blocks from the church deterred her from attending the ceremony.

"My neck only hurt a little bit," she confessed later on.

I sensed her incongruous presence in the church as I stood in the shadows waiting to walk down the aisle. A slight murmur went up from the seated crowd, as it often does when she enters a room. A Chinese women sporting a fur coat, black sunglasses and several large diamonds is hard to miss.

Summer started officially in my house on Monday; it's d-day, which means all day childcare provided by me for my three children. This puts a kink in my writing schedule, my schedule in general. Now that Sue is laying in that hospital bed, my day doesn't look so tedious. Just another phase in the flow of life.