At 4:00 PM on July 28, 2002, the sun was still high, the air warm and the smell of summer was strong. I was sitting on my porch putting on my mountain biking shoes, preparing for a gentle single-track ride that began close to our house. I had one shoe on when the phone rang. Normally, we would have ignored the phone and just gone on the ride. But that day was different. I paused and asked my husband to answer the phone. As he answered the phone, I sat there, doing nothing and staring at my shoes. In a few seconds, he came to the door with the phone. "It's a woman calling from New Zealand," he said. The feeling I had went from bad to almost panic as I took the phone because there was only one
When I entered the first grade, I had just been speaking English for about a year, just since I left my OBaachan with my adoptive parents. I was attending a Department of Defense school in Japan at Grant Heights. I did not know the other children. The other children were Americans and always had been, even those that looked Asian. My teacher was even Asian, but she spoke like an American. The only memory I have of this first grade class was this cute little stuffed white baby seal that the teacher had. Each day, the seal would be given to a different child and the seal would sit on that child's desk for the day. The teacher selected the child who would hold the seal for the day. Every day I
I spent most of the summer writing a book. Crazy! And during that time, I even went to Hawaii to surf, twice! That's even crazier! ... I cri
