Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  AUTHOR COMMENT

  ONE - WHEN I WAS BORN

  TWO - WHAT CANNOT BE SEEN

  THREE - THE GIFT FROM GOD

  FOUR - THREE DEATHS

  FIVE - GYPSY TRASH

  SIX - COME LOOK

  SEVEN - KARMA

  EIGHT - THE LESSON

  NINE - RETIREMENT

  TEN - IN STEAD

  ELEVEN - THE LITTLE BOAT

  TWELVE - FREE WILL

  THIRTEEN - THREE THINGS SHE DOESN’T KNOW

  FOURTEEN - ONE THING I DO KNOW

  FIFTEEN - SWEET INDEPENDENCE

  SIXTEEN - THREE YEARS LATER

  SEVENTEEN - THE BIG FIGHT

  EIGHTEEN - THE JOURNEY

  NINETEEN - PRACTICE

  TWENTY - HOME, AT LAST

  TWENTY-ONE - FAVORITES

  TWENTY-TWO - NEVER GIVE UP

  TWENTY-THREE - FOUND

  TWENTY-FOUR - CATHERINE

  TWENTY-FIVE - REUNION

  TWENTY-SIX - BREAKFAST IN RENO

  TWENTY-SEVEN - JACKPOT

  TWENTY-EIGHT - JUST THREE AGAIN

  TWENTY-NINE - FORGIVING

  THIRTY - THE KITE RIDER

  END NOTE

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SELECTED TITLES FROM SEAL PRESS

  Copyright Page

  For Spencer & Josephine

  My Beloveds

  “In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage—to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.”

  —Alex Haley

  AUTHOR COMMENT

  Blackbird was a book I needed to write. Dead parents, a spate of homelessness, and countless moves from Nevada to California and back to Nevada had me emerge from my childhood in a spinning haze.

  The voice I discovered was that of a child who seemed to be in shock. Writing was like debriefing a disoriented witness. As I wrote, I tried to form opinions about all I had gone through, but like my narrator, I could only feel numb and amazed. I found myself asking a series of questions instead: Did my life have some meaning beyond all the loss? Was there some higher purpose to suffering? Could a person heal from such a childhood?

  Over the next few years, a series of extraordinary events unfolded and are detailed within this book. It seemed that in writing Blackbird, I had begun a long journey that, in the end, would provide answers to all my questions and much more.

  Blackbird was a witness account conveyed by a little girl. Found is a widened perspective narrated by a reflective woman and mother. Both memoirs are my truth. As part of the creative process, I have taken liberty with conversations, with time, and with identity.

  My great hope is that this story will be of benefit to all who read it.

  —JENNIFER LAUCK

  PORTLAND, OREGON

  2010

  “I am now seventy-one years old, I feel, still, deep in my mind, my first experience, my mother’s care. I can still feel it. That immediately gives me inner peace, inner calmness. The mother’s physical touch is the greatest factor for the healthy development of the brain. This is not due to religious faith, but because of the biological factor.”

  —HIS HOLINESS THE DALAI LAMA

  VANCOUVER DIALOGUES

  2007

  “The separation from the mother’s body, at birth, is the most dreadful thing. The baby was one with the mother and then the people take the child away and put him somewhere else. Dreadful.”

  —ECKHART TOLLE

  FREEDOM FROM THE WORLD

  ONE

  WHEN I WAS BORN

  I WAS GIVEN the perfect name, although it would take the better part of forty-six years to puzzle this perfection out.

  Jennifer, popular in the ’60s, is my first name and seems on the surface to be a fad. But in the end, it is my first name that leads me home.

  Lauck, my last name, is the family surname and a German derivative of lock. Lock weaves a path of connection, at the root, to the verb form of luck. Coincidently, pull a from Lauck and there it is again. Luck. Of all the things I have been in this life, it is most accurate to say I’ve been lucky, indeed.

  And here comes Caste, my middle name, which is core to the circumstances from which I began my life.

  Caste originates from the Latin castus, meaning chaste, pure, innocent. As caste traveled through Portugal and Spain, it shifted to casto, meaning lineage, race, breed. In English, caste most often loses its silent e and becomes just cast.

  While there are many meanings to the word cast, the markers on my map are these: to cast is to throw something away from yourself, usually with force; to cast also means to remove or banish something from your mind deliberately, decisively, and often with great difficulty. A castaway is one set adrift. An outcast has been rejected by a particular group or by society as a whole.

  I WAS BORN in Nevada, which jigsaws against California. Most Nevadans occupy the narrow band of land situated along the western and southern borders. The population clusters in the big cities of Las Vegas, Carson City, and Reno, and then spreads wide in the smaller towns of Elko, Fallon, and Lovelock.

  The largest part of Nevada is owned by the military and is unoccupied. At the bottom corner of the state, five hundred miles from Reno and seventy-five miles from Vegas, the U.S. Department of Energy operates the Nevada Test Site. Between 1951 and 1992, more than a thousand nuclear bombs were detonated at the Nevada Test Site. Octopus clouds could be seen from Las Vegas and it was not uncommon for tourists to gather on hotel balconies to gape at supernatural detonations that smeared the sky.

  I wonder what these day-trippers thought as they watched tendrils of radioactive debris spiral back to earth. Were they afraid? Or did they feel proud, confident, and safe somehow, in the knowledge that these bombs were being perfected? And what of their senses? Did they notice the texture of the air transform from clear and clean to spiky and bright? Underfoot, did they feel the earth buck and then collapse? Could they detect any reorganization of atoms within their own cells?

  OVER THE MONTHS I gestated, during 1963, more than forty nuclear bombs were detonated at the Nevada Test Site. They were given names like Chipmunk, Gerbil, and Pleasant. The combined explosive power of those blasts was equal to thirty-eight attacks on Hiroshima.

  MY MOTHER WAS named Catherine. She lived in Reno and had blond hair and a heart-shaped face. Her eyes were a dove-soft shade of medium blue that might be called gray. She was seventeen.

  My mother’s boyfriend was Bill. He was also seventeen and had moved to Reno from California. Bill was a tall, awkward teen who passed time with the boys who wore leather jackets and smoked cigarettes from packs rolled in their sleeves.

  Being unmarried, pregnant, and a teenager in 1963 was a dangerous combination that blew nuclear families wide open. Loyalties melted. Love vaporized. Protection was withdrawn. Shamed and afraid, the girls were scuttled to secret locations. Evidence of their pregnancies was hidden. Once babies were born, papers were signed, birth certificates were altered, and files were sealed.

  Catherine had heard the whispers about girls who got pregnant and knew they always vanished from the halls and the classrooms of her high school. She didn’t admit to being pregnant herself until she was five months along.

  On a July morning, on or about the day a super bomb called The Sedan was dropped at the Nevada Test Site, Catherine told the truth.

  In the same way the Ne
vada Test Site became a national sacrifice zone, meaning it became uninhabitable forevermore, Catherine’s teen landscape evaporated. Gone were the simple times of drive-in movies, date nights, and long, languid kisses in the back seat of a souped-up Chevy while “Moon River” spilled from the radio. No more whispered secrets to her best friend on the telephone, no more “Dear Diary, I kissed a boy for the first time,” and no more dreams of white weddings and picket fences waiting in the future.

  Catherine’s world became an unfamiliar and unforgiving place. She was humiliated by her family, isolated from friends, forbidden to see Bill again, and restricted to her bedroom for the duration of her pregnancy. The only person allowed near Catherine was a private tutor with the unusual name of Carmel. Her name was not pronounced like Carmel, the sea-splashed town below Monterey, California. Carmel came out of the mouth as car-mull, like one might refer to caramel apples or caramel corn.

  Bill wanted to marry Catherine. He believed it was right for a child to have a name and a father. His own father had disappeared before he had been born. His mother wasn’t even clear who his father had been—perhaps a man with the name Hamilton, or it could have been Wright. The vacuum in Bill’s life was something he didn’t want a child of his own to experience.

  Catherine’s family refused the marriage option. Catherine was considered irresponsible and immature. Bill was classified as trash and banished. Relinquishment was prearranged with Catholic Community Services of Northern Nevada.

  OVER THAT LONG fall and into the winter, Catherine wept—of course she wept. She was scared, ashamed, and utterly alone. She kept up her schoolwork, though, and read a few novels to pass the time. Her favorite book was the Pulitzer Prize winner Gone with the Wind, that sweeping tale of the United States divided between north and south. The central character was Southern Belle Scarlett O’Hara and her home was the plantation Tara. Scarlet, spoiled and indulged, had to grow up during the Civil War and in the end, acquired strength from the land—from Tara.

  Something in Gone with the Wind sparked inspiration in Catherine and she named me Tara and called me by that name again and again.

  Did Catherine think, perhaps, if she named me then she would keep me? Or did she name me this so that I might become her strength? Or perhaps, like a good mother, she set this name into my heart as a way to give me the strength of the land, which I’d need if I didn’t have a mother.

  Through the power of my mother’s imagination, she was able to transform me into something far greater than a dreadful mistake. And in naming me Tara, she also gave me directions home.

  IN SEPTEMBER 1963, the Cuban and Russian governments placed nuclear bombs in Cuba.

  In October 1963, the Cuban Missile Crisis ended when the Russian government agreed to dismantle the weapons in Cuba and the U.S. government agreed to dismantle similar nuclear weapons in Turkey.

  In November 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

  In December 1963, I was born to Catherine and taken away.

  TWO

  WHAT CANNOT BE SEEN

  IT’S HARD TO FOCUS and seeing into the distance is impossible. My eyes work best when I squint and I squint a lot.

  One of my first memories is linked to my poor vision. I have a deep sense of strain between my eyes. This tension has been with me all of my life.

  THERE’S A LEGEND about Christopher Columbus. When his armada arrived in the new world, the native people could not see the ships. In all their lives and in the lives of their ancestors, no one had seen a ship before and so their brains did not have the experience needed to discern the shapes. A shaman came to the edge of the cliffs, looked at the ripples on the surface of the water, and noticed the current was unusual. After many days, the ships came into his view. The shaman told his people about the ships and eventually the people could see.

  IS MY FIRST memory about sight? Or is my first memory actually the inability to recognize what was happening—or better stated, what wasn’t happening?

  It remains, all these years later, inconceivable that my mother wasn’t the first person I saw.

  If I would venture to guess at my first thought, I am sure it would have been this: Where is she?

  WHEN I AM an adult, an optometrist will say I have the strangest muscles in my eyes. “You work very hard, as if you want to see what’s not there.”

  I will need glasses by the time I am ten.

  As a younger child, I will develop the quirk of studying each location where I live or travel. I’ll take inventory of houses, neighborhoods, restaurants, office buildings, and churches. And I’ll stare at the people I live with until someone inevitably says, “For heaven’s sake, what are you looking at?”

  By the time I am four or maybe five, I won’t remember that my eyes search for my mother. Like dirt thrown into a deep hole, primal conditioning will be buried under the minutiae of details that become my life.

  IT IS NOT a stretch of the imagination to say I searched for my mother from the moment I was born. A baby, indeed, searches for its mother—frantically so when the mother cannot be found.

  Sight is the most used sense and the one most aligned with thought. More than eighty percent of what happens in the brain is related to sight. Yes, looking would come first. The thought Where is she? would certainly be one of the initial coherent thoughts.

  I would have also listened, intently, for the timbre of her voice; I would have tested the air for her scent; I would have reached out to make contact; and I would have salivated in anticipation of her milk.

  Babies are sensory creatures with highly developed brains.

  What is not commonly known—although it is common sense—is that within moments of separation from the mother, a newborn will experience outrage, panic, and eventually terror. Within forty-five minutes, studies show a baby will go into shock and lose consciousness. Once the baby awakens, she will use her senses to search for her mother again and if the mother isn’t there, the baby goes through the same process.

  Imagine what this shock must do to the brain.

  The only mercy for the baby (and the brain) is amnesia—shockbased unconsciousness.

  IN 1997, I was jarred by my own amnesia. This didn’t happen gently, like the soft kiss of a prince but came on violently—in an explosive rush of life.

  “PUSH. PUSH! PUSH!” came the collective scream of one doctor, three nurses, and my husband, his booming baritone firing into my left ear.

  My knees were forced up to my underarms and contractions rolled thunder from my belly. The doctor pushed at my most tender place with such force her nails cut through latex and left half-moon incisions.

  The whole scene was pandemonium with focus. My son wasn’t born as much as he was commanded into our midst.

  Me? After four days of labor with no sleep and no food, I was eager to get him out too. I pushed!

  When my son finally emerged, all became quiet—as if a pause button had been pressed. Look at him waving his arms and kicking his feet, his face scrunched in a grimace of glorious outrage.

  I cradled him close to my chest and entered into that universe of mother and child.

  He warbled his first sounds that were cries of indignation and I whispered how everything was going to be okay. I made note of how perfect he was, how powerful and wise for one so small. I was like every other mother throughout time, touching fingers and toes, but before I could finish my count, a nurse popped our bubble by explaining the baby needed to be assessed—standard procedure for a baby born six weeks early.

  I was hesitant to give him up but I was also in a pretty compromising position. See me on the delivery table, legs spread far too wide to be considered appropriate, blood everywhere, and those overhead floodlights that left no room for imagination.

  At that same moment, the doctor, eager to deliver the placenta, pressed on my belly. There was a splash and out came a rush of water that made the doctor jump back. “What in the world? ” she asked.

  In a flash, the nurse lifted the
baby off my chest like a seasoned waitress taking away an empty plate and was gone before I could protest, “Hey, bring that back, I’m not done!” Worse, the doctor pushed up her sleeve and reached inside my body without even asking. As she screwed up her face and considered the ceiling in concentration, she also patted around inside like she had lost a ring in my uterus.

  Did I mention the pain?

  Yes, all this hurt like hell, most of my body—especially down there—was on fire. I wanted to beat this woman in retribution and scream at her to get her goddamned arm out of me. I was also steamed that my kid was gone.

  The doctor pulled out and made an educated guess. “Looks like you were pregnant with twins,” she said. “There’s no fetus now but obviously the bag has been there all this time. No wonder your baby came early.”

  There was laughter among the hospital staff.

  Another baby? Did he or she die? I blinked on a moment of sadness—a lump formed in my throat. Poor baby.

  The nurses called out their reports: “Good color. Strong lungs. Nice reflexes. A first-rate heartbeat.”

  My son was given a score—eight and nine on a scale used to determine good health. Ten was the best.

  The baby cried and I felt the surprising tug of his need in my heart. “Give him back to me,” I said.

  The edge in my voice had my husband give me a look that said, “That wasn’t very polite.” The doctor even raised her eyebrows.

  Was there such a thing as delivery room etiquette? Had I missed the memo?

  I slapped at my husband to get off his chair and get the baby, since obviously I could not. He jumped into action and headed over to the corner, but before he could take over, one of the nurses had our child bundled like a to-go order of ribs. “We’re going to need to do more tests,” she stated. “We’ll bring him back soon.”