Serendipity Of Andrew George

Once on the Turnpike, I opened the package and read my mother’s letter. 

“Andy, you are in for a surprise,” it began.  “Your grandfather, Professor Victor Wicks, better known as Vickie Wickie was from Ceylon and it was from him I had the tan which my friends envied.  I should have had much more than that from him.  But mine is a sad story.”

She had never written a letter longer than a page and to see it run to six closely written pages intrigued me.

“Son, you have to know my story before you begin to search for your identity and legacy.  Read every line patiently.  Don’t rush to judgment until you have heard me fully.”

It was a sad story of a girl of twenty-one who left her home for graduate studies and never returned.

“I couldn’t see my parents’ faces again.  I was ashamed of what I had done, though youth and inexperience in the affairs of the world could be given as excuses.  I had no right to deprive them of their honor, nor damage the social respect they had earned the hard way.  The only solution was to cut myself away and let the world think that I was no more.  I did a good job.”

It was love at first sight for Lizzie Wickie and her Professor of English, George Parsons.  It grew in leaps and bounds. I had made my appearance as a product of their love on a January morning - an exuberant baby boy weighing seven pounds two ounces.

“You had a most loving and caring father.  He named you Andrew after his paternal grandfather and gave his first name as your last name.  Eventually I named myself Mrs. George and we lived happily ever after on the happy shores of Lake Winnipesaukee.”

It took a minute or two to figure out what my mother meant.  Then it dawned on me.  We were in a larger house on the same Varney Point Road.  As the days lengthened and late spring warmed the lake, my father would come loaded with toys and other goodies.

“Welcome, welcome, my globe-trotting hero,” my mother would leap in joy.  He would raise me aloft and kiss me all over.  The days that followed were joyous whether we lolled about in water, paddled about in our little boat or simply sat in the den listening to the radio.  My favorite seat was his lap especially when we wrapped me with his large muscular arms.  As years passed I knew that he had to leave when the jet green forests of New Hampshire painted themselves in bright colors of red, yellow and brown.

“Off to another voyage, son.  What would you like from Australia?” he asked me as he packed his trunk.  I remember asking where Australia was.  I was only ten.

That summer he did not come.

“Could the cannibals have eaten him?”  I asked my mother.  All I had as a response was a long, tight hug.

I got out of my reverie and went back to the letter.  But I could not proceed.  

We had reached Idlewild International Airport.

Laden with things I had bought mostly from the basement bargain counter of a Department Store, I set out on my expedition in sunny Ceylon - the land of many cultures - where the people were said to be always smiling. The lines of an old ballad came to my mind as I had already fallen in love with it and I was longing for my new home “where skies were never cloudy all day” and “seldom was heard a discouraging word.”

The first class seat in a PanAm Clipper was the last word in flying luxury.  With a graciously served sherry in hand, I read my mother’s letter.  It moved me to tears.

“How much George loved you and me, I had never realized until he was no more.  What surprised me was that his heart was large enough to love others as well.  He was married to a woman of singular charm and he was a father of two more children by her.  He explained his predicament on the very first day he dated me.  But in my immaturity I hoped to win him all to myself.  Your birth made us closer but he hoped that he could love both his families with equal commitment.  From the day after the commencement ceremony of his University, he was ours.  He left just two days before the beginning of Fall Semester.  The rest of the year, he was theirs.