Clark is one of my favorite characters. He’s been so much fun to write, that I decided to try to dig into his back story from Clark’s point of view.

Clark often felt as if his mom was is a stereotype, of sorts. She was one of those white girls who saw herself in another ethnicity. Although she was paler than an albino rat, she was insistent on speaking Spanish at home for at least two hours a day. She said it would keep them from losing the culture. What culture—we’re white people without roots! Still, he didn’t squash her ridiculous hopes. He went along with the Spanish practice, ate the arroz con pollo she cooked once a week, enjoyed the tastes, smells , sounds, and moves of the other cultural traditions that her friend Rosanna had helped root in Mom’s soul. He ate, danced and sang to good Spanish music with her, and he let her tell him all the stories about their time together before Rosanna had returned to Puerto Rico not long after his birth.

Secretly, Clark imagined that his mother dreamed of going to la isla just as Rosanna had gone. He could see her reading a book while lying in a “hamaca” tied between two palm trees on a beach. And why not—she had nothing here. 

Mom was a poor single mother. She got pregnant at seventeen—quite an accomplishment in a neighborhood where girls had babies much younger. She had fallen in love before having sex—an even greater miracle. Then, she had even married the guy, for a while. Within a year, however, the stereotype had played out and the man split, leaving her with a little baby boy in a trashy neighborhood, the proud owner of a trailer that no one would repossess because the cost of the repairs needed to make it habitable was greater than the trouble of waiting an extra month for each payment.

Surprisingly, even though it took her ten years to pay off the five year mortgage, she had done it. Now, every month, instead of making a payment, Mom made a repair. When the place was finally up to code and no one could take it away, she had turned her focus to interior design.

Every evening, she tuned into the home improvement channels and laughed at how they wanted to teach her to make new furniture look “vintage.” Laughing, she would say, “See, son, this time we’re ahead of the season’s decorations.” The difference was, they didn’t plan to leave things that way.

While listening to tropical beats, laughing and chatting, they would strip and sand the wood on another solid oak trash day curbside find, making the “vintage” furniture into true works of art. After years of effort, the little trailer was really looking like a home, and Clark was proud when his friends came over to visit and they called his mother’s house the coolest one in the neighborhood.

He had thought himself quite unique in his upbringing, until one day he met some teens at an afterschool event hosted at his high school. Apparently, the principal was open to Christianity, and she had permitted a Christian group of older teens to come in and give a presentation.

Afterwards, they all hung around eating with the students and playing ball with them in the gym. Clark had hung around, too. He was most impressed by the charismatic appeal of a tall, handsome black teen who stood beside a stunning asian girl. They made a neat couple, he thought to himself, though what he found out later surprised him more than anything he had ever seen. 

“We’re brother and sister—really.” As Clark cocked his head in confusion, the pretty girl laughed. “We love that reaction—it gives us something to tell Mama about when we get home.” The boy interrupted with, “My name’s James, and this is Justine.”

Over a meal of hot dogs and chips, he explained, “Our mother’s a wispy blonde with no outstanding facial features. When she married my dad—a black man—she ended up with a little kid who looked exactly like his father.” Nodding, Justine added, “Yes, and we still don’t know what she was thinking when a  year later, she ended up married to a Japanese man and gave him a daughter who was his carbon copy, too.” 

Clark agreed. What was the woman thinking? Love, however, wasn’t always predictable. And in this case, it was extremely unexpected. Yet, obviously, that second relationship had worked out. Or not, he discovered…

“Now, about a decade later,” James added, “she’s happily married to another washed-out blonde like herself and they have four beautiful little featureless children—our preschool aged siblings!” Justine let out a half-laugh, half-snort and added, “So whenever we get together for a family outing, the whole world stares.”

Clark could imagine the kids, and the mental contrast between them and these very colorful teens made him chuckle inwardly, but only inwardly. They watched him closely, looking for a reaction, but they apparently found none. Clark was not very expressive among strangers, or so he’d been told a couple of hundred times. 

Check back next month or check out other Blog posts for more…