38. Arrival in America 2002

Fredrick Miller had come through and I have this letter still in front of me as of the 8th of May 2015. Congressman Sweeney had the aged portfolio: ‘Older Americans Caucus’, and ‘Rural Health Care Coalition’ along with some other titles which could have been of assistance. I am not sure why it is dated June 17th when our visa interview was July 17th. Perhaps it was an earlier letter and then he contacted the consulate a month later when we were stuck in Sydney.

Congressman Sweeney

The absolute wanker from the consulate was all very politie. I think getting a congressional fax from D.C., where Sweeney was at the time, got the idiot off his ass and to work. He was no longer arrogant like he was when we were there.

Monday morning we rocked up at the start of the day in the lobby of the consulate. There in front of us was the little shit that had given us such a hard time. He was alarmed that we were there in front of him and he was not behind his plexiglas window. Narda is five foot eleven and I am about six foot two before old age has knocked me down a bit and this ass was about five foot two and skinny. We looked down on him and like all short people called to task he almost pissed his pants. Nevertheless we got Narda’s visa stamped into her passport and we were off to Hawaii. Legally.

I was off to begin working at the State University of New York at Albany and Narda was on her way to work at the Albany Academy for Girls. We were on the way there to be close to my 97-year-old father. In 2002 Leigh was playing for the LA Dodger’s minor league club The South Georgia Waves in Albany, Georgia. The fact that Leigh and I would be going to a city with the same name seemed cosmic. We both were having career moves and advancing our lot in life.

The absolute wanker from the consulate was all very politie. I think getting a congressional fax from D.C., where Sweeney was at the time, got the idiot off his ass and to work. He was no longer arrogant like he was when we were there.

Monday morning we rocked up at the start of the day in the lobby of the consulate. There in front of us was the little shit that had given us such a hard time. He was alarmed that we were there in front of him and he was not behind his plexiglas window. Narda is five foot eleven and I am about six foot two before old age has knocked me down a bit and this ass was about five foot two and skinny. We looked down on him and like all short people called to task he almost pissed his pants. Nevertheless we got Narda’s visa stamped into her passport and we were off to Hawaii. Legally.

I was off to begin working at the State University of New York at Albany and Narda was on her way to work at the Albany Academy for Girls. We were on the way there to be close to my 97-year-old father. In 2002 Leigh was playing for the LA Dodger’s minor league club The South Georgia Waves in Albany, Georgia. The fact that Leigh and I would be going to a city with the same name seemed cosmic. We both were having career moves and advancing our lot in life.

We stayed in Wikiki for a couple of days and went out to Kahuku Medical Center where Sacha was born and saw Queens Medical Centre where I worked back in 1980 and of  course my little involvement with the Holy Order of MANS started there.

Flying to Hilo we met my brother for the first time. Euclid. He was about ten years younger than me. We had the same mother but a different father. [I wrote of this at page 343]. Over the past twelve years since I first met him I see

Euclid - Terrell Hawaii
similarities in our thinking but we have had quite different lives. We are quite different in size too. It was interesting that he has spent his life in Hawaii since leaving home when he was 17 or so. Both his parents died when he was a teenager; our mother who died of cancer age 44 and his father. That we both lived in Hilo in our youth is a bit of coincidence.

I have only ever seen him the once, thirteen years ago. We sometimes communicate on Facebook but we were ever only going to be a passing family in a short history of a dissolving moment. Shared DNA strands {polynucleotides} unwinding and winding back across time and space.

We spent a week in Hawaii then on to San Franciso where Narda was able to visualize the stories of the 1960s and 1970s that I had been telling about and that I have gone on and on about in this story of myself. Everyone is writing memoirs and with the ease of e-books there are thousands being published daily. Nevertheless I continue for no other reason than to piece together my life before I forget it all. That no one else will ever read this is a mute point. This is one of those constructs where the process is more significant than the end result. I printed out two large leather bound copies eight-years ago and it has taken me that long to get back and edit and add and of course delete many things that would not be good for anyone else to view but for my son, wife and me. Sacha was keeping a copy in his bathroom and reading bits at a time though I did not see it in his loo the last time I was there and would imagine it is in a box out of sight if no longer even in existence.

We drove to Los Angeles and early August flew to Clifton Park.

Clifton Park quickly brought us down to earth. We had arrived though neither of us were sure what we had arrived at. After more than a year of planning and new jobs ahead of us in a new life of getting to actually stopping was a challenge. Narda was more excited than me about the future. I had issues.

Kenneth Adsit  the early years

My father had turned 97 years old. We had nowhere to go except to my father’s home. Over the years he had gone from our farm to a small house in the mid-1960s to a trailer home park, all in Clifton Park. We had planned to stay in his trailer at 77 Martindale Court until we found a home, hopefully soon.

Firstly, I had just turned 55. Not old and surely not ready for a retirement village. Martindale Court was for those who were 55 and over. With all my high self-esteem, all my worldly travels, my almost completed PhD I fancied a higher position in life by the time I was 55. Moving in with my father, my newish wife, OK we had been married for three-months so we were a ripe couple as newly-weds go, into a rather aging trailer was quite the downer.

My father had always been very careful with money to an embarrassing level all my life. But here he managed to take it to new levels. August in New York is hot. He did not put on his air-conditioner because he said he could hear the words, ‘money-money-money’ screaming forth from it. He did not mean it literally as he was really very sound of mind but it was how it described his reasoning for his extremely hot trailer and no cool air. He would use the same paper towel over and over and he would have just enough food for the day. He was very independent and refused meals-on-wheels and help from anyone. At 97 he had no problems with driving. As a matter of fact his driver’s license was renewed for like another ten-years. It was scary riding with him as he would sometimes go quite slow then a bit fast sometimes on the left lane then sometimes on the right lane. Really – actually it was terrifying riding with him.

Not only was it hot from not having the air-conditioner on but the windows were closed. Our first night sleeping in the ‘guest bedroom’; the trailer had two bedrooms, we could not sleep due to the heat and jet-lag. We drove to Walmart fifteen minutes away and like many Walmarts it was open 24 hours a day. This is a novelty after living in Australia where stores close at 5:30 pm except for Thursday when they are open until nine pm in the suburbs and on Friday in the city until nine pm. At two in the morning we were buying screens for the window which would give us some relief. We never told my father but just did the best we could living with him for a couple of days.

Across the street from my father’s trailer was a trailer for rent and after investigating we moved in by the end of the first week. This was the perfect solution for the moment, living across from my father. Trailers are well insulated staying cool with an air-conditioner on or a heater in the winter. The trailer we moved into was furnished making life that much easier. It was furnished too much. The owner, Louie, was a bit of a character and was renovating a house in Albany where he was living. He left socks and shoes in the drawers, there was a roast in the oven, partly eaten bags of chips in cupboards and in an annex just a lot of junk. We cleaned the place up and bought new sheets and got rid of his food and left behind stuff in the drawers. In his own way he thought he was helping us out as we only had arrived in the States with a suitcase each. It was like he had just watched some immigration movie from the 1920s with foreigners coming into New York with nothing.

We gradually took my father’s car away from him by borrowing it then parking on our side of the street. After a month he did not use the car and we got what he needed or took him to where he wanted to go. He was a bit lame and would use a walking stick making driving rather dangerous. He only wanted the car one time and that was on Halloween.
I was using the Internet at the Shenendehowa Public Library; from a historical point of view, in early 2000 not everyone had Internet at home, especially 97-year-old folks. And this was before smart phones. I had my mobile phone but it was not on-line, which now twelve years later is difficult to imagine when there was a time without Wi-Fi on our phone. Narda rang me and said my father demanded use of his car and what should she do. I thought we should ring the police but we let it go.

He came back half an hour later and even parked the car on our side of the street. He had gone to the local fruit and vegetable seller and bought a bag of apples to give away to children visiting Halloween evening. We later learned that he got to DeVoe’s Apple Orchards, rolled down his window and yelled out to get a bag of apples. My father loved Halloween and every year he would do the same; give an apple and a Bible track to each child. He had done this since I was a child. He put his apples in a basket on a table near the door next to his pile of Bible tracks.

I use to pick strawberries as a child at this place and my father did when he was a child. The place is more than a hundred years old. http://www.devoesorchards.com/

No one came. We felt really sorry for him.

2002 like every year before progressed with us in tow. We were doing fine in our trailer and lived there for about nine months. Narda taught at Albany Academy for Girls part-time music and had several piano students as a side for extra cash. She also got a Sunday morning job playing organ at a Clifton Park church and that was an extra $10,000 for the year. Being supported I even went most Sunday’s with her. As always church was not a place for me and I was often amazed at the crap that the minister would say. This is my problem with church, there is this person saying crap and no one can challenge them and say ‘are you kidding?’ Furthermore people look up to this person as someone, a representative of God. I am always surprised at how gullible humans are. Nevertheless we were getting weekly cash for a couple of Narda’s musicianship hours.

I was happy teaching my classes at university.

State University of NY, Albany , winter 2002 - 2003
It was my first jump into teaching with no support; I had done adjunct teaching at the University of South Australia but that was set up with someone else’s course. Here I was on my own with course material, assessment and dealing with students. My speech classes I sensed were going well. Years later reading what some students wrote about me in a social site, I discovered that to all I was not quite the great teacher I thought I was. I have a sample earlier; see Rate My Professor, page 165 if reading this as a book or click on some interactive device.

I am sure if I ever published this and had any readers I would get the same mix from: ‘stupidest thing I have ever read – ended up skimming through the first 36 pages, then stopping altogether…’ to ‘not bad for a loser’.

My ‘Globalisation and Culture ACOM 465’ course [http://neuage.org/GC/gc.htm] fared better. Most classes had up to 50 students. I spent a lot of time setting up the course. Students were engaged and I used a lot of multimedia keeping the class going forward.

I liked my Monday first block classes the best as students were half-asleep from whatever students do on weekends. My favourite out-of-the box behaviour was spotting a girl giving a boy a food massage during my class. Otherwise they were uneventful moments. I taught classes in Adobe Dreamweaver, Flash and InDesign in a web creation class. That was one thing I had done for years and I did not need to put a lot of effort into the class. Now twelve years later I am still using those programs and taking Adobe online courses on a regular basis.

I had dropped out of Shenendehowa Central School in 1964 and now 40 years later I was teaching at university and completing my PhD.

Christmas  2002 Clifton Park , with my 97-year-old father, wife number two and two of her sons

Christmas 2002 with father in his trailer

Two of Narda’s sons came to visit for Christmas 2002. It was their first trip to the States and the first time to see snow. Chris would later marry a Yank and move to the States where he is currently living as of 2015.

We created our first Christmas card together. At Walmart they had several different templates and we liked one that said Happy Kwanzaa. We had no idea what it meant but it appeared to have something to do with Christmas. We had a photo with us and our first snowman and one of my poems put on the card and sent it off. Australians had no idea what Kwanzaa was but my niece, father and others in New York looked at it with some dismay. We looked up what Kwanzaa meant and realised it was not really something do with white folks playing in the snow. ‘The celebration honours African heritage in African-American culture, and is observed from December 26 to January 1…’ Oops. 

Happy Kwanzaa

We drove the four hours to JFK Airport to collect them. It had started snowing when we left upstate New York and by the time we got home at midnight the snow was more than a foot deep with the main road from NYC to Albany; the Northway, being closed behind us. We were like the last car on the road. This would happen to us several times during our decade in New York where we would barely get to where we were going. We never once had an accident involving snow which is quite amazing as Narda had never driven in the snow before and I had not for about twenty-five years.

We had an accident when a large truck hit us and knocked us across a four-lane highway inAlabama in July 2012. In that accident we landed against a cement divider between the four-lane highway going in the opposite direction and our side of the road. We smashed in the front and side of the car but were not hurt. We had borrowed Narda’s son’s car to go to New Orleans from his home in Atlanta and it was on our return back that we got knocked across the highway. We were doing 70 miles-per-hour and there was a bump and away we went. The truck driver said he did not see us when he was switching lanes. Our car was not that small, just a regular car but the truck was huge and I suppose to the driver we were just a toy along the highway of life that was in his way. It was 104 Fahrenheit and standing along a very busy freeway in shock and in that heat waiting for the police left us quite concerned for the well-being for the planet or at least for ourselves. The policeman was good to us. He drove us to a car rental and I drove the rest of the way back to Atlanta. Narda and I were a bit shaky for a few days. The trucking company involved with the bump and greet had the car towed away and paid twice what the car was worth so Narda’s son was happy with the outcome. The trucking company was happy we did not sue them. We were happy with being able to continue on with our lives which at the time was living in Dalian China.

Once, in 2010 we were driving to Georgia to see Narda’s son Chris and in the mountains of West Virginia in a white-out situation; a white-out is where the snow is falling so heavy – well you guessed it – it is impossible to see. We pulled off of the highway and found a motel. All roads were officially closed by the time we got into the motel.

Fortunately for us we had a box of food in the car as we had rented a house on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina to have Christmas with Chris his wife and Brendan who was meeting us in Atlanta. We were stuck at the hotel until late the next day and we were making meals in our room. I only bring this up as we have a history of not letting anything stop us when we want to go somewhere.

When we got to our trailer park in Clifton Park the road had been recently ploughed. When we got to our trailer our driveway had been ploughed. Later we discovered that Fredrick Miller, the cousin who got Congressman Sweeney to write the dick-brain at the US Consulate in Sydney to give us our visa, had cleared our driveway. He would do a lot to help us out over the years. A week later there would be another foot of snow giving Chris and Stu a great introduction to the wonders of snow. As boys would they went out to have a snow fight but unlike us knowledgeable winter boys they did not have a clue. They would take shovels of snow and throw it at one another. I taught them how to make a snowman and how to make snowballs. As a step-father it was my role to teach these life-skills. I doubt in the past 15 years I have taught them anything else but I am sure put into a winter situation again they would be able to defend themselves if attacked by snowball-throwing others.

Chris stayed with my father and Stu with us.

Narda & Sons 2002 visit

39. 2003 began well and ended terrible