Tangle With Regret

1
He didn’t want to tangle with regret—
not at his age, approaching 93—
and yet, in moments in between his naps
and over lunch or dinner, whether I
or we—whoever took him out for it
would follow as he seemed to circle round
on going, leaving, staying, coming back,
and everything that happened in between.

2
Their early in-betweens meant weeks at sea:
no luxuries on those freighters, coastal steamers or
old ocean liners recently demobilized from war—
I wasn’t there, but can recall, much later,
our surging, rolling, passage into monsoons
and night sweats, all sharply introduced by
the harshly musical shouts of stevedores
and shrieking exhortations of hungry gulls.

3
Advancing by this time, Dad’s macular
disease obscured the things in front of him,
so he couldn’t look directly at anything—
only around the margins—and even more,
he keenly felt his memory letting him down,
with things he thought he should remember, but
he couldn’t—so I can’t—recount them here, although
I hope, somehow, to make this thing complete.

4
You might be feeling reluctant about wading through
all this (and I am, too), like enduring—oh, here’s
an archaic image: someone’s well-worn carousel
of travel slides—that slow, mechanical release
of artificial sunlight through old memories, maybe
washed out, damaged, out of order, upside down.
So here’s the deal: I’ll leave out everything I can,
and you can skip or leave, it’s up to you.

5
Young, energetic pastor of a sturdy
wooden church whose steeple needed shingles,
he ascended—nothing to it, given all
the barns and houses he had worked on with his dad—
and gazed across the roofs of the bungalows
of Scandinavian fishermen and lunch-pail crews
off shift from building bombers, and was struck: “Just look
at all these churches—they don’t need me here!”

6
So they first sailed west from San Francisco
to Bangkok in ’47. Sharon and Paul
were 5 and 3 or so, plus Ellen and Fern,
two single women, made a faithful little band.
Sailing back to the States in ’53 with Mark 
along, they sailed on out again with Mark in ’54—
going east that time, via the Suez—returning in ’59
or so with me along. And then they “stayed” a few years—

7
I’m using air quotes, since we were in
Toronto, Philadelphia, some other places
and Santa Cruz, in a complicated sequence
that none of us now seems fully able to recall.
But early ’64 they sailed on out again, with
Mark and me, through those heaving seas above.
When we docked in Saigon for a couple days,
Dad flew with Mark up to Dalat, a boarding school

8
in the Central Highlands, where he was dropped,
you might say, into the middle of ninth grade,
having already attended twelve schools by then—
and, thankfully, I can’t recount them, either.
Reboarding, we proceeded round the tip
of Vietnam and up the Gulf of Thailand,
steaming into the muddy Chao Praya
and through a seeming jungle into Bangkok.

9
Skipping ahead, in ’69 we flew
the other way, Dad leaving early for
a conference in the UK, Mom and I on
an intercontinental hopscotch flight,
landing in Beirut and Athens, then to London—
where the sky was strangely light so late as
I rolled in starchy English sheets and tried to sleep,
flying my bike down dirt roads under palms.

10
In ’70 we left the States again—I know,
more skipping—leaving Sharon in Santa Cruz,
Paul in Oakland, Mark in college in Pennsylvania.
It seems like Dad went on ahead; Mom and I gazed out
at a sunset washing an Alaskan range, then crazy lights
and frenetic traffic to an austere hotel in Tokyo.
In ’74 when I flew back, switching planes in Honolulu,
I hardly believed I’d miss that tropical heat.

11
Some days when I was visiting, Dad would pull
a couple of old padded photo albums down
and try to focus, sideways, on their faded little squares
of people by a church, a farmhouse or,
more often, a dusty car—soon leaving for
another windy, windows-down adventure,
barreling away through golden waves of wheat—
but here squinting together, into a dropping sun.

12
Mom’s lovely, rolling cursive, labeling
these, would yield immediate, specific memories—
stories of so-and-so whose brother or
sister, wait—that was another time, but
we were coming, going, or we met them there—
but then he’d pause and shake his head, and say,
“Who are these people anyway, I don’t know
why I’m looking, nobody remembers them”—

13
except he wanted to. Sometimes, I thought, his cars
were loaded with his memories, starting with
a ’32 Dodge sedan he bought for
sixty-five bucks, down in Minneapolis.
Thinking he’d outsmart his friends, he’d hidden it
by the river before the wedding, but they found out
and brought it up to the church, hoisted it
up on blocks, and took off all the wheels.

14
In their wedding photo, on the church steps—Mom
would always point out—Dad was in white gloves
because he’d gotten into some poison oak
a couple days before. But they all look proud and
serious. He was newly ordained at 22,
and already had been preaching here and there
across the upper Midwest, driving church to church—
and even a summer with two churches in New York.

15
And that car carried them, grandly, west to Seattle
and their first church, although, being wartime,
they had about twenty flat tires along the way—
since all new rubber was going off to war.
He liked to remember the billboards they’d seen,
proclaiming, In the West, It’s Rainier—
since there was lots of rain, but liking
the joke about beer. What Mom remembered was

16
their drafty two-room apartment hanging off
the back of the little church (incredibly,
still standing in Ballard), and her feelings of shame,
having almost no money and conjuring some soup
with one potato and onion, for some
unexpected company Dad brought home—but even
more, having to go to the Catholic hospital
as a charity case, when Sharon was born.

17
And she remembered, vividly, the smell
of fish that almost made her sick each time
they drove across the Ballard Bridge
while she was pregnant, to the hospital.
For Dad, it was tobogganing in snow down
a hill near Seattle Pacific College—and how he fell off,
twisting his ankle—with the friends who got them
into missions, starting them on their way.

18
Other than those two albums, falling apart,
we don’t have much of a family record to go on—
their move across town into the mission group’s
communal house, or all their later moves:
Charlotte, where Paul was born; Toronto, Pennsylvania,
California; then back and forth to Thailand;
many crisscross drives across the States and Canada—
but she packed them carefully along for fifty years.

19
When he seemed disappointed not to have
more albums, I’d recall Mom asking, so many times,
“Wilf, did you bring the camera?”—and he rarely had;
or, “Wilf, do we need more film?”—and we usually did,
though film was hard to get, upcountry in those days.
We do have random snapshots and rather stiff
family portraits, staged on various furloughs, but there’s
mostly no way now to know where they were taken.

20
At this remove, he also skips around,
hardly remembering the early challenges—
their bouts of fever in Bangkok while wrestling with
the ornate and colloquial filigrees
of spoken Thai—before they could learn to read
its elaborate, carving, curving script,
that curled and flew around them in the clang
and clamor of nearby alleys and canals.

21
Soon, Dad and a seasoned missionary
colleague, with a Thai evangelist, went on
ahead to scout three northwest provinces,
near Burma, that the evangelical association
had identified for them. In 2005 when we
took him back—with Mom’s ashes—I asked
how they happened to choose that town, Tak, and
he supposed it was the most remote place they could find.

22
I wasn’t there for that first long journey
up from Bangkok, fourteen hours by slow train
with all their trunks and crates; then overnight
in noisy, buggy rooms near the railway station;
followed by six or seven hours in a flatbed truck
on long wooden benches under an open canopy,
crammed and lurching together on rutted dirt roads
that would become impassable in the rainy season—

23
but I’d heard about it, and even in ’64,
when I was 7, and Dad had gone on ahead
to the field conference—eager to dive back in
as field leader, since they’d been gone for
the last five years—Mom and I took a rattling,
crowded bus from Bangkok to Nakhon Sawan
(“Heavenly City”), then waited for what felt like hours
in the chaotic, dusty station’s blazing afternoon

24
as she tried to figure out which truck or bus
we’d need to take to Tak. She’d been concerned
about this, with her Thai so rusty after
all those years away, but eventually we
squeezed in on a narrow, lumpy bench and
roared away into the hot wind, swaying.
I could tell Mom was relieved when we arrived—
sweaty, weary, but happy to see everyone.

25
The small conference had gathered at the Borneo House,
an old, colonial bungalow of sorts,
with a heavy, frowning brow of eaves that
shadowed a wide upstairs veranda and little rooms.
Before the war, the East Borneo Trading
Company had maintained a station there, buying up
all the harvested teak, but it was a family landmark too,
having been their first rental house for a couple years.

26
I’d been 3 when we left in ’59,
so everything now was new: endless mosquitos
and long, sweaty nights under mosquito nets;
the gleeful roosters puncturing that almost cool
last hour of sleep; learning to climb and keep
my balance on strange, boxy, wet squat toilets—and then
flushing them, and taking dipper baths, with well water
from those roughly glazed, deep, dark, clay urns.

27
And I played where Sharon and Paul had played
some fifteen years before, though there wasn’t much
to do in the weedy, plain dirt yard with
a couple of trees too big to climb. Beyond
the splintered fence, some roosters, chickens and
stray dogs owned the crooked path going back to the well,
to the pigs and oxcarts, and to the water buffalo
waiting their turn in flooded paddies and fields.

28
Out front, the main road was a country lane
meandering along the river between the simple,
faded wooden houses, some on stilts or leaning
into their fences, with their worn accordion doors
all folded back to catch whatever breeze might
follow the next slow wave of ox-carts or bicycles.
That neighborhood, Hua Diat or “Boiling Head,”
was known for street fights and drunken brawls.

29
I could smell charcoal smoke from the fire pots
in the kitchen shed out back and nearby houses,
stinging with pepper or I didn’t know what,
and also hear Mom getting reacquainted with
the cooks and their routines, laughing together.
Evenings, she’d light the oily wick of a tin can lamp so we
could read, but with the conference going, I could
drift away to the comforting harmonies of old hymns.

30
Dad doesn’t reminisce about these things, of course—
but I can’t help it, they’re my backdrop for his offhand
references to the villages and people he recalls,
how they first went out on foot, few maps or roads,
hiring a couple men to carry bundles of gospel tracts
and some supplies. A little later he bought a motorboat to travel
up and down the river; I’ve always wanted a picture of that.
“Press on,” he liked to say. “We will press on.”

31

Mom had been an elementary teacher
in a one-room schoolhouse in Saskatchewan,
so, in addition to learning Thai, managing
the household and helping new missionaries adapt,
she knew how to teach those early years to
Sharon and Paul, and later Mark, then even later
Robby, Beth, Ruth and me, with correspondence textbooks
and some missionary barrel books she’d saved.

32
Rather often, he returns to what I think is
the defining chapter of our family story—how,
at the end of their first furlough in ’54,
Sharon and Paul, at 12 and 10 or so, were left
behind—or stayed, I’ve also heard it said—for their
further schooling, at a home for missionary kids
in Three Hills, Alberta, a tiny prairie town, and
they didn’t see Mom and Dad for five long years—

33
because there were no other schools available
in Thailand then. I don’t know the details,
and as with any family history, some things just
don’t get discussed that much; and it’s even harder
now that he and Mom and Paul are gone. I’ve got
my memories and some hearsay, check some things
with Sharon and Mark, but I’m no biographer,
so can’t tell others’ stories, only mine.

34
Still, he seems to feel the distance of it now,
acutely, just how far away they were,
and can’t believe the distance or the time.
“Not one phone call in all those years! Not one
visit! How can it be? How can it be?”
And then he tries to imagine having one:
“But how would it go if you did call?: ‘What did you
do today?’ ‘Nothing.’—What would you even say?”

35
If there, Sharon would roll her eyes at me—
not this again!—“Dad, that’s what families do,
they have those conversations every day.”
He shakes his head again. “How can it be?”
“In any case,” we’d say, “You couldn’t have—
there were no phones upcountry in those days,
and later, even when there were, it would
have cost too much!” “How can it be?” he says.

36
I reminded him of a phone call in the ’60s,
when he was arranging for Mom to fly back
for some medical help and a visit with
Sharon and Paul, for a few months or so. He had
to make a reservation at the post office,
which had the only phone in town, and they charged
five hundred baht for three minutes—twenty five
dollars then—the same as one month’s rent on their house—

37
illustrating the costs and limits of
long distance calls, but he doesn’t remember this,
imagining more pointless conversations:
“‘What did you learn in school today?’ ‘Nothing.’
How can it be?” Sometimes he left it there,
but a few times he sort of tiptoed closer:
“Well, there’s no point in worrying about it,
I can’t change anything that happened, now.”

38
When I say “Dad” and “now” in this, I mean
more than ten years ago, although it feels
like he’s still talking—so here I am, still
trying to understand, to listen and talk back.
I know there’s nothing unusual about how
I’m going over all of it again and again
(except for this compulsive format), but
I wish I had been wiser than I was.

39
Their mission founder, C.T. Studd—an outstanding
cricket player in his day, who gave it all up to go
to China, India, and Africa—famously said this:
“If Jesus Christ be God and died for me,
then no sacrifice can be too great for me
to make for him.” That was their ethos:
a communal, prayerful, pioneering
urgency, with nowhere too far to go.

40
I didn’t bring it up, but also couldn’t forget
I’d asked him once—though I can’t remember when—
if leaving Sharon and Paul in Three Hills
was one of those sacrifices, and he’d said
he didn’t look at it that way, it was just
something that had to be done. And now I wish
I’d asked him: What did you think you were
asking of them, and how did you ask it, then?

41
I don’t claim to hear the silent echoes
of those unasked questions, let alone
whatever answers never came, but
I recognized the sinking feeling of goodbye
again, the way cold water closes on
an old, familiar, dropping stone—the turbulence
of little memories going out and coming back,
like ripples from a shore that hasn’t changed.

42
And I couldn’t offer a forgiveness that
he wasn’t even asking for—and which,
in any case, wouldn’t have been mine to give.
Maybe it wasn’t a sacrifice for him—
or maybe he’s starting to feel it only now—
but I know it was a painful one for Mom and them,
and I also wish I’d asked him this, so overdue:
What do children know of sacrifice, and time?

43
Color our family distances lightest blue
for the endless skies above our long betweens,
for how we trimmed and flew them back and forth
on the folded kites of sky blue aerogrammes—
or flung them high on fragile wings of featherweight,
almost translucent, airmail paper in special
envelopes for flying, with special stamps.
So delicate to fly like that, and go so far.

44
On Sunday afternoons, daydreams like these
might lift me briefly in the stunning heat
or dive me into a sweaty, restless sleep,
before I leaned into the task of writing home.
The letter required when finishing that nap
was always fraught with the unspoken burden
that we should not interrupt the work of God
with any silly issues or complaints.

45
And so I struggled with my brief reports,
wrote plenty big and used the widest margins,
affecting a laconic nonchalance
I hadn’t earned, but faked with bravery:
Everything’s fine. We had some fun. I got an A.—
thereby foreshadowing Dad’s concern by fifty years.
And then, in cryptic, disappearing ink,
I spilled the longings I could not express.

46
In Mom’s letters, she was generous with stories,
adding details that she thought I’d want to know
and always reaching, gently, to pull me in—
while Dad’s were brief and typed, and very rare.
These little tugs across our empty distances
might send me up or down, like an erratic kite,
since anything beginning with a cheery, dear hello
would finish with a loving, soft goodbye—

47
but at least I had the prospect of rejoining them
in a few months—either an eight hour bus ride up from
Bangkok or four hours down from Chiang Mai, where Dad,
either way, would have some meetings and retrieve me
for the dusty, crowded ride, in buses barreling
down those two-lane blacktop highways, often racing
each other and playing chicken with fearsome trucks,
oncoming and piled high with fateful logs.

48
For years, in letters, Sharon and Paul—
and later, Mark—were almost mythical
to me, all their adventures in America.
Some distance would have happened anyway,
given our spread of ages, but we had
no chance of holidays together or other
casual family trips and gatherings, when there
was half a world between us for so long.

49
A few years later, I caught whiffs of vomit
on buses that labored up and down those long,
almost intestinally winding mountain roads
between Dalat in Tanah Rata and Butterworth,
for the twenty-four hour train ride to or from Bangkok,
with several guitars—including mine—and ten or twenty kids
belting out songs we hardly understood: Proud Mary,
The Boxer, Sound of Silence, and Hey Jude.

50
Dad was one of the parent chaperones on that
train ride once (out of my sixteen or so trips)
but doesn’t remember it now, or much
of anything about my school years, it turns out—
which frustrates him and surprises me, a bit,
since I’m pretty sure that he, as field leader,
wrote some letters, visited, negotiated,
and generally made arrangements. I walk him

51
through the years—more skipping, briefly, here:
asking Uncle Bob and Aunt Muriel Sjoblom
to open their home in Bangkok as a hostel
for us and their sons, Mark and Bill—which they kindly did,
in addition to running the Christian bookstore—
and asking the mission to send a teacher out,
renting the house next door to theirs
for her and our one-room schoolhouse—

52
and then, a couple years later, I think he asked
Uncle Art and Aunt Ginny Gualtieri to move
to Chiang Mai and manage a hostel—which they
graciously did—so we could go to a mission school up there.
Then, after my eighth grade in California, I think he asked
the mission to send a couple out to manage
a hostel near Dalat in the Cameron Highlands
and traveled down there himself to rent a house

53
large enough for several of us and their family, and
must have talked with someone at Dalat about taking
some off-campus students, which was new for them.
Later, Dalat moved down to the island of Penang,
and I think he asked again for help, which allowed
me and a couple others to live with faculty families
that year—and the Gunthers kindly took me in—
while he sent some letters about starting another hostel.

54
Still, none of these events comes back into focus
for him, not even the handful or two of afternoons
on his trips to Bangkok, when he had time
between visits with Thai Customs or Immigration
for this or that missionary, coming or going,
to take me away for an hour or two—a tuk-tuk ride
across town, and maybe an ice cream bar.
When even to him, for all he does recall,

55
forgetting things like this seems like too much,
I offer him a pass, “Well, you were busy—”
he waves it off and says, “How can it be?”—
which leaves me with some gaps I’d hoped to fill,
and him with disappointment that he can’t express.
But that’s not something he’ll investigate,
so I still can’t parse whatever he meant by “it”
or conjugate our past imperfect out of  “be.”

56
I should have mentioned earlier, we have
an oral history of Dad’s stories that
Sharon transcribed some years before this,
and rereading it’s like listening to him—
though I want to interrupt—and I’m sorry now
we didn’t think to take him back through these
to tease out possible revelations, so
I’m not surprised to find no answers there—

57
but it seems that even he remembers they
were always going somewhere, or about to go.
When I think of Sharon typing out his memories
of the way things came together—for leaving them—
and he says “It seemed to be the right choice,”
I’m reminded of those distant ripples in
the endless skies above our in-betweens,
and all our fading, ragged whispers of goodbyes.

58
I can’t say “Mom” and “now” in the same way, either.
She’s been gone for over twenty years and left us
even sooner, with her memory cruelly leaving her
behind. But I’m still listening, as carefully as
I can, and I think for her this leaving chapter
never ended. I often saw and heard her
linger with or turn toward them—in little
observations, silent meditation, and in prayer.

59
And I wish I didn’t have to skip around like this
to find her, but she left with such a scattering
of memories—the way a breeze might tease a page
or two in fun, then tear away the rest.
In the late nineties, after Christmas, we flew down
for a few days, and after dinner one evening, she asked me,
“How’s your mother?” “Well,” I said, “I think she’s fine—
you’re my mother”—and she replied, “I don’t know that.”

60
She was so sincere, and I wasn’t prepared
to be forgotten—though I should have been,
considering the tentative unravelings
I’d heard on our more and more infrequent
calls between our yearly holiday visits—
but even as I tried to reassure
her who she was, I thought: She’s lost herself,
not me, though maybe I am gone as well.

61
She’d wanted to describe the endless winds
that muscled down across Saskatchewan
and bent the wheat around them; how her dad
was knocked down by a stroke at 49,
which meant the farm and all became too much,
so they move a few miles up the gravel road into Frontier
where her mom took over the cafe and worked long hours,
all eight of them crammed in rooms on the second floor.

62
A skinny little girl (those were her words),
Mom at 11 would dip into her homework,
laid out on the far end of the counter, between
her trips with stacks of dishes, full and empty—
ignoring the farmers’ comments piled on them—
and her older brothers got work at the lumber yard.
She meant to write about her mother’s grit and
sacrifices, how she pulled them through—and stories

63
of her mother’s early days in Minnesota—
also teaching in a one-room schoolhouse; and how
her grandparents, Samuel and Taletta, published
a Norwegian paper, Bud og Hilsen (“Message and Greeting”),
widely read across the Midwest for many years.
I wish I’d taken better notes—or any, really—and
she always closed those stories by reminding me:
“Don’t ever forget, you are a Tunheim”—

64
but, sadly, now she had, their stories gone and
all her own that never would be written down—
including the one when I was born in Chiang Mai,
at McCormick Hospital. She’d been having
trouble and gone up there early (since Tak
had no hospital) and stayed with the McDaniels,
who lived across the street. Mark was living
with them that year, going to second grade

65
at a new mission school, but he doesn’t
remember my arrival—and I’m not
mentioned in his Tales of a Young Nomad,
an engaging memoir he wrote a few years later
as a class assignment in sixth grade,
in Pennsylvania (his sixth school, already),
though it’s been useful in helping us
disentangle our memories of other moves.

66
One night, Mom started bleeding heavily
and they rushed her across to McCormick
for my delivery. When, in the middle
of it all, Dr. McDaniel realized she
needed blood and they had none of her type,
he handed me off to the Thai doctor helping him,
lay down and gave his own, then got back up
and they worked together to take care of us.

67
When Mom and I went back to Tak a few
days or maybe later, I’ve since learned,
she was still so weak she couldn’t lift me,
only hold me, so Nancy Ashcraft, a
new missionary, volunteered to help—
for several more weeks, but Mom still wasn’t
recovering, so they took her down to Bangkok,
where the hospital could do a biopsy—

68
but I never heard this part of the story
until fifty years later, after Mom died,
when I visited Nancy during her retirement
in Florida, where she was working on
a history of the mission’s early years,
on an original PC with two floppy disks
and an old dot matrix printer, and she
gave me a copy of the manuscript—

69
that her biopsy had to be sent all the way
to San Francisco, and then, praying of course,
they waited on the slow mail for the results,
which came back positive for cancer,
so she had a hysterectomy, and eventually
we returned to Tak. I’d known about Nancy
helping in my early days, and she was
one of my several favorite missionaries—

70
but I hardly ever saw her, since I was
usually away at boarding school when she
came down out of the hills near Burma at
conference time, or maybe for some supplies
they’d haul back up on an elephant or
an ox-cart, though later I went with Dad
on a perilous logging trail, grinding
and lurching up hills in the steaming Jeep.

71
I’d say that Nancy’s gentle empathy,
paired with her quick, self-deprecating wit
and a disarming bravery, with her steely faith,
carried her through many challenges out there,
a long way from help. Sometimes she had a coworker,
sometimes not, as she relayed in her first book,
At the Scent of Water, which Mom gave me
years ago, though now it’s out of print.

72
But—thanks to Robby Charters, my childhood friend—
Nancy’s manuscript of those first ten years
has been polished up into another book,
No Turning Back, which you can download
as an ebook or buy in paperback
from Amazon, that big river that Mom
could never have imagined would carry her—
and I arrive in the last chapter, as noted above.

73
I think Ellen and Nancy were Mom’s confidants,
and whenever they met, in Tak or Maesod—
not that often—if I was there I could listen in
on their stories and laughter, prayers and murmuring
in those screened-in dining rooms—a refuge from
mosquitos—though maybe late at night, I’d leave for
my own mosquito net and read, or listen to
the rain pounding our roof of corrugated tin.

74
So it’s with memories of that thrumming rain
and the curling smoke from green mosquito coils
that I reread these excerpts from her book:
Wilf and Evy started [that furlough] with a
tremendous trial before them. They had discussed,
endlessly the reasons why they ought to leave
the children at home. Maybe they did not
verbalize to each other any reasons why they

75
should take the children back to Thailand.
It is certain that Wilf did not explore
his emotions and tell Evy how he felt
about this coming separation… Wilf
could tell you why it was best to leave the children
at home. He could not have told you how he felt
about it… Only Wilf’s actions observed
over the years following this furlough

76
would show the deep scars of pain and hurt that
this separation from his children caused.
And Nancy quotes Mom’s letters to her friend
Sylvia, in Alaska: But Evy, ever honest, wrote,
‘This summer, as we were moving day by day,
inevitably, toward the days when we must
leave Sharon and Paul, was unbelievably hard.
How sweet were the words of the song:

77
‘It will be worth it all when we see Christ.’
It is not in our own strength that we have taken
this step, believe me! But Nancy also writes:
Evy was far ahead of her day in being able to
explore and verbalize her feelings and she let
the listening world know that leaving her two children,
Sharon and Paul, was a deeper more horrifying loss
and grief than she could ever have imagined.

78
And Nancy follows with this observation:
Only their obedience to the Lord
and the urgency of the task He had laid
upon them could enable them to leave
their dearest treasures, Sharon and Paul,
behind them and go forward to Thailand.
But before that they’d been praying about Colombia,
and this earlier passage pulls me back again:

79
Then Wilf mentioned Siam. “Would you be willing to go
to Siam?” Almost to her own surprise, Evy answered,
“Yes!” “But it’s a pioneer field and maybe
we couldn’t take the children,” Wilf mused.
Even with that colossal possibility of being parted
from their children, Wilf and Evy were still willing to
accept Siam. For the Overgaards this was a sacrifice
that touched the most sensitive part of their hearts.

80
That God did not require this sacrifice
until Paul and Sharon were much older
does not take away from the painful surrender
the couple made there at Round Lake.
“It was not dramatic,” Evy wrote
of that long ago conversation, “but it has
a settledness and peace that
indicate His presence and guidance.”

81
I’m trying to honor them—including their regrets—
so I’ll confess to lingering doubts about 
the blanket certitudes of C.T. Studd,
as I recall those cool unwrappings of goodbyes.
Might there have been some other options, unexplored?
Who said they had to stay away five years,
or that God’s will could not accommodate
some changes or adjustments on the way?

82
The winds that Mom remembered still rolled down
across Alberta and Saskatchewan as
Dad and Mom pulled out of Three Hills, taking Mark
and leaving Sharon and Paul. I can’t imagine how
it must have felt to watch their car get small
and turn away, under that empty prairie sky.
Do you have moments when you feel you’re still
about 10 years old inside? I know I do.

83
Sharon can tell you all about the rules—
especially for girls—how boys and girls were
kept apart, and even siblings were not
encouraged to spend any time together.
Mom’s cousin and kids lived across the street
but they weren’t allowed to go over and play
there, either. And they were often told, “If your
parents have to come back, it’ll be your fault.”

84
Paul told me a couple of times that he didn’t
remember anything about Thailand, and he
wouldn’t talk about their time in Three Hills, either.
In fact he didn’t see the point of talking about it,
and would only say, “They did the best they could.”
But after we came back in ’59 and all moved
to Philadelphia, he asked to go back to Three Hills
so he could finish high school with his friends.

85
I set these memories out, like souvenirs,
and though they’re not all mine, they’re dusty from
from the wrinkled tissue that I’ve stuffed them in,
and rather dented from the journey. There’s
a lot I’ve left behind or can’t express—
at least not yet, or maybe ever. We
might want to choose what things to take along,
but memory’s always gathering and packing.

86
As I lift away these layers, they release
a swipe of salty ocean spray—maybe with
tears—that curls with pepper in some charcoal smoke,
rising like burning prayers. I started this
with him not tangling with regret—at least,
not wanting to—and oh, I didn’t either,
but am glad I did. I breathe it deeply in
and fold some words into another page.