Storytime Tapestry Newsletter

The newsletter devoted to spreading love and cultural awareness throughout the world.

Special Treat – Birdie Jaworski

Sept 16, 2006

Today we announce another new writer for Storytime Tapestry.  Birdie Jaworski becomes writer # 356 to have graced our wonderful newsletter with her great prose!  Birdie just happens to be my favourite Avon Lady and just maybe if you ask her she might share some of her wonderful Avon tales with you as well. 

Friday Morning, for Kevin and Ada
by Birdie Jaworski
littlebirdie@mac.com

One January day during my third grade year, Mrs. Mackenzie marched us 
outside and lined us up against the cool brick wall facing the 
playground. A Polaroid camera hung from her neck, and one by one, she 
asked us to smile. Flash! Slide. Out popped a photograph, which she 
gave us to hold and shake dry. I remember I wore my red teddy bear 
sweater and my hair in two pigtails sticking straight out the side of 
my head. We slipped these photos inside a letter to an unknown 
student our age. I remember my letter, too, word for word as if it 
were yesterday.

Dear Pen Pal,
My name is Birdie. I like dogs. I don't like math. My left thumb has 
a double joint. I have four sisters. My dad is a teacher. What does 
your dad do?
Sincerely Yours,
Birdie

Mrs. Mackenzie sent these letters to an inner city school in 
Baltimore. And one day late in the Spring she opened a large manilla 
envelope and passed each of us a response. I still have that first 
letter from Ada. I keep it framed near my desk.

Dear Birdie,
I never heard that name before. My name is Ada. I live with a foster 
family. This is my third family. I like dogs too. I want to be your 
friend.
love,
Ada

I didn't know what a foster family was. I asked Mrs. Mackenzie but 
she didn't give me a straight answer. Ada's face stared at me through 
huge brown eyes in the photo she enclosed in the letter. She wore a 
yellow dress with a white princess collar, and her hair frizzed 
around her face in a natural afro.

I wrote back to Ada. I told her about my dog and my sisters. I told 
her about Mrs. Mackenzie, too, how she had a round wart on the back 
of her neck and the way she made us listen to classical music before 
class began every morning. I told her to write to me at home over the 
summer, and gave her my address. She wrote back a few weeks later, 
and I read about her favorite city park and how much she wished she 
had sisters, too.

Those four small letters turned into many years of friendship. I 
followed her heartache as she moved from foster family to foster 
family. I grew up poor, but my life was so cushy and forgetful next 
to Ada's. I had a mom and dad and sisters and dog and cat and lived 
in a real house with a backyard and we took driving vacations every 
summer. Ada didn't know month to month who her guardians would be, 
and she never took one true vacation growing up. Her father was 
serving a life sentence in a Virginia prison for shooting her mother. 
I wanted to visit her but my parents said no. I wanted her to visit 
me, but she had no way to purchase a bus ticket to a destination many 
states north. So we wrote. And wrote.

I ran away from home, got pregnant, married young. Ada got pregnant 
too, but her boyfriend ran off with some other woman and she raised 
her son alone. She named him Kevin, and she promised me and him she'd 
be a teacher one day and help girls like her. She did, too, attending 
community college to get a GED and then undergraduate classes in 
subjects like education and remedial reading skills. She earned a 
teacher's certificate and started substitute teaching somewhere 
around the time I left my first husband.

Life, it was life we shared, some kind of strange life of fits and 
starts and stop signs and green lights, just two women doing the best 
they can in a world of messy uncertainty. Ada bought a city condo in 
New York and I bought a suburban house, and we planned our first 
reunion on the phone, a celebration to congratulate Kevin on the 
successful culmination of his high school years. I flew to the big 
city and ate chicken and corn and biscuits with Ada and Kevin and 
their friends, and though I was the only white person at the table I 
felt as much a part of the family as I did at any of my own family 
reunions.

Kevin introduced me to his three best buddies, each of them a wearing 
the uniform of an army soldier. Kevin wore one, too. He joined the 
service so that he could get an education, and he would soon fly to 
Iraq on a mission to find and keep the peace. I watched them drink 
beer and reminisce about the women they loved and lost, and saw so 
much of myself and Ada and our unending dreams inside each of them. I 
left them laughing on the balcony and walked to the kitchen to give 
Ada a hug.

"Dang it, girl. I don't like seeing all those beautiful boys in the 
service. Your son is a wonder. He looks so much like you, and he has 
that same underlying quiet that you have."

Ada's eyes filled with tears, and she hugged me in return. She didn't 
say anything, but I knew she worried about Kevin and didn't want to 
see him hurt. I got his overseas address that fall and started 
sending him a weekly care package filled with snacks and deodorant 
and batteries and magazines. I stood in line at the convenience store 
in my town buying Playboys and Penthouses and plunked down my money 
on the counter like it was nobody's business. I didn't like the way 
those books objectified women but this was Kevin I was helping. He 
wrote to me many times telling me how much those silly magazines 
meant to him and the other men. I got to know his troop-mates, and 
stuffed little personal notes to each of them inside the box. They 
knew I was some nutty liberal hippy California mother friend of 
Kevin's mom, so they sent me letters in return about the Iraqi 
children they met or the way they knew - just knew - that their 
efforts were bringing the world to a better place.

One day last year my phone rang. It was Ada.

"Kevin's dead." She hung up, left me holding the receiver to my ear, 
my heart skipping beats in unrelenting grief.

Ada died, too, three months later when the grief overcame her, became 
who she was. She lay in bed, a bottle of pills by her side, never to 
wake. I attended both funerals, left flowers and notes at graveside, 
cried for that little afro girl with the yellow dress. I miss her so 
much.

It's almost a year later, and life goes on. And because it's Friday, 
I'm packing more girly magazines and cologne and shaving supplies and 
fig newtons into brown cardboard boxes and stuffing a handful of 
personal notes inside. I don't believe in war, in any kind of 
conflict that results in harm. I'm just a nutty hippy mother. But I 
believe in Kevin, and Ada, and all those sweet boys with guns, and 
I'm not going to let them down.