And now for something completely different

The books I've published to date have all, in various ways, involved journeys. Santa Fe on Foot detailed paths for walking, running and bicycling around my hometown, Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Santa Fe Trail by Bicycle described my bicycle trek from home to New Franklin, a daunting but quite wonderful expedition of 1,000 miles. From Calcutta with Love-the World War II Letters traveled back in time to the wartime correspondence of my parents. Beast of Bengal adventured into a fictitious hostile military hospital and the hero's journey from an underground prison and past the jaws of a man-eating guard tiger. I began a sequel to Beast of Bengal, tentatively entitled The Hand of Ganesha. A few chapters into the novel, however, I could not continue. It wasn't writer's block but rather another book, one that I'd been intending to write for twenty years.

THE GOODBYE BABY is the story of my adoption and reunion. It begins like this...
"Every goodbye is a hello," wrote one of my army psychologist's father's patients during World War Two: the first line of a handwritten verse. The poem was just one page of Dad's wartime memorabilia. I discovered it while reading through hundreds of letters for From Calcutta with Love. I set the poem aside, not thinking too much about it. "From Calcutta" was published just as I was losing both of my adoptive parents. A few years later, I began to dwell on the real meaning of the unknown soldier's words. For a decade, my life had been a series of goodbyes. Four deaths in painful succession: my biological father, my adoptive father, my adoptive mother, my husband. The weight of these losses shoved me back to an earlier time. I was no longer anyone's child or partner. Even after eighteen months of loss support groups, private therapy, talking to best friends, I still felt eviscerated. Deep down, I knew that being adopted had much to do with my inability to accept my losses. Until I looked back over my life's journey, however, I realized that understanding would elude me.
posted by Elaine PInkerton at 10:59 PM
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Elaine PInkerton
I'm a Santa Fe author who's lived in the City Different since the mid-1960s.
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