It's a Smaller World

My bloodline is divided between my maternal Hibernian roots and my father's Yankee heritage. My Nana was transported from the West of Ireland across the Atlantic in steerage and my DownEast ancestors sailed with the Pilgrims on the Mayflower. Both families held strong convictions about the value of hard work and in 1962 my father found my older brother and me a job delivering the morning newspaper for the Boston Globe and Herald to our neighborhood south of the Neponset River. The distributor paid four cents a paper. My brother and I earned more than $10 a week at a time when then minimum wage was $1.15. We were rich boys at 8 and 9. My mother banked the money from the newspapers for our college fund. We got to keep the tips.

Our youthful spending sprees devoted to Yodels, cokes, movies, and comic books didn't deplete our personal stashes and I decided to be charitable with my money. The nuns of Our Lady of the Foothills had organized a fund drive to proselytize the war orphans of Korea. My Uncle Jack had fought with the Marines at Chosin Reservoir. My father had escaped service in that far-off conflict by writing a letter to JFK, then Massachusetts' freshman congressman. They had both done their duty in WWII. My father was exempted from joining the battles against the Chinese hordes. He was the sole source of income for his family. I felt that I owed a debt to the less fortunate children and contributed $15 to the nuns' charity.

My selfless donation was praised by the sisters and I was given the right to name the baby orphans at their baptism. It was almost like having my own children and I gave $30 more for the right to these motherless wards of the Church with names such as Peter Nolan Kim, Chaney Park, and Fabian Lee. The pastor of our parish rewarded my generosity with documentation of my wards' baptism and enrollment in an orphanage with hopes of increasing Christ's army in Asia. I stashed the certificates in my closet. I attended Catholic school only to please my mother. My belief in God had reached a dead-end in 1960, when my best friend, Chaney, drowned in Sebago Lake. He had been 6. No god I wanted to worship would have let someone that young die.

Over the years I would wonder about my wards. I hoped that they had escaped the clutches of the Church. My research into the numerical ranks of the faithful in Korea revealed that many Koreans had rejected traditional beliefs in favor of the more liberal concepts of all men and women sharing equality as espoused by the Chatholic and Protestant missionaries. Their proponents ballooned to sizable proportions of the population and in recent years I have Googled the names of my charges without any success. I also have occasion to travel through Korea on trips to Thailand. Korean Air is the best airline in the Orient. Each time I'm waiting in Inchoen Airport, I study the name tags of the workers in their 40s. One day I'll meet one of my orphans.

Either in this life or one of the next.

We are all family.