GRAND ADVENTURE

Adam and I are reading a picture book. ‘Hunh?’ I say, turning to the previous page. “I don’t get this.”

Adam instructs me.

“What would I do without you to explain these things to me?” I ask him affectionately.

“I don’t know what you would do!” he answers importantly.

I’ve told him I’m going to South America. He keeps thinking it’s Africa because he remembers about the jungle—and keeps telling me plaintively that he wants to go with me.

                                                                             …

Over the years my father had done extensive reading related to his medical condition and had become convinced that he didn’t have arthritis after all, but a chemical imbalance that affected his neuroreceptors. He was prescribed the anti-depressant Elavil, which increases serotonin levels in the brain—the same drug I used to take for sleep—and, after seventeen years as a semi-invalid, he made a complete recovery virtually overnight.

When he asked himself what he most wanted to do, he told me, he decided it was to hunt for rare butterflies in the jungles of South America. A couple of years later Doug and I visited him in Tucson, and he showed us slides of his thatched hut on the Amazon River, a short distance from a tiny Indian village, where he spent summers with a parrot, spider monkey, and coatimundi.

He wrote me that a friend of his down there, George Salikas, had a boat service that ferried tourists down-river; because I knew Spanish, he was prepared to hire me as a guide. So I quit my housekeeping/babysitting job, ready to dash off on a grand adventure.