The Bus Driver and the New Girl

When I first came to DC I took the 52 bus to work. Most of the riders on the 52 bus were Latinos or African Americans, and I felt like an interloper. It was their bus, and I didn't belong. I was white, new to DC, and new to the bus. I tried to be invisible, just blend in, but I had red hair, so . . . .

What the bus driver said to me changed everything.

The driver on the 8:35 bus, my bus, was an African American with a salt and pepper beard. Well, all bus drivers in DC are African American, of course, but I thought I should put that in there for those of you readers who don’t live here.

I’d been taking the bus for a few months, then one week I drove to work because my boss had given me her parking pass to use while she was out. (Without the parking pass, $15/day; hence, the bus.)

But after a week of parking in the underground lot at work, I was back waiting for bus 52 at 14th and Irving, like always. It was the driver with the salt and pepper beard. When I climbed the steps and shoved my dollar in the slot, it happened. He said, “We missed you lately!” I was stunned. He recognized me? He knew I hadn’t been there?

As I worked my way back to find a seat, I heard his words again and again: “We missed you lately.” He knew me! The morning sang.

Maybe they all knew me—hard to be invisible, after all, being one of the only white riders, and with red hair, to boot. Maybe they thought this was my bus, too. The 52 bus. My bus.

America, my country

I learned a lot when I hosted a 16-year-old German exchange student, many years ago. For one thing, I discovered I felt personally responsible for the United States of America. 

Take our first supermarket trip. As we parked in front of the grocery store, my thoughts started running like this:

Will she be impressed with how big Kroger's is? Do they have bigger ones in Germany? Oh, nevermind big. That's stupid. That's so American. Just please let there be no rude people. Well, at least no people yelling. What about food quality? Probably the tomatoes in Germany are redder and plumper. Will the green beans have brown spots like last week? Maybe we'd better go to the Farmers' Market tomorrow.

So, I headed for the cereal aisle. Now there's an aisle that makes you proud to be an American. But wait. Do they have cereal in Germany? Maybe she doesn't even know what cereal is. 

"Do you eat cereal for breakfast in Germany, Tina?"

She hesitated a little before answering. It was her first day here, and I didn't know yet how much English she knew. Maybe she didn't know the word "cereal." Maybe I should explain.  I looked for a cereal box picturing a bowl of cereal.  Instead, I found pictures of Batman and the Smurfs and Count Chocula. I imagined her letter home. "Americans eat cereal with marshmallows and fictional characters." 

After a couple weeks, I began to understand a little more that the point of the exchange program was to educate the host parents. That is, I didn't know for sure how much Tina was learning, but I sure as hell was learning a lot.

That cereal business, for example.

First we had Rice Krispies. I explained that Rice Krispies were made in Michigan, where I was from.  "Yes, we have Kellogg's in Germany, too." Of course they do. I couldn't have figured out that Kellogg might, maybe, have an international division?

The next morning I held up the Quaker Oats box before I started making the oatmeal.  "Do you have this?"

Tina looked inside. "Yes. My little brother especially likes it. He has it every day." 

Great! I smiled as I heated the water for the oatmeal. Another German-American bond!  Imagine my surprise when Tina didn't want the cooked oatmeal and instead put raw oats in a bowl to eat with milk and sugar, the way they eat oatmeal in Germany.

The next day I brought out the Wheaties—Breakfast of Champions. Tina didn't know the orange and blue box, but after trying some, she announced that they had the same thing in Germany. "But we call it corn flakes."

Tradition Slippage

When I stuff the turkey on Thanksgiving, I use Pepperidge Farm Herb Stuffing Mix. That's how it all begins. Just a little crack n tradition. One year you don't make turkey dressing from scratch, and before you know it you're ordering the holiday dinner package from Colonial Cafeteria. Wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to convenience foods. The Pepperidge Farm stuffing. The Betty Crocker canned frosting. The Sara Lee cheesecake.

Tradition slippage is something I’m concerned about as a parent. I want my Rachel to be part of a heritage that I learned from Mom and Grandma. I want her to use a special Christmas tablecloth, and not because Martha Stewart is promoting an eggplant-and-fern color scheme for the holidays. I want her to realize that buying birthday cakes from Kroger—or even from La Madeleine—is against the rules: real cakes are made from scratch, and on birthdays you use the favorite recipe of the birthday person (pineapple upside-down cake, in Grandpa’s case). I want her to see that rolling out biscuit dough and cutting it into powdery circles with a glass dipped in flour is more fun than rapping that Pillsbury Doughboy on the ass and arranging sticky lumps one inch apart. Will my Pepperidge Farm stuffing shortcut—innocent though it seems—lead Rachel to a life of Tater Tots and Hamburger Helper?

I know, I know. This is the era of cell phones and Starbucks, and you’d have to be seriously underemployed not to use convenience foods regularly. All lanes are the Fast Lane. Convenience foods are made for, well, our convenience. I accept that. I’m neither a Luddite nor an ecofanatic. I do not live in an old farmhouse using a wood stove for heat, buying only unrefined sugar. I live in Washington, DC. I pick up deli food at Sutton Place Gourmet with the best of them. I would not want to give up my morning Eggo Waffle, snatched from the toaster on the way out the door.

But there are times when fast food just won’t do. Our family Thanksgiving is a heritage I have to offer Rachel. I want her to learn to do it “our way.” Isn’t that, after all, the reason we have children in the first place? I’ve lived for many years halfway across the country from my family in Michigan, so to compensate for the absence of relatives at the holiday table, I always invite a dozen friends—waifs, like us, with no family nearby. Waifs being what they are, the guests change from year to year, though there is now a core group of three or four who have come to consider dinner at my house their own annual ritual.

The before-the-day preparations are a sine qua non of the ritual. Ironing the tablecloth and napkins, which have been dampened by sprinkling. No spray starch. No steam. No Permaprest. Making the pies—pumpkin and apple and raspberry, and not with Pet-Ritz pie crust, either, but with real crust, rolled out on a floured countertop. Grinding the cranberries and orange peel for the cranberry relish. Not with the Cuisinart. I clamp the hand-cranked grinder (a garage-sale find) to the table and fill the hopper with the plump red berries, which crunch and pop as they are mashed. Some juice always drips from the bottom of the grinder, so, just like Mom, I place a bowl beneath it on a chair. 

On Thanksgiving day, I get up at 5:30 to make the turkey stuffing and get the bird ready for the oven. Some families have Thanksgiving dinner in the evening, but our dinner is at 1:00. And the turkey is always 20 pounds or more, which is why it has to go in the oven by 7:00, and why I always invite a dozen waifs. That’s how we did it when I was growing up, so there it is.

Except for the stuffing. One year, shopping at 10:30 on Sunday night before Thanksgiving, I stood before the shiny bags of stuffing mix on display at Albertson’s. I picked one up to read the instructions: “Just add water” (which, being translated, reads “Wide is the gate”). I bought two bags. Oh, sure, I sauté celery and onions to “make it my own,” as the package says, but I’m not kidding myself that such tinkering takes the place of laying out bread slices to dry overnight. I started down the broad path, and I never went back.

Stuffing mix aside, so far I’ve held on to Thanksgiving and some of the other celebrations in my jihad against Tradition Slippage. But I have conceded many battles. An entire canon of domestic arts has been surrendered—sewing and knitting and crocheting, for example—skills my mother learned from her mother and passed on to me. The other day I was sewing up a rip in Rachel’s jeans, threading the sewing machine and checking the tension, and I remembered when Mom taught me to sew—on that very Singer Featherweight. I was 10 years old and we made a pair of flannel pajamas for me—pale green with little yellow and pink horses. I learned the word “placket.” But I have not taught Rachel to sew. How could I, when I have quit sewing myself? The maternity clothes I made when I was carrying Rachel is the closest we ever came to sewing together.

Grandma was an expert knitter. Of the many items she made, my favorite was a sweater she knit for me when I was six—dark green, with elves jumping over toadstools. Rachel wore it when she was six, too, and many times I’ve told her how Grandma called me to her side to measure the sleeve against my extended arm, and that’s when I knew she was making it for me. I love that sweater, tucked away now in the cedar chest for some future granddaughter. Grandma told us that knitting socks for the family was one of the things she and her sister had to do at ages six and seven. I marveled at that as the needles cramped my sweaty hands during my first knitting project, at age 13. I was making a pair of bright red booties for my first niece. Quelle ordeal! But how proud I was when my sister folded back the tissue paper and saw my handmade gift!

Some domestic traditions passed down to me were more mundane. Take ironing. Before steam irons, I mean. Now there’s a lost art. Sprinkling takes a special touch to obtain just the right dampness, and each shirt, each tablecloth, has to be rolled up to sit for at least an hour to let the moisture spread evenly. I was the youngest of three girls, and therefore the last to learn each task. My first real go at sprinkling came when my older sisters were at camp for a week. Mom never said anything to me, but I read in the letter she wrote to my sisters, “Marian sprinkled the wash. It was so wet I almost had to wring it out.”

Ironing, sewing, cooking—these are traditions that have slipped during my watch. But why choose the hard way? Mom herself was open to shortcuts. Those great biscuits she let me cut out after she rolled out the dough? Bisquick! And I remember she tried a ready-mix cake or two. They were dry, and whether chocolate or lemon, they tasted something like rye crisp, which is precisely why Mom shunned them. But Betty Crocker has learned a thing or two since then, and now box cakes can pass the blindfolded taste test. Convenience creep is inevitable. No doubt some great-great grandmother of mine dropped churning butter and spinning thread when the packaged products became available. I consider this progress.

For all of the warm memories I have about my inheritance from Mom and Grandma, part of my heritage was also the responsibility for preparing meals. Not just for Thanksgiving dinners and other special occasions, but day in and day out. While Rachel has not learned some of the traditions, neither has she inherited that sense of responsibility. She represents the first generation in my family to be freed from the assumption that cooking and laundry are the domain of the women. She has seen that both men and women can cook and iron. Now that's progress.

I have kept Thanksgiving and a few other traditions as my gift of family heritage to Rachel. Call it Tradition Tokenism. But in truth, repeating the Thanksgiving rituals is as much for me as for Rachel. I like grinding the cranberries because it makes me feel close to Mom. And I like seeing Rachel repeat my childhood jobs—getting out the fancy dishes and stemware to set the table, arranging the relish plate.

“Why do we only have black olives at Thanksgiving?” she asks.

“Just because,” I say, giving her Mom’s answer.

“I’m going to make place cards!” she announces, just as I did, and I smile, just as Mom did.

But still, I wonder. Have I held the line sufficiently? Have I passed on enough of Grandma and Mom so Rachel won’t forget them? Will Rachel want to carry on the traditions?

Deep down, I still have doubts. Maybe I should have taught her how to can tomatoes.

Halloween phenomena and broken vows

As I walked around Capitol Hill last year I took pics of all of the Halloween yard stuff I saw. It was lots of fun, and some people are so inventive. These are a couple of the photos I posted on Facebook.

But a couple weeks ago I noticed tons of ready-made Halloween paraphernalia (for lack of a better word) at Costco, and also at two different garden shops. I realized that Halloween is the new Xmas. Something to spend more money on. To put time into. Commercialized. I haven't checked, but I'm sure there is a whole line of Hallmark greeting cards for the occasion.

I know, I'm really slow on this. Obviously it's already a thing.

Sure, in our culture, haunted houses and trick-or-treating and pumpkin carving are longstanding traditions. I myself have put together a costume and hosted a front-steps Halloween party for the last dozen years or so. 

But what I realized is that decorating the yard or the outside of the house for Halloween is a commercial growth industry and not simply the work of clever and quirky people. Granted, the phenomenon is probably contributing to the GDP in some positive way (and if we could only have the strings of little pumpkin lights made in the U.S. it would even create jobs!). 

But I didn't want to abet the noncreative aspect of this trend, so I vowed to resist the urge to take pictures of all of the decorations as I take walks around the neighborhood. I would not include these fuzzy spiders or huge blown-up pumpkins in my regular Facebook postings of front-yard sculptures.

But then I saw this yard, and it was so cute I had to break my own pledge. I mean, they even put a basket in the dog's mouth. Makes me smile even now.

My weakness in sticking to what I already decided reminds me of an interview I heard. A veterinarian was asked if dogs really need those little coats that some dog owners put on them in the winter. You know the ones--the poodle with the red plaid vest, the chihuahua with the tiny fleece jacket. 

The vet said absolutely not. She said that dogs have appropriate metabolism and fur that keeps them warm. She pointed out that when humans think their dog needs a jacket to keep warm it is just a projection of the owner.

So the interviewer started naming some breeds that he thought might need coats. 

"What about beagles?" 

"No." 

"Dalmatians?"

"No."

"Westies?"

"No."

"Dachshunds?"

"Well," the vet laughed a little bit. "They really are so cute in those little coats. . . ."

So, there it is. 

But they really are a cute pair of skeletons, don't you think?

Calling the Doctor's Office

I think we can all relate to this today, even though it happened in 2001.

I was at work on Thursday, July 5. I had had pain in my ankle every day since I had fallen and twisted my ankle. The orthopedist I had seen nearly a month earlier had said I had a “non-union” in my ankle. I guess that made me pretty special, because he said that during his career he had seen about 3,000 ankle fractures but maybe only one non-union.

Well, my non-union was hurting like hell and I decided I would have to face the music and call his office for an appointment.

“Please pay close attention, because our calling options have changed. If you are having a true medical emergency, please hang up and dial 911 now. If you are a physician or other health care provider, press 1. If you would like to reach the billing department, press 2. For office location, fax number, and office hours, press 3. If you would like to schedule an appointment, press 4.

I pressed 4. A new recording reported that everyone was already busy and I should stay on the line for the next available person. After just a few seconds (!), a real person answered. 

“I’d like to schedule an appointment with Dr. Klimkiewitz.”

The real person briskly asked me for my name and date of birth. I’m not sure why she needed that, because she then said, “The first available appointment he has is August 7.” Maybe they don't give that information out to people whose dates of birth they don't know. 

Disappointed with the month-long delay, but knowing it was probably futile to try to get in sooner, I said OK.  But then, realizing my referral might not be valid that far down the road, I added, “This is for a follow-up—could you check that my referral from my primary doctor will still be valid?”

“Do you have the yellow copy we gave you? It gives the number of covered visits.”

“Not with me,” I said.

“Hold on, let me transfer you to his secretary.”

A new person answered. I told her I was scheduling a follow-up visit with Dr. Klimkiewitz and wanted to be sure my previous referral was still valid.

She started to tell me that referrals are good only for a certain length of time, but interrupted herself and said “What insurance to you have?”

“Capital Care.”

“Just a minute,” she said. Then I got a dial tone.

I sighed. I looked up the number again (this was before I had a cell phone). I dialed again.

“Please pay close attention, because our options have changed. . . .”

I couldn’t remember which option I has used, so I had to listen to it all again.

I pressed 4 and got the recording that everyone was busy “helping other people,” which by then I was quite certain was a lie. 

This time a real person did NOT answer within a few seconds, and I got the on-hold torture: “Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line. This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes.”

PLEASE, I prayed to the god of phone trees, PLEASE make this call monitored for quality assurance purposes. Eventually the first person I talked to, so long ago, came on the line.

I tried to sound chipper: “Hi, this is Marian Wiseman again. You transferred me to Dr. Klimkiewitz’s secretary and she . . .”

“What is your date of birth?”

I considered pointing out that we had gone through this before, but I suppressed that urge and gave her my DOB.

“Let me transfer you to his secretary. Her direct line is 546-8613. Her name is Charlintsia.” Then she transfered me. Again.

The call was answered by a woman sounding very much like the woman I talked to before..

 “Hello—Charlintsia?”

“Yes?”

 “This is Marian Wiseman again. We got disconnected when we spoke before.” Please note, readers, that I did NOT say “YOU disconnected me.”

 I repeated my request about the referral.

“When was the last time you saw Dr. Klimkiewitz?” 

“May 9.”

“Was this for your knee or your shoulder?” She had apparently pulled my file and found—I can’t deny it—that I had previously seen Dr. Klimkiewitz for numerous body parts.

“Actually, it was my ankle.”

In what can only be called a tone of superiority, she said, “The referral you had, if anyone had looked at it, was dated for 2000, and was valid up to July 19, 2000.” I pictured Charlintsia, smiling smugly like a frog that just caught a grasshopper. 

I responded sweetly. “Well, let’s just ignore the year part, because we know that was just a mistake and was supposed to say 2001, since I didn’t hurt my ankle until this year. So, I’d like to see Dr. Klimkiewitz before July 19, 2001, which is still two weeks away.”

“He isn’t available next week.”

“What about today or tomorrow?” I would have willingly cancelled  my lunch date and skipped two scheduled meetings to avoid needing to get a new referral from my primary care doctor. Believe it or not, the phone tree and recordings and unreturned phone calls of my PCP’s office made the current interaction with Dr. K’s office seem positively streamlined.

“Today he has clinic, which is double booked, and he doesn’t see patients on Fridays.”

“What about the week after next?”

“I don’t have the schedule for that week.”

I knew that she meant I had to go back to the appointment desk and start over. I decided Charlintsia definitely looked a lot more like a wart hog than a frog. I was pretty sure Dr. Klimkiewitz could have surgically repaired my ankle in the amount of time I had already spent on the phone.

I decide to play the long shot. I did, after all, have a non-union and was prepared to tell Charlintsia that I  was very special to Dr. K.

“I’d like Dr. Klimkiewitz to call me.” 

Nothing daunted, she said, “What about?”

“About my ankle.” I didn’t even use a sarcastic tone of voice.

“What about it?” she asked. Was she kidding? Can warthogs make jokes?

I used small words: “To talk about the pain I’m having and decide what the next step is.”

“What’s your number? Dr. Klimkiewitz returns calls within 48 hours,” she said. 

Wow! Maybe Charlintsia was really a warthog whose inner piglet just wanted to get out.

Finding Grandma at Ellis Island

When I watched the movie Brooklyn last week, I remembered my search of the Ellis Island records for my own family, nearly 15 years ago.

I had noticed a small news item in American Heritage magazine about how the Mormons had contributed millions of volunteer hours to scan all of the immigration records from Ellis Island for the period of 1892 to 1924. And—this part was so amazing—the records could be accessed for free on the Internet.

I decided to try to look for a record of Grandma Baker, my Dutch great-grandmother who had sailed from Rotterdam with her three children. I knew it was around 1906, because my grandma, who was one of those three children, always said she was 5 when they came, and she was born in 1901.

Grandma Baker came to America to join her husband, who must have left Holland about 3 or 4 years earlier, since the kids were aged 4, 5, and 6. I always secretly wondered whether he sent for the family. Could he possibly have deserted them, and Grandma Baker just packed up the kids and came after him across the Atlantic? She was spunky as hell, and I loved the idea of her showing up on his doorstep with their three kids. I knew my imagined desertion story was not very plausible, since the two of them did indeed get together in the new world and have six more kids, plus I never heard anything bad said about him. So I never asked.

He died before I was born, but I knew Grandma Baker. When we visited, she sat on the sofa, usually knitting—a pair of mittens, a sweater, maybe—talking animatedly in a rich Dutch accent full of rounded vowels and lots of “ach’s” and “ya’s.” She had very azure-blue eyes that, I swear, twinkled when she laughed, and she laughed a lot, because quips and jokes were standard fare among the Bakers. Her cheeks were moss-rose pink, with soft wrinkles. She had snow-white hair, twisted into a soft pile on top of her head—not drawn tightly back, but pulled gently up so that it waved a little bit around her face.

She was already in her 80s when I was old enough to realize that she was a pretty neat commodity to have, because none of my friends had an alive great-grandmother.

As I typed in www.ellisislandrecords.org, I pondered—as I had many times—what it must have been like for her to say goodbye to her family in Holland, knowing, very likely, that she would never see them again. Did she know anyone else who was boarding the ship? I imagined the kids bundled up in big coats, wearing hand-knit mittens and scarves. Was there a big trunk? Did each child carry a little suitcase or bag? Were they crying or happy? What did they eat on the ship? Did they get seasick?

What I knew about that journey was that  Grandma Baker did join my great-grandfather, who was living in Hoboken, and for several years the family lived on the fifth-floor of a tenement house there. My grandma, who had been the 5-year-old on the trip, told me that when she started school, all the kids spoke different languages. I love the notion of that Tower of Babel classroom, with students speaking Dutch and English, German and Italian, Russian and Norwegian.

Another story—the only other one Grandma told me about her life in Hoboken—was that when her dad played cards with his pals, he would send her and her brother to buy a pail of beer, which cost a nickel. When they brought back the beer, they attached the pail to a rope, and their dad hauled it up to the fifth floor. How I wish I had heard more stories. How I wish I had asked more questions.

The search engine for the Ellis Island database allows a search for a range of years, so I tried 1905-1907. I didn’t think that the children would be listed by name, so I searched for Grandma Baker. She was called Minnie, but that was a nickname for something like “Jaquemina.” I wasn’t sure of that spelling, but I gave it a go.

Given the spelling challenge, it was no surprise that there were no matches for “Jaquemina Baker.” I tried “J Baker” and was rewarded with 97 matches. Each listing gave some summary information—residence, year of arrival, and age. I pored over the matches that came back—Jacob Baker, Jaenne Baker, J. Allen Baker—but there was no one from Rotterdam. No one even from Holland.

I started over, using simply “Baker” with no first name or initial. This yielded 970 names, but, again, when I scrolled through all of the records I found no one from Holland. I wasn’t sure what was wrong. Could I be searching on the wrong years? Was I not using the search engine correctly? Could those Mormons have missed someone?

Maybe “Baker” was an incorrect spelling, although that was one question I had asked Grandma, because “Baker” never seemed very Dutch to me: “Did the name Baker get changed from Baaker or something after you came to America, Grandma?”

“No. It was always Baker” She was adamant. But now I wondered if she could have been wrong. After all, she had been only 5 years old. and everyone knows the stories of how those Ellis Island clerks assigned new names willy-nilly.

The Ellis Island search engine suggests variant spellings, and for Baker it offered a couple dozen alternatives, many of which I would never have thought of—everything from Baaker and Beker to Bacere and Baeger. It allows searches for two variant spellings at a time, so I tried again for the years 1905-1907, this time searching for the variants Baaker or Bakker, which seemed pretty Dutch to me.

That search returned a list of 115 passengers. I started reading through the entries. Mrs. A. Bakker. Aart Bakker. Abraham Bakker. Ailke Bakker. When I got to the “C’s” my heart jumped with a shock of recognition: Cornelia Bakker, Rotterdam, age 7. It was Aunt Cornelia! I clicked on her name. The next page was her passenger record, stating that she had arrived on November 4, 1907, on a ship named Rijndam.

I clicked on “View Original Ship Manifest.” Wow. Here was a scan of an actual ledger page from Ellis island, listing individual steerage passengers. I scrolled slowly down the list of passengers from the SS Rijndam, reading each name, not breathing. Then I saw them. All together, lines 25 through 28:

       Jacomina Bakker; female; age 29

       Cornelia Bakker; female; age 7

       Jannneke Bakker; female; age 6

       Jan Bakker; male; age 5

I stared at the names. There they were, a tidy little group. A family. My family. I was bursting with a thrill so deep it filled every cell, and I had to stand up and walk around the room, crying and laughing.

When I calmed down, I went back to my desk and studied the ledger for more details. So, Grandma, who went by Jennie, was originally “Janneke,” and she was 6, not 5, when they came to America.

The record gave more information than I expected—not that I know what I expected. Written carefully in columns across two ledger pages were the facts about hundreds of passengers booked on the SS Rijndam, which had sailed from Rotterdam on October 26, 1907.

The columns following Jacomina Bakker’s name offered these details: Occupation: wife. Able to read: yes. Able to write: yes. Final destination: Hoboken.

I pictured the hundreds of weary and excited immigrants, everyone wearing brown and gray (because, of course, that’s how they are in the movies). I saw them at the processing office, waiting in a long line to be logged into this ledger book by an immigration officer. I saw a young Grandma Baker, a 29-year-old Grandma Baker, to be exact, clutching a suitcase, relying, no doubt, on 7-year-old Cornelia to keep the two younger kids in line.

I saw the whole scene: Seated behind a big oak desk, holding a black fountain pen, was a clerk who wore black worsted trousers fastened to brown suspenders over a white shirt. The registration rooms were cold and drafty, so he kept his wool jacket on all day. He, too, was weary, dipping his pen in an inkwell in the desk, bending over the book, recording bits of information about hundreds of passengers in 29 columns across the ledger, asking over and over, “Name? Age? Occupation?”

I read across the columns of the ship’s manifest and learned, from Column 15, that Grandma Baker and the three children had indeed been sent for by my great-grandfather: “By whom was passage paid?” The answer: “husb, self.” For each of the three children, the answer was “fath, mother.”

The answers to the Column 16 question confirmed that they were poor, though I had never thought otherwise: “Whether in possession of $50, and if less, how much?” The immigration officer had written “0.”

Column 27, “color of eyes,” was blank for Grandma Baker. Incredible. The immigration officer must indeed have been weary not to have noticed her blue eyes. I suppose they were not twinkling right then.

                                 *          *          *          *

I called my 24-year-old Rachel that night and told her about the amazing Ellis Island records, about the years of work by the Mormons, about finally using the different spelling for Baker and finding Aunt Cornelia, about finding the little family of names, about being overwhelmed with joy and tears.

She took it all in and paused for a few seconds before she said, “You know what this means, don’t you, Mom?”

“No, what?”

“We’ll have to become Mormons.”

She’s a Baker.