Her Hands His Eyes — Entry 6
Six years old. 8,600 miles from home. One smile that made room for everything.
I’ve been going through the slides this week. Sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes one stops you completely.
Hackensack, New Jersey. 1976.
First days in America. My American grandparents’ apartment. A little girl from Korat hearing city noise through the walls for the first time.
Six years old. 8,600 miles from home.
I didn’t know what to do with that sound, so I pulled the blinds down. Trying to make America quiet. That is my clearest memory of those first days.
But This Photo Was Grandpa Lloyd
Not the blinds. Grandpa Lloyd’s smile.
The two of us cheek to cheek. His smile was wide, certain, the smile of a man who had been waiting for you. Not surprised at all by what he felt when you arrived.
And me looking straight at the camera. Directly. Without hesitation.
I was not scared of him. Whatever the noise, the strangeness, Grandpa Lloyd made room the moment I got there. Children know this without words.
He just held on. That was enough.
“He just held on.
That was enough.”
Why the Arrival Hurts to Write
I sat with Grandpa Lloyd’s smile for a long time.
I kept coming back to my own face in that photograph. Six years old. 8,600 miles from home. And I was not scared. Not even a little.
He did that.
I thought the hardest part of writing this book would be Thailand. The leaving. The grief of what was left behind.
But it’s this — becoming someone new while the old you is still there — that breaks me. It’s quieter than grief. Deeper than homesickness.
Grandpa Lloyd never asked me to be anyone different. He just made room.
That was enough then. It’s enough now.
The People Who Hold Space
Some people do that.
You spend your life grateful for them. Grandpa Lloyd made room in Hackensack in 1976, and that moment now lives in my father’s slides.
“Grandpa Lloyd never asked me to be anyone different. He just made room.”
Next week: the mother image I keep returning to. That’s all I’ll say for now.
