My brother, Doug, and I had a daily routine. As soon as we arrived home from school, we raced to the bedroom we shared, lunchboxes and books in hand. The first thing we did was quickly shed our clothes and step into our flannel superhero pajamas. Then we ran to the big box television, plopped ourselves onto the floor, lay down with our hands underneath our faces, and became entranced by the cartoons on the screen. We were the first generation of latchkey kids. The television became our favorite babysitter. Chong, Doug, and I went into a trancelike state watching cartoons. The television was a portal into a new world, like the digital world would someday be to the next generation. When Pong, one of the first computer tennis-like games you played on TV, became part of our world, we thought we’d taken a quantum leap into the future.
One late afternoon, as evening was approaching, Chong started cooking dinner for us, and Doug and I got lost in some animated fantasy on the giant tube. In my peripheral vision, I happened to catch a flickering orange light coming from the kitchen.
“Chong, there’s some bright light coming from the kitchen,” I said, not thinking much about it. I was mesmerized by the cartoons.
Chong turned her head toward the kitchen and immediately sprang up from her position next to us. Moments earlier, she had heated the oil in a pan for dinner. When she reached the doorway to the kitchen now, she gasped.
“Doug and Dave!” she called out. “We have to leave the house right now! The kitchen is on fire!”
Chong stood by the door, her face pale as if she had just seen a ghost, her eyes full of terror. We jumped up and ran outside. We didn’t consider grabbing anything. We were in such shock that we blew right past the hamsters resting in their cage next to the door we burst out of. Thankfully our dog, Penny, followed us outside.
In a matter of moments, the whole front of our house was engulfed in flames. Large, billowing black smoke plumed, polluting the fresh, rural farmland air. I stood in fear, watching the scene unfold as if it were on the evening news. The only difference was I could feel the heat, taste the smoke, and hear the crackling.
The sirens announced the arrival of massive glistening red fire trucks. A fireman jumped off one and unfurled a large hose, then he ran toward the house to extinguish the flames. I looked around us to see neighbors gathering to view the unfolding spectacle.
When Mom and Dad finally arrived, they were relieved to see that we were all safe. We embraced them in disbelief, not saying anything. We didn’t know what to say as we watched the frenzy of activity around the house. After the firefighters gained control of the fire, the truth was obvious:
Almost everything we owned was gone.
As our family stood there, stunned, silently, staring at our home in ruins, we thought about everything that was lost. The new furniture that our parents had recently purchased was now destroyed. The beautiful living room sofa that still had its plastic covering on it—ironically, to protect it. The dark coffee tables. Our new television. The beloved stereo system and my dad’s prized collection of rock-and-roll music vinyls he had acquired since he was a teenager. My mom’s mementos and art collection of gold jewelry. Her ornate boxes and vases made in Korea. So many other priceless objects that held memories from thousands of miles away. All turned to ashes.
I suddenly had a terrible thought.
The hamsters. We forgot the hamsters.
All at once our future had disappeared inside an inferno. The question now was, where would we live?
Chong was never blamed for the fire. She was still a child. My parents weren’t cited, either. Life just kept going. We had been renting the house from some farmers, and the landlords kindly let us live with them as our house was being rebuilt. We lived in a trailer on their property for a couple of months, and this pause in my family’s life led my parents to reexamine the world we were starting to create in Maryland. They felt like it was time for a change. So did my dad’s brother, who lived in Arizona.
“It’s a sign from God,” Uncle Lloyd told my dad when he found out about the house fire.
My dad’s older brother was a stenographer, too, and also a volunteer associate pastor living in Arizona. He had been telling my dad for a while that we should move out there. Some might see this fire as a challenge, but others, like my uncle, viewed it as an opportunity. He encouraged my parents to move to Arizona for a fresh start. We had never even visited Arizona.
I will always give credit to my parents for not freezing in the mess of it all. They had learned how to just move on and make the best of whatever they had in their hands.
Arizona was rapidly growing beyond the typical “snowbirds” coming from the colder climates during the winter months. Now people who wanted to build a new life in the valley of the sun were moving there from all over America. Young families, entrepreneurs, and people looking for their field of dreams streamed into the newly constructed suburbs of the desert in metropolitan Phoenix. Dad and Mom decided to join this new wave of pioneers.
As we left our Narnia to move to the West, Uncle Lloyd was delighted. He would offer us a refuge from our burned-down house in Maryland and even lead us to a place where we could handle the very flames of hell.
CHAPTER THREE The Valley of the Sun
Seeing the desert for the first time from the backseat in our orange Pontiac Grand LeMans felt like we were on an extraterrestrial space mission. The shapes, huge colorful vistas, and landscapes were captivating. We were accustomed to thick green landscapes, but the desert was all about the stark reality of sand, dirt, cactus, and tumbleweeds. The heat in Arizona can get over 100 degrees in the summer. People say it’s different because it’s dry heat, but so is a blowtorch. It gets hot enough to fry eggs on the sidewalk.
Arizona would be a dramatic change for my family, and in more ways than just the climate.
We ended up in Tempe, a suburb of Phoenix, home of Arizona State University. Tempe boasted about its independence, its New Age vortexes, and also about how many people had left Southern California to come there for lower taxes and a better opportunity to own a house. Less government, and a vibe of independence. You could feel the future potential of Arizona, with its distinctive desert beauty, chill lifestyle, and relatively low cost of living.
Once we grew accustomed to the summer heat, we loved Arizona. I was only ten years old, but I knew this would be a great place to grow up; my parents felt the same way about uprooting us to Arizona to create a new life. It felt like a place where pioneers could find a home.
Before we’d settled into a new house of our own, we moved in with my uncle and his family. None of us, besides my dad, had ever met them. Uncle Lloyd lived in a three-bedroom house with his wife and three children, and they were hospitable enough to let our family of five live with them. It was a stretch for all of us, but we made it work. What stood out to me was that the backyard contained a bean-shaped, baby blue pool with interwoven cinder blocks as a fence around it.
Uncle Lloyd was the second of four sons, right above my dad. He was born in Sikeston, Missouri, the same place my father was introduced to the world before the family moved to Michigan. During World War II, Uncle Lloyd served in the Army Medical Corps in Europe. Later he enrolled in business college, got married, and attended court reporting school, where he honed his skills as a stenographer like my dad. After becoming a Christian, he enrolled in a Bible college, where he studied to become a pastor.
The first thing I noticed in Uncle Lloyd was his loud, uninhibited, contagious laugh. He was an outgoing man with a constant smile on his face. His icy blue eyes mirrored my dad’s. They enlarged every time he laughed. Whenever he said something funny, he scanned the room to see if others were joining in his hilarity. But it didn’t matter if others approved or not; if he thought it was humorous, the shoulders on his wiry frame curled as the laughter shook his whole upper body. Watching him get tickled by his own humor was contagious.
One day Uncle Lloyd said, “Hey, David, come here. Come to the bathroom for a second.” He had a winsome and innocent way of making people trust him.
I knew he wasn’t going to do anything dangerous; people were in the house, and the bathroom door was open. By now I knew he liked to laugh and entertain us, so I followed him into the bathroom without a second thought.
“Watch this,” he said.
Uncle Lloyd pointed his index finger and thumb toward his right eye, then in one swooping movement, popped his eye out of his head.
What in the world?
My mouth gaped open. I stopped breathing for a moment. I saw the glass eye he was holding with his two fingers, then I noticed the hollow part of his eye socket with its pinkish flesh and thin blood vessels.
If this is supposed to make me feel more comfortable around you, it’s not working.
I offered some form of a smile to be kind, but my uncle just guffawed when he saw my horrified face. He acted like this was the funniest thing he had ever done. But I knew I wasn’t the first victim of this family carnival act. It was too well choreographed, so I knew he must have done this to multiple children to see their response.
It’s funny how something can look real to you, but you can’t unsee it once you discover it’s not.
Up to that moment, I had no idea that his right eye was a prosthetic made of hard acrylic. From then on, I never looked at Uncle Lloyd the same way. At dinner, I could feel the queasy sensation in my stomach as I imagined that plastic eye pinched between his thumb and index finger. I never asked him how he lost his eye because I didn’t want him to use it as another opportunity to exhibit the new plastic one. I didn’t need to know anything more.
This was part of what my dad called “the Gibbonses’ warped sense of humor.” And aside from this, Uncle Lloyd was endearingly odd yet fun. Ultimately, he was trying to make it through a hard situation. He wasn’t going to let the loss of his eye destroy his sense of humor.
