In 1969 our family left Pakistan for a year leave and came to the United States. We rented a home on Klondike Avenue in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. It couldn’t have been a better place for our family of seven. We had space and safety in a medium-sized industrial city in New England. We were minutes from my parents home church and the neighborhood personified the words ‘family friendly’.
Klondike Avenue was thousands of miles away from our world in Pakistan. We traded boarding school for day school, a land rover for a Ford station wagon, Sunday night singspirations for Sunday night cereal. We were the missionary family with all the kids and as we entered the neighborhood seemed to know we were coming.
The day we arrived, Carin Waaramaa came to the door of our house. She was there to invite me, a stranger, into her world. Even at 9 years old Carin was a beauty. She had the curly hair of her mom and I’m not sure whose eyes, but they sparkled with eyelashes a mile long. She was taller than me and slender. Carin and I could talk for hours and during that year on Klondike Avenue we were inseparable. We walked to school every morning, talked about our mutual crush on Daryl Freeburg, timidly entered into cheerleading for the church basketball team, and watched the end of Dark Shadows on a small television high on the wall of a dingy lobby at the YMCA after weekly swimming lessons. Neither Carin nor I had ever heard the term ‘third culture kid’ — I had no label, came with no warning sign and certainly no instruction manual.
To Carin I was just Marilyn. When the year ended one of the hardest goodbyes I would say was to Carin. We never lived in the same place again and time and life moved us far away from that year on Klondike Avenue. Carin was my first childhood friend who died. She died too young, leaving two young children, her extended family, and most of all a mom who exemplifies grace and compassion.
Klondike Avenue was Carin Waaramaa and East Street School; swimming in the Pierce’s pool and playing softball on late spring evenings on the field above Rodney Pierce’s house. It was riding bikes to the book mobile that came every Thursday and Vacation Bible School at Highland Baptist Church. Klondike Avenue was a four bedroom house and dandelions on a long, sloping front lawn; it was instant friendships and a gaggle of kids. Most of all it was the Waaramaa and Schotanus families, the Pierce families times 3, and us – the Brown family. For a kid coming from Pakistan, Klondike Avenue was near perfect.
It was years ago that we lived on Klondike Avenue, but a year ago I had a meeting in Fitchburg for work. I was heading to a community health center on top of a high hill, a sight that used to house Burbank Hospital. As I was following the directions I had carefully printed out, I suddenly felt a familiar tug on my brain and perhaps my heart. I couldn’t place it and then I saw – there was Klondike Avenue, right in front of me.
When I want to be critical of the United States, when my heart goes to a place of alienation and feelings of misunderstanding, I sometimes close my eyes and think of Klondike Avenue. For Klondike Avenue gave us, a missionary family that needed rest, friendship, and belonging the best of the best, never asking for anything in return. Klondike Avenue was pure grace.
This post is dedicated with love and thanks to Sandy Waaramaa, Carin’s mom and my dear friend.
