The friends with whom we raised our oldest three (now in their twenties) are enjoying their empty-nest years. Where else are adults so thrilled to see your children? "Did you have a great summer!?" cry the beaming teachers, and your child shyly leans into your side and confesses that yes, it was a great one.
My husband and I have clapped with pride at a child's graduation in May and returned in August with a different child for registration day in the "cafetorium." Where else can you find a deal like a PTA membership? For five dollars, you're in, and urged to accept the presidency. I have given standing ovations, volunteered at the school library, and stood in the cafeteria line as the servers dropped balls of Thanksgiving-flavored foods from ice-cream scoops onto my wet tray. For twenty-one consecutive years I have carried in cupcakes, enclosed checks, and provided emergency phone numbers. This is my twenty-first year in elementary school.
No Biking in the House Without a Helmet - her joyful and big-hearted new memoir - completes the picture. Four of Greene's children were orphaned by AIDS and adopted from Ethiopia. Greene has since added three more children to her family and in 2006 published There Is No Me Without You, an engrossing portrait of an Ethiopian orphanage that offered some insight into her unusual and abundant family. How, I wondered, does a woman with six children find the time and bandwidth to write nonfiction of such scope and ambition? Though I soon learned that the author, Melissa Fay Greene, had written several acclaimed books about the civil rights movement, what fascinated me almost as much as her body of work was this biographical tidbit: Greene had six children. Though it wasn't a subject that naturally appealed to me, within a few pages I was hooked by a propulsive narrative that ingeniously wove together the gritty drama of the trapped Canadian miners with a larger portrait of turbulent race relations. One day about seven years ago, I began idly flipping through a new book called Last Man Out, the true account of a 1958 Nova Scotia coal mine disaster.
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