It Doesn't Get Any Better Than This: The Dream Lives of Papa Madre and the AngloArabAsian Brothers

By Sam Moses

In this rollicking memoir that reads like “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” meets Pee-wee Herman, veteran journalist Sam Moses tells all, about raising his two sons from their birth to the ages of seven and five. The stories and incidents are often hilarious and sometimes scary, while the themes and issues are universal to parenting. Light bulbs of recognition will pop, for mothers and fathers alike. There are lessons, there are confirmations, there are cautionary tales. A parent can relate.

The book moves from a Brazilian beach to the high banks of Daytona, from the wasteland of Detroit to the glory of the Pacific Northwest, from the waves on Maui to a rundown trailer in an RV park the Sea of Cortez … toddlers always in tow, and then some. Even if you’ve never been to those places, if you’ve ever raised a child, this book is for you.

An early review by The Gorge magazine calls it a "touching memoir," adding, "Moses weaves funny, fascinating and poignant stories of his various jobs (including editor of AutoWeek magazine, American Windsurfer, and even creative director at a San Francisco dotcom) into the narrative, because his kids were right there with him for the ride. In the introduction Moses tells readers, “You can pick up the book and put it down, lose your place and skip time and read some more, and it’ll be fine.” It’s true. And anyone who has experienced parenthood will find both laughter and tears here.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781626755208

Sam Moses

Sam Moses is the author of the acclaimed race-driving memoir, Fast Guys, Rich Guys and Idiots, as well as At All Costs: How a Crippled Ship and Two Merchant Mariners Turned the Tide of World War II, a gripping account of a naval battle in the Straits of Gibraltar, and a heartfelt parenting memoir, It Doesn't Get Any Better Than This. A former senior writer for Sports Illustrated, he began writing as a U.S. Navy Seaman on a cruiser engaged in shore bombardment of Vietnam, long letters home. He lives in an eco village on the Indonesian island of Lombok.

Book preview

Madre

Part I

Chapter 1

Kim

I jumped up to fight the doctor as Tai was being born, to make sure everything came out all right. I would have fought him to keep him from hurting someone I loved. That would be Kim.

Until he was about 16 and got ripped, Tai was small and lean like Kim. He came out of her womb with a cone head, from struggling in vain to squeeze his soft skull through her small birth canal. His head rounded out in a few days, although sometimes it takes years, and sometimes it never gets better, that's what they said. In the beginning, you haven't a clue of the torpedoes.

Kim's spirit never wavered, enduring the pain of contractions for 12 hours. Finally an experienced doctor joined the team of ever-changing young ones, and with one look pronounced, This girl is too small for this baby. Kim was whisked off for a Cesarean, under local anesthesia, as she wished.

They allowed me in the operating room and sat me in a wheelchair in case I fainted, near enough to stroke Kim's head, her beautiful black hair. I held her hand as long as they let me, until the surgeon sliced. She shouted out sharply, in a cry of pain. This isn't supposed to happen, I thought. The doctor asked her if she could take a bit more, those were his words, a bit more, denying the word pain. Upping her game, unsurely, Kim said yes, and to understand why might be to understand Kim.

She yelped a second time, a short scream that affected me as if the scalpel had stabbed my heart. I sprang from my wheelchair and shouted, Stop!

The doctor too was shaken by the screams of his patient, so he didn't have to be persuaded. He called in the general anesthiologist, as they escorted me to another room, although I crept back and lurked outside the operating room, listening for sounds of trouble that I might need to fix.

I sometimes do that. Tai might tell you about that.

The word tai means talent in Vietnamese. I wonder if Tai would be different if I had actually named him Tai Bob as I wanted to, not that I could have talked Kim into it. Or Tai Bones. Or any of the silly others: Tai Maverick, Tai Zane, Tai Braveheart, Tai Shootingstar. Well, Tai Zane sounds kind of cool. We ended up with Tai Chinnock, not so expressive, but it has family heritage. His friends used to take Tai Chi out of it, without knowing that the Chinese translation is supreme ultimate force.

Sometimes they called him Ticco. I don't know where it came from, but I like the sound. He plays soccer on teams with Mexican boys, and he passes with flying dark colors, having Kim's tawny skin and beautiful hair, although he keeps it buzzed now. I used to call him Tai-Tai, until I shouted it during a game and he stopped running and gave me the evil eye, his being especially effective. I used to think the dark evil eye was Asian, like Kim's, but I'm beginning to think it might be Arabian, my side, and it scares the shit out of me.

What did I do? I asked.

You called me Tai-Tai, he said.

I've been calling you Tai-Tai for 12 years, I replied, baffled.

It's embarrassing, he said.

The soccer parents on the sideline all laughed, clear to them that this was news to me.

Tai is 18 now, and his brother Maks is 16, and so far they've both come out fine. You could write a book. I've been writing this one for five years, if you don't count another ten years of keeping the TaiMaks Journal.

Beginning when Maks was about nine months old, I wrote down almost every little thing that happened among us. A million words and counting. Every issue documented. I never read any of it until I started this book. It took all that summer to read just the years in this story, and boy, is it something. I still haven't read the rest of it. Some day, when this much all dies down, I will.

I tapered way off over the last couple years, and now almost not at all, because they're teenagers and there's so much drama, and our interpersonal relationships are not so sweet, and there's too much grief in the lessons.

Sometimes the journal blows me away. I see the inevitable in it. I see that it's always been that way. I see the first time.

When Tai was three weeks old we took him to the Florida Keys for spring vacation, three days in a cottage on the beach in Islamorada, the most blissful three days of my life. I carried him in a pouch on my chest and sang to him as we walked. He smiled a lot, hardly cried, and was game for everything. He slept in a string hammock in the shade, his wispy hair caressed by the breeze as I rocked him.

We drove south to Key West and visited my friends, the sunset buskers Bounce the Clown and Mademoiselle Ooh-La-La. Bounce twirled a basketball on Tai's finger as he held him on the hood of the little green Geo Metro convertible I was road testing for an article, and the photo made it into the magazine.

When he fussed, I'd pick him up and curl him like a barbell, and it calmed him. I flew him around like a dive bomber, or the man on the flying trapeze, and he loved it. New nicknames came out of the sky: Red, for the Red Baron; Tiger, for Tiger Bill Destefani, alfalfa farmer and champion air racer in his P-51 Mustang; Chuck, for Chuck Yeager, faster than the speed of sound; Burt, for Burt Lancaster, acrobat and crimson pirate.

I tweaked the lyrics to Dem Bones, adding funny bone, wishbone, ham bone, crazy bone, chicken bone, soup bone. Dog bone. During diaper changing, a job Kim chose to perform 24/7 with unfailing cheeriness, I'd sing the Tell Overture: diddypoop diddypoop diddypoop poop poop, diddypee diddypee diddypee pee pee...

Tai traveled to ten states plus Canada and Nova Scotia in his first ten weeks. Working for AutoWeek magazine, I covered car races and events. We drove from Detroit through Niagara Falls to New York City for the auto show, in a turbocharged black Volvo V70R wagon, low, stiff and fast. On the way back I got a ticket for 85 mph on the curvy Pennsylvania Turnpike, where I had learned to drive, delivering cars across the state to and from the Manheim Auction on Saturdays, my job in high school—and I learned to drift delivering newspapers in my mother's Jeep Wagoneer in the snow at 5 a.m. before school. The Pennsylvania state trooper didn't seem to notice Tai in his car seat in the back, behind the tinted windows. It was a wonder the cop didn't haul the speed demon off, to save the child.

When Tai was three months old we went for an 800-mile weekend drive in a Porsche 911 Turbo, for a story. We strapped him into his baby basket onto the leather bench behind the bucket seats, and he was content for two days of hard, flat driving in the Porsche. We drive through Hell in search of one good curve, said the subtitle. The town was named Hell in the 1830s because of its whiskey still, as wives would say of their absent drunken husbands, He's gone to Hell. Never found that curve. Welcome to Michigan.

In his first two years, Tai was on the road for more than two hundred days. Twenty-three states including Hawaii, plus Baja and Jamaica, and Venezuela's Margarita Island for a windsurfing vacation. Many days in Florida for Daytona Speedweeks and other races, running from the end of January to the middle of March. About the only places Kim and Tai didn't come with me were overseas trips: Germany for a cover story on the Callaway C7R prototype racer; France for the 24 Hours of Le Mans where the 55-year-old Mario Andretti drove a hero shift at daybreak in the rain to finish second, within minutes of becoming the only driver in history to win the Indy 500, Daytona 500, Formula 1 world championship, and Le Mans; Peru for the legendary six-day rally called Road to the Incas; Brazil and Australia for Indy car races; the island of Madeira off the African coast for the launch of the new BMW Z3; back to France to track-test the Oreca Viper racecar at Paul Ricard; and back to Germany to track-test the factory Mercedes touring car at Hockenheim.

Kids under two fly free. My family never got in the way of my work. I came back to the motel and spent nights with my wife and child, is all. There was always plenty for Kim to do with Tai during the day.

As deputy editor at AutoWeek, when I was on the road I edited stories from very early to late morning, then spent the day at the track or event. At races I wrote all night Sundays, and often Saturdays, so I'd be free to speed-edit for eight hours beginning 4 a.m. on Monday, to meet the noon deadline for the magazine's electronic shipment to the printer. I edited most of the race stories, sometimes four or even five of them on a Monday during racing season. I went to new car introductions around the world, and wrote about the cars I drove on the road, new models out of press fleets near airports. In 1996 I wrote 66,500 words for AutoWeek, including features, race reports, road tests, and columns.

We took Tai to Disneyworld in Orlando when he was 11 months old, where I covered the Indy Racing League's inaugural race, tagged the Mickyard 200, on a temporary oval in front of a sellout crowd of 51,000. He rode in my baby backpack everywhere, and when we played air hockey with Kim at Polynesian Village, his happy squeals in my ear gave me a visceral joy. A month later I carried him on my shoulders down Main Street during Daytona Motorcycle Speedweeks, through the Harleys and babes and booths selling eau de outlaw. He towered over the rowdy bikers jostling on the sidewalk, and was rendered big-eyed and speechless by the thundering hawgs cruising the street.

I still have the biker tee-shirt he wore, stored in a box in the attic over the garage with Flatso, the baby-blue beanbag hippo he brought home from the hospital on that frigid February day, after he was born. Tai and Flatso made it into a review of the Chrysler Cirrus, whose swaying suspension put the baby to sleep.

I flew to Australia for the Indy car race at Surfer's Paradise, while Kim and Tai stayed in Waikiki. She took a photo of girls gone wild over Tai on the beach in his diaper. It went on my office wall with the caption, Tai Bob picks up chicks. There was a gallery of Tai Bob pics: Tai Bob drives a Ferrari, Tai Bob drives a Porsche, Tai Bob drives a Viper, Tai Bob eats a dog bone, Tai Bob gnaws a chair leg, and somewhere I think all the pictures are saved.

Kim was named Nguyen Ninh for the first three-and-a-half years of her life, in the Duc Anh Orphanage in Saigon. She was the sole survivor of a Viet Cong mortar attack, one shell poorly aimed at the nearby officers' quarters, a six-month-old baby lifted out of the smoking rubble on the street and carried to the orphanage by a teenage Saigon policeman. She doesn't make a sound, marveled the gray-haired director, Madame Kieu, accepting one more orphan with a sigh.

She was lying on the edge of the dark pitted street, spindly legs outstretched, howling to the Asian moon, when the policeman found her, wrote Frank Chinnock, in Kim: a Gift from Vietnam, published in 1969. Near her were several dead Vietnamese men and women. Obviously, there had been an explosion here, and he marveled at how the tiny infant had come through unscathed. But she was thin, wasted, so frail, with the swollen belly of the half-starved. The policeman was surprised that she had the energy to cry so lustily. When he reached down and picked her up, her tiny fist-blows at his head were like a moth's wings flapping against a light bulb.

Frank Chinnock was an author and editor at Reader's Digest. He and his wife Jan had three sons, 12, 11 and 6. They were both upset by the killing and suffering in Vietnam. He came home from work one day in 1966 and said to Jan, I'm going to Vietnam to adopt a child.

Oh? she replied. A girl, I hope.

Having written this book, I am more than ever aware of the treasures beneath my own roof, he said in the dedication, stealing my line by 43 years.

Working his Reader's Digest credentials for military travel and writing stories to pay other expenses for the trips, Chinnock looked at a lot of children in Vietnam orphanages before he found Kim. There were five times as many boys as girls, because the girls were used as money-makers, beginning at puberty. He found a beautiful five-year-old girl but she had congenital syphilis. Another was unavailable for adoption because her parents had been executed.

There are certain moments in life when one is aware that something special is about to happen, wrote Chinnock, predicting my moment on a Portland sidewalk with his daughter. It was on that bright morning when I turned and saw the little girl standing by herself next to the wall with chipped plaster. I felt a chill, a slight tremor. Then it was gone—and there was only the girl standing alone, about two years old, unsmiling, with short black hair. She stared at me, as unblinking as a statue, with the widest eyes I had ever seen. Her name, Ninh, meant pretty" in Vietnamese.

"Her eyes fixed on mine, she began tottering slowly toward me. She came up until her face was only inches from my leg. There, her hands by her sides, her head tilted way back, she peered up at my great height. Unsmiling still, she did not speak, did not change her grave expression, did not reach out to touch, only studied my face with those incredibly wide eyes. And I knew.

I could hardly restrain myself from reaching out and touching her head. I was afraid if I did, like a butterfly she would flit away.

Kim was the first Vietnamese war orphan to be adopted by Americans. With no precedent, the red tape took 20 months, and during that time she contracted tuberculosis and an ear infection that couldn't be treated, for lack of drugs. The Duc Anh Orphanage was the best orphanage in Saigon, run by the Bao Dai sect of Buddhists with French Catholic nuns who deeply loved their children, but conditions were overwhelming, with thousands of orphans in Vietnam at that time, and many more to come.

The orphanage had been able to get rid of the worms but not the skin disease. When Kim got off the plane from Saigon to New York, her face was blotched with sores, most of her teeth were rotten and black, and one was abscessed. She had lice and she wasn't toilet trained. The ear infection had perforated a drum. Imagine being a baby crying in pain with an earache and a toothache in a dark orphanage. The horror, the trauma.

She seemed well made, but she was very thin, with a distended belly, the mark of malnutrition, observed Chinnock when she took a bath.

At first Kim wouldn't speak, couldn't speak much, just baby talk seasoned with French. At dinner that first night she spat out the mustard with the word merde--shit in French. The first thing she had to say to her new world. She thinks better of it now. She has beautiful children.

The Chinnock family lived in a 150-year-old colonial house with hardwood floors and two acres of lawn, where Kim rolled in laughter playing with her big brothers. Slapstick and pratfalls got her going. She gave her brothers her lice. The pediatrician had missed it, having never seen lice in tony Westchester County.

With a healthy diet, vitamins, antibiotics and love, Kim thrived. Frank and Jan invited a psychiatrist friend over one night, and Jan said, She certainly doesn't act like a product of institution life, does she?

So few children make that long leap up from such an environment, the phychiatrist replied, but it appears that Kim is the exception, and will have the strength and will to rise above it.

Chapter 2

Birmingham

I was flat on my back on a beach in Brazil looking at the stars, when I decided to ask Kim if she wanted to start a family. It was the middle of the night, and there was a party going strong in the house over my shoulder. Brazilian parties go on. It was Christmastime and I was there to write a profile of the charismatic Brazilian racedriver Emerson Fittipaldi, who had 5000-acre orange plantation in the north, and a beach house near Sao Paulo.

I'd just driven six hours from the village of Sao Tome das Letras, the Sedona, Arizona of Brazil, where aliens from a dying planet had been abducting earthlings to breed with them. Great road-trip story, in a Chevrolet Vectra borrowed from GM Brazil—the Vectra was the fastest car made in Brazil at the time. I spent a night waiting for aliens on Ufo (ooh-foe) Mountain, but they didn't come, maybe because it was raining. The 2000-kilometer story was not dampened. Ufo Mountain exerts a magnetic force on the soul, said the subtitle.

Freelance and single, I could have stayed in Brazil. Five years earlier I'd spent six months traveling in the Amazon and living in Ipanema, and the country fit. I knew the New York Times correspondent for Brazil, who had my idea of a dream job; Brazilian stories are rich, passionate, astounding and infinite. I could have written about Brazil for years. Aging bachelors in Brazil do well. Americans were liked at the time. I might have been in demand.

Or I could come home and start a family.

Kim and I were married on July 3, 1994, one year to the day after we met. She was pregnant with Tai, as planned.

We were in Aspen where I was writing about the country's first car-racing country club, at the old Woody Creek Raceway, when Kim told me she was pregnant. I flew around the house whooping, upstairs and down, as if I'd been shot up the butt with nitrous oxide. My friend Slats was there, he could tell you. My first thought after the jubilation was that now for sure I'd take the job with AutoWeek in Detroit that I'd been offered the previous day.

Two weeks later we were married in the backyard of her parents' summer house near Gig Harbor in Puget Sound, Washington, beside a small field of wildflowers growing against the driftwood on the shore of Rocky Bay. The ceremony was performed by Kim's 91-year-old grandfather's 60-something girlfriend, Minister Marian of the Vector Church. Kim was sweet and beautiful, in a long white linen dress drifting in the summer breeze, a straw hat with one pink and one white artificial flower, and white sneakers. She had just turned 30 but looked younger. We hadn't told anyone that she was pregnant, it was a private matter. We drove off in a turbocharged red Mitsubishi Eclipse convertible and honeymooned at the Portland Blues Festival. For the rest of the summer, she lived in her Portland studio apartment and worked at a small graphics art studio, while I lived at my house in Hood River 60 miles away.

In October we drove back to Detroit in a new 1995 Buick Roadmaster station wagon, last of the line. Kim called it a big honkin boat anchor. I wrote a fond farewell to the era of big honkin boat anchors, and got to say big honkin boat anchor three times in the story. My dog Cassie rode in the back of the big honkin boat anchor. Kim, three months pregnant, drove a while, and I coached her in passing on a two-lane, as we drove along the Columbia River in Eastern Washington toward Idaho and Montana. Step on the gas, I said, and she accelerated to 90. Whoa, I said, and she happily squealed, You told me to step on the gas!

For a couple hours between the AutoWeek interview and the flight to Aspen, I had gone house hunting. I wasn't going to take the job unless I could find a place to live where we could be happy. I asked a few questions around the office and went to the town that sounded best, Birmingham. I trolled up a slow street under a lush green canopy, and saw the house: a gray brick 1940s two-story cottage, half-hidden by bushes and trees, walking distance to the heart of the small hip downtown. There it is, that's the house, I said aloud to myself.

Then I saw the For Sale by Owner sign, and knew it was meant to be. I went to a payphone and called and asked if I could see the house right now, I had a plane to catch, and the guy asked his wife and she said no. I bought the house anyhow, the next day over the phone, a wedding present for Kim. We lived there for three and a half years, through two remodels and the birth of two children, and it was perfect for her, and us.

Over the years, I've done some things that some might say show no fear: 170 miles per hour on the Daytona banking on a racing motorcycle, and 190 mph in a racing car, at night. With two partners, I made the first free ascent up the 3000-foot face of the 16,024-foot Carstensz Pyramid, a mountain wall in the New Guinea jungle, led there by erstwhile cannibals wearing penis gourds. With an expedition, I made the first descent in 50 years down the 665-mile-long Rio Roosevelt, also known as the River of Doubt, a Class V whitewater tributary of the Amazon River, through hostile Indian territory deep in the Brazilian rainforest, following the 1914 trail of Theodore Roosevelt and