Green Bay, Wisconsin Revisited

Where to from here? I could have gone to the University and do more printing but I am also bound to end up jammed in the traffic congestion bevcause of the convocation going on there over the week end. Just got back taking my daughter to the Saint Vincent De Pauls second hand outlet where she loves to rummage for name brand blouses and pants, used off course. Took along one of my nephews and got him a nice pair of sports snickers that fit him perfectly and I got myself an apron for my printmaking. So the afternoon went after sending my son and his buddies to sleep over at one of their homes and tha was before I took my daughter to the thrifty store. Where to from here?

I would like to reflect a little over my past to Green Bay, Wisconsin where I first settled down after making the big move from Malaysia along with my former wife and my first born son. My son Nazri was about four months old then and he was born at the Asunta Hospital in Petaling Jaya, Kuala Lumpur on April the eighth of 1973. I was not present when he was born as I was hten working in Georgetown Penang for Hagemeyer trading Company as their Sales Executive for the NIvico and Matsushita departments depending on where or who needed my services more at the time. That morning when my wife had driven herself in our VW from Shah Alam where she was a resident lecturer to the Hospital and admitted herself to deliver the baby. My former wife was one gutsy lady from Stevens Point, Wisconsin who came to Malaysia as an exchange student and met me and decided to saettle down in Malaysia when our son decided to drop in on us unannounced.
We decided to get married right away when we learned of the gift we had given ourselves when having a great time one the beaches of Terengganu and Penang and the wedding took place at my Auntie's house on the junction of River Road and Sungai Pinang.My firends called it a shot gun wedding and we had a great time although it was not a grand show by a long shot. After the wedding for the next few months i was walking on air feeling on top of the world like nothing could bring me down and then he came and it was the cream of my existance, the peak of my young adult life. I had a good job with a bright future, and my wife had an even greater prospect teaching at the college. But all good things must end and the end in this case came in the form of the Malaysian Bureaucracy, the Immigration Department in this case. Not wanting to go into it too much surfice to say we had to make a choise of staying or leaving and we opted to leave.
Thus after selling off whatever we could and saying good byes to good prospect vocations and some close friends and families we got two one way tickets on board the Air Cezchkoslovakia and flew all the way from Kuala Lumpur to New York and from New York to Green Bay, Wisconsin. It was one of the most uncomfortable trips i ever had as our son was not too happy with the flight and threw a fit almost all the way there so much so that I can almost say that I had walked across the Atlantic simply because that was what I was doing exactly carrying my son in my arms so that he stopped screaming. It became a joke with us later that Sam walked across the Atlantic to get to Green Bay. I did not minded at all as I was driven by the adrenalin of looking forward to being in the United States and whatever that laid there for me.
The most impressive thing about landing at the airport in New York and in dealing with customs and immigration was the fact that it wnet so smoothly that the only thing that was not in harmony was my son's screaming. I was waived over by an immigration officer and told that if i gave him the envelop I had in my hand he would give me tha card he held in his and that was the extent of my dealing with the immigration and when I got my card I was automatically a permanent resident of the United States barring the fact that I cannot vote or become involved in any anti-government activities, I am short of a full fleshed citizen with all the rights of a US citizen. I was moved to love and respect the country by this simple gesture from hence forth.
After a night spent in New York we flew to Autin Strobel Airport in Grenn bay, Wisconsin and it was the cold autumn sunless grey skies that greeted us upon our arrival. I was shocked by the leafless trees and the lack of colors all around me as we drove in my former mother in law's car from the airport to Duck Creek. When we got to Duck Creek I was struck with a sense of lose and forboding, I was scared of being in an unknown territory with no one to turn to except my wife and her family. For the first time I felt like I made a big mistake and there was no turning back, I might never see my home again and what am I going to do there? My mind was running helter skelter sketching the worse case scenarios it could of our bleak future in this cold and colorless place. To make matters worse we were informed by the Hospital authorities that our sone had contracted a kind of worm from the flight to Green Bay most probably from the milk he was provided and that we were all asked to be quarantined till the Health Authorities could be sure that we were safe to move about. The quarantine included my mother in law and my sister in law both had to take off from their respective works. So I spent my first few weeks of my arrival in green Bay indoors watching Gilligan's Island and Private Gommer Pyle reruns.
Off course my bummbed out feelings became contagious to the others and it made their lives i am sure as equally miserable especially my sister in law who was working for twelve hours a day at a paper company and often came home too tired to stand and my mother in law who had so much pains in her athritic feet which were often swollen. I would offer to massage their feets and hands whenever I had the chance to and this helped to build a bond between us as they thought it a little weird but great the fact that a man would offer to work on their feet and hands which is seldom heard of in their neck of the woods which by and large was considered a typical red neck country with me being the first few colored guys that had set feet in their midst, but being Beatrice's son in law made a difference I came to find out.