Love in a Global Village: A Celebration of Intercultural Families in the Midwest

Like Minds: Clara & George

Like minds clara& george Clara & George. Photo by Lauren Smith. eorge and Clara Kamats live in a housing development in Ypsilanti, Michigan, between Detroit and Ann Arbor . Theirs is a family-oriented area, built in the leafy Michigan countryside — people on bikes and handmade garage-sale signs everywhere. The couple’s home is relatively new, everything fresh and unsullied. A cathedral living room opens onto a kitchen and den, which in turn looks out on a back porch and a vivid expanse of green grass. Clara, we are told, is in charge of interior design, and she has arranged the house with the precision of a professional, all the furniture coordinated, the colors understated. Though six months pregnant herself, Clara helps us settle into the den, gets paper towels for our sticky baby, and assures us that she is not worried about the pristine white carpet the baby is eyeing with drooly enthusiasm. Our favorite spot in the house is a set of shelves in the den populated with dozens of framed photographs — friends, relatives, and a few shots of Clara and George at various stages of their romance . “We have at least one picture,” Clara tells us proudly, “of every member of the family.” The faces in these photographs come from very different family histories and backgrounds — half of them Cuban and the other half thoroughly Anglo — though you cannot see this by looking at the pictures. George was born in Miami, but his father worked for the airlines as George does now, and he grew up moving from state to state, rarely staying anywhere for more than a year. “Pack your bag. Don’t leave nothin’ out,” he says by way of summary. Then he adds, more seriously, “I liked moving everywhere .” He got to see lots of different cities and parts of the country , but, more important, the frequent moves helped foster in 122 { Like Minds } G George a hard-edged independence that is a central part of his identity. For George, friendship is not a priority. “I probably have about five really close friends from all the different places I’ve lived. I just don’t like living in the past. Here, we are in the present. We’re looking at our future, and that’s where I’d like to stay. I told Clara when we moved away from Florida, ‘You know it’s nice that you’re writing to all your friends, but you’re going to send all these letters and make all these phone calls, but they’re never going to call you back.’ Whenever we do see our friends from Florida, they say ‘Come by and see me! Come by and see me!’” “‘When you comin’ to Miami? When you comin’ to Miami?’” Clara interrupts with an imitation of those Florida friends. “But few of them have come here to see us.” “I have a couple of really close friends, just a couple, who have come,” affirms Clara. “That’s the way I’ve always been,” says George returning to his focus on the present. “People think I have Alzheimer’s, you know, they say ‘remember two years ago when this happened,’ and I’m like, ‘I don’t know.’” “I remember everything,” says Clara.· Among other things, Clara remembers parts of her childhood in Cuba before the revolution. Her grandparents had a dirt-floor farmhouse within walking distance of her home that Clara describes with particular fondness. “I used to visit my grandparents’ farm, sit under a tree eating mangoes. We would pick the mangoes and then stop under the last tree with our buckets full of them. It was so hot sometimes that we would sit there in nothing but our { Clara & George } 123 underwear,” she continues, as though surprised that she can still picture those summer days so vividly. Her grandparents’ farm was situated on beautiful land, bordering a river and several smaller creeks. “We used to bathe in those creeks and play there. The government took the farm after the revolution. Eventually, the river flooded and washed the whole house away.” Clara is wistful when she tells us how her mother gave birth to Clara and her siblings in that farmhouse, returning home to stay there with Clara’s grandmother during each child’s first weeks of infancy. That sadness, however, is marked by a sharp clarity about the unfairness of her family’s loss...