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

Signs: Doug & Katy

Signs doug& katy Doug & Katy. Photo by Corbin Sexton. hen Doug Boynton learned on a bright spring day in 1996 that he had gotten the perfect job — a rare split appointment in history and speech pathology and audiology that fit his eclectic interests exactly while allowing him to live in the same city with his academic spouse — it was not through official channels. He was walking down Iowa City’s busy Burlington Street with his wife, Katy Stavreva, and with Katy’s sister and brother-in-law, who were visiting from Bulgaria. The four had just stepped out of a restaurant called the Bread Garden, where Katy and Doug had, coincidentally, had their first date. “And one of the professors pulls over out of traffic and yells, ‘You got the job!’” Doug’s face brightens with the remembered joy of that moment. “It was so neat, too, because we had with us this huge loaf of bread,” Katy contributes with a matching flash of enthusiasm. “In Bulgaria, it is considered good luck if you see someone carrying a loaf of bread in their hands.” At first we are surprised to hear that Katy and Doug believe in signs of this sort, since such beliefs seem at odds with our initial impression of them. To us, they seem the consummate scholarly couple, witty and urbane, with a sophistication that sometimes borders on the sardonic. But when we listen to their love story, fate seems as good an explanation as any of how their paths converged . Their story, as they tell it, is such an accumulation of false starts and nearly missed opportunities that we are convinced, along with Katy and Doug, that whatever happened, they would have ended up — happily — together. Doug grew up in the New Jersey cities of Middletown and Shrewsbury. “Bruce Springsteen country, blue collar, lotta ethnic 48 { Signs } W communities, real diverse schools. There’s Italian neighbahhoods ,” he says, for a moment reverting unconsciously to his old New Jersey accent, “and Polish and African American neighbahhoods .” He lived his boyhood as part of a multiplicity of cultures that was just a fact of life for him as a child. After he graduated from high school in the early seventies, Doug “hit the road,” where he met an even wider range of people. “I wanted some adventure. I was looking for experience and truth and beauty,” he tells us without irony. To some degree, he found what he was seeking, but, more important, he made friends who changed the way he looked at the world. “I met Native Americans, I met Mexicans, I met cowboys — that was all fascinating. I met Californians,” he finishes dramatically. Doug thinks that his predisposition toward an intercultural life may have begun with his attraction to deaf culture in the midseventies , when he had temporarily settled in Colorado. He was working at a preschool and became friends with a deaf coworker. “She took me to the deaf bar and deaf community events. I started hanging out with deaf people, and I realized they had a whole other universe. I was fascinated by this other culture in our midst and by the strangeness of their other, visual language.” Sign language also brought Doug “back to education,” he tells us. His family still jokes about Doug, who, despite his earlier lack of interest in college, has turned out to be the professor in the family. “I took some sign-language classes at a community college, then wound up interpreting for friends, though at first I was really bad at it.” Eventually, Doug moved to Seattle to attend an interpreter training program, then to Oregon, where he worked at a small university, interpreting classes. Doug became so interested { Doug & Katy } 49 in one particular history class that he decided to take it himself, and ended up with “a bachelor’s degree in history and an associate ’s degree in interpreting.” The history of deaf culture has since become Doug’s area of scholarly research. “But then there is the question of why I was attracted to that, too,” he muses. After further thought, Doug is inclined to trace his interest in other cultures even further back to his family’s adoption of a Korean child when he was a teenager. “It was this great family project ,” he tells us. Doug was watching television with his brother and sister one night when they saw something about an...