by Donald Hancock

Created on: January 27, 2010

 

Thank God for Girl Scout Cookies!

She was like the daughter that John never had. She was the image of his own wife that he had lost just a year ago. How could she be so much like his dear Anna?

She had come into his life just a week ago. Her little girl had come to his door selling Girl Scout cookies. The mother was there with her daughter for moral support but she had let her little girl make her “sales pitch” as she had learned it from her Scout Leader.

He gladly ordered the “Do-si-dos” cookies but, during the process, he could not take his eyes off of the mother. She talked, moved, and had so many mannerisms that reminded him of his Anna.

Now it was a week later and she had come back to deliver his cookies. As she started to leave he expressed how much she reminded him of his wife. She said, “it is weird that you should mention that because I never knew my mother. She died when I was born and I was raised by my grand mother.”

“Well, that ends my theory. I thought that perhaps, since there is so much resemblance to my wife, that you might have been related. It is still uncanny, however, because my wife had a sister that died in childbirth. That was even before we met. But I would have known if anyone were raised by her mother.”

“Oh, I did not mean my maternal grand mother. You see, I was raised in Brazil. My mother and my father were both American. But my father's family had an importing company that had offices in Miami and in Rio. My father and mother ran the American office. Shortly after my mother's death, my father was drafted into the army because of the Korean War. I was left with his mother in Brazil with the anticipation that we would come back to America when he returned. But he was killed in Korea and so my grand parents raised me as their own.”

“When I finished high school, I came back to America for college. Before I finished college, both of my grand parents had died. They had sold the import company when they retired but they had left me a generous inheritance and I was able to graduate and establish myself in a small accounting business.

Before long I began to feel very lonely. I had no relatives that I knew of. I began to think of my “roots” and decided to move here to Cleveland, since my mother had grown up here. But I was unable to trace any of her family.

The only clue that I had was a scrap of paper that I found in my Dad's things. It had my Mom's name

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