Twenty-three years ago today, I waded through a muddy yard filled with boys, 3-and-under. They hungrily grabbed at the chocolate cookies -- "biscuits," they called them -- that we'd gotten at a gas station along the road that eventually passed through Giurgiu, Romania, and crossed the Danube to Bulgaria.
I looked at the boys and wondered which one was mine.
They were dirty, obviously not tended to well by their guardians in terrycloth bathrobes -- even late in the afternoon.
This sea of children, most with dark brown eyes and hair and skin, almost Middle Eastern complexions, gathered around my legs.
My wife, Suzanne, was perhaps a dozen yards from me, also making her way through the island of unwanted boys, society's castoffs, who pushed at all of us, eyes pleading. We gave out more hugs than biscuits. Plenty.
Our attorney and my friend, Doru, passed by me, his eyes focused firmly on the front door of the disheveled building that obviously was the tattered home that had spilled these boys out, unsupervised for the most part, onto the muddy field.
My eyes played over the faces. I'd been in a similar situation three years earlier, when we found our daughter, Emily, in an orphanage in Arad, Romania, a few hundred miles to the northwest.
But that time, the children were, for the mostly clean. Semi-happy. Little Mariana -- we kept that as Emily's middle name -- was chubby, the favorite of the nurses and caretakers.
In the yard at the boys' orphanage in the countryside outside Giurgiu, no one was clean. It was a Dickensian scene. Little boys, many in toboggan caps, clothing and bodies soiled with sweat and whatever, had not been cared for.
"Which one is mine?" I asked myself, realizing that if I could, I'd take them all, maybe 50 of them.
They smiled and begged, tugged on my clothes. They'd been here since they graduated from the infants' orphanage in Giurgiu, where the sewers ran in big, leaky pipes above the sidewalks and yards.
I know that, because we had stopped at the infants' orphanage, where some of our party of four couples, had adopted little ones.
We had actually wanted to adopt a 2-year-old, the same age as Emily was when we got her. The babies had a better chance of being adopted. The older they got, the harder it was to get adopted.
A few weeks before we had climbed from the little, Romanian-styled "Mercedes" -- I'm not sure if it really was one -- we had been told by the adoption agency here in Nashville that a boy who was pushing 3, was in desperate need of a family who'd take him.
Who'd love him.
His adoption had fallen through. Lazar's days in the "warmth" of the children's orphanage were numbered. If we could get to Romania quickly enough, we could adopt him. We cleared our paperwork and then made the journey, standing in that yard two weeks after we had decided, with no coaxing, that we should take the boy we'd name Joe, a family name filled with love and dignity.
Time was running out for him.
When boys turned 3, they were relegated to the big institutions, lost in the system, perhaps destined to be living in the sewers and tunnels of Bucharest, the pedophiles' capital of Europe at that time. Teenage boys and girls were out there, every night, all night, outside our hotel, one time a group of them nearly cornered me in an underground shopping mall. I doubt they meant harm. A few bucks and they would be gone. Or a Snickers.
"Don't give them money," Doru had told me, in his thick Bela Lugosi accent.
"That will encourage them." Instead, we carried candies to hand the children. I had seen "stern" Doru handing money over to a child, I should note. Doru's dead now, but he spent his adult life helping the orphans of his native land..
On that first trip to Romania, teenage girls and boys waited in the hotel bar well into the night. Smiling at the tourists, bumming cigarettes and selling themselves.
I swear the guy down the hall from us in the hotel in Arad was Saddam Hussein. Two soldiers, automatic rifles at the ready, stood outside his room day and night. Inside, I'm sure he was mapping out weapons of mass destruction. I doubt that Saddam Hussein was evil enough to be there to prey on children. Suzanne tells me it wasn't Saddam. But I prefer to think I was two doors down the hall from a 20th Century villain.
But that was three years before we descended on the dirty yard outside Giurgiu, where little boys asked "Mister" "Mister" "Lady" "Lady" to take them to America. Anywhere but this desolate and heart-sickening compound.
Across the road on one side, a farmer had set up a tent where he and his family were selling "buy-'em and gut-'em" chickens for the early evening, ox-cart and horse-and-wagon "commuters" on this dirt road that ran pretty much parallel to the Danube River in extreme southern Romania.
A family rode past in a horse-cart, leaving "souvenirs'' on the roadway.
One of the women in a bathrobe made her way through the crowd of boys and rescued my wife and I.
"Your son is inside," is probably what she said in Romanian. I gave her three packs of Merit 100s for her trouble (a long story, but bribes of American goods were encouraged if you wanted to make it quietly through Romania in 1998.)
She led us into the building where we were met by a snarling, swearing doctor in a soiled white coat who was scolding, bitterly, hurtfully, the crying almost-3-year-old who was in the room where we were led.
Suzanne, who by coincidence, lucky stars or whomever/whatever, was celebrating her birthday by adopting a child, held the boy and told him "it's OK, Joe, you're safe now."
While she stripped him of his worn orphanage apparel -- all of the clothing had to be left for other boys -- and put on the little blue shorts and jacket we'd brought him, I looked at my son.
I wondered where all the scars had come from, but didn't want to ask.
I didn't want to stir up any fuss. I just wanted us to get this little boy out of this horror, get him back to the relative civilization of Bucharest, begin the series of legal steps and medical tests, that would enable him to move to Nashville.
Sometimes it hurts me to think of the little boys who "didn't make it out." And it hurts to think of what Joe may have gone through in his first three years. And what he escaped in the last 23.
But then I will look at my son, healed in body and soul, as he works his way through graduate school and has his eyes on a career in which he could help the orphans of Eastern Europe, through a government agency or other employment.
My daughter, Emily, is in California, where she is just beginning to raise my first grandson. Roman will have, from the very start, a feeling of security that only can come from being lovingly raised from birth by his mother. I'm proud of Emily, and Roman is a happy fellow.
Today, 23 years after we stood in the muddy yard of the orphanage outside Giurgiu, Suzanne and I met Joe -- who lives with us right now -- at one of our favorite Nashville restaurants.
And it is a glorious "Gotcha Day."
I love my children. I was an old dad when I adopted them and am nearly 70 now as they live, happily, as young, American adults, taking their own chances and paying their own dues.
I don't think I did anything really special by going to a third world country and adopting them. It's what they have done for me that counts.
(Apologies if this isn't perfect in grammar. But it is perfect in intent. I love my kids and am proud to be their dad. This is just a quick first draft of my thoughts on this day. The picture is from a Titans game Joe and I attended a few years ago. Love, Tim)
