Waving The Stolen Child, Rio Bocay, Nicaragua, 1985 About John Addiego

John Addiego Waving There is an old woman waving from a sixty-eight Imperial driven by a grim old man. I am the only one on the street, and she is still waving two blocks down the road at the empty storefronts. I remember a man in Berkeley who beamed each night on Grove Street, arm raised to the angry commuters, belly nosing from a misbuttoned shirt; and the fellow on roller skates near Eureka on 101 a smile from the cradle every morning waving hello, goodbye. Beyond him the fetid marsh, the mill steaming pulp, the bars and dunes rolling to the dark arms of the Pacific. The very old and the insane can make us titter and shake our heads, can make us dip our shoulders and press on, past the hands raised to no one, to everyone. We their minions running errands, scrambling dumb between hello and goodbye, we their beloved people. The Stolen Child, Rio Bocay, Nicaragua, 1985                "Come away, O human child!                     To the waters and the wild.."                             - W.B. Yeats The telling was confusing: he some distance ahead, his son on the horse, the contras, numbering thirty or forty, taking only the child. It was a new word for me, sequestrada. His wife shooed chickens from beneath the hammocks we sat in, eyed the recorder like another weapon for stealing. Your words, my companion said, will be as bullets in the struggle. The Sony hummed on my lap. A nine-year-old child, sequestered, stolen. What could they hope? That he'd hidden these years in the elephant-eared banana leaves; that they'd given him canned American food and taught him the M-16 or AK-47? Or that he'd come back someday for his father? John Addiego lives on an overgrown half-acre a few miles from Corvallis and teaches at Philomath High School. He's published poems and stories in several literary magazines. He was a recepient of a fiction fellowship in 1999 from Oregon Literary Arts.