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This summer, my grandmother called my mother weekly to complain about the amount of papers that my grandfather had stored in his filing cabinets in the basement.听 To be sure, my grandfather had accumulated an astonishing amount of quotidian detritus, which had somehow found its way into a small labyrinth of storage systems lovingly maintained by my grandfather.听 This would not have been such a problem had my grandmother not set out on a Great Purge of her earthly possessions earlier in the year.听 Having recycled several handfuls of her mystery novels (much to the horror of my mother) and donated a large box of dishware to me, she had fallen upon the basement with a vengeance.听 My grandfather, sensing her looming presence, had the wisdom to avoid confrontation, but after several months of his artful dodges the matter had come to a head. My grandmother raged and my grandfather demurred, but very little was actually getting done.听 With limited recourse, my grandmother would call my mother to complain.听 On one such occasion, my grandmother interrupted herself, shouting, 鈥淚f you don鈥檛 know that book by now, you never will,鈥� after the retreating back of my grandfather, who was on his way to a Bible study.听听

Such was the distress of my grandmother that God mercifully sent a flood.听 After two straight weeks of rain, the foundation of my grandparents鈥� house sagged and the basement was flooded, swamping my grandfather鈥檚 filing cabinets.听 In the following weeks, I spent many hours in the cavernous (and now mildew-filled) halls of my grandparents鈥� basement, wading through soggy carpet carrying piles of neon windbreakers and shaggy sweaters.听 An uncle and several cousins generously arrived from out of state and together we began what I considered a modern-day equivalent of a barn-raising, and attempted to salvage the basement.听 Failing to recognize the disaster as heaven-sent, my grandmother complained with greater enthusiasm, causing my brother to mutter mutinously as he hauled mushy boxes of tax information from the 80鈥檚 out of the wreckage.听 And, after most of the basement had been cleared and the relatives had departed, the filing cabinets stood defiantly untouched.听听

It was after several long days of sorting that we came upon a treasure buried among the yellowed calendars and pulpy receipts.听 It was a small, faded red notebook, with the words 鈥淔ederation of Malaya鈥� and 鈥淢alayan Driving Licence [sic]鈥� in all capital letters emblazoned upon the front. The notebook, reluctant to open due to so many years of remaining closed, contained several small legal papers signed by my grandfather, a list in miniscule type of the classes of vehicles, and an old picture of my grandfather, looking dashing and young and somehow exactly like how he looks now.听 It hadn鈥檛, unfortunately, escaped the ravages of the flood, and I ran upstairs with it clutched in my hands, its fabric covers fluttering softly.听 I laid it on a towel in the sun to dry, trying to splay it open so that the pages would not lose their crispness.听 We checked on its progress throughout the day, carefully peeling each page off the last and pressing them between our fingers.听 Here was a document from a government that no longer existed, granting driving privileges to a man who no longer drove.听 It had endured so far beyond its purview of use that practically it should have existed in the same category as the ten-year-old calendars that it was stored with.听 Yet it was salvaged and rehabilitated, not as a keepsake or a memento, but as a living shard of a family myth.听听

Upon the reappearance of the documentation of his bygone foreign driving privileges, my grandfather greeted it with his unique brand of understated pleasure, all crinkly blue-eyed glances. The long nose that has unfortunately proven to be his genetic legacy seemed even longer as it curved over a smile wide enough to see his silver tooth. Never a particularly ostentatious or even a very vocal person, he shuffled upstairs with us to observe our ministrations to his old license, but didn鈥檛 say much. My mother was astounded at its sudden unearthing and my brother and I, well versed in the family lore, similarly regarded it at something sacred. My grandfather, however, merely stuffed his hands into the worn pockets of his faded blue jeans, and watched us.听听

In order for you to understand the significance of the story contained within the Malayan driver鈥檚 license, I must first explain that my family is one of doubles. My great grandmother had an identical twin sister, Frieda. My mother鈥檚 adoration of all things old dictated that a photo of the pair was hung in our living room throughout my childhood, and so the blank stare of my ancestors followed me eerily throughout my youth. I watched them right back, terrified that I would one day find one missing from the frame. My great grandmother, the beginning of the story of the license and of my family as I know it, was a woman of great courage who suffered many losses in her life. She gave birth to my grandfather and his identical twin brother. As my great-grandmother bore only sons and the propensity for producing twins expresses itself only in females, there were no twins in my mother鈥檚 generation. In mine, however, my brother and I make up one of several pairs of duplicates. My great grandmother鈥檚 twin, Frieda, had suffered a stroke and passed away about two years before my grandfather and his twin brother departed for Malaya.听听

I have known the story of my grandfather鈥檚 time in Malaya from the instants of my earliest memories. I remember hearing about it on car rides when I was too small to easily see out of the window. My grandfather and his twin brother Richard departed for Malaya shortly after graduating college to do missionary work and to teach Math and History on the mission. They trained for several months in the American South, and Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to their class of trainees. After completion of their training, they were sent to Malaya, arriving there by boat in the late 1950鈥檚. Richard was to take up his mission work in a town called Malacca and my grandfather was to stay with him for several months before continuing on to his mission in Sumatra. The first several times the story was told to me, before it became familiar, I had no concept of what a missionary was, and a decade would pass before I understood the cultural and historical context and consequences of missionary work. As a result, I always imagined my grandfather living in a bamboo hut deep in a tropical jungle, isolated from anyone for miles and finding giant snakes in his bucket shower. It was not until embarrassingly late that I realized that this was not the case.听

One particular story that I took at an early age to be proof of my grandfather鈥檚 rugged lifestyle was about how he had been bitten by a poisonous centipede only a month after he and his twin brother Richard had arrived in Malaya. So severe was the bite that my grandfather had to be hospitalized. This story marked the beginning of my abiding fear of centipedes. Even after my mother had explained to me several times that the kind of poisonous centipede found in Malaysia could not be found in the American Midwest, I remained vaguely suspicious of them throughout my youth.听听

While my grandfather was in the hospital, Richard and many of the other missionaries decided to take a trip up the coast for a beach party.听 Naturally, my recovering grandfather did not accompany them. The next day, Richard was caught in an undertow as he swam off the coast of Malaya in the South China Sea and drowned.听 There was a sign on the beach warning of the strong undertow, but as none of the party had yet learned to speak or read Malayan, the sign went unheeded.听 My grandfather was notified and discharged from the hospital. He returned to a near empty mission.听 There, he found his Bible open with John 14 Verse 2 circled in red: 鈥淚n my Father鈥檚 house, there are many mansions.听 If it were not so, I would have told you.听 I go to prepare a place for you鈥�.听 When I was young, I was never clear as to whether or not God himself had taken a pen to my grandfather鈥檚 Bible, but I think that there was never any doubt in my grandfather鈥檚 mind.听听

Days after Richard died, my grandfather was sitting alone on a bench and a girl from the mission approached him with surprise. She told him that she had heard that something very bad had happened to him. She told him that she heard he had died. My grandfather carefully explained to her that it was his identical twin who had died, not himself. I wonder if it was then that he realized that he would carry Richard with him henceforth, or if he had already accepted this responsibility. After the passing of Richard, my grandfather was asked to stay permanently in Malacca, to take up his brother鈥檚 place. I think the fact that he agreed speaks to an unfathomable courage or an unshakable faith that I can understand only during the most sleepless of nights. Regardless, he remained in Malaya for four more years.听听

And here, having washed up at the heels of a flood, was the driver鈥檚 license that my grandfather had carried with him when he went to attend to his twin brother鈥檚 body, which had appeared on the beach two days later.听 It was regaining its form and drying out steadily in the weak afternoon sun.听 It must have been in my grandfather鈥檚 pocket at the funeral, when he buried his brother in Malaya because the paperwork to arrange for the return of the deceased to America had not come through.听 He must have had to renew it when he decided to stay in Malaya, to carry out his term as a missionary, despite the way his mother had begged him to come home.听 He must have used it when he journeyed to Kuala Lumpur to witness the revolution that ousted British rule.听 And then鈥攚hat?听 Had he traveled home, and stowed it away in the filing cabinet right away, or had it stayed in a bedside table until my grandmother complained and it was sentenced to the basement?听 Had it lay there, dormant for nearly fifty years, throughout my mother鈥檚 childhood and young adulthood, until it had been disrupted and reawakened by its own aquatic disaster?听 I could not help but wonder about the life this small document had led, particularly its early years, when it had inhabited my grandfather鈥檚 breast pocket, so close to his heart.听 And now it sits on my desk, resting on top of the plastic bag that I stowed it in for security, innocuous and miraculous.听听

The story of my grandfather and Richard鈥檚 time in Malaya is so integral to the culture of my family that, in discovering this small artifact which had lived through things I had heard about so many times I dreamed about them, I felt akin to how the brothers Grimm might have felt upon discovering Cinderella鈥檚 glass slipper.听 The story felt tragic, ethereal, and fantastic, and was surrounded by the fine mist of passing years.听 Yet this artifact made the story real and, somehow, implied that it was still unfolding in my grandparents鈥� basement.听 Upon discovering the driver鈥檚 license, I experienced simultaneously a sense of something familiar returning to myself, and of coming upon something new and cherished, both inside and outside of my self.听 By finding the license, I recognized the piece of myself that had grown up internalizing the story, fearing centipedes and undertows.听 But at the same time, it brought with it a new understanding of my grandfather鈥檚 life and that of his brother.听 By reconstructing the imagined life of the driver鈥檚 license, I felt that I could reconstruct this pivotal period in my grandfather鈥檚 life.听 More importantly, I felt it as a connection to his brother, Richard, whose absence had been so mythical and influential on all the members of my mother鈥檚 family.听 When my grandfather鈥檚 hand had touched that paper for the first time to sign, it must have been before he lost his brother.听 In this way, the license, beyond representing a presence where I was used only to absence, was also the condensation of a cultural ghost whose presence was held sacred by my family.听

My mother has told me that, when she was growing up, the story was not openly spoken of except on very rare and sublime occasions. Though my grandfather tends toward quietness, I hypothesize that this moratorium was in fact placed by my grandmother, whose aversion to the expression of unwieldy feelings is mythic in scope. And though the tragedy has always lived inside my grandfather, a piece of it must belong to my grandmother, who was dating my grandfather while he was in Malaysia. So, while the story forms a structure so integral to my family that I, two generations later, have hung pieces of myself upon it, it is also not frequently spoken of. Once, when I was in middle school, I saw my grandfather cry when he spoke about Richard. It was at a family event and he was talking to adults鈥擨 ought not to have seen it. But there he was, slouching in plaid and white sneakers, quietly crying for a brother who should have been there, but hadn鈥檛 been for fifty years. I was touched and terrified.听听

So, when the driver鈥檚 license announced itself on that sunny June morning, we did not press my grandfather or speak much about what it represented. Once, about a year after I had caught the glimpse of my grandfather鈥檚 tears, he kissed my cheek before releasing me from a hug. I was surprised and delighted and he put his hands into his pockets and leaned toward a smile. Sometimes, that says more to me about him than all the rest.听听

Though of course I cannot begin to image all the feelings that my grandfather must have experienced upon uncovering the everyday reminder of the loss of his twin brother sixty years ago, the mere presence of my brother, my mother, and me allowed the event to be shared.听 His ambient grief was noted by us, and the existence of the license reminded us all of the existence of Richard.听 The absence of a presence and the loss of a double was observed and ritualized, and the way that the license has been passed around the family allows us all to take part.听 We, the middle and younger generations, can recognize our solemn duty and inheritance in carrying the reminder of Richard forth into the world and into family history, to continue its story and incorporate his into ours.听 So it is with great emotional care that we handle this distillation of the story of my grandfather in the form of the license.听 It remains our responsibility to ensure that his Malayan driver鈥檚 license, hopelessly outdated and useless, is nevertheless recognizable as priceless.听听

So the Lord took mercy upon my feuding grandparents and sent a flood. And a relic bobbing in the ocean of thirty years鈥� detritus was washed ashore, reminding us all of a sea half a world and half a century away in which the fate of my family was forever altered.听 Sometimes, when I鈥檓 feeling like poking at life with a stick, I wonder who circled the verse in my grandfather鈥檚 Bible the day after his brother died.听 Nobody ever owned to the graffiti and my grandfather never found out who was responsible. It is such a small part of the story that it shouldn鈥檛 matter and of course it doesn鈥檛 really except that it does.听 Maybe it鈥檚 just one of the small miracles that get us through the enormous disasters of life. One of those dim flickers of inspiration or coincidence that make us feel as if we鈥檝e glimpsed something larger. Regardless, I think that, as I鈥檓 telling the story to future generations, I shall relate the appearance of the driver鈥檚 license with the same reverence because, for us, it was absolutely a small miracle.