True Stories

You Were All Right

2007-06-28T15:59:00.001-07:00

You were all right. It worked!

Motion in Poetry

2006-10-30T11:21:00.000-08:00

There are some days that are good, and some days that are great. I find that the great days come most often when we are not taking ourselves too seriously, but are still totally involved in or engrossed in something; that is to say, when we are the most in the moment. These moments become the stuff of eternity because our participation in some quintessence ties us to it, so forgetting the ticking of the clock can stop it. As the band Borderland said in their classic, “We can have forever for a while…”

When we are in these moments the eternal ideal in which we are participating sometimes takes over, and we are swept away in the manifestation of the ideal. This can be awe-inspiring, sublime, and even hilarious. The instance when this was most obvious to me was the poetry reading contest. Let me tell you about it.

I was the Language Arts coordinator for St. Anthony School on Makawao St. in Kailua, HI. I had the fourth through sixth graders every day for all things related to English, but I was charged with doing everything related to the poetry reading contest for the Leeward Systems. All the school systems on the leeward side of the island were involved, not just the private schools. My boss made it clear, nicely, that he wanted our school to have good participation and to make this opportunity available to all of our students.

I was the student government faculty advisor. I was running a WorldWise Schools program in which my class corresponded with a Peace Corp Volunteer’s class in Malawi. I was helping my friend with the river cleanup. I was taking extra time with some individual students. I barely had time to surf as it was, I didn’t want this extra burden too, but I couldn’t say no. A flyer was printed and distributed to the student body, and I had the first meeting of the hopefuls and participants on a Thursday afternoon after school. When the bell rang and I got my kids out to their buses and rides I took a few minutes to get a cup of coffee in the teacher’s lounge. I took a deep breath and wondered first how poor the turnout would be for a poetry reading event and second how I was going to get through it without experiencing severe negative growth.

I walked back into my classroom and it was full, just as if I still had class in session. The difference was, though, that there were very little kids from the first grade and on up to kids who were considerable larger than me; eighth grade Polynesian boys can be quite large. I stood in front of them and instantly the enthusiasm emanating from the shining eyes of the youngsters started to penetrate my cynicism and seep into my person. Some of the little kids had books with them and already knew what poems they wanted to do. They were doing a sort of classroom gymnastics trying to get the teacher’s attention by raising one hand and using the other arm to support it while elongating their trunk to get the absolute most loft on the raised hand. They absolutely could not contain their nervous energy and the sounds of their “ooh, ooh, ooh”s and “mistermistermistermister” formed the background of the recitation of the contest rules. It sounded like a monstrous hive on a hot day, with all of the drones fanning their wings at the same time.

I told the kids the rules, encouraged them to pick out their poems and have them ready for my review by the next session to be held early the following week. I bade them good afternoon, and almost immediately the kids lined up in front of me to read their poems so I could tell them if the poems and the readings were good. I tried to get away, but little kids just won’t let you go. While I was listening to the little kids belt out every word that Shel Silverstein ever wrote I could also see that the bigger kids hadn’t yet wafted away. Eventually, some of the bigger kids lost patience with the little ones and moved them to the side while they monopolized my attention. The seventh and eighth graders were as excited as the little kids, but cool prevented them from showing it. Their need to communicate some of the angst and confusion that both consumed them and drove them forward kept them rooted there for some time. I was struck with an incongruously light vision of the hulking young men as planets and the frenetic, buzzing young children as their moons or comets in their Oort Cloud. I chuckled all the way home.

I knew for sure that thereafter I would have to have a real plan for preparing these kids for the readings. Since I didn’t have a TV or a radio at my house I allowed my mind to become occupied with the planning when not performing the tasks of grading papers or planning lessons. I found that I did get quite a bit of inspiration while bobbing on the waves as well. By the time the next meeting came around I did have a plan, and I thought it was a good one. I would hear every poem and decide if it were appropriate for the contest. I would give the body of students the pointers that I had discovered in my three trips to the library to research public readings of poetry. I would assign each student to a group of peers, by age, with whom each would practice recitation and offer critiques intended to assist the reciter.

Over the next few weeks the plan was implemented and I must admit that it came together better than I expected it would have. The younger kids really got into the theatrics of it, but they took the responsibility of providing criticism as an excuse to insult the other kids. I had in the past tried to get my class to compliment everybody they met on a given day, in order to combat their predilection toward conflict. It worked well with the class and I had the younger kids confine their criticisms to compliments. They found that they enjoyed giving and receiving compliments, and then they gained a vested interest in their friends’ success. The older kids were having success developing bonds with their cohorts too.

Some poems were humorous, some were inspiring, some were exercises in rhyming, and some others still were just plain dark. There were a couple of junior high school girls who were “Goth chicks” for lack of a better term, and had chosen poems of desperation with heavy, angular wording. It was hard for them to perpetuate their aura of gothic weight while wearing bright white polo shirts and long plaid skirts in the bright tropical sunshine and lilting trade winds of Oahu, but they were persistent. One of the older boys had chosen a poem by a local writer. The poem was intended to show the incompatibility between the traditional Hawaiian and mainstream American cultures, and it did so by interjecting words in Hawaiian where there were no English words to describe local wildlife or cultural circumstances. This occurs more frequently over the course of the reading until eventually the poem ends with two stanzas in Hawaiian alone. I didn’t understand it all, but I thought it was clever. My favorite, though, was a Shel Silverstein classic that goes like this:

The Bagpipe Who Didn't Say No
It was nine o'clock at midnight at a quarter after three
When a turtle met a bagpipe on the shore side by the sea,
And the turtle said, "My dearie,
May I sit with you? I'm weary."
And the bagpipe didn't say no.

Said the turtle to the bagpipe,
"I have walked this lonely shore,
I have talked to waves and pebbles--but I've never loved before.
Will you marry me today, dear?
Is it 'No' you're going to say dear?"
But the bagpipe didn't say no.

Said the turtle to his darling,
"Please excuse me if I stare,
But you have the plaidest skin, dear,
And you have the strangest hair.
If I begged you pretty please, love,
Could I give you just one squeeze, love?"
And the bagpipe didn't say no.

Said the turtle to the bagpipe,
"Ah, you love me. Then confess!
Let me whisper in your dainty ear and hold you to my chest."
And he cuddled her and teased her
And so lovingly he squeezed her.
And the bagpipe said, "Aaooga."

Said the turtle to the bagpipe,
"Did you honk or bray or neigh?
For 'Aaooga' when you're kissed is such a heartless thing to say.
Is it that I have offended?
Is it that our love is ended?"
And the bagpipe didn't say no.

Said the turtle to the bagpipe,
"Shall I leave you, darling wife?
Shall I waddle off to Woedom? Shall I crawl out of your life?
Shall I move, depart and go, dear--Oh, I beg you tell me 'No' dear!"
But the bagpipe didn't say no.

So the turtle crept off crying and he ne'er came back no more,
And he left the bagpipe lying on that smooth and sandy shore.
And some night when tide is low there,
Just walk up and say, "Hello, there,"And politely ask the bagpipe if this story's really so.
I assure you, darling children, the bagpipe won't say "No."

As the big day drew nearer the kids started to voice their concerns about stage fright, nerves, and the fear of “screwing it up in front of everybody.” The older kids felt the same fears and told me one by one that they thought the exercise no longer held merit for them and they wanted to withdraw. Each asked me in condor if I would be there for his or her performance and I said that I would. One by one I talked them out of it. I gave the entire assembly a speech about how important oratory skills are, and I explained the ancient notion of arête. I also pointed out that no matter who came or did not come, that I would be there as each delivered his or her oration and that I would provide succor and support. Only after this promise was made did I realize that it was impossible to keep.

I had about thirty students, each with a five minute slot in a two and a half hour program. My zeal to buoy the kids’ confidence had clouded my ability to tell time and do math. When I got the schedule for the recitations I realized that there were many times where the kids would be reciting at the same time. I was in no position to rescind my comment, nor did I want to, but I had to figure out some way to be there for them all. I took a ride out to Kaneohe High School, where the event was to be held, and had a look at the venues for the recitations. There is, or was, a quadrangle of classrooms set out in a pattern like an old Italian villa. The classrooms had windows on both sides with louver blinds kept open at all times to maximize the breeze. I was told that the windows would be opened as much as they could be on the day of the contest because there would be no use of the ceiling fans in order to avoid unnecessary background noise. I went from room to room following the schedule of my school’s recitations, and identified who would be where and when. The Kaneohe High School bells rang and the campus was flooded with high school kids who were staring and sometimes commenting on my presence and odd behavior. No matter. I had a very tight schedule to plan and I couldn’t get caught up in justifying my presence. I identified each place and reciter and drew lines on the plan for where I would have to be in order to be recognized as present. I then choreographed my routes and where I would place myself so as to be situated in the line of sight of the participant. Then I did a practice run to make sure I had it all down pat and that it could be done in the correct time. Then I did it again. I thought for sure that I had it nailed.

The day of the contest came, and we all met in the parking lot / playground of the school and convoyed to the high school. My good friend came too, to cheer on his students in the contest, and to offer support if I needed it. I had a few responsibilities as the coordinator from my school in order to ensure that all of the participants were registered and were present. By the time I had the school registered the recitations were set to begin. I walked my youngest, most nervous student to his venue and stayed with him until he was two minutes into his reading and apparently had stopped looking to me as an anchor in the audience. I took off for my next destination with a cartoonish puff of smoke left curling where I had stood.

For the next two and a half hours I sped here and there and gave thumbs ups, offered pantomime advice on volume and projection, nodded, clapped, and most of all, kept moving. I realized that my friend had actually come to laugh, and not necessarily to lend support. I followed my choreographed plan and schedule to a T, and it turned out to be magnificent. I was completely on edge and in the moment when the last recitation took place. We all reconvened to carpool back to our school. It would be a week before the results were tallied and communicated, and we had an opportunity for a hopeful afterglow while waiting for the parents to come to claim their children at our school. Each kid had a point he wanted to make, either about how the preparation matched the delivery, or how the nervous energy became an asset during the recitation, or some other memorable thing to take with him to the next year’s event. The kids felt that they had accomplished something, and they felt a closer association with the written and spoken word. Subsequently, I too felt that I had accomplished something.

When the last kid was in the last car on the way home, my friend pointed out that he had the boards on his roof rack, and that his girlfriend was working a double. He suggested that we catch some waves out at Diamond Head and then get a few beers and some food at Aloha Tower. I was ready to make the most of the rest of my Saturday, and between sets we talked about the teaching profession. We decided that there would always be something to complain about, but what motivated us as teachers would never change. He pointed out that I looked like I was caught in an unrealistic circumstance on a bad sit-com, and when I laughed at that, he asked me seriously, how much money it would take to get me to behave like that if I were working at any other job? I laughed again, because there really wasn’t any other answer.

How's Your Head?

2006-10-02T10:29:00.000-07:00

My memory is starting to fade, but I can remember this incident pretty clearly even now. I had been COS’d from the Peace Corps and I was on a plane leaving London and heading for Boston. I didn’t do any traveling in between leaving Africa and going back to America, which is not the norm. Most people take some time and go somewhere to spend some of their readjustment allowance and get back into the American head. I had a sunburn, a straw hat, and a battered dashiki when I left Ghana on the Lorry Airways plane, and I had the same get-up when I joined the flight in London. I have to admit I was a little put off by all of the clean white European people in what appeared to me to be fancy clothes.

I was sitting in the very back of the plane where you could still smoke, and I was savoring one of the last of my Ghanaian cigarettes. An obviously American guy sitting near me asked what I was smoking, and I gave him one. He looked a little bit like a hipster, and I asked him what he was doing in England. He hated the African cigarette and he said that he had been working with a rock band that was touring Europe. I asked who it was, and he said it was Phish. I said that I had lived with guys at UMass who knew them, and he invited me forward to meet the rest of the band. I sat down after introductions and met the guys in the band. They had been touring with the Psychedelic Furs and had hated it. They found the fact that I was a returning Peace Corps volunteer to be fascinating. They had more questions for me than I had for them. Eventually I got to asking Trey for an autograph for my brother, who was a big fan. He asked me what to write and I said, “Hey Brother, how’s your head?” He looked at me funny, and I explained that we were known to have a few now and again and that the funny question the next morning was always, “How is your head?” He understood it, and wrote it down. I put it in my pocket.

When we landed in Boston we were herded through the gates and I caught sight of my mother, sister, and brother waiting for me. I tapped Trey on the shoulder and pointed out my brother. He wished me luck and got on with getting his stuff through customs. I got through the line and caught my mother’s eye, but she didn’t recognize me. I guess I had changed a lot. When I tapped her on the shoulder and stood right in front of her she recognized me. My sister and brother had been looking for me in separate areas and we all got together to head out to the car.

In the car on the way home my brother said that the weirdest thing had happened to him. That he was in the airport looking for me and he saw a guy that he could have sworn was Trey from Phish, perched up on a light stand looking around. When Trey saw Brother staring at him he looked right at him and said, “Hey, Brother, how’s your head?” I said that that reminded me, that Trey wanted to give something to him, and I handed him the autograph.

He thought that was funny as hell, and so did I.

Vanity of Vanities!

2006-10-02T09:29:00.000-07:00

My older daughter lost another of her front teeth. The upper one, and the one right next to it has come loose and has moved a bit toward the empty space of its neighbor. She is a snaggle tooth little kid, and she is really very cute. She was talking about the performers she sees on the Disney channel and was ranking them in order of importance to her. She mentioned one girl's name and said, "She is my favorite singer." And then she quickly recanted and said, "Well, no, you're really my favorite singer, and she is my next favorite, and then..." I didn't get it at first. I asked her to repeat herself twice and she did, even providing further explanation. Sometimes when we are in the car on long trips we will sing sing along songs, or if I have the time and inclination to pick up the old guitar we sing some of my old favorites together. I never thought of myself as a good singer, but I have enjoyed singing along with the radio or in the shower or what have you. I know for sure I am not as good a singer as the girls on the Disney channel, but I got a real sense of satisfaction from my daughter telling me that I was her favorite singer. This satisfaction comes from knowing that she did not make her decision based on precision of the notes or the quality of the tone, but rather that she made her decision based on the fact that our shared time and enjoyment was the true "harmony". I had always hoped that my kids wouldn't be so shallow and would have the strength of heart to cherish what is truly worthwhile in this world, but I did not know, and still do not know, how to teach that. The source of my satisfaction is the fact that she gets it. She is an honest to goodness real, good kid.

Knock Down Drag Out Dance Party

2006-08-04T09:50:00.000-07:00

This is a very short, but very recent memory. I want to throw it onto the electronic canvas for posterity before I forget to remember.

I was recently lucky enough to attend a dance party where all inhibitions were completely abandoned. It has been a long time since I have danced like that, and it was long overdue. The girls were so very aware of their fashion style and their dance moves were fluid and graceful. They were teaching each other the steps as they danced them. The boys moves were fully athletic, more clipped, and some could even be called military. I was spared the need to employ my hands, which is a concern of mine when I dance, because I was holding my newest little partner, who just broke the eight pound mark. The Egg Lady commented that we wouldn't have to mop for a long time because the boys got to spinning out some breakdance moves.

There is no feeling like that when your house is filled with your own new blood. You feed them, nurture them, engage them in revelry and ribaldry when it is right to do so, and you enjoy the uninhibited, unconditional response. I remember when their father was a goofy giggling little kid, saying stupid stuff and wearing his weirdness on his sleeve. He wasn't standing with me, having a beer and commenting on the idiosyncrasies of our children because he was escorting the family of a friend around the base. The family was with him, but the friend was lost in the desert. Now he, my own flesh and blood and the father on whom these tittering children so heavily rely, is again mounting the machines of war. Another of my brother's sons will join him in harm's way very soon.

There is no feeling like dancing around the kitchen with the kids, but it may be selfish. It is a fantasy to think that you can keep them with you, and keep them safe. It is a fantasy to which I cannot subscribe, no matter how much I wish I could. So we equip them with the morals to make good decisions, arm them with the strength and self confidence to actuate the convictions of those morals, and the will to heal their minds when it is done. No matter what heart pounding, blood roaring adrenaline rush they have to endure, no matter what foreign shore on which they find themselves, no matter how the traumas they might encounter manifest themselves, they will always have a giddy spin around our kitchen floor.

And I hope that will bring them back.

Father's Day '06

2006-06-27T18:00:00.000-07:00

I see him
Standing, lips smacking, teeth out
In the act of standing he has forgotten
why he rose

I don't know why he got up
But I have always known
what he stood for,
In my memory, in my life

Filling the door frame
creaking leather and weapons
He lifts me past his cologne and five o'clock shadow
and I am elevated past my fear

Past, I see him
waging war across the globe
a lionized youth
putting the world to order and then

A pensive man
standing by his aging and infirmed father
as he slips off to prepare his place
and happily raises his children up

I stand
and in the act of standing forget what I stood for
my children's small hands holding me here
and the line of my fathers calling to me.

Surf

2006-05-17T11:49:00.000-07:00

I realize that I write a lot about things that can’t be conveyed or explained. I feel as though I want to communicate feelings or experiences when I know it is truly impossible. Rather than relying on my ability to communicate that which can only be experienced I rely heavily on the universality of emotion, experience, and knowledge of the numinous. I really feel compelled to talk about the first time I really surfed, but I don’t know that I can communicate the main point, which is the feeling of surfing, because I had never experienced it before doing it and I don’t know how universal this unique experience is.

I had been going with my good friend to a couple different surf spots early mornings and on weekends much like I had gone fishing with my brother and cousin back home. I would join the effort for the sake of the doing of it, not expecting that I would experience any level of success, but knowing that the attempt was fulfilling enough in and of itself. And every once in a while I would catch a fish, but until one strange day I had never caught a wave.

My friend and I would most often go to a less crowded spot off of the far north point of Kailua Beach Park. The waves would break on an island probably a quarter mile off of the shore, and I could never seem to make it out past the break. I was riding his eight foot “long” board. It was not big enough to float my weight so I could jump over the whitewater and it was too big for me to duck dive the break. More often than not I would fight my way out just to get blown back in and then I would have to fight my way out again. Without fail I would get too exhausted to keep at it and would just climb around on the island and skin dive for limpets that always got away.

One day, when we were out at Diamond Head, my friend was surfing and I was battling my way out and getting blown back in. I fought my way out again to a point where I could almost get in front of the break, meaning that I could reach the wave before it threw a lip and bob over the top without getting blasted by the whitewater. I poured it on in a flat out race against the evolution of the wave. My arms ached, my shoulders and my deltoids could barely pull through the water and keep my body on the board and my skin was chafing raw against the salted, waxed fiberglass. I had decided that this was my best shot, that it was now or never. I gave everything I had to make it to the wave before it went white. I could see my friend off in the distance bobbing on the set, pumping his arm in the air, cheering me on. My neck ached too from keeping my head up while exerting every muscle in my upper body, but I could see as I got closer and closer that the wave had hit the point where the sine wave bouncing off of the ocean floor was diminishing as the depth of the water tapered up to the shore line. The wave reared, quite suddenly, and the lip formed on the back side of the wave. It was like the big bad wolf inhaling before delivering the blast of force that would blow me back to Lani Kai.

I was dejected. I gave up. I stopped paddling so the wave would go white first and push into me rather than landing on me with all of its potentially deadly weight. I lay my head on the board and held my breath. My world became a world of the instant; not even a world of connected moments. The blast of torrential whitewater was tremendously powerful. There was no thinking, there was only the reaction. Until that instance I had always tried to go over, duck under, or make something happen while being hit by the wave. I was not a quitter so I never had quit. This time I just let the wave take me, knowing that I would wind up back on shore anyway.

You have to understand how far the break is from the shore at Diamond Head. It’s pretty far. When the whitewater caught the board and I wasn’t kicking or paddling, the fin on the bottom caused the board to be turned in the direction of the shore, the way it was supposed to, as was the intention of the designers. Once the board was turned in the right direction the rest of the organic hydrodynamics took effect and the board was stabilized by the power of the wave. I was still far from the shore, but the board was caught where it should have been and I was on it. I realized in an instant that I was not going to be dumped into the water and bounced off of the ocean floor. I tried to stand up.

Have you ever been working on staging or on a ladder and taken a step and found that there was nothing under your foot, either because the planks on the staging were overlapped or because you had miscounted the rungs on the ladder? Perhaps you have been walking up stairs and thought there was another step at the top, so your foot rose and fell and did not meet a step where you thought it ought to be? (Or perhaps you’ve found yourself sliding inexorably toward the mouth of an open well with no way to stop yourself? Was that just me?) There is a split second of absolute abject terror that starts in your solar plexus and pulls your soul out of your body through that point. Stretch that split second to the entire ride of the wave, and that is as close as I can come to describing the feeling of catching your first wave. Have you ever had a dream where you were flying? Have you ever had a dream where you became aware that you were dreaming, but you were not so fully awake as to leave your dream state? Then you could control the unreal and unbelievable things that occurred in your dream. The feeling of knowing that you can keep that freefalling feeling going and control it is the same feeling as controlling your dream. Imagine the euphoria you would feel if you discovered that it was real, and that you could do it whenever you wanted to as long as the sets were rolling in. Add to that the fact that you are outside in the elements and in nature, experiencing the same feelings between the euphoric moments that you would on a mountain hike, and you have a very addictive combination. There are many, many people who give up everything else and devote all of their time to surfing. That is the draw.

Luckily, I sucked at it enough so that I knew it could never become a serious pastime for me, but I got good enough at it to experience the euphoria of catching a good wave often enough to keep me coming back. And my friend finally let me know that the long board was not really a long board for a guy as tall as me. Once I rode ten foot boards at easier spots it got downright fun. But then when you’re out there to ride three foot waves and a seven foot set rolls in…

But that’s a story for another time.

Lakeshore Limited

2006-05-17T10:40:00.000-07:00

I’ve got an experience stuck in my head, and I want to get it written down before it flits away. It won’t take but a second. I don’t know why this experience sticks in my mind; I think it may be because it was so pure and unfettered an incident of revelry. Here it is:

Once upon a time, I found myself on a train going west. This story is not about the journey west or the destination of the train. It is about the first leg of the trip, from Boston to Chicago, on AmTrak’s Lakeshore Limited. I have spent days and days on trains in Europe, Africa, Asia, and America, and I think the Lakeshore Limited is the train I like the best. I won’t deny that this very well may be because the Lakeshore Limited is the train I find myself on every time I arrive home in Boston. One has to admit, though, that the Lakeshore Limited has a certain character that is not found on any other train.

The people who staff the train live in one of the destination cities, which means that there are either Bostonians or Chicagoans imbuing the journey with their wit, sardonic attitude, and gruff hospitality. The passengers are also all either coming from one of those cities or going to one of those cities. This isn’t to say that all of the passengers are Bostonians or Chicagoans, but there is a very strong probability that they are New Englanders or Midwesterners. The train itself is the cultural melting pot of the two regions.

There are scheduled journeys at night. We left Boston at night and were scheduled to arrive in Chicago in the morning. There are sleeper cars that I’m sure were full, but the time of year was just at the beginning of spring break for the colleges, and the economy seats were all full too. I had never seen a train full to capacity until then. It was crammed with probably eighty percent young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, each with far too much luggage to keep in the cabin of the train. College kids were elbowing each other and stepping on each others’ toes to get to and from the bathroom and to their backpacks, etc. I decided I would head to the bar car for a beer because a fair percentage of the kids were not old enough to drink.

The bar car was just as crowded. It reminded me of a Dublin pub at 10:55. It was a lucky thing that someone was getting up just as I was looking for a place to sit. I hopped on that seat like a gull on a French fry, dropped my pack and shuffled through the rocking line to get a beer. People were thrown into each other with each sway of the train, and it soon became obvious that it would not be tenable to remain in the bar car and to uphold the integrity of the idea of “personal space”. It was like a front row crush at a general admission concert. I finally got back to my seat with my beer and tried to settle in next to a very heavy guy who was probably ten years my senior. He made a joke about everyone fitting in, and the thrust of it was the double entendre between getting along with a group of people and actual physical space. There was no way he could have made the joke to just me without everyone in the immediate vicinity hearing. We all laughed, it was funny. Because of the rattling and rocking noises of the train, each conversation had to be louder than the background noise, which made it impossible for everyone to talk at once. It was pretty clear too that there were plenty of people who were traveling alone and did not have the impetus to control individual conversations. Organically, the conversation in the car became a single conversation, based on clever quips, sarcastic comments, and clever banter. It was the single time when I felt most like I was an extra in a well written sit-com. As Boston became Worcester we felt out how it would work for us to all stay in the crowded car together. As Worcester became Springfield we were all having a good time. As Springfield became Albany we were trying to keep the laughter coming and looking for ways to maintain the good time. It became like a rolling party. The people who had seats would have their drinks passed to them by the people who stood by the bar. People whose feet got tired were spelled by those of us with seats.

I noticed at the end of the car three college girls standing together. One was clearly of north Asian descent, one was clearly of purely African descent, and one was clearly of north European descent, with blue eyes and blond hair. Each of the girls was beautiful but I looked at them in wonder not just to enjoy their beauty but to revel in the fact that I came from and was shaped by a place that could support and advance the cause of diversity so well.

The large man next to me was a driving force in encouraging the shared humor of the car. Eventually he lumbered to his feet, and I thought it a pity if he were to head back to his seat at that point, that it would leave the rest of us at a bit of a loss. He went to the bar and collected a guitar case from the barman. He explained to an individual near us, but really to everyone in the car, that he was a professional studio guitar player, and that he had to travel a lot to make his recording sessions. He was deathly afraid to fly, though, and had to take the train everywhere. He wouldn’t dare leave his guitar for storage or check in, and felt like playing a bit now.

The air filled with requests and there was a bit of a rush on the beer as everyone settled in for a tune. But there would be no settled tunes that night. The heavy guy was a studio musician who had done long stints in bar bands all over New England, and knew exactly which tunes he could pound out on an acoustic with a pickup and a little amp that would get a crowd of hazy college kids singing. Before long, every voice was raised in song and the barman had to run back to the dining car for more beer. The rocking of the car sent people leaning into each other, and there they stayed. Almost as if the player had a set list he put one song after another that complemented it perfectly, and we rocked on to Toledo.

The guitar player was like a master of ceremonies for the train that night, and he worked magic on the lot of us who were there. He played a couple slower tunes toward the end of the night, and took my request of “Sunny” on the condition that I sing it, and I tried, but he grew frustrated when I couldn’t remember the words and sung it himself (as I knew he would). When he put his guitar back in its case he made pronouncements about the time, and spoke of how much fun we all had- he wrapped up the night for us, and we filed back into our seats to unwind while we rolled into the city of big shoulders. When we filed off of the train in Chicago there were a lot of tired but satisfied grins. Instead of us feeling like we had done a hard night of travel we were experiencing the afterglow of a good party.

That is my most memorable recollection of riding the Lakeshore Limited, but I have to say that each trip has been good. The views of the Great Lakes are great (pardon the pun) if you travel by day, and the people are always cool. I hate to sound like an ad for the train, but I haven’t traveled any real distance by train in some time, and I kind of miss it.

Go West, Young Man

2006-05-17T09:18:00.000-07:00

There was a time when I was free to do whatever struck my fancy. It is rare that such a time presents itself, and when it does, it should be utilized to full advantage. I had some money in my pocket, I had no dependents, and I had the vigor and wherewithal to do something simply for the experience of it.

A friend contacted me and told me of his intention to visit a mutual friend at grad school in central California. He said that he knew I had availability and wondered if I might like to go. I told him that I now had a new friend in Colorado who would also be happy to host us if we found our way there. No sooner had we mentioned what was possible than we were planning how to make it happen. We got together and held “planning sessions” and in no time we had tickets for flights to Sacramento and Denver, and had people who would be waiting to pick us up at the airports.

We got off the plane in Sacramento and I commented that this was my first time in California. I had half expected, erroneously, that the earth would be quaking as soon as I got off the plane, and that all of the action scenes from every cheap movie I ever saw would be playing themselves out just outside the window. I thought the whole state would be filled with cowboys and hippies and valley girls goofing on surfers. OK, so I wasn’t all wrong, but the airport was filled with mostly regular people. The hippest hippie in the world was there, though, and he was the old friend we were there to see. We took a few minutes there in the airport to catch up, and then spilled out into the legendary California sunshine to work our way to the University of California in Davis.

Our friend’s car was a conservative sedan that you wouldn’t imagine he would drive. I forget exactly how long it took us to get from Sacramento to Davis, but the air was crisp, the sun was bright, and the conversation was vibrant. Since the time that we had all been in high school together my friend with whom I traveled had been in the Peace Corps (in the Persian Gulf), I had been in the Peace Corps, and the friend we were visiting was pursuing a doctorate that would help unlock the secrets of the universe. We did a lot of catching up on that ride.

When we got to his apartment I felt as if I had strolled right back into my senior year of college. The place was decorated in bohemian cheap, and there were people comfortably located on every sitting and lounging space available. It turned out that the crowd that was gathered was my friend’s band, and they were convening in preparation for their gig that night. My friend played the trumpet and some percussion instruments for the band, and they had gotten quite popular in the area. We grabbed a quick bite to eat and some recreational refreshment before heading out to the gig.

The show was at a well established brew pub, originally founded in the seventies. It was founded by a master brewer from Bavaria who had fallen in love with California and did not want to return to Germany, but who loved his native Germany too. He had decorated the pub in German style and had continued to brew Bavarian style beers that one would be likely to find at the Oktoberfest in Munich. These he served in one liter tankards of leaded glass, just like the ones advertisers showed zaftig frauleins brandishing in European beer gardens. I thought it was really cool, especially since I am such a lover of beer, but the clientele completely interrupted the German illusion. The place was filling up with nouveau bohemians and throwback hippies, all meticulously arranged so as to appear unkempt in just the right way. Undoubtedly, this was their milieu, and the event was a minor happening in their society. My friend and I from the east looked quite conservative by comparison, and my friend who blew the trumpet was the hippest hippie because he obviously gave no mind to the politics of the alternative world that swirled around him. Not that he was unaware of what transpired from day to day, but rather that he pitied those people too caught up in niggling about life and not living it.

He sat with us drinking a huge brown beer while the band took the stage and the bass player started a chunky line that clearly came as second nature to him. The rhythm guitar laid an easy progression over the bass line and it became clear that it was a contemporary funk song. The drummer and the lead guitar hopped in with driving beat and hook after hook, and we got worried that our friend had been too caught up in our conversation and had forgotten that he was part of the band. The band played on for about three minutes before our friend finished his beer and said he’d see us in just a bit. He went around to the back of the stage and came up onto it from behind, leaning against an amp and grinning. He held his trumpet in his hand, but was clearly caught up in the tune, like he was the biggest fan who happened to have the best seat in the house. I think I was the only one who took any notice of him at all. The song went on an on as a funk jam, and I knew that he had forgotten his part or missed his cue or something. My other friend took his leave to step outside and smoke, perhaps he could no longer stand to watch. I sat drinking beer and enjoying the song as it grew to a tremendous crescendo and, in an instant, every member of the band stopped on a dime and a spotlight bathed my friend in light while the rest of the stage went dark. He had snapped to life and was blowing the wildest, most inspired instrumental solo I have ever witnessed. The crowd had obviously been waiting for this. The players were good, and the band together was great, but my friend was the best musician among them by far, and they all knew it. The rest of the band joined in again and my friend was an active member of the show from then on. I was flabbergasted.

Over the course of the night I progressively grew less aware of where my body ended and the rest of the world began. I felt like I was in a UHF TV show that was experiencing interference. The return to the apartment was just the real beginning of the party, because the band couldn’t hang out and interact while they were working. The night grew fuzzier and I knew that the party was over when my friend handed me a hot cup of coffee, and it was light out. They tell me I had been sleeping for hours. The one thing that did stay in my memory from the night was seeing groupies in action. It was the first and only time I had been at a party with groupies. They were fawning over the members of the band and were vying to position themselves with the band members throughout the night. My friend had to extricate himself from several admirers in order to spend time with us. I thought it was the strangest thing I had ever seen.

My friend asked me what I thought of California and I had to admit to him that the Golden State was a little too hung over for my taste. He laughed and said that he had just the thing. We went to the university to visit the raptor center. We were out in the beauty of the California day and we were let in to watch the birds of prey feed. My favorites were the owls. My friend had to run in to his office very quickly; this sparked a conversation about his work. We asked him what he did, and he cheerily and immediately replied that he was a mad scientist. We pressed him more about the mad science. He became pensive, obviously thinking about how to portray his work in a way that an intelligent layperson could understand. He started by explaining that the particles that make up atoms have distinct qualities of their own. He went on to explain that there are particles that are just as small or smaller than the constituent parts of atoms that are not bound into atomic structures. This was my introduction to neutrinos, I think. He went on to explain that waves are observable, measurable manifestations of energy, and that they are free from the rules that govern particles (particles being “things” and waves being “energy”). His work focused on discerning the difference between particles and waves, and identifying whether or not there was a “building block” having the properties of both a particle and a wave, and thus unlocking the secret to the makeup of the universe. I was dehydrated and my head was throbbing, but I remember being fascinated by his description of his work, though my depiction of it is erroneous and clumsy. I thought that every hippie in a band should contribute as much to the world. Since then string theory has gained credence in the scientific community and I wonder if he alluded to that at all.

My spinning head was spinning as we drove into the redwood forest. It was not a forest of giant sequoias like I had seen on TV, but the redwoods were beautiful trees, and they are straight and tall. The aspect of the forest was clean. The bed of the forest was not crowded or cluttered like the deciduous forests back home, and there were no low hanging branches interrupting your view or posture. It was unlike the forests I had been in in Africa either. In the stillness and shade we shared a moment of quietude that refreshed the psyche. As we saddled up to get back to the pad I felt a twinge of regret that we would be flying out the next day.

We spent the next day catching up some more and just enjoying each others’ company as we had done as youths in high school. It was a day in which we did not need to experience anything extraordinary to get the most out of our time together, and we had to fly sometime around midnight. We made a big meal, we watched a movie, we walked to his favorite coffee shop- we clocked shared mundane experiences, and the common denominator of each was our mutual camaraderie. It is telling that this time stands out as the best part of the trip for me.

Our friend put us on the plane at some ungodly hour of the night and wished us good luck. We bade him farewell, and in the middle of the night we arrived in Denver. I was a bit disappointed because I couldn’t see the mountains from the window of the plane. We got off the plane in Denver and my friend was not there to greet us. This was before the age of the ubiquity of cell phones. We waited and waited and there was not only no sign of my friend, but there was no sign of anyone. Stanton International is dead in the middle of a weeknight. We discussed what to do, and I suggested that we try to make our way to Boulder and find his place, and that the only other alternative I could think of was to either wait until daylight and try to contact him, or to get on a flight back to Boston. We wound up taking a cab to Boulder, which cost us a little more than we wanted to spend, but we found my friend’s place. I knocked on his door loudly and persistently, and he eventually opened the door in his underwear with his hair two stories higher than his head. He let us in and said he was really glad to see us, but wanted to know why we were there a day early?

I said that there must have been a miscommunication, and that I didn’t mean to drag him out of bed. I suggested that we all crash out until daybreak and then decide what to do. (For the record, I know I had told him the right day, I’m pretty sure he just spaced it.) He said no, that since we were all awake and it was still predawn, that we had just enough time to hike the flat irons to watch the sunrise. We were tired, but we figured that it was an opportunity that we wouldn’t get again soon, so we took it. We waited while my friend got dressed and then we drove out to where the flat irons are. My high school friend and my Peace Corps friend got along well, as I knew they would. When we arrived at the trail head and began to hike I was a little surprised to find that “hike” in Colorado does not mean the same thing as “hike” in New England. In New England “hike” means a long walk up a mountain or hill, gaining altitude gradually over time. In Colorado “hike”, according to my friend, meant a climb up a rock face. I felt bamboozled, but my eastern friend and I kept our wits, focused our attention, and made it up to where we would watch the sun rise.

Sunrise from the flatirons was magnificent. It was one of those moments when you realize that you are in the presence of God. What else can be said? If we had never taken that trip then we would never have that experience to carry with us. It was clear, as the gloaming turned to day, that this experience was the reason we had come.

And then we had to do the same climb in reverse, which is harder, and it was back to reality. We got back to his place and because the date of our arrival was in contention, he had not taken the day off from work. My eastern friend and I stayed at his place and rested and then got out to explore Boulder Colorado a little bit. Boulder is a nice city. It is a beautiful city high in the mountains and the air is crisp and clean. I couldn’t help coming away with the feeling that Boulder knew how cool it was. I felt like Boulder had an attitude. This feeling was not abated over the next day and a half that I stayed there, but rather it was reinforced. This was the beginning of the “extreme” sports movement, and Colorado is an extreme state. Further, Boulder is a college town filled with young “extreme” people. I’m certain that my assessment of Boulder as a city with an attitude stemmed mainly from my first experience of being out of touch with the youth. That had never happened to me before, and I think I took it out on the city. Next time I am in Boulder I promise to give it a better chance.

We stayed another day and explored Boulder a bit more. We had excellent Mexican food, which I was later to find out was quite authentic, and spent time recounting our misadventures in the Peace Corps and comparing the Arab experience to the African experience. Each of us thought that his experience was the best and most unique, and for each of us individually, we were right. The next day we got on a plane at a more acceptable hour after saying our goodbyes. When we landed at Logan I knew the trip was one without a purpose, but it was one well undertaken and one that I would not soon forget.

May Day

2006-04-24T13:34:00.000-07:00

May Day is a big holiday in the Hawaiian Islands. The saying is that “May Day is Lei Day”, and it really held true. There was a May Day pageant at our school, and the theme was “It’s a Small World”. Every class had to put on a presentation of song and dance for its chosen country or culture. The second grade did Korea, and the third grade did Germany. I had the sixth grade and we did Hawaii because one of the class mothers in my class was a kumu hula, or a teacher of the traditional cultural ways in the Islands. She knew that I taught the kids a new Hawaiian word per week and that I was interested in learning about the culture in which I found myself. She thought it was a good thing, and thought that it was good for the kids too.

We took time out of each day for a month in preparation for the pageant. We had to acquire and perfect the traditional costume of our culture and we had to get the dance down pat with the music. I had never tried to hula before. My hula experience began and ended with a plastic hoop. I did know, however, that the hula is the oral tradition of the Polynesian people, with music and movement included. It truly carries the heart of the culture with it. In the distant past, though, there were many hulas that were lascivious in nature, and it caused a conservative reaction by the missionaries who tried to extinguish it. In response to the religious reaction, the Hawaiian people were, and perhaps still are, in the throes of a vital resurgence of the culture that includes a devolution movement.

The kids insisted that I practice the dance with them. I was a very involved and interested teacher, and I promised to practice with them but not to dance in the pageant, and they agreed. This is how I came to learn my first, and only, hula. The story was that of the goddess Pele’s sister, Hi’iaka being caught between the worlds of men and gods. It is a poignant story. Pele is the goddess of fire, but really she is the goddess of the volcanoes that create the world- without volcanoes there would be no earth in the middle of the Pacific. Hi’iaka is the goddess of some things, but in this hula she represents the flowering forest at the breast of the volcano- there is a question whether she is Pele’s sister or daughter here, and if you care for further elucidation I suggest you read up on it (Hi’iaka was brought to Hawaii from Tahiti as an egg, and … it goes on). For the purpose of this tradition, the forest is in the embrace of the volcano, making the connection between the volcano and the ocean, where Maui lives. The ocean provides for the people, and the forest provides for the people by producing kalo and pigs, and the volcano has the power to both create and destroy. Above the volcano is the endless sky, which represents eternity. Hi’iaka intercedes for the people in her charge with her angry sister Pele and binds the culture to the land in a covenant not unfamiliar to Westerners.

The music was percussive because it contained only instruments that were found in the Islands prior to the arrival of the “breathless people” or Ha Oles. The main instrument that the kumu used during the rehearsals was a gourd covered in a net of cowry shells. It was amazing how much noise she was able to get out of that alone. The hula required dance steps and learning two languages. For me, learning the Hawaiian words for the shouted song was cool, but the most interesting part was learning the sign language. I learned the signs for ocean waves indicating distance, direction, and time. I learned the signs for the passage of suns and moons. I learned the dramatic signs for expulsion and conflagration. The students were all very serious. When I was in sixth grade I couldn’t take anything seriously at all. About half of the students had significant amounts of Hawaiian blood, and I could tell that their parents had influenced them to be serious about this as part of the cultural resurgence and devolution movement. I, as a teacher, benefited from the cresting wave of Hawaiian pride. They got it down pretty good, pretty fast. One day when there was too much noise after lunch I went with the kumu to Kailua Beach Park with the kids and watched them stamp out the hula on the white sands facing Moloka’i. I was so proud of my kids, doing their culture proud and maintaining the appropriate level of decorum. I hope I never lose that memory.

When the last few days before the pageant rolled around, the kumu brought in another kumu from her hulau to help get the girls’ moves and costumes right, while she worked with the boys. She also brought the entire band from her hulau. Suddenly there were a handful of scowling, large, muscular bad-asses imposing their way around my class, and I was a bit worried about how the kids would react. I should have known better. Sure these guys were huge and potentially ferocious, but they were related to half of the class. Everybody called them “Uncle” in much the same way Akans call the older men “Father”.

On May Day, the day of the big pageant, every class did their routine, but the whole school was keeping a close eye on my class. They had the burden of representing for the entire population, and had to do everyone proud. They did a great job. Each boy gave it his all, and they maintained the requisite steeliness of gaze and martial quality of manner. Each girl moved fluidly, attending to the requisite precision that the goddesses required. I found myself mimicking with stilted, staccato movements along with them and reciting the ancient words to myself as they shouted them. When the performances were over there were congratulations all around, and there was a general consensus that I had done a good job in spite of my being a haole.

That night my friend, his girlfriend, my brother, and I all had a cookout on the beach and took in the sunset. It was one of those nights that seem steeped in comfort and contentment. The feeling of having done well at something and having it over with, like the sigh of an infant, is eternal in its own way.

Renaissance

2006-02-23T13:05:00.000-08:00

The Death of Youth in Africa

There was a particularly trying time in my stay in Africa when everything seemed to go terribly wrong at every turn. My project was having difficulties in supply compounded by difficulties thrown up by man made decisions. I was frustrated in interpersonal relationships, particularly with my girlfriend. I was falling under a long spell of melancholy brought on by homesickness and my erroneous insistence to myself that my problems were exacerbated by the remoteness of the location and the lack of development and education. My mood had deteriorated completely. There was no one or no thing that could grasp me by the heartstrings and pull me into the realization that life was good. There was no final arbiter of equity or worth in the professional, personal, or spiritual realms. I drew on the reserves of my enthusiastic naiveté and found that the reserve had been spent.

I got together what little I needed to sustain myself throughout a weekend away and decided to go to a friend to drink beer and talk it out. I walked up to the center of the village to wait for a tro-tro and I sat in a shaded spot scowling until the muscles in my head and face ached and wrangling with God. If life is fair, I asked him, if there is truly a set of parameters that guide behavior in the universe, if there is truly an argument to be made that there is a purpose to all of this, then give me a sign that it is so. It is the only time I ever asked for such a sign and I will not ask again.

There was a little girl, probably no more than four years old, who would follow me everyday as I walked to work and sing to me and dance along. She found great joy in my difference and shared that joy out to those who would have it, most of all to me. She was very, very cute. I saw her coming toward me as I sat there in the square, splayed out in her mother’s arms, limbs akimbo and dangling, lifeless head lolling to and fro. Her mother was wailing in anguish, crying and cursing God, asking why her baby had to die. When she reached the center of the road she began to try in earnest to crack open her own head, and had injured herself seriously before she could be restrained and dragged away. Some elders took possession of the tiny corpse and whisked it away for traditional treatment.

There were no sirens. There were no cameras, no reporters, and no markers trumpeting the cataclysmic event. The stinking, baking, remote dirt road went back to being a stinking, baking, remote dirt road. When I got on the microbus that would take me to the town, though, I was numb. I had asked my God for a sign and I felt that I had been given one. I had at the time seen it as a metaphysical event after which, psychologically, I would not be the same.

It took time for me to realize that every experience is to some degree a metaphysical event after which one will be forever changed, including the mundane experiences of being cut off in traffic and holding open a door for an invalid. Ten years after that numbing, soul crushing day I was back in that same village center. My own little girl was back in the house in the village “suburb” with her grandmother, aunts, and cousins. I was walking with my wife to buy a few things in the market. My wife was hailed by a cousin who was working on staging, plastering a building at the roadside. She exchanged a short laugh with him, acknowledging his cleverness in posing his request for a few coins. She tried to hand him a bill but it fell and was blown a short distance. Across the road there were some children who had gathered to watch us come into the village and who were calling to us, and may have been asking for a few coins too, I don’t recall now. I stooped over to pick up the bill to throw to my cousin-in-law and heard the sound of a car coming into the village too fast. Still bent over I looked up and just saw the blur of the young boy who had come running across the street to me, eclipsed by the moving taxi. The sound of the screeching tires and the sickening thump of the small body against the car were too close together. My wife stood shocked and I ran to the child, arriving just as his grandmother did. I looked him over. He was unconscious, but breathing. There was no significant swelling anywhere and there were no open wounds. I tried to look into his eyes to ascertain dilation, but it was instantly like a circus around us. I could not believe that people were trying to pull at the boy and jostle him around. The car started to rock. A crowd was pulling the driver out. I imagined a lynching about to occur. I put bass in my voice and spoke with force, telling the driver that he would have to drive the boy to the clinic because there was no other car. The people put him back in the car and the boy’s grandmother sat in the back. We put the boy lying flat along the bench seat in the back, with his head on his grandmother’s leg. A burly family member got in the front next to the driver, assuring that he was going to the clinic and nowhere else. I thrust a bill into the grandmother’s hand and told her to see to the child as best she could.

I was later to learn that the bill was large and that without this significant amount of money the child would not have received treatment at the clinic (I think it was about five dollars). The next day the entire family came to our house to express their thanks, and the following day the boy himself came to thank me. We sat him down and gave him cold water and a piece of candy, and I knew I was right to have stopped asking for signs. I had long since stopped asking and just started looking.

Flights

2006-02-23T10:52:00.000-08:00

When you travel a lot in the modern world you are bound to take a lot of trips on planes. Some plane trips are memorable because they are good, others are memorable because they are bad. Almost every plane trip is memorable for one reason or other, but there are only a handful that really stand out for me. Below you will find some very short comment on a few flights I think bear reciting. They are not in chronological order.

St. Petersburg

I went to Logan to get on a plane from Boston to Vancouver, and then on to Hong Kong. We got snowed out and I had to fight my way home in a blizzard only to get up four hours later and fight my way back in to the airport. So instead of taking the western route the whole way we got a flight from Boston to London and London to Hong Kong. The trip over the water wasn’t a good one, and the layover at Heathrow left some people grumpier than they should have been. Everybody was happy to get into business class and to try to get comfortable for the long journey before our engagement even started, and everyone was soon asleep over the Continent. A few hours into the flight I had to use the restroom and when I was getting back into my seat I was amazed to see St. Petersburg from the air at night. I asked the flight attendant where we were, and she told me it was St. Petersburg. I asked why it looked so big, and she said that we had to fly low under the cloud cover, and that we were only about eighteen thousand feet high. The city was arranged like an old tinker toy set, it was a set of circles interconnected by major and minor thoroughfares. It looked a little like a dazzling white crop circle. There seemed to be quite a bit of activity, too. The vehicles looked like toys and the bright, frosted scene could easily have been set up in a child’s play room. I knew for certain that if I were to descend and join the Russians on the street that night that the city I would experience would be far different from the one I perceived from so high up. I sighed and reveled a moment more in the comfort offered by the idyllic scene, and then tried to rest up for the oncoming bustle of the tropical metropolis.

Oilean Aleut

I have flown the Great Circle over Alaska on several occasions, and when you can see Alaska it is impressive. There was one trip in particular in which the Aleutian Islands were clearly visible. They jutted out of the sea in massive, frozen majesty. They were like enormous snow-capped colossi with angry white surf outlining their base circumferences. It is said that the ideal of every thing exists hidden in its observable manifestation, but for these island-mountains the manifestation was the ideal. Truly the bones of the earth. Capturing and internalizing the vision made my mind actually reel. I was deflated when we landed in Fairbanks (or was it Anchorage?) and I found it populated by mere mortals.

Seoul to Minneapolis

Some flights are memorable because of the traveling experience and circumstance. The first time I had flown first class was such a time. I had left Pusan first thing in the morning and had spent the greater part of the day in Seoul trying to get checked in and squared away for a very long flight back to Boston. There were problems with the baggage and there were problems with the aircraft itself. The American based airline was falling far short of its customer service goals that day. I was one of a long line of disgruntled customers having a difficult time staying awake and alert in order to make my travel happen when most of the work should have been done without gregarious haggling and customer oversight. Not many of us were having any luck maintaining our sunny dispositions. Then one of the workers from behind the Northwest desk came out and asked me if I would like to fly with Northwest instead. I said that I already had reservations, and that I was signed up in the frequent flyer program. He said that they would honor my ticket on the other airline and that they would match my frequent flyer miles as well. I didn’t believe him. He said that, no matter what else happened, that I could get a first class seat from Seoul to Minneapolis, the hub. I knew he had to honor that, because he would be the one to put me on the plane. I agreed, and waited to see what would happen from then on. The plane left three hours earlier than the other, and I got on and was shown to first class. The entire way to Minneapolis I was able to have my feet stretched out and I was given all the food and beer I wanted. It was like having a personal butler seeing to your comfort throughout your journey. It was the experience of a lifetime, among many others. I recommend it to anyone who has to travel for more than thirteen hours in the air. They did match my miles, and that got them my business over and across the Pacific many times, and the miles were used to bring one of my brothers to Hawaii to visit.

Boston to Shannon, the Second Time

The second time I flew from Boston to Shannon was when I was going over to Ireland for my junior year abroad. I was traveling with a friend of mine. We had lived together in Hadley and were going to live together in Ireland too. Because we were college kids and were going on the cheap we got an itinerary that included a very long layover in New York City. We landed in New York and took our time finding the Aer Lingus desk. We were lucky enough to be able to check in for a late afternoon flight in the morning. We were nervous about traveling internationally and found the gate and parked ourselves near it so there would be no chance of our missing the plane. The thing was, we parked ourselves at a bar near the gate, and the bar was running a special on Budweiser such that you could get a twenty-four ounce beer for three or four dollars. It was a great deal and we had the whole day to kill so we sat there drinking beer and conversing about all of the important things in the world. We had solved many of the world’s problems and were bout to get yet another round. I ran into the bathroom to let some beer out and came back to find my friend had gathered up our backpacks and all of our accoutrements and was eagerly awaiting my return like the hare at the starting line. They had been paging us for half an hour, holding the plane for us. We sprinted onto the jetway and into the plane under the disgusted glares of other passengers. It was obvious that we had been drinking beer for some time, and they were not amused. We snapped back to the reality that we were relocating our entire lives for an entire year to a new continent and we adopted appropriate tones of behavior. I’ve got to tell you, though, it amuses the hell out of me now.

Not-So-Great Circle

I don’t know all of the science behind the dynamics of pressure, tension, and lift. I know very little about most of the things that affect me in real life, so there is very little I can do about what happens to me in many cases. I often affect a fatalistic attitude as a result, and this attitude came to my aid on one flight over the Pacific. After I had left the Peace Corps but before I married I was blown around the world for a while, mostly between America and Asia. On one flight taking me back to Asia I had, surprisingly, drunk some beer as a sleep aid and it worked like a charm. Serendipitously I had fallen asleep on the half full flight with my seat belt still around my midsection. I had loosened the belt as I stretched further and further across the bench seat in the middle, because it was unoccupied. I was not nervous about my destination or arrival because I’d been there before and was looking forward to going back, so I was in full snooze when we hit the low pressure pocket. Here are some of the facts of the occurrence as I was to learn after the fact. Sometimes, apparently, there are pockets of low pressure in the atmosphere, but they do not occur until one reaches a certain altitude. In our case we reached the altitude of thirty-five thousand feet, cruising altitude, before we hit the pocket. In cases where a plane hits such a pocket two things can occur; first, the plane can drop like a stone without tilting until its momentum carries it through the pocket and back to the correct pressure for cruising according to the attitude of the aircraft such as it was, or second, it can fall and tilt until the pilot adjusts the attitude and increases speed to compensate for the corresponding loss of lift and continue on. Either way there is no great danger of the plane falling out of the sky, but also either way the occurrence is absolutely frightening for the passengers. We dropped like a rock and leveled off on the other side of the pocket. What actually happened inside the cabin was absolute bedlam for probably two seconds. Luckily, very luckily, I was asleep and still had the seatbelt on. Everything and everyone who was not nailed down bounced off the ceiling and then slammed onto the floor. Some old people suffered some broken bones and a flight attendant was injured by the falling drink cart; I guess it gets pretty heavy when it’s loaded down with stuff. Worse than the impact, I was told, was the actual weightlessness. I had previously written about the seeming eternity of the split second as my body traveled toward the mouth of an open well. In this instance I didn’t realize what was going on until after it was over, but it took a full two seconds. If you think that two seconds isn’t very long then count one-mississippi, two-mississippi when you’re going down the highway and then look back and see how far you have come in those tow seconds. One other American told me that he saw the face of God in those two seconds. I’m glad I missed as much of it as I did. Some senior citizens got broken bones and stuff, and there were ambulances waiting at Kimpo when we got there. And it was just dumb luck that I had my belt on. Since that day I have always kept my seat belt on when I am on the plane.

Dublin-Glasgow

I had written in the past about the trip around the Isle of Arran in Scotland. This is the tale of the trip over the North Sea from Dublin to Glasgow. The four of us mentioned in the previous story were packed into a prop driven plane. It was the first time any of us were on a plane so small. We were mainly very jocular and embroiled in the banter that accompanied the start of youthful journeys, except the young lady, who was exhausted from the trip so far. It was a short flight, but it was a bumpy one across the angry North Sea. In the front of the cabin there was a pilot from the airline who was not at work, but was being shuttled from one airport to the next. The young lady fell asleep lying across my knees. We approached the airport at Glasgow and began our descent, blown around by the wind more and more with each foot closer to the ground. We had dropped our bravado and had white knuckle grips on the arms of our seats. The plane came in for touchdown and literally flipped ninety degrees before touching down, but it happened so fast that it was over before you knew it. It went: SKY-GROUND-SKY-LAND. The three of us looked at each other as if we had just gone through the gates of hell together. The young lady woke up and began to come to, unaware of the close brush with the bug-and-windshield experience. The off duty pilot was the first out of his seat, going about business as usual and completely and totally unfazed. There was one nervy dude.

Accra-Amsterdam

When our daughter was about half a year old we went back to Africa to begin building our house in earnest. When it was time to say our goodbyes we got on a plane late at night. There was something wrong with the plane and they tried to fix it while we sat on the tarmac. The plane was overfilled with people heading back to Europe and the US with loads of stuff from home, and it looked like a lorry at the lorry park with wings. We were crammed in on top of each other, and any queuing skills acquired abroad were instantly forgotten in Africa. It was a brutal scrum to get on the plane and once we were on it we were very far from comfortable. Then the pilot tried to get the plane started and it kept conking out like my first car. We were stuck on the tarmac in the heat without hydration or relief of any sort. Our baby started to overheat and I thanked the Lord that my wife always provisions herself to be able to care for anyone in her charge under any circumstance. The baby had enough fluid to keep her going, and we wiped away her sweat and changed her diapers. The people on the flight got more and more raucous as we sat and sat and no information was forthcoming. Hours passed. The sun went down. Eventually a flight attendant came into the cabin and told us that there were so many problems with the mechanical systems that they would still be working on it for some time. I worried more that we would be flying over the ocean and the Alps in a plane that they couldn’t get started than I was about waiting. One was uncomfortable; one could be the end of my family. Finally they gave up trying and told us that we had to change planes very quickly. I don’t know why we had to do this quickly, I still can’t imagine why- perhaps we had to populate the next plane before it was claimed by squatters. We disembarked into the blinding light of morning; we had sat in that plane all night. We got into the next plane and after the hurried rush we had to resettle. There were people complaining so hard that other people had to quiet them before they upset everyone else. There were people getting quite vociferous about how detrimental it was to be deprived of water in the heat, and how we not only were not given food, but were not given the opportunity to deplane to find food. I was proud of my wife for not getting caught up in the complaining, and I was proud of my baby for being so good through it all. Once we were in the air the staff didn’t want to come back into the body of passengers because of the grief they were handed, and when an old man died somebody had to bang on the first class cabin door to get attention. By the time we landed in Holland our connecting flight to New York was long gone and our connection to Boston was a distant memory, and there was absolutely no assistance on the ground; in fact, there was not even a desk for the airline. It was an exercise in resourcefulness for me to get my infant daughter, completely dependent spouse, self, and all six of our huge bags all the way back home. Shortly thereafter the airline went out of business and has still not come back to life.

Fireflies

2006-02-02T06:34:00.000-08:00

While I was still in high school I went with a group of older friends to a Grateful Dead concert at Saratoga Springs Performing Arts Center. There were a lot of us, about a dozen I think, and we rented a large minivan to make the drive. We drove pretty much all day and into the night and finally arrived where we were going to camp. That ride was up until then the furthest I had been west. I thought the Buffalo area must be the Middle West because it was so flat and there were farms everywhere. Lake Ontario looked like the ocean to me.

We camped, and drank beer, and sat by the fire and eventually ended our long day by crashing out in the tents. The next morning we got up and prepared ourselves as best we could for the coming day. We piled back into the van and joined the long line of hippie traffic into Saratoga, and when we parked we joined the throngs of brightly colored, brightly lit people spinning in galactic arms around the vortex of the stage. We vied for a good vantage point to stake out our spot, and when we found one we put our backpacks and stuff in a central point on the ground and we hung out around the pile. People came and went throughout the duration of the show, jaunting off to get a better view or to share some of what they brought with someone new, and returned back to the central hang out. By the time the show was over and it was time to find the van we straggled back to it in twos and threes. When I got there a couple people had it opened already and were reclining and soaking in the atmosphere. I went to the open tailgate and was fetching a refreshment when suddenly I was accosted from behind. I was clutched heavily by a cold but sweating guy who was obviously in great distress, but who was doing me physical harm. I heard soothing words coming from inside the van, saying that the speaker understood the way the assailant felt, but it was unacceptable for him to have grabbed me like that and then, BAM! The guy went flying off me back into the parking lot and I stayed right where I was. George, a big football player who had accompanied us had launched himself out of the rear of the van and knocked the guy about ten feet, after explaining its necessity in dulcet tones. I didn’t feel bad that the guy got nailed back into the parking lot. He obviously didn’t feel at all bad about choking me.

The rest of our party dribbled back over the remainder of the afternoon, and that was fine, because there was no way we would get out of that parking lot before dark anyway. We hung around the van drinking our cold beverages and playing hacky sack and Frisbee when the space permitted. When we eventually took the final headcount and piled into the van, we all had a post-adventure, job well done feeling. It was easy to find the campground; all you had to do was follow the line of hippies right to the only place to crash out there in the country. Finding our camp site took a little longer.

Once we had singled out our clutch of blue and tan dome tents from the sea of other blue and tan dome tents we restarted the fire and went about cozying into our site for the night. I had run off to a convenient thicket to release some of the beverages and was called away by a voice in the dark. It was a good friend from our site who had happened to see me skittering by. He asked if I wanted to join him for a last relaxing smoke to round off the night, and I did. As we lit up we found a dry spot in the thicket and shouldered our way through. The noise, and campfires, and movement, and drumming were suddenly all behind us. What lay ahead was a pristine night meadow, quiet, serene, and populated by a cloud of blinking fireflies. It was spectacular.

Mark of Coincidence

2006-01-12T11:57:00.000-08:00

One evening, shortly after I had arrived in Hawaii and we had found our place in Kaneohe, my friend and I stopped at Aloha Tower to get a beer. We had been surfing, or rather he had been surfing and I had been bobbing around in the water like a champagne cork. Our heads were full of seawater and our skeleton-muscular systems were fairly exhausted. Aloha Tower has a pub there that brews its own beer; it’s one of the mainland franchises of Gordon-Biersch. It’s a bit upscale, but the beer is good and the scenery is fantastic- it’s at Waikiki overlooking the beach and Diamond Head.

My friend and I were catching up on time spent away in the interim since college. He had traveled and so had I. He was telling me what it was like to live and work on a farm in northern Europe and I was telling him what the Peace Corps was like. I was trying to describe the tribal markings the Akan people used, and he wasn’t understanding. I tried to think of a better way to describe it, and in my searching for words my eyes darted around the beer garden.

Strangely, at the next table I saw a black guy with an Ashanti tribal mark. He was in a group of guys all wearing the same kind of t-shirts and hats. They had obviously just gotten off work and were having a “pau hana” beer. I told my friend to look at the next table and he would see what I was talking about. He looked and then said that there was a black guy with a scar, true enough, but there are so few black people in the islands that it was virtually impossible that an Ashanti was sitting at the next table as we were discussing the ritual scarring. Told him that that was probably true, but there he was nonetheless.

My curiosity got the best of me and I had to go and ask him. I asked where he was from and he said that he was Hawaiian. Everybody at his table laughed, and he asked why I wanted to know. I told him that I was describing Ashanti tribal marks to my friend and that I saw that the mark he had was definitely the same as an Ashanti tribal mark. Odd that it would be on a black Hawaiian. He was flabbergasted that I knew the mark, and when we carried on the rest of the conversation in fluent Ashanti he was truly beyond belief.

Isle of Arran- Scotland

2006-01-10T15:42:00.000-08:00

From the island series...

There is an island off the west coast of Scotland called Arran. You can get there by taking the ferry from Greenock, it's not far from Port Glasgow. When I was a college kid almost twenty years ago now I went to that island with three friends, and we had a wild time.

There wasn't much wild to do on the Isle of Arran. We didn't stay out all night chatting up girls or dancing to flashy beat music. But the island was wild, the weather was wild, and anyone lucky enough to be caught out in it had better be wild too, or suffer.

There were a couple of tiny villages ringing the island on the one road. I remember Catacall and Pirnmill, but can't remember the other one or two. It was a miracle that we got out to the island at all. After living in Cork where the accent was very lilting I could barely understand the Scottish burr. It may sound odd, but that is completely true, I really couldn't understand everything the Scottish country people would say. Luckily, one of our friends' mother is Scottish, and he could understand everything all the time. It was as if they were speaking a different language and he understood it. I was amazed.

We took a choppy North Sea ferry from the mainland to the island and decided to have a look around. The landscape made a very stark impression. I can see it with my mind's eye, but I cannot at all describe it. It was beautiful the way a mournful uilean pipe solo is, unique and poignant. One had the feeling that all of the fertile, fecund, steaming places in the world could never undo the frosty, lonely rock on which you stood. On which you were priveleged to stand. This was the only time I had ever gone away for Spring Break, and I was instantly glad that I had come.

We tried to find the youth hostel that was in somebody's guidebook and learned that it was in a different village. We did more detective work and found out that there was a bus that would ring the island once a day if the driver felt like going. We strolled around while waiting for the bus. We ducked into a tiny shop for ham sandwiches and lucozade. We watched the see grow more and more angry as we boarded the bus that finally came.

We arrived in the village and found the hostel, but we couldn't all afford to stay there. In the dimming twilight the friend I was staying with in Ireland and I lit out to find a place to pitch our tent. We found what seemed to be a perfect spot. It was protected from the wind on three sides and had a deep bed of moss supporting the floor and easing the back. We went back to the others and stepped out for a pint. The ale was numbing. I could feel my bones being pulled inexorably toward the center of the earth through the wooden chairs next to the mumbling coal fire. Eventually we had to brave the cold and dark to find the tent again.

We fell into our sleeping bags and shivered off to sleep until, in the middle of the night, a torrential rain began to fall. We learned that the rock faces that protected us from the wind also channeled the rainwater into a waterfall as voluminous as an open spigot. That was why the moss had flourished there. We got out in the dark, cold rain and fumbled for the spikes until we found and dug them all up and could move the tent as a piece. We were soakded through by the time we crawled back into the sleeping bags, and we lay there silently shivering, neither of us asleep but both of us dead tired.

I got out of the tent at first light and walked to the headland. Clouds were partly obscuring the rising sun and some of the landscape was bathed in a new glow while some was being clawed back down into the gloom of night. There were short whitecaps all over the sea. Clouds were headed toward the island with columns of snow and rain streaming down to the ocean that looked like grey fabric hanging off of them. I went back to the tent to find it empty.

I started back toward the village where the hostel was. I found that the pub had opened to serve coffee and tea and all of my friends were in there wondering what happened to me. My camping friend and I tried to get as close to the fire as we could without falling in and we clutched the steaming mugs until the liquid inside was cold, trying to eke out every last calorie of heat. The well rested two wanted to try for the bus to explore the remainder of the island.

We waited outside for the bus to come and could see the storm clouds I told them about coming in. When they got close enough that we could easily see that it was snow, and not rain, two of them jumped into a phone booth that offered the only shelter. My camping friend and I just turned up our collars and bowed our heads against the North Sea squall. The wind blasted the heavy wet flakes into any exposed flesh and you could feel them hit, like tiny snowballs. The wind was so strong that you had to struggle against it to breathe. The frigid tempest made everything else go away, until you were only a bundle of neurons struggling to fire enough synapse off to keep up with the squall response, existing as a series of connected moments. It was pretty intense.

Finally the only bus came, but someone had left to find a restroom. Two people got on the bus, pointing out that if you didn't get on this one, there was no other behind it. I went to find the other, and the bus left. I finally did find her, and we had a great day exploring the island, and we did make it to the other side after all. She had come to see Ireland and Scotland, but she had also come to see me. When we found an old manor that had been converted into a B&B she took some of her vacation money saved up expressly for this purpose and got us a room for the night. The building was ancient and the decorating motif was antique. There were no other guests, so we had the run of the place. The old couple who were caretaking seemed to find us amusing, as we did they. They were our friends by the time we left.

I always wanted to go back to that very same place, but was windblown here and there. I would still go back if I could. I wonder if it's still the same.

Clondalkin to Cape Coast

2006-01-10T15:39:00.000-08:00

Another repeat...

There is a song by Johnny Clegg, a white South African, called “Jericho”. In the refrain of the song he sings that, “…we are the prisoners of the prisoners we have taken…” During a concert he explained the meaning of that line. The act of taking a prisoner makes you a jailer, regardless of what you would like to be. The interaction with the “other” elicits conditioned responses, limiting you to a certain set of behaviors. He said that without the consent of the bulk of the white populace in his country the power structure overcommitted itself to become a police state.
The idea is that the commission of certain acts or the pursuit of certain policies has consequences on a societal level as well as a personal level. Often trends in society have sociological repercussions that result in crises in individual lives; suicide, deviance, or one of the all too prevalent forms of madness. Nowhere are these personal tragedies more clearly tied to societal machinations than in the U.S.A.
When my family goes to Ghana we stop in the town of El Mina to revisit the spot where my wife and I honeymooned. Without exception I see African-American tourists in either El Mina or Cape Coast, and I often overhear them talking about “these people” in terms of what “these people” eat, how “these people” treat women, or the squalor in which “these people” seem content to live. Every time I see African-American tourists they are happy to tell anyone who will listen which creature comforts they miss and how good they will feel when they get back to Chicago, or New York, or Philadelphia, without fail. The locals call them “white men”, and the African-Americans may never find out.
The non African-American Americans that go to Ghana do not complain as much. They have gone to Africa to experience destitution and life where the masses live close to nature. They are in search of adventure, and that twinge of discomfort reminds them that they have found it; or they are in the service of their Lord and welcome the opportunity to prove their piety through worldly suffering. The African-Americans, though, are expecting to be welcomed home as brethren, and they are not. The experience of the Africans of the diaspora must be similar to the experience I had when I went to Ireland to live. European-Americans call it Third Generation Return Syndrome. The crux of the syndrome is that an ego creates its identity of self based on certain attributes that are not exclusive to the self but are rather based on attributes ascribed to a second tier group, or a group that has an identity affiliation with a parent group. When generalized others from the constituency of the parent group refuse to identify with the self as a co-possessor of the common attributes of the parent group, the subject ego is immediately thrown into a crisis of self identification, i.e., I am Irish-American because I possess strictly Irish traits, but when Irish (significant and) generalized others fail to validate my Irish traits they strip me of my adjective, rendering me American alone. This occurs with some regularity in expatriated communities and there is a recognizable structure to the responses for the ethnic group abroad. The African-American community, however, has been deprived not only of the glaringly obvious connections to the parent group, such as language, indigenous religion, and major cultural traits, but also of the nuanced connections that serve to solidify personal relationships. African-Americans have had to create an “African-American-ness” based solely on the experience of the diaspora. If African immigration were to have followed the pattern of European immigration then there would be Yoruba-Americans, Akan-Americans, and Sahelian-Americans.
The world will eventually reach a level of heterogeneity such that major population centers everywhere will present such a high level of integration that the term “diversity” will be used to express the gamut of major traits of individuals as persons, such as weight, personality preference, or rate of acceleration of development. Difficulties caused by peoples’ reactions to differences in skin color will diminish with an inversely proportional relationship to the level of integration and the frequency of interaction with groups identified as “others”. By then, though, I’ll be sitting on a tropical beach with a good book and a cold beer, secure in the propriety of my relationships and confident in the progress of racial relations; at least of the ones in my house.

Borders

2006-01-10T15:37:00.000-08:00

Also previously posted in Othering

I went north with two of my roommates and two German friends. One of my roommates was from Antrim, and we were to stay at his parents’ house over Easter. The rest of the long weekend we were staying in the empty dorms at QUB, where our host had gotten his undergraduate degree.

We drove north from Cork in a German car in a good mood, stopping to take photos of tourists’ points of interest and having lunch somewhere in the midlands. It took us the better part of the day to reach the border at Newry, and when we did, we saw it in all of its late eighties glory. There was a fortified roadblock manned by nervous looking kids who were younger than us. They had German shepherds and mirrors on long poles. They had very large assault rifles that they never put down. The kid with the thick Cockney accent approached the passenger side of the car, insisting that the window be rolled down, and assuming that the driver would be there because the steering wheel is on the other side of German cars, like American cars. Our friend Kieran from Antrim was in the front seat and rolled down the window and leaned back so the soldier could talk to the driver. The German driver was challenged with English, so we assumed the native northerner would do the talking. He never said a single word. The soldier got flustered talking over him and went around to the other side of the car. By this time his compatriots had taken the license number to run through the computer and had not found it listed, because the car was registered on the continent, not in the islands. This brought on the dogs and the mirrors. I felt bad for the kid because he couldn’t make himself understood and he didn’t know what to do with us. Then I realized that if he got too upset then we might have more problems than he did.

Eventually it was communicated that we were tourists from the south, and that we all originated in other countries. The native northerner just nodded when asked if we were all foreigners. They made note of it and let us through. Once we were through the checkpoint the driver had some very choice words for Kieran, mostly monosyllabic, but we got the gist that he was upset that assistance was not forthcoming. Kieran explained that it would have been more problematic if he had offered his assistance because they would have demanded his ID and seen his Catholic name and gotten it into their heads to keep them all for questioning until they sorted out what was going on. This guy was the most disingenuous, down to earth person who you knew could never ever, entertain the thought of deceiving anyone, but this act had come as naturally as laughing at a stupid joke to him- he was conditioned. That was our first impression of Northern Ireland; guns, dogs, tension, and conflict. For the rest of the weekend that impression was not to change.

As soon as we passed the checkpoint we could tell the country was different. It had a much bigger feel to it. There were bigger buildings, bigger houses, wider streets, working traffic lights, and the townships we passed through were better developed. The mailboxes were all red and the police wore different uniforms; the branding of the nation was distinctly different.

My memory here is imperfect, so please take the following glimpses of memory and impressions:

Helicopters: We got into the city and Kieran directed the driver through a maze of city streets precisely to the University where we would stay. Once we got into the city we could hear helicopters overhead. This was a sound we hadn’t heard for months on end in the south, because there were no helicopters in Cork, for ambulances or for reporting the traffic. The helicopters in Belfast were military helicopters that stayed low to the ground and patrolled constantly. The helicopters we had heard back home were completely different. Comparatively, the British Army helicopters were behemoths that made a terrible racket. The helicopters didn’t stop flying the whole time we were there. They made it hard to sleep.

Paisley: One day while traipsing around looking at things we saw a large gathering of people. They had gathered to hear the Reverend Ian Paisley speak. We got near enough to hear that we couldn’t understand his accent. Kieran understood him, but did not want to listen. He translated some bigotry for us and soon we were queasy from knowing that his audience believed his tripe. Kieran told us that Paisley was the safest man in Belfast because he cast his people in such a bad light for the international media. I got the idea that his people, like white South Africans or Israeli settlers, felt so secure in the rightness of their actions that they just didn’t care what anyone thought.

Police Station: There was a police station directly across from the University. It was a fortress. It had high walls and blast proof windows. There was concertina wire all around the top. The personnel going in and out were armed to the teeth, in stark juxtaposition to the gentle gardai we had seen down south, holding the leashes of attack dogs. The constant drone of the helicopters overhead completed the picture. The impression was one you could imagine from an old film about the Nazi occupation of Paris. Even I felt a psychological impact from the overt show of force. It was not left to the imagination that the “government” could perpetrate acts of violence against the population at any time.

Barfight: I saw the first barfight I had ever seen in a three story pub near the University. They had a traditional pub on the first floor, the second floor was like a disco, and the third floor had a live band. Kieran knew one of the guys in the band so we went to the top floor for a few beers and some relaxation. I got bored and went to the bogs, winding my way down the stairs to look in on the other two bars for the hell of it. While I was in the stairwell between the second and third floors (the Irish would say the ground floor and the first story) a squad of police in full body armor and face shields crowded the landing and burst into the disco level. They left one guy holding the door open, and no sooner had they entered than they were leaving, with two flushed and dishevelled young men restrained and being removed not under their own power. I looked out the window and saw the armoured car that awaited them, running and with the hatch open with an armoured rifleman standing guard. I learned that this was barfight between two individuals fighting over a woman (surprise, surprise), but that they were known to be from different camps. In my mind these police may not have been the good guys, but they were definitely professional and efficient. I returned to the third floor and raised a glass and toasted with the Irish, “Slainte,” and Kieran immediately said, “Cheers,” loud enough to be heard by anyone who had heard me. I found that I was not particularly good at being oppressed.

Attitude and Safety: By the end of our time in Belfast my American friend and I had been travelling for the better part of a week without the benefit of razors or Laundromats. We were both poor college kids who had been living in Ireland for some time. We had supplied ourselves with a lot of clothes that were appropriate to the weather by patronizing the second hand clothes stalls at the quays in Cork. Because of this we were dressed in the fashion of poor Irishmen. We are both ethnically Irish as well, so we looked very Irish. One day in the city we were away from the rest of the group and we were standing on a street corner where one of the many armored cars had stopped at a light. The top hatch gunner was riding at his post and had looked down on us and started to make the sheep noise, “Baa, baa, baa-aaa.” This is a common insult in Ireland; I don’t think I need to explain it. It struck me that he was insulting us because we were Irish, or rather, he thought we were Irish. He certainly wasn’t fooling around like you would with an old friend; he was trying to separate us from him, dehumanizing us so that us “Paddies” would be OK to shoot. After all, he had come all that way and done all that training. The light turned and the armored car sped away before we could assimilate what had happened and react. It was a good thing, too, because I’m sure one or the other of us would have done something rash. I hated him, and by extension everybody like him. In that minute I hated the police holed up in their fortress, I hated the military on the ground and in the air, and I hated all the people who looked like regular people but who were secretly hating me because of my name and my look. I was fully prepared to perpetuate the cycle of violence, because I was angry, and I didn’t even lose a family member or get wrongly incarcerated for any length of time. I had a much lower tolerance for it than I had encouraged northerners to have in prior political conversations.

Later, it may have even been that very same day, my friend and I were lost wandering aimlessly around the city. As it turns out, Belfast in ’88 wasn’t the best place for that. We wandered down a long lane that had nobody on it. The evening gloaming was coming on, and nobody was out. There were graffiti on the walls and trash in the gutters. We walked slowly, trying to get our bearings, but still looking like the world famous Irish poor. We came to the end of the side street and found light at the juncture of a larger, if not major, thoroughfare and turned to get our bearings again. In the shadows in a doorway there was a sniper crouching, and following us with his scope, his rifle trained on our backs or heads. We talked each other around the corner, and I was angry again.

We went to shop for comic books and browsed Kieran’s favorite comic shop for about an hour. Then next day, in the dorm at QUB, we saw the same wall we were leaning against on the TV news, covered with the blood of a bombing victim.

When we were in Kieran’s hometown, a village really, preparing for Easter mass, we were pretty far from any large city, but we were in the same area as Enniskillen, where a major bombing had taken place a year earlier. As we walked to church with all the other families dressed in their Easter best we were eyed by police and soldiers with rifles, assault weapons, and attack dogs. They were not there to protect us, they were there to protect themselves from us. The IRA bombing was wrong and bad, but being marched to church like a prisoner of war was also wrong.

Impact: When I returned south and spoke to my cousins about the trip they spoke to me as one would to a school child who is first discovering that the world is not fair, or to a junior high kid who was jilted at his first dance. They were life long veterans of the conflict, but in a much different way than the people in Belfast. They were tired of the Republican factions in the north trying to drag the whole country into a conflict that would surely extinguish its sovereignty. They wanted to move past the armed struggle and towards a lasting political solution, and all of their arguments were logical and well thought out, and sensible. But something I have not forgotten is the visceral reaction to the insults, the implied authority over life and death, the imposition of a false fealty to an obvious oppressor. I got the feeling that if I were raised there and had to choose between living like that or any other alternative, that I may have chosen any other alternative.

When I returned to the U.S. and tried to talk to the “Irish” in Massachusetts I got no condescension to my naïveté. They could not understand what I was talking about at all. They could not formulate informed arguments one way or the other. They had no context from which to frame their perspective. They knew generally that long ago the British had done bad things, but they didn’t know what the bad things were and they didn’t know about the bad things done by the Irish against the Irish. What I found most shocking was that most Irish-Americans didn’t realize the scope of the troubles. In Ireland we would hear about a killing in the north almost every night on RTE 1. Eventually I stopped talking about it. In the later years of my late brother’s life he became intensely interested in his Irish heritage, but by then my ardor for the social justice aspects of the originating culture had cooled.

What Bernie Taught Me

2006-01-10T15:36:00.000-08:00

This one was previously posted in Othering...

I have six older brothers, and when I became a teenager I thought it best to learn to fight. I took boxing lessons and started boxing at a gym not far from my house. My hometown is famous for boxing, so there are plenty of places to box, if you are of a mind to do so. I boxed through high school, and when it came time to go away to college I boxed there too. I could go on for pages and pages about boxing, but this story isn’t solely about boxing, it is about a cross cultural experience at the basest level. This cross cultural experience stuck with me and really gave me more of an education than I had expected to get at UCC.

When I went to University College, Cork, I joined the boxing club. It took me a while to get around to it, but I knew that I eventually would. I took the time to sightsee and to do the more traditional things that exchange students do, and when it was time to settle into a routine I found the boxing club. To tell the truth, I took long hiatuses from the boxing in order to travel around and to spend time with new friends, but boxing was a worthwhile thing to do, if only for the lesson I learned during one bout.

I had befriended and been befriended by the captain of the boxing team, a guy named Trevor Hayes, who was a concert pianist and a pre-med student. Why he wanted to jeopardize his hands by boxing I’ll never know. He kept cajoling me at first to join the club, and when I had joined, to spar with the fighters. Boxing is what boxing is all about, so I sparred with the other guys, trying to keep to the coach’s guideline that bouts are won by points, and that fighters should focus on scoring points, not knocking the opponent unconscious. That’s the way it was while sparring.

We sparred quite frequently, at the end of the club’s training sessions, and if someone did not want to participate then he was not required to participate. After only a few sessions I noticed something that I never said aloud, and never would. I was a better boxer than eighty percent of the fighters there.

The coaching and the facilities were not up to the same par as the club’s U.S. counterparts. The club coaches in Brockton and at UMass had a tremendous amount of experience and expertise both in the ring themselves (which is important) and as expert observers (which is more important). The Irish club didn’t have a weight room or any of the equipment specific to a boxing training regimen, such as medicine balls, weighted gloves, or duck-ropes. Back home, thirty percent of the training time was spent reviewing and dissecting techniques, doing reflex exercises, and working to undo habits. In Ireland we worked out with callisthenics and abdominal exercises, did some bag work, and sparred.

It is easy to tell who does and does not have a lot of experience in the ring. The thing that you look for is coverage. Someone who has frequently been in boxing matches knows that the fighter gets hit the most when he is throwing a punch. An experienced boxer will offer as little of his body unprotected as possible, will keep his head down but eyes up (covering his neck), clenches his teeth properly, forcefully exhales while delivering, and can sustain a hit and still deliver a combination on rhythm.

When I sparred with the Irish guys they couldn’t hit me as much as they wanted to, and when they did, it didn’t satisfy them as much because they would get my shoulders, upper arms, or gloves more often than they’d get their targets. I would be able to put gloves on their score zones when they didn’t think I could, because the average Irish boxer at UCC stopped throwing punches when they were getting hit. At first they were surprised, but then they complimented me on my abilities by saying that they wanted to see me beaten. Trevor and I worked up to a match to decide who the best boxer in the club was, but that is a story for another time.

The UCC boxing club had a meet with a club from an agricultural school from Kerry. We trained for it and shared our secrets with each other like warriors going into battle. I told each of the guys what I noticed about them, what their “tells” were, and they shared with me. There was some discussion as to whether or not I would participate, some saying that because I was not a regular student I shouldn’t be included. That was fine with me. No matter what the coach said, I knew this meet would be bloody. This was a rivalry between entities that would not interact again for a year. The opponents had no impetus to restrain themselves, and neither did we.

I was put on the slate and the opposing club had no complaints, so I was assigned an opponent by weight class. We were the third bout, so I had the opportunity to look him over. His name was Bernie, and Trevor knew him from previous meets. According to Trevor he was a big dumb country boy who thought he should fight because he was strong. That gave me something to think about. Bernie was about six inches shorter than me, but he outweighed me by at least twenty pounds, and he was not at all fat. He looked like a hurdler that someone dropped an anvil on from twenty stories up. A true fireplug. I knew how to use reach, agility, and foot and hand speed to rack up points, but I had a strange feeling going into this bout.

It is normal to fear physical pain and injury. Anyone who does not fear pain and injury has a form of psychosis, which can cause the person to die prematurely. Boxers, the ones I knew anyway, had healthy doses of fear and nerves before bouts, but never to the point of debilitating the fighter. Again, this is a function of experience. When a boxer is new to the sport he may be preoccupied with injury and pain. Eventually, though, one learns that injury and pain are inevitable, and that preoccupying oneself with them increases one’s chances of sustaining injuries and feeling pain. So a boxer’s anxiety dims and fear becomes a background sense, more of a heightened sense of awareness than abject terror. I saw Bernie from that perspective, but I also had a different feeling. He looked like he had something to prove. He was cocky and arrogant. He had obviously worked on his considerable strength, and there was no getting around the fact that he was short. I was not the underdog. The gossip that flies around a meet must have come to Bernie; I had overheard “Yank” in the conversational buzz.

We watched the first two three round bouts and cheered on our club-mates. By the time we were stepping into the ring we were one hundred percent in the moment. We met in the middle of the ring and he was trying to make a point of appearing ferocious and hard-eyed. He fought me and I boxed him. I landed my gloves on him over and over as he tried to get close to me. I had conditioned him to expect head shots as he tried to get in range to land his own combos. I would score points on him and by the time he got under my reach I slipped the corner and was back in open ring. It frustrated him mightily, and he became predictable. I used his predictability to land some body blows on him to try to get his arms down, but they didn’t come down. In the second round I was fairly tired and I tried to give him more of the same, but my fleetness afoot left me for a while, and when I tried to lull him into reacting predictably enough to try to take his wind away with body shots he made me pay, big time. He caught me with a hook that physically moved me back in the boxed off corner. All the air in my body expulsed from the force of the blow and snot hung from my nose. I was lucky to keep my mouthpiece in. I was stunned long enough for him to bull his body straight into mine, forcing me against the rope (where he wanted me). He was able to unleash a combination that made best use of his strength and unleashed all of his frustration. I covered up as best I could, which was fairly well because I was no novice at getting my ass kicked, but he hammered my arms and trunk with a force I hadn’t experienced since my first year of boxing. I started to get that suffocating and underwater feeling. I had to get out of there, so I let myself take a hit to the ribs in order to land a blow to his face. A blow to the face often serves to disorient an opponent long enough to make an escape. It did, and I made my escape to open ring. I couldn’t breathe as deeply as before, my feet were flatter. I was hurt and the cajoling teams outside the ring became a roaring din.

I hated not being the underdog. I hated being singled out as a foreigner, and I hated the fact that Bernie had so much support. More than anything I feared Bernie’s strength. He bulled right back to meet me in the center of the ring and I didn’t try to be cute with combinations landing lightly to earn points. I hit him in the head very hard, over and over again. He was at first surprised, thinking perhaps that I couldn’t hit that hard simply because I had theretofore chosen not to. He pursued with more dogged persistence, and I met him and let him under my reach in order to land punishing blows on his head. Soon enough he became muddled, and his decision making faculties began to be compromised. I dropped my guard and delivered blow after blow, and I must admit that I was unsettled. The bell rang.

Trevor and the guys in my corner congratulated me on a good round and Trevor told me that I had to keep fighting my fight. The other guys were telling me to keep doing what I was doing. It entertained them, but Trevor was right. I said that Bernie hit like a bull, and Trevor told me to stay out of his reach. The bell rang, and I went back in.

Bernie had regained his wits and was fighting smart and well, if not cleanly. He committed the fouls of charging, head butting, and rabbit punching in a clinch, but he was doing everything he could to get under my reach and land body shots. I took a couple serious blows and I had my wind taken away. I feared that I would suffer a broken rib or worse. Bernie scared me early in the round, and I decided the best way to deal with the threat was to eliminate it. I decided that I would knock him out. I mustered a rally of my internal resources and rained some head shots on him to cloud his eyes and stuff up his nose. He had his hands up and he was facing where I was standing a moment before, expecting that I was still there. I waited an eternal moment and he did what I knew he would- he dropped his hands and looked up, looking for me. I had a clear and open shot to deliver a haymaker if I wanted to, to give him the coup de grace, and God forgive me, I did. I hit him as hard as I have ever hit anyone, a punishing blow to the left side of his jaw. The sound and tactile sensation were unforgettable, and sickening. I was flabbergasted when he punched back at me. By rights he should’ve been dead. I couldn’t believe it.

He turned toward me and I started to count off combinations. Jab, jab, cross, jab, out. Jab, cross, hook, hook, jab, out. I gave up trying to score; I gave up body blows altogether. The coach from the other club was berating me and the coach of our club. What kind of a savage was I? Would I be wielding a tomahawk in there next? I put it out of my mind. I had to drop Bernie before he hurt me seriously. I know Bernie had the sympathy because my blows were landing on his face and head, but his blows were more devastating to me than mine were to him. Blood came out of his nose, blood came out of contusions inside his cheeks and lips, and each blow would fleck blood on me and clinches were his opportunity to clear his eyes and face by wiping his blood on me in big smearing swaths. I became disgusted with myself and laid back to wait out the round and he pummelled my solar plexus and lights flashed in my peripheral vision. He had indicated that he was not amenable to allowing the bout to end without further gore. I resumed hammering his head until he fell over.

He sort of staggered to the left and it seemed as if he simply forgot to put his other foot down to keep himself up. He wound up sitting and leaning on his outstretched arms with his head hanging. A long gooey line of deep red blood and snot hung from his face. There was a mixture of horror and relief. I had unleashed the atavistic, reptile core of myself in the fight or flight reflex and it had taken over, but at least it was done. The danger stopped. Until Bernie started back to his feet.

Some of the members of his club cheered him on, but others advised him to stay down. By the time he got up the referee took a while before he started the standing eight count. I was about to chalk it up to home field advantage because he was Irish and I was not when I rethought that this was our club’s gym and that I was a home member. I wasn’t allowed to approach him, but from my corner I also advised him to stay down. I think he took it as an insult, when in fact it was good advice to a man I now respected. He got to eight and asked Bernie if he wanted to keep fighting, and he said he did.

I didn’t wait for him to meet me in the center of the ring. I went to him and resumed my effort to put him away. I spared nothing and I knocked him down again. He got up again and I kept at it. Eventually the bell rang, ending the bout. We went to our corners to regain ourselves and to receive our admonishments and congratulations. The scores were added to the teams’ totals and we left the ring. There were a couple of bouts after ours, but ours was the talk of the meet. By the time we left, Bernie looked as if he had been thrown under a truck. His face had begun to swell and the cuts that you could see became visible wounds, not just seeping nicks. No one could easily see my injuries, but I think I got the worst of it. I definitely bruised a rib if not cracked a rib and I couldn’t leave the house the next day. I felt it for weeks.

What Bernie taught me was that I could turn myself into an animal. I didn’t like it, and I quit boxing after that.

Commute

2006-01-10T10:20:00.000-08:00

I’d like to take a minute (or ten) to share a commuting story. So many of us commute to work on buses and trains and in our own cars. For many of us the commute is the worst part of the day. My most harrowing memories of commuting are definitely the commutes into Boston from the southern suburbs. Route 24 between Brockton and the split is the most congested piece of highway in the country, I’ll bet, and the red line into the city from the Quincy or Braintree is its own kind of nightmare.

I have had some memorable commutes, like the ride into the city of Jeddah on the school’s commuter bus from the compound by the Red Sea. I never had to drive and it was only about twenty-five minutes. Often, though, the sun would be just squeezing out the crescent moon and the off-kilter constellations, and the driver would be bantering in Amharic with my blonde blue-eyed American friend. You could smell the baking unleavened bread through the open windows and in the shadows cars driven by women in abayats looked as if they were remote controlled.

From my grand hovel in Haeundae I had a short, brisk walk to the institute in the morning. Korea is called the Land of the Morning Calm for good reason. One gets the feeling that life in Korea on a typical day starts as it should. When I reached the tangent of the hill that rounded the corner to the institute I had a great view of the hill commanding the panoramic sweep of the beach below. There was always a moment or two to stand quietly and watch the street come to life.

In Ghana there was the walk from my house in Sukum up to the bustling center of Besoro to meet the workmen and find some sustenance before beginning whichever endeavor commanded our attention that day. I will always remember the bleary eyed children wrapped in cloth with chewing sticks protruding from their mouths, staring, stunned, as if someone had just clubbed them. I know they were battling their residual exhaustion in the same way I always did when I had to wake up for school as a child. In their case, though, the exhaustion was caused by improper sleeping quarters and pestilential insects. They were juxtaposed against the older people already in full motion before the world was entirely lit.

My most beautiful commute by far was the ride from Ano’i Rd in Kaneohe to Makawao St in Kailua. I had my own car, which was an 86 Sentra wagon, three speed. I loved that car, even though it picked the most inopportune moments to express its disdain for the world of men. I learned to shift and drink blistering hot coffee at the same time, while keeping my eyes on the road for as little time as possible so I could take in as much of the view as possible. I would leave the mountainside and catch the warm tropical breeze coming off the ocean as I passed some very quaint, country looking shops. There is (or was) a piece of Kaneohe that reminded me very much of northern Vermont, and I loved buzzing through there. I would have hated the fact that I was going to work, except that I knew the best of the ride was yet to come, and I loved my job too. Kaneohe Bay is picture postcard perfect for views. I have seen it on many postcards. When I was commuting it there was almost always a three masted sailing ship docked and waiting to carry its crew back into the days when Kamehameha ruled the island. The Bay is bounded by hills on both sides. The rising sun over that beautiful scene wraps you up in it. No matter how angry or frustrated or depressed you are, you could always count on being happy for that few minutes. Then you go through Kailua which has almost no traffic coming into it; all the cars are headed for the big city and the skyscrapers there. On that last stretch down Makawao St you can see the ocean at the end at Kailua Beach Park. The final part of the commute, and maybe the best part, in my opinion is right after the pledge of allegiance when everyone has his or her head bowed in silence contemplating the prayer. You could clearly hear the soothing respiration of the waves, shared in the company of those with whom you would spend the rest of the day.

Five

2006-01-06T13:07:00.000-08:00

I remember being five years old. It was a good many intervening years ago now, filled with plenty of sound and fury. I don’t think it is odd that I remember being five. What may be considered a bit odd is how vividly I remember the experience of being five, committing to being five, and promising myself that I would stay five.

I have six older brothers and three older sisters. My house was always busy while I was growing up- always. There were times when I would be able to get lost in the crowd and get away with not taking a bath for a night, or I would be included in a task that normally would not be given to a five year old, like ferrying tools to a sibling on a ladder. More than once I stayed under the radar and was able to breach my bedtime to watch important events on the news, or to keep watching pivotal games. This is how I come to remember footage of foot soldiers on patrol in Viet Nam.

The year my brother Joe went to first grade and I stayed home I had the entire house to myself. My mother may have been thinking that there was just one child left to send to school before she could begin the next phase of her own life. I was thinking how good it was to have my mother’s attention. I remember being able to say, “Ma” and having her answer. Not that she wouldn’t answer before, but you had to make your voice the one that was heard among all the others in order to get her attention.

I clearly remember leaning against the upright part of the boat trailer hitch piece in our driveway. We had a boat in our driveway most of my young life, and it was always a place to play, if not to sail. I remember thinking that the feeling of calm and contentment that I had day to day during the week was unfamiliar, but was nice. I knew that first grade would start for me the very next year, and that my life would change forever. I could not have put it in those words back then, but I did know it.

I clearly remember telling myself that I wanted to stay five forever, and I knew exactly why. I still know, because I keep reminding myself. I won’t try to put the reason into words, it was largely something that has to be experienced; and even then it is more a sense of being than a knowledge of knowing. Putting words around the experience will do it no justice and in fact may belittle it. But I knew it then, and I know it now, regardless of all of the sound and fury in between. I don’t expect that as the years run on I will forget my promise to myself to stay five forever.

My daughter is five. Sometimes my wife tells me that I talk to her like she is too grown up, like she is far more advanced than a five year old really is. I won’t do her the disservice of insulting her intelligence or underestimating her capacity. I know how aware and alive and engaged she really is, and I know how impressionable, and I know how wondrous. I know from experience that her five will go on forever, and I won’t rob her of the chance to gather up all of the good five that she can, or to arm herself against the coming sound and fury.

Well

2006-01-06T12:37:00.000-08:00

I almost fell down a well one day. It was the most frightening three quarters of a second of my life.

It was at an in-service training exercise for water and sanitation volunteers. We learned how to make hollow blocks to line wells. They would be very cost effective and function perfectly. The Peace Corps wanted us to introduce this technology to the masons in the rural communities. In order for us to learn it and be able to pass it on, we had to dig a well and do it experientially.

We had to travel all night to get to the Volta training site, pretty far from the Ashanti site I lived at. We got in really late, but still did some catching up with the other volunteers we hadn’t seen for many months. Morning came quite early.

The cultural tradition in Ewe land is not too terribly different from Akan land. Before starting a major project there has to be a prayer and a libation poured. In the very old days the libation was a ritual sacrifice, but now the drinking of the local moonshine replaced sacrifice.

We all stood in a circle around the beginning of the well the villagers had dug the day or two previously and listened to the fetish priest giving his blessing and rendition of the desired outcome. He talked and talked and talked, and the tropical sun rose in the sky like a marble flung out of a kid’s slingshot. By the time we were finished doing shots the temperature had risen into the nineties.

The digging began again in earnest. We hadn’t slept properly, hadn’t eaten, and had done shots of killer moonshine. Some went into the well and dug, some people had to stand on the two by fours slung across the well hole and lift out the water and rocky mud and pull it out using buckets tied onto long ropes. Some people used the red clay of the open courtyard to form templates for the concrete blocks that would line the well; others mixed the mortar for the blocks.

After some time everybody was starting to dehydrate and water was brought for refreshment. Ewe land is low, and there are marshes everywhere. The standing water that is too brackish to drink has no bacteria. The water that is not too salty to drink has been standing on the surface forever, and is essentially a science experiment waiting to be drunk to release its progeny into the closed system of the unlucky drinker. It is almost a form of torture being desperately thirsty and having water on hand that is just not potable. Some guys went back to do another shot of moonshine to quench their thirst. In case you don’t know, moonshine doesn’t work that way.

People had initially been intended to rotate tasks so as to experience each facet of the operation, but that process quickly deteriorated to people milling around doing whatever they felt like doing. Me and a couple other guys were doing the hard work because we knew it would not get done otherwise. I was standing on the planks over the twenty foot hole pulling up wet rocky mud. It was heavy and the bumping and sloshing of the buckets before me had covered the planks with wet clay. There are probably fair few of the reading audience who have ever walked on wet African clay, so you’ll have to take my word for it when I tell you how slippery it is: it is very slippery. The people who had dug before me did not want to go far before releasing their bucket loads of well bottom, so there was an amphitheater of slick mud built up around the hole, funneling any loose rocks or drunken onlookers right into the twenty foot drop.

Hunger, exhaustion, dehydration, alcohol, heat, all came together to hit me with a bolt of dizziness just as I was trying to crest the apex of the amphitheater to dump a bucket. One of my wafer thin flip flops slid down until I was on one knee holding the full bucket at shoulder height. My entire person, in tableau, began to slide down the hill of unbaked pottery and I kind of snapped to the realization that I was about to fall down a well. It only took a split second, but that split second was enough to leave a lifelong impression. I knew in that instant that there were no medical care facilities within a day’s travel. That’s the thing about getting hurt out in the middle of nowhere- you are at the mercy of God’s creation without benefit of human society. If I fell down that well it would be exactly as if I had fallen from the tree of forbidden fruit in Eden- Eden on the branch, purgatory after impact.

One of the Ewe villagers grabbed my t-shirt and had grabbed the person standing next to him. He knew what was happening. He had been pulled by my substantial weight into the slippery cone as well, but he knew that it would happen, so he had as an act of forethought held onto his neighbor. His neighbor had instinctively held onto the man next to him, and the man next to him instinctively pulled away and in so doing had fallen to the ground. His falling to the ground produced a force that was levered against the fulcrum of the apex of the crap-heap, pulling the whole line of us, and me, to the top. Once I was on the far side of the hill I nearly shat myself thinking of what almost happened.

I nearly shat myself just now, thinking about it again.

The Underside of Beauty

2006-01-06T11:23:00.000-08:00

I lived in Haeundae in Pusan. Haeundae is the Beverly Hills of Korea, especially around the beach. I was privileged enough to live in a single room attached to big house. I was slumming it in Beverly Hills. It is hard to be poor among opulence.

One of my opulently wealthy students took me and a friend out for drinks one night. It was after a Friday night class. We all met at the institute and walked to the strip along the beach. We went to a restaurant that had drinking salons upstairs. We had raw fish in the restaurant and then took one of the drinking salons for the evening. A drinking salon is a small private room that has no window and no view. There are guards at the top of the stairs and in the hallway to ensure that no one who is not a paying guest is allowed upstairs. Usually there is a karaoke machine and a hostess will bring in platters with bits of fruit impaled on toothpicks, roasted nuts, and dried squid or other “anju” or drinking snacks. Koreans do not drink without having food on the table. This is true even if the food never gets touched.

The drinking salons also come with the ubiquitous amenity of a young woman who “facilitates” the proceedings. She is not a master of ceremonies. She smiles and laughs and keeps pouring beer and sings along with whomever is at the karaoke machine. I was uncomfortable with the practice of having these women around, because in my mind either something untoward would become of them or in the best case they were objectified and made somehow less of people than they should be. All my American friends who went out with their students thought this practice was at best immoral. It is not in the American character to assume a pretty young woman should be assigned a station where she is a known quantity- no one ever asked these girls their opinion on politics or philosophy. In any case, I knew the people I was with were good people, and they wouldn’t do anything that would cause them to lose face; they knew how I felt about having comfort women around.

After a couple hours of drinking beer and gnawing squid and making a complete mockery of some very bad seventies and eighties tunes, we took our leave. The person who tendered the invitation pays the tab, and my friend and I waited on the top step while the bill was squared away. When we got to the street, the gazillionaire student offered to get me a cab back up the hill to my abode, but my friend and I had been scheming to turn the night out into a long night out, and I respectfully declined.

Out on the street we said our long goodbye, as custom dictated, and went our separate ways. Friday night on the strip was just getting underway. There were tents and kiosks of varying sizes set up around the street that followed the beach. There were mechanical bulls, electric punching bags, and sundry other carnival games set up in and among the noodle stalls and soju vendors. Our plan was to start at one end of the beach and work our way to the other, while eating, drinking, playing games, and killing time. When we got the hotel at the far end of the beach we would go into the Irish bar and drink Guinness and play darts.

To make a story about a very long night shorter, we accomplished all of our objectives. We poured ourselves out of the hotel’s Irish bar sometime before morning and began to trudge along the beach on the sand, shoes in hand, listening to the waves. We came across a clutch of college students who said they were still on the beach because they were simply too drunk to stand up and walk away. They had a small propane burner set up in the sand and they were warming their hands and bottles of soju on it. Two kids had guitars and they invited us to sit and belt out a tune with them. Because I was different, they asked me to play, and I honored them with a ragged version of an old American song they did not know. We all got up to leave when the tide came in on us.

We kept trudging along the beach, with the understanding that when we arrived at the jetty on the far side my friend would catch a cab home and I would continue on up the hill to the frozen postage stamp that was more of my cage than my home. But it didn’t work out that way. My friend pulled out a collapsible fishing rod from his inside suit coat pocket. He said he just wanted to take a couple of quick casts from the end of the jetty before going home. Who leaves work and goes out drinking all night with a fishing rod in their coat? We headed for the jetty.

There was a small shack set up in the nook of the leeward side of the jetty, and when we got close the occupant called to me to join him for a shot and to watch the sun rise. My friend kept looking down, picking his way from concrete jack to concrete jack. I went to greet the occupant of the shack.

I was pulled into the shack by the arm. It was a single small room made of used pieces of wood and bits of iron sheeting. There were three stools around a small table that had a game of goh set up on it. There was a small propane heater in the corner with sets of gloves hung on a rack in front of it. There was a very stout, short man with a very red face sitting on one of the stools contemplating his cards. At first glance it appeared as if his entire body was chapped, and the roundness of his girth was not flaccid weight. He looked like a judo guy who had been left in the weather too long.

I was pointed to the empty stool by the smaller grinning guy who had led me in. I took the seat and we started to communicate in a fumbling way, using both Korean and English. I kept wanting to get up and see where my friend was and I was urged to play out at least one hand of goh. The person who had extended the invitation got a short bottle of soju and pulled snacks out of unopened boxes of cargo. It was then that I noticed that half of the shack was filled with just stuff.

Eventually my friend called to me through the open door of the shack. I had finished a hand or two of goh, had drunk a toast, and had laughed with the Laurel and Hardy of the jetty. They were pretty cool guys, I thought. I went outside to see my friend standing well away from the shack calling to me. He was insistent that we leave right away, and said as little as possible to the others. I took my leave and stumbled off with my buddy.

My friend told me that those guys were gangsters, and that they were stationed there to skim off of the traffic in and out of Haeundae. It made sense to me after he explained it in a little detail. They were obviously there for a while, but they weren’t fishing and they weren’t working. They did have a lot of cargo just piled up. They even had raw fish that they had taken from fishermen.

I thought it odd that there would be such an operation right there in and among the trappings of wealth. As I slowly made my way back home, I noticed that the normal rhythm of the morning had begun and thought it odd that I had turned a Friday night into a bright Saturday morning.

Wake Up Dreaming

2006-01-05T13:17:00.000-08:00

I don’t think I can ever forget one night’s interrupted dreaming. I was bone tired and did not want to be burdened with any kind of thoughts. Anyone who has had his sleep interrupted but has not woken up can sympathize with my feelings. There has been a time since, as a graduate student in a very long night class after working an unusually long day, when I began to fall asleep in class. Dream overlay the wake-a-day world of the classroom, and superimposed on actual reality was the incoherent construct of my imperfectly functioning mind. This intrusion of the real world on my sleep was something like it.

I knew that I was in Ireland, at 6 Aldergrove, lying in my bed on my side of the room I shared with John. There were several things going on in my life at that time and in my dream state I was aware of them all. Uncourageously, I did not want to have my rest troubled by them. Though I had been truthful in dealing with the ending of one relationship and the beginning of another, there was some gray area in which I did not practice full disclosure, and it weighed heavily on my conscience. There was also a fight that I had coming up which had been built up in the boxing club to be a battle of behemoths, in which I was to fight one of my good friends. It was a cause of trepidation. There was a definite rift in the house between the Irish and the Americans, not only because we Americans were not afraid of a pint or two, but also because we were not nearly as conservative as the Irish in general; socially, politically, and religiously. Also, I, as most students do, had to pay very close attention to fiscal discipline. All these things came together to harass my mind and keep me from plummeting to the depths of my subconscious, where I could find the sustenance necessary to rejuvenate my mind.

I have seen sleep studies being conducted on public television where the subject has wires attached to his head and there is a monitor that graphs the amount of brainwave activity as an indicator of the level of consciousness of the subject. I am a complete layman when it comes to the science of attaching wires to someone’s head while they sleep, but the program was convincing enough for me to come away with the impression that a person’s level of consciousness rises and falls throughout the sleep cycle, and that the most nourishing sleep occurs at the deepest depths of one’s consciousness. As if magically, my level of subconscious consciousness rose, but I woke up without having woken all the way up.

I suddenly knew that I was back home in Eastern Massachusetts, safely and soundly lying in the bed that I was most comfortable in, free from the situational worries of my year abroad in Ireland. I knew that my closest friends were nearby and that we would meet at some time in the near future to raise a glass in celebration of our youth. I knew that my family, parents and siblings, were all close at hand to lend the succor and support I had come to rely on to frame my life as a whole. I was calmed, reassured, and happy that all of the burdens troubling my sleep had been removed. It was like the reward for having endured that time, and having successfully navigated the waters of murky ethics, conflict, and want. I was relieved, and heaved a deep and heavy sigh, and settled in to resume the sleep I so richly deserved.
This comfortable bliss lasted a very short time. There was a long, loud, persistent wailing that woke me up and would not let me sleep any longer. It woke me all the way up. I opened my eyes. The horizon was dusty dun colored baked mud with small humps marching away into the distance. The sky was a smear of scarlets and maroons with a grey gauze of high clouds dabbed in. I was lying on the roof of a roundhouse in a Sahelian compound amid drying millet cakes and the muezzin was calling the faithful to the sunrise prayer. On and on he bellowed into the morning, “Allah hu Akbar! Y’allah, salaat, salaat!” I sat up and pawed around for my Red Sox hat, knowing that nothing else that could happen that day could possibly be stranger than the day’s beginning.

Having extremely vivid dreams is one of mefloquine’s many known and documented side effects. I know that the mefloquine, the malaria prophylaxis I had taken the night before, had worked this side effect on me. Yet the three realities that I had experienced in such a short period of time were all as real to me as the reality that I am now experiencing. Since that day I have been half expecting to be involved in some mundane task like mowing the lawn or driving to work and suddenly wake up on another planet or deep in the jungle of Borneo or Brazil and to have a known recent history, complete with memories, waiting for me to pick it up and carry on like I did that day.

A Near Folly of Youth

2005-12-20T12:44:00.000-08:00

When I was doing my year abroad at UCC I was just twenty or twenty-one and I was becoming more confident in myself. Physically I was strong and I felt the vigor of youth. I was a very active member of the boxing club. To people who had not known me before, my actions, as well as prejudices about Americans, defined me. I had the opportunity to rewrite myself. I was far more outgoing with the college girls than I was in the States, and was shocked to find my familiarity reciprocated. I was more apt to take stances where I hadn’t in the past. I had more of the luxury of acting out of principle than ever, as well.

I had a pretty, young girlfriend with whom I was quite enamored. We both considered our relationship to be a dramatic event more than a comfortable and rewarding condition. I think everyone should have at least one such relationship in his or her life so at least a smile might cross their lips in the fleeting moments on the way to the grave. My girlfriend was not frail, but neither was she a vigorous Amazon; she lived in her head rather than in her body and was a skilled artist and an accomplished linguist, even at her young age. I valued her and cherished her, and I believe that her lack of physicality, among other things, evoked in me a protective, almost paternal, attitude.

One day we went for a pint with two of the guys I lived with, the American and the Northerner. We were all friends and we all got along famously, it was not at all out of the ordinary for all of us to while away an afternoon or evening. On this particular day we decided to go to a pub called the Loch. It was set on a pond a fair walk from our house. The pond had a swing set and a small park where families would bring their children to swing and to feed the ducks. Once in a while you could see a swan. It was a nice place. The pub was nice on the inside, but its draw was that there were tables outside, and on the nice, long summer nights you could take your pints by the “loch” and watch the fowl parade by. That is exactly what we were doing.

The four of us sat around a picnic table under a tree and discussed politics, literature, economics, and culture, and nursed our stouts so as to afford a full evening out. I was immersed in our accelerated conversation, engaged in the mental gymnastics of timing glib comments and dispatching ever worsening puns. There was quite a crowd ringing the loch, and the level of noise was high for the outdoors, but I had shut out all the rock-skipping children and impaired college kids. Our conversation met an expectant pause and the two guys said that they had to excuse themselves to the bogs. I also rose, as it was my turn to fetch the pints, and we left my girlfriend sitting outside alone.

Anyone who has been to an Irish beer garden on a summer Friday night could tell you that getting three pints of stout and a shandy is no easy task. It could be likened to trying to walk from one end of a Tokyo subway to the other, at rush hour, and then back while balancing a spinning plate on your chin. I was still insinuating myself into the crowd when I saw my girlfriend coming through the door carrying all of our coats. I caught her eye and beckoned her over, asking what was happening. She said that it had gotten a bit cold, and that she thought it might be nicer to come inside and sit by the fire for a while. She looked upset, and I asked her what had upset her. She told me that there were some boys at the next table saying some things, but that it was not worth making a fuss about. She told me to get the pints and to join her at a table that she indicated by pointing her chin, saying that it would be the best table in the place when darkness fell. I agreed and told her not to be upset, and she said that she wasn’t. I saw her walk to the table and meet our friends as they came out of the bathroom. There was a short discussion and they looked at me and I nodded. They all proceeded to the table and sat down.

As they all were in the process of settling in I took the opportunity of their distraction to slip back out the front door. I was young, as I said, and hadn’t yet completely figured out which offenses were worthy of true indignation. I walked to the table we had occupied and saw the group of young men to whom she had referred. There were six of them sitting at an adjacent table, all clearly in a heightened state of jocularity and camaraderie brought on by a powerful mix of alcohol and testosterone. They were cat-calling a couple of girls walking by as I approached.

They were at a picnic table, three on each side, and I approached from the foot of the table, if the head were pointed toward the loch. As I got nearer two of the guys pointed out my presence to the obvious ringleader, who sat at the head of the table. He took their comments and looked over at me, and in that split second that followed I learned something about myself that I would rather not have known.

There were six guys, three on each side, and I assumed that they were all right handed. If I were to fight them all I would have to take advantage of the fact that most of them were seated while I was standing. I could use my mobility to approach them on their weak side and use what martial arts I knew to incapacitate three. Then I could go over the table, assuming that the other three would have gone around it on either side, forcing them to come back around the table to confront me. This would afford me the opportunity to choose a side to advance on, and meet, and it would naturally be the side with one, rather than two, of the remaining combatants. That would buy me three seconds alone with the one before the two would factor into the melee. I felt that at that point the situation would have degraded to me facing two, standing, and that I could have taken any two of them in an even match. The thing that I would rather not have known about myself is that I was willing to do it. In order to take a man out of a fight completely you had to put him in so much pain or shock that he could not function, or to knock him completely unconscious. I knew doing that would involve eyes, throats, collar bones, and jaws, and I was unfazed. I had made the conscious decision to impair any or all of these guys, perhaps permanently, and to take any similar punishment they might be able to mete out against me. When I think back now on what drove me into that atavistic, reptilian corner of my brain I realize that it had very little to do with the girl and everything to do with my pride, and my assertion of my place in the tribe.

“Were you just out here with that girl?” he asked.
“You know I was,” I replied, “What did you say to her? Couldn’t you see she was with me?”
The ringleader was the only one speaking. He wasn’t particularly combative. He seemed confused.
“Did you come out here alone, to six men, because she was put off by what we said? My God, that’s fucking brilliant. Really, we didn’t say anything bad, just joking around a bit. If she was put off then we apologize, but you’ve got some nerve, I’ve got to tell you.”

I didn’t know what to do. I was tensed, on the balls of my feet and ready to pounce on these interlopers and to vent fury. And now it wasn’t necessary. The world came back into focus. I was completely disarmed and at a loss.
“As long as we understand each other,” I mumbled, and shuffled back into the pub, both relieved and disappointed at the same time.

As I came through the door I saw my girlfriend at the table by the fire with the Northerner. The look on her face as she saw me could be described as nothing but adulation, so ill-deserved and so misplaced. My American friend returned from looking for me and we rounded out the night. In retrospect, I am grateful for having had the opportunity to learn my lesson without having to deliver or receive a serious drubbing.

American Geisha

2005-12-15T11:36:00.000-08:00

I left the West Coast after camping on a glacier with an old friend, discussing my decision to fly back to Africa to marry. I got on a train in Eugene Oregon and started to let some of the agitation leech out of me. I had recently divested myself of everything I owned, gotten out of a job, left the house I had lived in, caught waves, climbed mountains, and talked about what I was doing and why. Finally, as I crept onto the train and put my entire life into the overhead bin I knew I would have three days of largely uninterrupted revelry and self-reflection. I already felt better rested as we laboriously climbed through the Cascades along the banks of the Columbia. By the time the conductor was regaling us with the story of the Donner party I had napped briefly and was ready for a hot smoke and a cold beer.

I made my way down to the observation car, which is the car on the Empire Builder that has glass walls and roof and seats that all face outward. You could smoke there, and on the ground level there was a booth, really, where you could buy cans of Bud from a cooler. I went right to the beer guy and got a beer and returned to the top to observe the U.S. rolling by. I fell into an empty seat and opened the beer, putting it into the arm of the seat. I took out a pack of smokes and went to light one when I was interrupted. A young woman was sitting in the next seat over, and was asking that I light her cigarette. She held it in her mouth and leaned over, under the dual assumptions that I would provide a light and light it for her, both of which I did.

She was a woman who I normally would have taken notice of before sitting next to her. She was young, had a beautiful face, and whose body was not just functionally fit, but had obviously been sculpted for maximum visual impact. Under other circumstances I may have been intimidated by her looks into sitting somewhere further away. Indeed, there were a fair few unattended young men in the observation car not sitting by her, and I think misplaced intimidation may have been in more than one mind. Since I had made the decision to return to Africa to marry, though, the presence of my yet-to-be wife was with me constantly. She inhabited the quiet place in my mind with the aspect of a wraith-like afterimage, keeping me sedate and preoccupied. I had no need of anything from this young woman, so I had nothing to fear either of her or from her.

She thanked me and I commented on the beauty of the view. We fell into conversation of our destinations and what brought us to where we had been. The transfer of information was intended to fill the silences and make our convergence on the same seats bearable, but as we learned more about each other our curiosities were further piqued. Before long we were engrossed in an active and meaningful conversation.

My side of the conversation consisted of revelations of facts you already know, and of points of view and timely comments on her utterances. I will spare you its recitation. What is of interest is what I learned about her and about her point of view. Here is what I found truly interesting.

She told me that she was traveling along the corridor of the northern rail line. She had to make frequent stops and hated to fly anyway. She was a dancer from New Jersey, but she traveled along the northern border of the US and Canada by choice. She said that she had always craved attention, since the time she was a young girl, and had excelled in dancing school. But because she needed attention and loved to make moving her body her occupation, she told me, “I had to take off my clothes- it was the next logical step and it was so natural that I never had an ethical ‘dilemma’.” I found this admission both fascinating and refreshing. I had gone through young adulthood thinking that exotic dancers were all somehow forced into the profession as an option of last resort, and that they were caught up in some sordid web of underground life. It didn’t occur to me that they may actually have normal lives and have chosen their occupation because it truly was, for them, the best fit.

I asked her about the clientele, if there times when she felt unsafe. She said that there were no times when she felt unsafe in this part of the world, but that she would not do what she did in her native New Jersey. She told me that the bachelor farmers of North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin were mostly good natured, well mannered, rough gentlemen. She said that they were lonely, and that their loneliness touched her. She explained how it made her feel as if she were doing some good in society and filling a deep need by providing not only succor and companionship, but also comfort to these men.

I laughed. It caught her attention and brought her out of her soul-plumbing groove. She leveled a curious and disdainful eye on me. I felt I had to explain. I told her that I was not laughing because what she was saying was amusing, but that I was laughing because I so easily recognized the correlation between what she was saying and what I had heard from a “comfort woman” in Korea. I paraphrased what the comfort woman had told me, which was that sex was not the object or the center of her industry, but that listening and understanding was central to the service provided. According to her, Asian (particularly Korean) comfort women filled the traditional role of women in the old society. They made men feel important, and led them away from their substantial day-to-day cares by engaging them in petty distractions that bordered on flirtation. With a broad repertoire of mimes and programmed reactions they could elicit emotions and responses from their clients. They perfected the “yin” to the male “yang”, and this was their product. If a man left her company feeling good and knowing that he would seek her out again then her interaction was successful. When she told me this, on that beach in Korea, I was assailed with the image of a T-lymphocyte forming the complementary shape to neutralize a jagged, threatening virus.

The dancer admitted that she was never a student of culture, but that she had always thought of herself as a student of psychology. She said that the Asian women had obviously given some thought to the whole thing, and asked what else I could tell her. I told her that they had been perfecting the role for hundreds of years and that she could learn more and stand on their shoulders by researching the geisha. She said that she would, and that she should be getting back to her first class sleeper car because the dining service would be serving her suite soon. She gave me her card and said that I should call her the very next time I was in the north but didn’t have a deadline or a strict itinerary. She offered to take me out for dinner and a show, which was kind. I thanked her and told her in truth that once I returned from Africa, if I returned, then my future was completely up in the air. We took our leave and I went back to my tiny seat, encroached upon by the rotund thighs of the drunken businessman next to me, and rooted through my backpack for peanut butter crackers and a boiled egg.

Thank God there were still two days to disentangle my thoughts.

The Egg Lady

2005-12-01T18:49:00.000-08:00

I was used to being an oddity by the time I became aware of the egg lady. I had been in Ghana for over a year and I had been at my site for about a year even. There were things that became a natural part of my day that theretofore had been stressors and that served to distract me from the normal observations I would make in the course of my life at that age. Before my interactions with the egg lady were over I was to learn to scrutinize my own perceptions of the apparent and the inferred. For that piece of self awareness I owe her so much; I won’t even try to get into the rest of it.

After my arrival at my site in the village of Besoro I was afforded the attention a rock star would get, but I had none of the benefits that went along with celebrity. I found that I was the sole representative of not only my country, but also of my race. I would be followed by children who would chant at me, asking for money and food, and who would scatter in fear if I were to turn my head. People of all ages gave me such attention. The elders told me how to live my life, every preacher made a play to have me attend his church. Women of my age were very forward with their curiosities.

For a long time I was so concerned with personal and professional matters of immediacy and urgency that I was constantly dealing with the moment, even though many of those moments were spent battling a cultural lethargy that I was not yet educated enough to understand. I chalked up some of what I considered then to be victories and got some committees formed and some concrete things built. I stayed busy in my personal life too.

When I finally had found the groove where my life was not a battle of convincing the community that they wanted my way or moment to moment spin control over my interpersonal relationships with authority figures and peers, I began to reap the rewards of the intercultural experience. I settled down to be myself and to live my life as a regular person, but a regular person in a West African village. The people got more accustomed to my being around and allowed me more leeway to live in normalcy. It was then that I noticed the egg lady.

I was in the center of the village for some reason or other. The village center was like the downtown. It was where the transport came and it was where stalls and kiosks were erected to carry out the commerce of the village, like the local Times Square. I was smoking a cigarette and leaning against the post of a building which needed my support more than I could count on its support. Across the street behind a small handmade school desk stood a young woman selling eggs.

She looked to be in her late teens or early twenties. Her comeliness and natural beauty were undeniable. I’m sure I had seen her before, but had not taken specific notice of her because she did not go out of her way to be noticed. She had an air of confidence about her, but not of arrogance. My initial impression was overwhelmed by what met the eye, but my subsequent surreptitious glances stoked further curiosity rather than sated it.

She caught me looking, and as I was rather more confident and less proper than I had been in the past, I winked at her. She was surprised by it I thought, because she laughed. She didn’t laugh coyly or coquettishly as if engaging in a flirtation, but she laughed like a child would when startled with a funny gesture or surprise face. That ingenuous laugh endeared her to me even more.

I took myself away as my piece of business required, but I noted to myself that I should get to know this girl. As was the local custom I sent my second man to make inquiries after her on my behalf. The initial feedback was positive. Apparently her concerns were whether or not I was encumbered with any relationships, what my intentions were with the inquiry, and to let me know that she would not engage in any meetings that were not at first properly chaperoned.

She came to my house and we spent an early evening cooking, discussing our different cultures, laughing in two languages, and laying the foundation for a friendship by clocking shared experience time. The twilight came, there was no electricity, and she took her leave. I walked her to the road. I wanted to kiss her, to touch her, but the opportunity was not presented, and I knew it was calculatedly not presented.

I went out of my way from then on to put myself in her line of sight during the day. As I went on with my business and she with hers, as we carried on our wake-a-day lives the coincidental incidents where we met and were made to interact became quite frequent. We would treat each other with mock aloofness then. Our interactions during the private time we made for each other were far less staged. She was learning about the world beyond the village through me and I was gaining more specific insights into the microcosm of not only Ashanti life, but also the life of the village too.

I can not say that I did not suffer from the same yearnings that all young men in my situation do. Prior to interacting with the egg lady I had not governed the conduct of my part in intercultural interrelationships by locally sociologically accepted rules. I did not press advances if there were no indication of reciprocal interest, but I had become accustomed to the reciprocal interest being present.

I could tell that this beautiful girl was interested in me. I knew she was interested in what I thought, how I felt, who influenced my life, how I would act in certain situations, whether or not I would let circumstances influence and compromise my ethics. She wasn’t interested in whether or not my eyes were actually cold because they were blue or how long it took to grow hair on your arms. As time went on she showed her interest by actually caring for my health and well being.

By the time the coming gloaming would not chase her back to her mother’s house we had built a solid relationship on the foundation of shared experience and mutual respect. She had ensured that our relationship was not marred by a premature acquiescence to the basest inclinations that lurk around relationships once they are known to be more than acquaintance. She was able to manipulate me as if she had known me all of my life. The first time I put my lips to her ear it was to whisper an inside joke in public, and the first time we were breathless in each other’s arms it was from laughter.

I can now admit that I had prejudged her, and that this was a terrible disservice. I had allowed my biological reaction to the text she portrayed to cloud my initial judgment of her capacities. I had allowed experience of others of her ethnicity to fill in blanks around what I perceived her behavior would be. I had allowed experience of others of her beauty to project character traits onto her. All mistaken, all wrong.

I think, all things being equal, that if our relationship were to have progressed at the predictable pace and evolutionary cycle of my previous relationships then we would have known each other as intimate acquaintances and would not have afforded ourselves the opportunity to explore who we truly were and could be to each other. I know that she did not premeditate the progression of our relationship and that her actions and activity was a derivative of who she was as a person.

Slowly, surely, I fell in love with her. I never had a chance.

Now, when I sit in traffic on a frigid night, or battling my way through the current of thronging, angry Boston commuters on the red line I find my mind wandering back to those sultry African nights when I had the undivided attention of a beautiful young woman who wanted to properly and meticulously fall in love. I am often overcome, overwhelmed, by the longing for those lost days, and my greater heart, from my solar plexus to my Adam’s apple becomes a vacuum of need for that beautiful young woman.

I suffer like that until I come through my front door and I am assailed by the savory smell of West African cooking and a different beautiful girl jumps into my arms with the cry of, “Daddy!” And the egg lady, all these years older, but still young and beautiful gives me her trademark smile; a smile that affects me the same way in our Boston suburb as it does in our house back in that village. It serves to remind me that home is truly where the heart is, and that I should find a job closer to home.

Asia, Bullfights, and a New America

2005-12-01T18:11:00.000-08:00

I remember coming home from Korea for good. It was a strange trip, as were many of the trips I took back then. I traveled a long distance in space in a short distance in time. The world around me changed rapidly and my ability to relate to it and to digest and react to the local environmental stimuli did not change as quickly. Luckily, I had experience and training in dealing with entering new cultures and situations. One might not think that returning to one’s native country would require training in dealing with new cultures, but it does. Expatriates often imagine that their home country stays the same while they are gone, and that everything will be the same when they return. This particular journey home served to punctuate how change is as constant and as consistent as the staccato rhythm of rocking train cars on steel rails.

I left Pusan and flew through Kimpo International Airport in Seoul straight to Los Angeles. I remember the approach to LAX very well. I don’t know why it sticks out in my mind. I had never been to LA by that time; I had flown through San Francisco on my way to Korea. I fully expected LA to look like any of the other big cities I had seen from the air. I had just come from Korea, which was at the time the most densely populated country in the world- even more densely populated than Japan. Everywhere in Korea the people congregated in tightly packed population centers in order to preserve the most arable land possible because arable land to the Koreans was a very important resource in the national defense. I thought I would see outlying farmland or unoccupied forest or mountain and then suburban housing and finally the eruption of skyscrapers and ribbons of highway that encircle big cities. Los Angeles was nothing like that. Los Angeles began far out of the center of the city and continued on forever and ever. The height of the buildings remained fairly low and there were no hills that broke up the endless grid of neighborhoods and businesses. In my mind LA was the reason the term “urban sprawl” was coined. It amazed me that people could live there and not go mad.

After shuffling through the velvet ropes and being herded through customs I was deposited outside on a curb at LAX. I don’t know why I was surprised to see palm trees and to feel the warmth of the Southern California air. It was then that I was introduced to LA’s world-famous smog. I waited for a while and was met by Lynne H, who I had worked with in Korea trying to find investors for American inventions, which is another story entirely. After a brief reunion greeting and introduction to a friend who had accompanied her on the trip to the airport I put my bag in the trunk of her large American car and we were on our way to her place in Indio.

Lynne’s friend was trying to draw stories out of her about her long and interesting career as a private investigator and Lynne was trying to get some stories out about the time when she was the first female matador in the Tijuana bullrings. She had planned for us to spend a long weekend in Tijuana to attend a bullfight. It was her intention to provide me an education in the sport, as we had long discussions in Korea about the value of blood sport in the modern era. We got stuck in traffic in Korea-town, a section of LA that is exclusively Korean like Chinatown is Chinese. The people on the street were all ethnic Korean, Korean was being spoken, and the signs were almost all in Korean, but the buildings were distinctly American and the cars were all American. I had not slept in a day and a half, and I had a few minutes of not knowing if I was in Korea or America. My eye was drawn to the Korean stimuli outside the window, but the temperature was definitely not Korean and I was attempting to feign interest in the conflicting conversations about tracking killers and killing bulls. It was a kind of confusing I had not experienced since mefloquine side effects in the Sahel. Eventually Lynne said that they would not bother me any further because I must be exhausted, and I apologetically agreed. The car started moving again and I dozed, waking up in the driveway of one of the dots on the endless grid I had seen from the sky.

Lynne lived with her husband in a middle class home in Indio. Lynne and her husband were in the process of getting a divorce, but were obviously still very good friends. They had been in the process of divorcing for some months and they were still living together. I found that very strange. I was at first a bit concerned that her husband would be uncomfortable with a single man staying under his roof as a guest of his wife’s- I was not completely comfortable with it. Her husband Dave turned out to be a great guy, though, with whom I hit it off immediately. Perhaps he knew the relationship between Lynne and me. I was a friend of Lynne’s boyfriend in Korea. He had introduced me to some business opportunities that never panned out, but I got to know them quite well while we waited for the business to fail. They were quite a bit older than me, so that made my platonic interaction with Lynn in the U.S. that much more believable.

Lynne and Dave set me up in the extra bedroom and insisted that I rest in order to refresh myself after the long journey. I told them that I wanted to try to stay awake as long as I could in order to normalize my schedule as quickly as possible. They insisted a bit more and then acquiesced. All four of us sat at the kitchen table and discussed the itinerary of the journey Lynne and I would take to Tijuana. We would spend two days touring Southern California from the house in Indio and then drive south to Mexico where we would stay in a nice hotel Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday night before returning to Indio Monday morning. I would then be put on a train in Santa Barbara for a three day journey back to Massachusetts.

I had never been in Southern California before. After I got out of the Peace Corps I took a trip to Northern California and Colorado with Noah, an old friend from home, but we never got further south than Davis. This was my first chance to soak up the atmosphere of what I had seen on TV and movie screens all my life. While Lynne and “Mrs. Dr. Carter” caught up in the living room I stood outside with Dave grilling steak and drinking a Corona. We talked about the potential for flash floods the same days that there was the potential for flash fires. He told me about treasure hunting with his metal detector and genuinely piqued my interest in it. We talked about differences in the culture of the West Coast and the East Coast. He told me about the nuanced differences between what he called “coastal Southern Californians and desert Southern Californians”. Over the next two days I had the opportunity to carry on different iterations of the same conversation with Dave. As Lynne was preparing me for my Mexican bullfighting education Dave was carrying on my education in Southern California culture. I enjoyed and appreciated his input and I endeavored to observe his lessons in action as I moved through the Southern California days.

Rancho Mirage, Palm Springs, Palm Desert, and Indio were all stops on my whirlwind tour of Southern California. I ate in some of the restaurants that the stars ate in. I attended a rally for South American immigration. I started my one day Spanish language course by shopping on the roadside and ordering at Carl’s Jr., a fast food place we don’t have on the East Coast. I tried to assimilate as much of the total experience as I could. One day we were driving on the highway through the southern part of the city, which as I said, is huge. Lynne’s old American car started to make a thump-thump-thumping noise and I hung my head out the window to see what it might be. One of her retreads had come off, unpeeled from the core of the tire, and was certain to pop, leaving only a tire husk on the side of the highway. I told her what it was and pointed to a gas station at the next exit. I insisted that we stop there so I could throw the spare tire on or get the tire changed. She slowed down as much as she could, but refused to stop. I did not at all understand why she wouldn’t stop. I again let her know, as we passed the exit, that the tire wouldn’t make it very far.
“What does the exit sign say?” she asked.
“Crenshaw Boulevard,” I replied.
“Uh-huh,” she said, by way of explanation. I didn’t get it.
“I don’t get it,” I said. She then explained that white people didn’t stop at Crenshaw Boulevard. Not for a flat tire, not for a raging fire under your hood, not if gremlins swarmed over your vehicle and pulled it apart bolt by bolt. It was not until after I returned to the East Coast that I learned that Crenshaw Boulevard was famous for its gang activity.

I had in the past wondered why one area could be “good” while an adjacent area could be “bad”. The attributes of the land and the resource endowments were the same, what made the difference between a good place and a bad place? I first thought of this regarding Campello, my neighborhood in Brockton, as opposed to West Bridgewater, which is a nice little town on the other side of a political boundary- an imaginary line. I still don’t have an answer, but in Southern California it was much easier to make the distinction. A bad area was brown and a good area was green. This is because the wealthier people can afford water to support their landscape. Indio was mostly brown, but Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage were green. They also had mostly gated communities, in which the people who were keeping the land green were brown. The difference between good and bad areas divided by an imaginary line was about to be completely driven home by the differences across the line that separated San Diego from Tijuana.

The day that we left for Mexico we woke up early and had to lay in provisions for the drive. According to Lynne, no one should go into the desert without extra water, adjustable size belts, and at least one spare tire. She said that people died when their cars gave out in the desert, because of the elements on the U.S. side and because of the elements and the bandits on the Mexican side. I said I found that difficult to believe in the modern era, but she assured me that her tenure as a CHP had proven it. When we were properly provisioned we lit out for the border. I asked if she wanted me to drive for a while, and she said that since I had not driven in so long that it would not be a good idea for me to get behind the wheel on that particular stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway. It was not long into the trip that I realized that she probably was right, but I still wished I was behind the wheel so I could hit the brake at my discretion. She still drove like a CHP, and going over the mountains there were sheer drops of what seemed like thousands of feet. I was in the passenger side so I could easily see the guardrail less than an inch from the door and beyond it the smiling face of St. Peter following his index finger down the list searching the “F”s. When I wasn’t completely terrified I was in awe of the stark beauty of the mountainous desert. There were some similarities to the Sahel that I could see, and in retrospect I can picture some similarities to the edge of the Saudi desert. I knew then as I sat in the passenger seat that there was a magnificent experience to be had out there in the desert, but that I couldn’t ever get an appreciation for it from the seat of a Lincoln.

Thankfully, we stopped at a roadside restaurant and I was able to gather my wits. It was an old working ranch that had been turned into a sort of an attraction. There was ground water there, so originally it was a Pima Indian settlement. The settlement then became the site of a Spanish Catholic mission, and the mission church had been turned into a museum. We went through the museum and it was there that I learned that the Pima had made bread from ground acorns from the many oak trees that grew in the area. My nephew John has some Pima blood, so I took note of all that I could. It was interesting. I had the opportunity to get a buffalo burger in the restaurant. I had never tried buffalo meat, so I got one. I found that it was leaner than beef but less flavorful. If I had to live off the land on the plains I could easily get used to buffalo. The burger was enormous, but I ate the whole thing so I could say that I didn’t waste any part of the buffalo.

We continued on until we could see the ocean, and it too was a rewardingly beautiful sight. The highway ran alongside San Diego for a long while, and to my eye, from the front seat of a car, San Diego looked like a very nice city. If we weren’t trying to check in before nightfall we would have stopped to see Chicano park. Close to the border we saw those highway signs that seem so surreal, the ones with silhouettes of nuclear families in running poses. The signs that make motorists aware that families of illegals may be sprinting across the highway. I couldn’t believe they were real- I still can’t. As we approached the border traffic became stop and go, and we inched toward Mexico.

The border between Mexico and the United States was not at all how I had imagined it. I took a long look at it from afar as we approached and I realized that our southern border is much more porous than I, and I expect many other New Englanders, ever imagined. There were streams of cars on either side of glorified tollbooths and chain link fence. There were stairs leading over the fence funneling foot traffic to the customs checks. It reminded me of the border with Canada, which I had seen several times, but the Mexican border was much browner, hotter, and more sinister. For us blue eyed Caucasians with American passports I thought crossing would be much easier than it would be for Mexican-looking people. I was wrong. Crossing from the United States to Mexico was easy for anyone at all. The U.S. was not trying to keep anyone in and Mexico was not trying to keep anyone out. From the U.S. side of the border the crossing was the inconvenient wait of a traffic jam. On the Mexican side it was an open air bazaar not terribly unlike some of the busier markets I had perused in Africa. In fact, the surroundings and the weather made me think of Bolgatanga. The big difference was that in Africa I could communicate. In TJ I was just another gringo who no hablo Espanol.

We drove through the outskirts of the city and in toward the center, to the hotel near the bullring. There was the first and only time thus far that I have experienced the third world in America. Clearly the people were poverty stricken and clearly they were battling for subsistence on the edge of a bustling city. I saw shacks thrown together out of whatever material was available with naked and barefoot children darting in and out of outdoor cooking fires. In my mind I was reliving visits to squalid villages, but this time there were big American cars parked here and there, and some of the building material was obviously the sheet metal of defunct appliances. In Africa the destitution is set against the background of forested nature, and one does not get the feeling that the people are destitute as much as one gets the feeling that they are only lacking cargo. The people there laugh and smile and fight and drink and love, but they do all those things without the trappings of manufactured stuff all around them. In Tijuana the destitution was clearly juxtaposed against a well developed city, and though I do not know how it affected the occupants of those shanties it saddened me that much more. The sociologist Max Weber wrote that one cannot miss what one has never known, and postulated that those in close proximity to great wealth will feel poverty stricken, even if they can subsist handily. As we drove out of the shanties and into the manicured, palm-lined streets I guessed that he might be right.

We arrived at a hotel whose name now escapes me but was clearly one of the better hotels in the city. It was located close to the bullring and the streets around it were well kept and clean, and so were the people on those streets. The hotel was set up like an old Roman villa, with a large swimming pool in the center and two tiers of large rooms around it in a horseshoe shape. The front of the hotel took up the last side of the pool with the reception area facing the street and a restaurant half in and half out of the covered building, so patrons could either eat in the building or poolside. Upstairs over the restaurant was the nightclub, and there was a swim-up bar inside the pool. We each paid about thirty dollars per night for our large poolside rooms. Each room had twin beds, bathroom and shower, and free HBO. It was a great bargain, and I’d go back in a heartbeat if I had the chance.

We checked in at the hotel and then went out to get something to eat and to meet some of the people to whom Lynne wanted to introduce me. It turned out that the hotel was where the important people in the bullfighting world came to stay during the Tijuana season. The shops and restaurants around the area were the places where one could expect to rub elbows with the bullfighting elite. Lynne really was the first female matador in Tijuana, regardless of how much I wanted to disbelieve her. When we strolled out into the heat of the dusty late afternoon we were met by one after another of well groomed, well heeled, slick middle aged aficionados who stopped Lynne to greet her and schedule some of her time for later conversation. We met critics who wrote for the newspapers in Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Madrid. We met ranchers who were famous for producing the finest bulls in the Americas; the ranchers were celebrities in their own rights. We met picadors and rodeo clowns. We met judges. We met every kind of bullfighting dignitary there is, and they all knew Lynne. I was beginning to think that there was no bullshit in the stories I had heard as we sat by the Pacific with Korean beers eating crunching, wriggling, live things from the sea. At those times in Korea I had the local vocabulary and I knew the powerful people. In this instance, in Tijuana, I was very definitely in Lynne’s world.

Lynne suggested the place to go and when we got there she surreptitiously tipped the maitre d’ to get us seated ahead of the line. She ordered in Spanish and it was there that I was introduced to real Mexican food. I had eaten faux Mexican food at Mexican places in Massachusetts, and it was always good, but I knew in my heart of hearts that it was not authentic. The authentic Mexican food was far more nutritious and delicious than I had had before. The patron spices his or her own food with peppers in Mexico, so the food can be spiced to taste. The Mexican beer was good too. I tried a Tecate because it was so much cheaper than Corona or Dos Equis, and found that I liked it better than Corona but not as well as Dos Equis. Mariachis wandered among the tables serenading people for small donations. I was unused to the local currency and did not know what was considered acceptable as a tip or payment, so I deferred to Lynne’s suggestions of how liberal to be with the pesos. We finished a good meal and made our way back to the hotel to turn in for the night in order to be well refreshed for the full day the next day.

Later that night I was as surprised to see Lynne in the hotel bar as she was to see me. She had assumed that I was still experiencing jetlag, which I was, and that I wouldn’t want to be out after dark, which I did. Lynne was ensconced at a table with some of the bullfighting dignitaries that we had seen on our walk earlier. There were introductions all around again and I got to use my new Spanish phrase, “mucho gusto” until it came as naturally as the Korean it was edging out of my head. I made polite conversation with everyone and was able to communicate so well through clearly spoken English and Spanish and through patient translators that I was warmly received by the who’s who of the bullfighting world. I was invited to tour the bullring the next day and to attend the viewing of the bulls, which is an honor not afforded to any “nuevo aficionado”. I graciously accepted and must admit that I felt quite a bit like Ernest Hemingway.

Lynne asked me to accompany her to the bar to carry drinks even though there was a waiter shuffling drinks to and from the bar. I went. She took the opportunity to apprise me that one of the older gentlemen, a critic from an interior newspaper, was projecting his attentions on her rather forcefully, and that she had told him that we were there as a couple in order to distance him. I had to bite back a laugh because the old codger was well into his seventies to the eye, and Lynne was as much older than me as he was of her. I somberly agreed to bear this in mind as the night progressed and could barely keep from writing a situation comedy on the premise. Sometimes life is funnier than fiction. I have told a couple of people this story as a funny anecdote and they seem to think that this was Lynne’s way of intimating that we should spend the remainder of the weekend as more than traveling companions, and seeing the story in print the telling of it does lead one to believe that. However, I never got the feeling that that was her intention and I was usually rather attuned to such insinuations. I think to properly appreciate it you had to have seen the old critic. Thinking about it still makes me smile. Ha!

Not long after returning with the drinks Lynne took her leave while I was still at the table, making it difficult for the old codger to follow. It was cannily done. I assumed that the folks would take their leave as the night grew long, but apparently no one was going to make the first move. Eventually midnight rolled around and they were all still in attendance. I had drained enough Tecate bottles to render the language chasm a moot issue and was having a good time learning about Mexico, bullfighting, and the individual’s lives. I found out that the slick, handsome, young men on the dance floor who comported themselves like astronauts were actually matadors. The toreros had a fast and loose reputation and were living up to it on this particular night. The dance floor filled up with pretty young girls who acted as satellites dancing around the mainly stationary matadors. The poor slick matadors were terribly outnumbered, but were holding their own famously. As my beery eye lingered on one or the other young girl too long they called me out to the dance floor in English and Spanish, gesturing with their hands and their eyes. I remembered my acquiescence to Lynne’s charade ruefully- the old goat was still at the table! I finished the last beer I had and also took my leave, bested by the gray haired Mexican teenagers. I was later to learn that in Mexico it is not uncommon for people to start their night at ten and only go to bed when the sun comes up.

The sun came through the window’s louver and detonated my head far too early the next morning. I had slept until almost 11:00, but that was OK, because everyone else had too. I rolled out of bed and showered and brushed my teeth. I sat in the hotel’s restaurant and drank some very good strong coffee and had authentic huevos rancheros. My tongue found it excellent, but my stomach thought it a bit heavy. I finished it and took a swim in the pool while waiting for Lynne to come out of her room. I swum up and ordered a Bloody Mary as hair of the dog that bit me. It was all very decadent, but refreshingly so. I was wishing for a Korean mok yok tang and some hae zhang kuk to chase the hangover away. I sat watching the aching and weary Mexicans and gringos emerging from their rooms and felt a twinge of homesickness for the comfort and familiarity of Pusan. I was still dreaming in Korea. The heat and the music reminded me that I was no longer there.

Lynne came in from the street side of the pool. She went to bed so early the night before that she woke up bright and early and went out souvenir shopping. She told me that we would tour the bullring early that afternoon, so I should make my preparations. I let myself float around lazily for a little while longer and then got out and got ready to go. The tour of the bullring was one of the best takes I can remember.

I can remember quite clearly the ride to the bullring on that Saturday afternoon. Lynne didn’t want to drive if she didn’t have to, and I got to experience my first Tijuana taxi ride. The brine of the experience was not the speed of the vehicle or the meandering through the tangle of streets, but rather it was the haggling with the driver over the price of the ride prior to getting into the taxi and then haggling over the price again when we arrived at the destination. There was a meter, but the driver insisted that it did not work. Lynne’s Spanish was impeccable, but the driver pretended not to understand either English or her Spanish. I was tempted to begin haggling in Korean or Ashanti, but I knew that would not get us a better price. Throughout the ride I hung on for dear life and kept my eyes glued on the cityscape zooming by. Lynne commented that I was like a typical first time gringo turista with my neck swiveling around to take it all in. She may not have known, but I was more interested in how many Americans I could see than in the local hawkers or the urban poverty. It crossed my mind that the lure of life in the charming slow lane might attract quite a few American expatriates, and I wondered if there were a significant amount of Americans who made their homes in Mexico or if the Mexican lifestyle exerted cultural force on Southern California or Texas and slowed the pace of life in the abutting areas of those states.

We arrived at the bullring and Lynne paid with dollars while I fumbled with dollars, pesos, and Korean won. I told her I’d pay on the way back and asked if there were anywhere I could change Korean money. By way of answer she only laughed.

We were met by some of the crowd from the previous night. The facility was closed to the public and our tour would be a unique, uninhibited experience. The critics were very nice to me and walked me around the facility. There were people in various stages of preparation and as we approached each was happy to be interrupted in his work and describe what it was he was doing. Many of the hands working directly with the horses and the bulls appeared very gruff. They were hard working men who were short in their answers and obsequious to no one. Although I could not understand their speech I knew their responses were terse and utilitarian. They had a large metal tub in the stable filled with ice and cans of Tecate, which they held and disposed of nonchalantly. They didn’t care at all that they were working or that people were watching. They reminded me of construction workers in New England, and though we couldn’t really talk, I liked them anyway.

We met picadors and matadors walking the ring in teams. I didn’t realize that the picadors and matadors colluded so closely in formulating their strategies to conquer the bulls. The actual bull fighters were deferent to the critics, and it was clear that they were interested in influencing their press at any opportunity. I could tell that they were trying to advance their careers just like so many businessmen at cocktail parties, trying to leave powerful people with positive impressions about them. I thought that they may have overdone it a bit, in light of the fact that the world would be able to see how skilled they were or were not at their craft the very next day in the center of the ring.

All the while we were meeting and talking the critic from Los Angeles was progressing my education about the sport as a whole and about the constituent parts as we encountered them. I think she most appreciated my lack of understanding of the sport and could sense how interested I really was. I would be doing the sport a terrible wrong if I attempted to paraphrase the lessons of that day, so I will not. I was not so surprised to learn that there were matadors who were more European than Indian, even though they were all Mestizos. The whiter matadors played to their whiter, more affluent crowds who could afford seats in the shaded area of the arena, the “sombra”, while the darker matadors played to their proletariat supporters in the sun-struck, or “sol” part of the arena. The critic made me promise to take note of the placement of the bulls the next day as the two matadors worked their charges. I said I would, and I did, and she was right.

I was brought to meet the rancher who provided the bulls. I had sat next to him the night before and we had some exchanges that began as probing questions and probable answers intimated through gestures and long shot vocabulary. Toward the end of my night I had begun to substitute some high school French for Spanish, thinking it might be understood. Surprisingly, some of it was. On more than one occasion during our exchanges we were quite obviously following separate lines of inquiry and response, and building on our erroneous one-sided conversations. For example, he would say something that I would interpret to be a question about life in Korea, and I would do my best to be understood in my response. He would gesticulate and lean in to be heard over the music and then nod knowingly, and I would assume he had built on my response or asked a follow-up question. When eventually, incontrovertibly, we knew that we were on different wavelengths we broke down into the kind of laughter that is self perpetuating; the kind of laughter that precludes all propriety and is so conspicuous as to draw stares from adjacent tables. Because we were unable to communicate verbally we connected on a level more rudimentary than cerebral, and we had a good time. I learned from the Los Angeles critic that he was fabulously wealthy (he was very well turned out) and that he paid for our night of revelry.

He was happy to see me and we laughed at our shared gestures indicating aching heads in the morning. I gave him Korean cigarettes; he gave me a Cuban cigar. He took care to explain about the bloodlines of the bulls he raised and how they stretched across the globe. The critic translated quite clearly and took care to verify that I understood. By the time our brief conversation was over I had a much deeper appreciation of the importance of the breeding and ranching of the bulls to the sport itself. The ranchers were as important to the sport as the matadors. I also had an invitation to the ranch, where apparently I could stay as long as I wanted in perfect comfort. As I asked the critic to translate my inability to accept his hospitality she intimated that this was perhaps an opportunity I should not pass up. I promised to think about it and reply by Sunday night.

The critic took her leave to rub elbows with movers and shakers, as the tour was at its end, and I thanked her profusely. I shook hands with the toreros and bad them be careful in their conflicts the next day. I wandered into the holding pens again to internalize the fear I had of these massive animals. Casually I pulled a Tecate out of the tub and cracked it. The hands gave me a cursory glance and left me to my own devices.

As it stood I didn’t have to pay for the taxi back to the hotel. We caught a ride with some of the out of town bullfighting dignitaries. Lynne and I agreed to relax for a while and reconvene for a late lunch or early dinner and some sightseeing and souvenir shopping. I went back to my room to bathe and relax. I then went to the front desk and changed some dollars for pesos, only to find out later that I never needed to. I drank some tea and took a quick siesta and woke to a knock on my door.

Lynne took me to a part of the city that had open air cafes with overhead misting tubes like there were in Palm Springs. She said that this part of town was where we would find the most developed amenities. I told her that it was very nice, but that I wanted to see something a bit less cosmopolitan, that I wanted to take in a bit of the local color. She understood and asked what, particularly, I had in mind. I asked her to take me to a place she used to frequent when she was living there fighting bulls. She laughed and said that all of those places were gone, thankfully, and that she outgrew them for her own safety. We went to a place I’ll never forget, though I’ll never remember where it is. We took a cab to somewhere close to but not in the barrios we drove through the day before. We got out, walked for a while, and abruptly ducked into a shabby building’s basement. Along the sidewalk outside I was sure there were eyes on us that we could not see. I had just gotten one of those strong feelings, like I had when the British soldier had his sniper rifle’s crosshairs on my neck, but I never found the source of my unease. We walked into the small, dim basement eatery and Lynne sat directly at a high table on the side, and I sat opposite her. The place looked like it was a storage room that had been converted into a business. Lynne ordered a local specialty for both of us and it was somehow, magically, exactly what the doctor ordered. I’m under the impression still that it was some kind of pulled pork on a bed of rice, but it reversed all of the gastrointestinal issues I could tell were mounting. There were no other gringos in the place. There were probably six or seven guys and they were all drunk. They were not happily sharing a drink with some friends on a fanciful afternoon; they were about the business of drinking heavily. They had bottles of tequila sitting on their tables and they drank, shuddered, and poured again. There was no question that they were drinking to numb out the heat, smoke, and stench of the world outside the door that was their lives. I had been in many such drinking parlors in Africa, but none of them had food this good. I was just waiting for one of the drinkers’ anger at the world to be turned toward us in the form of shouting, mumbled insults, or loud insistence that we buy booze for the locals. I had steeled myself for a conflict that never came. I was unused to being one of such a prevalent minority. Gringos stood out here, but I guess were common enough to be window dressing.

Leaving the eatery, we headed toward an outdoor market where tourists normally shopped for trinkets. It was pretty busy but the sellers weren’t as aggressive as I thought they would be. Many of them waited for the buyers to approach them. I was told by Lynne and “Mrs. Dr. Carter” back in Indio that the popular things to buy for souvenirs were vanilla, tequila, and hand woven blankets. I bargained a bit and bought a couple of things. I didn’t stick to my prices like I would have in Africa or would later in Hong Kong because my heart wasn’t truly in it. I was bargaining for tourist trinkets because I felt I should, not because I really wanted to or needed anything.

We again returned to the hotel to repose until the evening’s activities were to begin. By this time I knew that the night would start late and would go late, so I half dozed and watched a movie. I got the distinct idea that it was not problematic for Mexicans to have several late nights in a row. In Korea there could be a holiday or festival or even just a Saturday night that allowed people to get out and blow off steam, but you wouldn’t see the same people out the very next night doing the same thing. This was to be my brush with the Latin lifestyle, and I was just a bit rueful that it would be spent with a group of people out of my age group.

We all got together at the hotel bar and decided that we would go out to where the matadors said they were going to be for the night. They went to Senor Frog’s, which I was to learn was a modern franchise bar that was famous for its outrageous youthful benders. The critics said that there were matadors from around the circuit who were in town to watch the bullfight tomorrow, to check out the competition, and they were all going to Senor Frog’s. We decided we would go along as well.

We took a taxi there and when we got to the parking lot I knew this would not be a low key night with elders. The place was packed with young people and there was a pervasive nervous energy that ran through the line of people queued up to get inside like electricity. I thought the older people might be put off or feel out of place, but they were as embroiled in the atmosphere as any of the youths. My earlier rue about the company was misplaced. When we got to the front of the line I realized there was a metal detector at the door, and there were security guards frisking the patrons before allowing them entry. This gave me pause and made me wonder a bit. The critic from Los Angeles voiced her concern about the relative safety of the place if there were such stringent security measures, and the rancher, I think, shouted her down, cajoling her for her lack of adventurous spirit. Lynne’s translation proved me right, and we all went inside.

When we got inside the rancher insisted that some of the workers put tables together to accommodate our party, which was large. While they were at that I went to the bar to get drinks for ladies with whom I was standing. One wanted a mixed drink and one wanted wine. I wondered how I would order these drinks, trying to remember the drabs of Spanish that I had picked up over the last couple of days. I looked around for the bar. The place was exactly like so many modern bars all around the world. It had an open floor plan with high ceilings with ceiling fans and subdued décor. The bar was long and made of hardwood, and was conspicuously stocked with every kind of liquor known to man. There were two bartenders and people were stacked up three deep waiting to be served. I waited patiently and when I got to the front I started to stammer out my order in weak, faltering Spanish. The bartender motioned for my to move my head closer so we could hear each other over the music.
“Just tell me what the hell you want!” he shouted in my ear. I guess they got a lot of Americans there. I gave him my order, chuckling to myself, and when I told him I wanted beer he asked me if I wanted a big one or a small one. To me that was an unnecessary question, and I quickly said that I wanted a big one. What I did not realize was that a small beer was a bucket of ice with four pony Coronas stuck in the ice and a big beer was a bucket of ice with seven pony Coronas stuck in the ice. I paid and tipped the bartender and struggled back through the crowd to the table. I had to explain my misunderstanding and asked anyone if they cared for a little beer. There were no takers.

Because the tables were pushed together the outside table almost touched the dance floor. There was only one unoccupied seat and it was at the very end. I sat there and put the bucket of beer on the table. I was taking in the atmosphere and watching the people as they drank and danced and bounced around. Everyone was fashionable and everyone was well aware that they were seeing and being seen. The scene was both avant-garde and high society at the same time. I tried in vain to carry on a conversation above the oppressively loud music but soon settled in to enjoy the unique experience for what it was.

I had only gotten halfway through my first beer when the fight broke out. Apparently one of the out of town bullfighters was dancing with the girlfriend of a local bullfighter, which is offensive enough in and of itself, but he had also taken liberties considered to be inappropriate with the girl. I was to learn that this was the immediate cause for a long standing rivalry to manifest itself as a violent incident. There were associated parties aware of the situation all around the bar, and when the two principal antagonists began throwing punches, they all did. Just like in a movie the entire place erupted as if on cue. Half of the crowd went down in tangles of appendages like in real fights, but a fair few remained on their feet swinging fists and hurling glasses. I was not in a mood to get involved in a fight of any sort in Tijuana because I had heard that Mexican jails were not hospitable places to be, and none of my next of kin knew that I was in North America, never mind that I was in Tijuana. I sat rigidly at the end of the table trying to stay alert in case some projectile or other should encroach on one of the ladies with whom I was sitting. Although I was just sitting down I had adrenaline coursing through my veins and I was more awake than I had been in a long time. Across the dance floor two guys were locked in combat. The one with his back to me leaned over a table to grab some utensil to use as a weapon of opportunity and his counterpart rushed him and grabbed him under the arms while continuing the charge. The one with his back to me had to backpedal in order to keep from losing his footing, and the charger raced with him all the way across the dance floor. I kept my eye on these two until I realized that they would arrive at our table in a second. Thinking quickly I grabbed the beers off of the landing zone and placed them on the floor by my side. No sooner was the beer safe from harm than two angry, sweating, cursing Mexican youths landed on our table. For a second the scene was laughably grotesque. These two guys were struggling in a battle of physical strength, I was holding a half full beer above them, and on the other side a middle aged Mexican woman was loudly berating them both, as if they were her children. The one contacting the table rolled off and took the assailant with him to continue their struggle on the floor. Out of nowhere police and security guards appeared and swept everyone on the floor out toward the door in a practiced maneuver. Because I replaced the bucket to its original spot, was evidently unflustered, and continued drinking the beer, I was left alone as were the rest of the patrons at our tables. The entire incident took no more than six or seven minutes tops.

The clientele with whom I had arrived decided that it would not be wise to stay, and we took our leave of the place and the brooding crowd of sanguine youths in the parking lot. One of the doormen advised me not to take the bucket, but encouraged me to secret the remaining bottles around my person for carriage back to the hotel. When I did, I realized just how cold beers left in a bucket of ice can get. When we got back to the hotel everyone said their goodnights, but I had the same hum in my ears that I had after boxing matches at college, so I took my tiny beers poolside and went for a swim while admiring the stars. As I toweled off and was putting myself to bed I thought of what a strange sequence of events filled up the day and I thought about the bullfight I was to see the next day. That night I dreamt of the time I was swept off the streets by the Korean military and in my dream the Korean language filled my ears. In reality it was an argument between two of the domestic workers at the hotel that woke me up, jolting me into a world of loud, angry Spanish. I took a leak and wondered how much weirder it could get.

The next day we woke up and had breakfast together and went to the bullring. The atmosphere was one of festivity. There were people selling programs and there were hawkers of all sorts outside the arena. We went inside and took our seats on the “sombra” side. The people with whom we had been interacting up until that point were sequestered away in special press boxes and judges stands. Lynne told me that sitting in among the people was the best way to experience a bullfight. She explained the entire event as it unfolded, and the electricity of the event was undeniable. According to Lynne, and later all of the others, there could be no better bullfight to attend as one’s first. It was rife with drama, courage, honor, and violence. The first matador was the European looking Mexican who worked his bull masterfully and dispatched him with workmanlike efficiency. His muleta work was a study in form and finesse. The shouts of “ole!” that welled up from the crowd were well deserved and heartfelt. We had the best view of his work because he brought the bull to our side, as the critic said he would. The judges awarded him both ears and the tail, showing he had earned the prize of their respect. The second matador was the dark mestizo who waved off the picadors so his bull would not be too wounded to be spirited. He brought the bull to the “sol” side of the arena, and took bold chances with him. His bull seemed angrier than the one before him and one could feel the malicious rage as he flailed his murderous horns harmlessly through the empty cape, until he finally located the matador and gored him horribly, throwing him over his horns and through the air. The first matador was called to draw the bull away as assistants dragged the wounded matador outside the ring. The first matador had gotten the bull’s attention and then had jumped over the boards as he approached. The bull found himself to be the only one in the ring for a short while, and his rage played out alongside his confusion. Lynne explained that in the event that a matador is gored the other matador on the day must finish his bull. She further explained that once the bull has figured out to go for the person instead of the cape, they are infinitely more dangerous. She said that this was the case with almost all bulls who were allowed to live to sire the great lines that were sent to Europe. This was obviously no consolation to the first matador who knew the danger he was in as he reentered the ring. He was visibly shaken and fearful. He had not taken the same chances as the first matador and his bull had been less dangerous from the outset. He approached the bull and allowed one or two wide passes, then he retired as far away from the bull as he could get. The audience, including me, was rapt. In my mind this had gone from a guy fighting a bull to a bull fighting a guy, and the bull had the upper hoof, so to speak. Then the wounded matador limped back into the ring, using his sword as a crutch, determined to finish the bull or let the bull finish him. The lighter skinned matador was visibly relieved and hopped the boards without being asked. The crowd who had been happy to oblige the stand in matador with “ole!” broke into a chant of “Torero! Torero!” stomping the aisles of the arena in cadence and making the entire structure shake. I knew this man had come to kill this animal, but his courage was undeniable. The bull seemed to recognize his assailant and attacked him at once. The matador allowed a few close passes, going down on one knee and leaning an arm on the ground for support, but always keeping the bull’s blood pumping out of its body. Then, when the matador could no longer muster the strength to work the cape he had to deliver the coup de grace, and there was only one way to do it. He lured the bull into a full charge straight at him, at the last moment throwing the cape to the ground and fully exposing his body. When the bull lowered his head to gore the matador, the matador placed his hand between the bull’s eyes and leapt over his horns to plunge the sword down between his shoulder blades and through the heart. The noble bull instantly fell in a heap, and the matador collapsed.

The crowd had gone absolutely wild and the arena was in complete pandemonium. Medics had run to the field to take the matador away and were assailed by a hail of flowers that piled up on top of him on the stretcher as he was removed. A judge came to the center of the ring after conferring with his compatriots and held up the ears, feet, and tail, indicating that the matador had earned them all, because the matador could not receive them. Lynne told me that no one would leave the grounds until they learned the fate of the matador, so I flagged down the beer guy and bought a Tecate. We stayed on site until it was announced over the loudspeaker that the matador would be able to make a full recovery in time.

The critics had all run for interviews and to make sure their articles would make the press times for their publications. The ranchers were aggressively marketing the bull’s progeny to principal parties from around South America and Europe. Lynne and I went out for dinner to discuss the afternoon, and after dinner she went in search of an old friend who she said she absolutely had to see before we left the following morning. I went back to the hotel to rest. I turned on the air conditioner and watched a movie, but eventually grew restless and went back to the hotel bar. A lively crowd had gathered again and the bullfight was the topic of conversation. I was again beckoned by a local nymph I had seen there previously. Her name was Matilda, which I thought an odd name for a Mexican girl.

The next morning we were able to prepare, take our leave, and depart at our leisure. We had a much longer wait at the border and were subject to questioning and a cursory search of the vehicle prior to being allowed to cross back to the U.S. side. It was a relaxing ride back to Indio. Lynne did not risk life and limb on the highway this time. I had the same distinct and comforting feeling that I used to get on rides home from the beach in the back of the family station wagon as a child. We got back to the house in Indio and unwound with some languid pleasant conversation about the trip. We called it an early night in preparation for an early day.

The next morning we got up early and Dave drove us to Santa Barbara. I said my goodbyes and thanked them for a wonderful re-introduction to American life. We promised to keep in touch, which we didn’t. I got on the Southwest Chief which would take me through Albuquerque and Flagstaff and then follow the Mississippi up to Chicago. I purposely took a three day train journey so I could remain anonymous and acclimate myself back to American life. I sat in the viewing car and watched the desert roll by until it became a flooded plain in Missouri that looked like an inland sea. By the time I got to Chicago to get on the Lakeshore Limited I had resigned myself to putting on a tie and crawling into an office for a regular nine-to-five job that would drive me crazy. Of course it would only be a few short weeks later that I would be moving into my house in Hawaii and catching my first few waves off the leeward coast of Oahu.

Repository

2005-12-01T18:04:00.000-08:00

This blog is intended as a repository and sounding board for autobiographical short stories. I had heard that I should write down some of my experiences so many times that I eventually figured I'd give it a whirl. I am not a writer, I am a banker, but there are many things a banker can find to write about. Some of these posts have been posted previously on a blog to which a friend was kind enough to allow me to contribute.

As I add posts please be kind enough to render your feedback. A good friend once told me that criticism is a gift, and a lack of red ink is a disservice. I would really like to know what you think, about the stories and the writing.

As I write some of my memories down, I find that surprising things stay with me, like the memories of smells and of how people treated me. And I find that I am reminding myself of what is important in life and how to manifest that priority in day to day "mundane" activity.

Thanks for joining me. Let's start with a big one you can read in as many sittings as you like...