Apr 3, 2015
“Are you writing?” someone asks. “Oh, not really. Just the blog.” And I change the subject.
I began this blog three and a half years ago, and have posted about 90 short essays. I used to write one a week. I switched to every other week because the non-stop deadline was too much pressure. Then I switched to monthly, to make space and time for my novel.
The blog posts come easily, though I work hard on each one. When a subject occurs to me, I throw all my random thoughts onto the page. Each thought leads to another, and in a few hours I have a first draft. Then comes a bit of research, a lot of revision, and the fun of finding illustrations.
Writing the blog is satisfying. I figure out what I think. I feel no anxiety; I am completely confident that ideas will come, and that I will be pleased with the final product. I get gratifying responses on Facebook and in Comments. No one ever writes a negative comment – I suppose that people who don’t like my writing simply go away.
So when you ask me if I’m writing, why do I say “Not really”? It puzzles me. I AM writing.
Woman Writing, by guess who? image:wikiart.org
It’s true I like fiction better than anything; I like a long, engrossing novel that opens up a well-inhabited world. But it’s not merely that I want to create what I love. I’ve already done that. I’m very fond of my three completed novels.
A well-inhabited world. Children’s Games by Bruegel the Elder. image: en.wikipedia.org
I want to be read. But the funny thing is, my blog does get read. I usually seem to have about 150 readers. In the blogosphere that’s not even peanuts; it’s more like teeny black lentils. Still, I love knowing I’m being read and appreciated. Like most of us, I want people to love me and think I’m wonderful. (Comments which say you already love me and I am wonderful will not pass muster with the comment moderator.)
image:agoramedia.com
So it’s not enough that I’ve written three novels, and I regularly write likeable essays. It doesn’t count. I’m afraid I also want to be validated by the Voice of the Fathers. I wish I didn’t, but my father and his ilk had very loud voices.
Dad’s ilk. image:bizarrevictoria.livejournal.com
A Father may be a brother. My late brother Dickie, a prominent book critic, told me my first novel was a page-turner. “I mean that as a compliment,” he said, but I knew my novel was not to his very complex and elevated taste. A few years later he called me to rave delightedly and in gratifying detail about my blog. “I think you’ve found your form,” he said. Ouch.
are miniatures my form? igavelauction.com
A Father can even be a woman. Any publisher is a Father, and I’m currently courting a small publisher run by a wonderful woman. I’d cut off my pinkie to be published by that house, except that it would hurt.
I want the recognition that publication brings. Not that the world will recognize me. I have no delusions, though I have all the usual Terry Gross-Pulitzer-Major Motion Picture fantasies when I get a nibble from an agent or publisher. But I want to hear the voice of the Fathers saying, “Yes, this is worthy. You are a writer.”
image:barlow.byu.edu
Maybe I want to write novels because it is so challenging. The Fathers, as you can see from the illustration, are earnest Victorians. If it’s not hard it doesn’t count. “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” Maybe in heaven I’ll finish my fourth novel.
Some writers love writing the first draft and hate revising. Not me. I love revising, because it comes easily. I am confident in my editorial instincts, and very decisive. I rarely dither. But to write a first draft is to create something out of almost nothing. My novels begin with an image that floats up to me – a baby lies abandoned behind a dumpster; a woman sees a man behind her reflected in a window; a sinkhole opens suddenly under a house raised on pilings. I follow the image and years later I have a bunch of characters carrying on and creating a story.
image: abcnews.com
It sounds simple, but every day of working on the first draft is like standing at the edge of a cliff and looking out into a great empty space. I throw little ideas into the darkness, hoping one will shine and cast some light. I make small desperate noises as I write a first draft. Worse, I often fall asleep.
image:pixshark.com
Still, even though it’s excruciating, it’s what I want to do. I hoped that if I dug around in my psyche to find the root of this foolishness, I could pull it up and be done with it. But this attempt at writing therapy hasn’t succeeded. Even as I work on this post, I decide I’ll finish this, and the second one about Argentina, and the one about the HOME Van. I’ll get them all into the queue for posting and I won’t have another one due till the beginning of May. Then I can go back to my real writing, the writing that counts.
Mar 1, 2015
Last Thursday, February 26, was the last HOME Van drive out. At all three stops we saw mostly familiar faces, and some people who are very dear to me. Many people came up to Arupa to say goodbye and get a hug. I occasionally hid behind a car to cry. I only lost it completely when I said goodbye to Mike, one of the sandwich makers, whom I have come to respect and admire as he and his wife nursed a friend whose house they shared.
The house, a small bright green geodesic dome, was built for the owner by several homeless men, who lived there on occasion. Showers and laundry were available on a regular basis, and there was a small food pantry. Gainesville is dotted with informal, almost clandestine services for homeless people, in homes and churches, and in our case, in an old gray van and a couple of cars.
Arupa and Bob Freeman, whose house is HOME Van Central, and who have been working 40-60 hours a week to run the project, are well past retirement age. The growth of services at Grace Marketplace, the new center run by the Homeless Coalition, has brought our numbers down, and the time has come to shift direction. Arupa and Bob will run a small food pantry, and respond to individual needs and emergencies. We will still deliver water to campsites in the hot months. Our main focus will be to buy tents for the people who want to move near Grace Marketplace, where people can get hot meals, showers, and many other services.
sunset and rainbow at Grace Marketplace photo by Greg Undeen
We all have our favorite driveout memories. One evening, going through the medicine boxes, I came across a bottle of flavored personal lubricant. “Who the fuck donated this?” was my ladylike reaction, and Arupa and I had a giggle. But a little while later a man and woman came up to the van window and shyly told me they had gotten married a few days ago. They were beaming with happiness. I slipped it into her bag – a lot of the women we meet are modest about intimate items. She thanked me the next week, and every once in a while I brought another bottle of lubricant for the honeymooners.
A woman in her sixties lived in a tent on the dental lab property in Tent City. She had greasy gray hair and filthy feet, but she had a strong sense of dignity and self-respect. The winter that she got a week-long cold night motel voucher, I brought her a bag of groceries. She opened the door in her bathrobe, with her long hair wet from the shower, and I realized that I had thought of her dirtiness as part of her. I was struck once again by my ignorance.
After the Bath by Edgar Degas
When she turned 65, I took her to apply for Social Security, and discovered she had been married five times. It was quite an enterprise for her to recall all the names and dates. The Social Security official was polite and patient. Not long after, she married again, to a 28-year-old man, and the HOME Van held a wedding ceremony. The bride spent the morning at the beauty parlor, and then I drove them to the downtown plaza, she in her white dress and veil, he in a tuxedo, where Reverend Dave, the HOME Van minister, married them.
image: worth1000.com
I have so many memories of the early days of the HOME Van, when the numbers weren’t so crushing, and we had more time for frivolity. Arupa and I spent an afternoon decorating Easter eggs to distribute on the driveout. At our first Christmas party I passed out song sheets, and my brother Don led the singing on his harmonica. On our third anniversary we had a big party on the downtown plaza, with ribs and chicken donated by David’s Barbeque, and a band of homeless pickers and singers. Less frivolous were the memorial services we held on the plaza – a circle of people holding candles, speaking of their friend who was gone, and Reverend Dave saying a few words of comfort and faith.
image: bangordailynews.com
As one of my very favorite customers said when he heard that the driveouts are ending, “All good things must end.” I have tried to understand why this makes me so sad. I won’t miss boiling ten dozen eggs, or as I used to do, baking five batches of cornbread. I won’t miss organizing the soup rota, or making five to seven gallons of soup when I had no volunteers.
we usually did better than beanie wienies
I won’t miss making sandwiches on Thursday mornings, turning six loaves of bread into pb and j’s. But I’ll miss the other sandwich makers, three men whom we met years ago on the drive-outs, all now housed. Arupa puts on Pandora, usually old country music or rock, and we talk as we work. Lots of gossip – celebrity gossip, local politics, who’s sick, who’s in jail. Personal history and family stories, what’s going on in our lives. Lots of joking, lots of teasing, especially of me.
I won’t lose track of one of the guys. He lives near me, and we rode together every Thursday to sandwich-making and then to deliver a food box to a former HOME Van customer. In the afternoon I’d pick him up to go to the drive out. He house sits for us when we go away, and now that he’s losing his HOME Van gig, he’s going to come walk our dog on weekday mornings. But I know I’ll rarely see the other two. I remember how close I was to my colleagues at the law school, and how quickly we lost touch. There are work friends and friend-friends, and you lose touch with the former when you retire.
Trisket needs her exercise
I have so many memories of so many people. A gentle schizophrenic man in many layers of clothing and scarves. It was years before he would look me in the eyes with the sweetest smile, and ask for “whatever you have.” I settled on giving him vitamins and bandaids and Tums. Another man, of enormous intelligence, integrity and courage, who has been in the woods since he was released from prison, where he spent fifteen years for avenging his daughter. A man who moved to the woods so he could support his daughter in college with his small Social Security check. I’ll miss the hugs, the jokes, the God bless you’s, the homemade card Rose gives us at Christmas.
image nydailynews.com
For years I was in charge of socks and candles, dispensed from the trunk of my car. This sounds tedious, but each transaction was a little connection. Can I have some dress socks for church? Do you have any more of those diabetics’socks? When we had more volunteers I graduated to medications, freeing Arupa to wander in the crowd and talk with anyone who needed something special, or merely a dose of Arupa.
image: sockittoemsockcampaign.org
I liked distributing medicines, because it gave me genuine, if brief, contact with a large number of people. I’m no good at names, but people expected me to remember their illnesses and injuries, and I often did. I sat in the passenger seat of the van, with a daunting line of people at my window, stretching around the parking lot. I heard of many ailments. People like to show their wounds. I have a weak stomach and would always let my eyes go out of focus when confronted by scars, stitches, burns and boils. I’d urge them to go to Helping Hands or the Rahma Mercy Clinic, the emergency room or the VA.
Rahma Mercy Clinic image: sam felter
I remember the woman who lived in Tent City and rode her bike to chemo treatments at Shands, the man who was between two surgeries and living with a temporary colostomy bag, the woman I saw on our last drive out, who had major abdominal surgery four days ago, and was about to start radiation. People were discharged from the hospital, sometimes sent home in a taxi to the trail that led to their camp, with expensive prescriptions which they couldn’t fill. Arupa carried some cash and could sometimes help, but often the cost was beyond us. We could give them ibuprofen and acetominaphen, but no real pain meds. We had bandaids and ointment, but no antibiotics.
image: theguardian.com
I retired more than eleven years ago from the law school, and never looked back. The only thing I was going to miss was my students, and even them, not so much. At the time I retired, the HOME Van was less than a year old. Now I’m facing a second retirement, and I’m not looking forward to it.
In all the years of riding with the HOME Van, I only saw the tip of the iceberg. After a winter drive out in the freezing rain, or a summer drive out where we fought mosquitoes and gnats, I struggled to wrap my imagination around how it would be to live homeless. People who live outside have complicated lives. Some of them traveled, many stayed put. I was just a tiny part of their lives, but they were a huge part of mine.
To JC and Gary and DJ and Rose, to Buddy and Michael and Bill, Matt and David and Nick, to Wanda and Nina, Diane and James, Nate and Judy, Ashley, Tommy, Renata, Charles. To all the people who live or have lived outside, coping every day with hardships and troubles I can barely imagine, making their happiness with or without booze and drugs, I will miss you more than I can say or you will know. You have blessed my life.
FOR MORE ABOUT THE HOME VAN AND HOMELESSNESS IN GAINESVILLE, GO TO CATEGORIES/HOMELESS, AT RIGHT
Feb 11, 2015
In the previous post, I wrote about some misadventures on our trip to Argentina. Why Argentina? I was born there. My father worked for an imperialistic American company, which I am still embarrassed to name, and he handled their legal affairs in Argentina. My parents lived in Buenos Aires for many years; my brothers Don and Dick were raised there. My younger brother fell in love with Esther, the little girl next door; they married at 22, had seven children, and were together almost sixty years.
Dick and Esther and the first three
We left Argentina and returned to the States when I was 6 months old. I had been back only once, for a glorious two weeks at Christmas when I was nine. We lived in Bolivia, and though we were living high on the hog, it was a very scrawny hog.
Surely our parents took us around to see the sights, but all that I remember from that vacation is the food. In Buenos Aires we ate huge quantities of beef and dairy. I had frogs’ legs and snails for the first time, bamboo ray with black butter and capers. We stayed in a luxurious old hotel, and breakfasted in our room on eggs, bacon, creamed mushrooms, croissants, and hot chocolate with whipped cream. At night my parents went out and Luli and I had room service again: delicious sandwiches of turkey and ham, fresh fruit and butter cookies.
In the 1930’s when my parents moved to Argentina, many middle class families in the US still had maids. When they moved back home in 1948, they didn’t understand life in the States. They brought with them an Argentine cook, a maid, and a nurse for my brother, who was recovering from polio. The maid and the nurse soon found other jobs; Elisa Dellepiane, the cook, stayed with us until I was eighteen, and returned to nurse my mother when she was dying.click
I write this in my newly cozy office, where I’m now spending a lot of time on the day bed, Here I read, write, crochet, practice my singing, and retreat from my uneasy role as mother of a teenager. To my left is a large sepia photograph of my mother at twenty, in front of me a black and white photo of her at forty. In this room I feel loved.
Like any immigrant who goes back to the old country to find her roots, I went to Argentina looking for echoes of my family’s life. I knew the stores and streets had changed. But on every corner, in every cafe, I tried to imagine my mother.
Mother about 1932
On Christmas Eve, after our money-changing adventure click, we took our taxi back to the Recoleta neighborhood for lunch and a museum. Our driver pointed out all the sights along the way, including the race track and polo grounds. My parents loved to go to polo matches and horse races, along with Buenos Aires high society, which took its cue from the British aristocracy.
Dad was descended from Jewish Eastern European immigrants. His maternal grandfather had gone to Colombia in the nineteenth century and established a sugar plantation. My great-grandfather is referred to as El Fundador (the founder); I call the Colombian side of the family the oligarchs.
El Fundador
Dad grew up in New York, and while he acknowledged that his father was Jewish, he always denied that his mother was. Like the Argentines, he yearned to be British aristocracy. Esther, my sister-in-law, says he always reminded her of a little boy pressing his nose against a bakery window.
We sat outside at an elegant Recoleta cafe, and relaxed for perhaps the first time in BA. Amanda had a very disappointing ham and cheese sandwich; Joe and I split a delicious “lomo” sandwich on baguette – the most tender, tasty beef, cooked medium rare. Amanda was happy and jokey, asking about how I learned Spanish, interested in everything she saw.
We sat a long time in the warm sunny day, under the shade of a huge historic rubber tree. Its spreading branches were supported by posts, except for one, held up by a statue of a man bending over and taking its weight on his back. A busker nearby, wearing a most penile clown nose, played carnival music on his accordian.
That evening we went to the outdoor ‘midnight’ mass at Iglesia Nuestra Senora de Pilar, next to Recoleta Cemetery. It was held at 9PM, since Argentine families have their Santa Claus and Christmas feast on Christmas Eve. As we neared the church after a mile-long walk I heard Adeste Fideles in Spanish. The night was soft and clear; people brought folding chairs from inside the church. It was a big crowd. The choir, high school kids, sang many songs, and the congregation often sang along – Christmas carols, soft rock, folky songs.
Iglesia Nuestra Senora de Pilar source:Barriada.com.ar
The priest’s brief sermon was sweet and kind, focusing on the shepherds, and how you can change the world, Argentina, Buenos Aires, and yourself, by letting Christ into your heart. Or something like that. I understood 87 percent of everything that was said, and of course recognized all the readings from Luke and Matthew. They finally got the bread turned into flesh and the wine turned into blood, and many people lined up to take communion, while others carried their chairs inside and left.
The service moved me, because it all carried my own past, while I felt the strength of this community and how much I was not a part of it. And throughout it I was thinking of Mother. She was Episcopalian, my father was an atheist, but I imagine they both went to the Anglican church in Buenos Aires. They probably went to Christmas Eve midnight mass. The feeling kept rising in me, “I want my Mommy.”
Joe wanted to see inside the church. I stayed outside with Amanda, who had been well-behaved and surely dreadfully bored during the service, despite the lots of music, and was now surly and loud-voiced. ‘Ooh, I want to drink the wine, why can’t I.’ I told her I was disgusted and ashamed of her and I didn’t want to hear another word until we left the service. She shut up for a while, and then said, “Can I ask a nice question?” I agreed, and she asked why we left Argentina. She was very interested in my history, and impressed, I think, by my fluency in Spanish, as was I.
On Christmas Day we tried and failed to visit several parks and zoos, and found them closed. But one of the most famous places in Buenos Aires was open. The fourteen-acre Recoleta Cemetery is almost two hundred years old. Over four thousand above-ground tombs are crowded together along paved paths divided by tree-shaded pedestrian boulevards, each family striving to outdo its neighbor.
“La Recoleta Cemetery entrance” by Christian Haugen
“Liliana Crociati de Szaszak (full)” by Iridescent
We arrived in the late afternoon when the light was particularly lovely, with long shadows and glowing statues. Joe went off to take pictures, and I was free to follow the pamphlet guide I had printed from the internet. Without it I would have been lost and aimless in that huge corpse-filled place.
The pamphlet gave a lot of information about Argentine history, which I appreciated, and explained the arrangement of the tombs. You can peek inside and see one or two coffins, maybe some urns, with an altar above them. The decor is elaborate – stained glass and wood paneling, sculpture and bas relief, crucifixes, paintings and photographs. Stairs lead underground so that when a new corpse arrives the decomposed remains can be moved to the basement. Families must pay for maintenance; when they stop paying, the spiders and dust move in.
I only made it to the first twenty-one tombs highlighted by the guide, but it was plenty. I didn’t see Evita Peron’s tomb, but the pamphlet had lots of information about her, unlike the stupid French biography I had tried to read, which was full of dreamy postmodern musings.
Eva Peron
Evita died at 33 of uterine cancer. The military didn’t want her embalmed corpse to be a political organizing symbol, so they stole it from where it was displayed in the Peronist’s headquarters, and each general kept it for a while in his house. One general was so worried about it being stolen that he slept with a gun under his pillow. When his wife came home late one night he claimed he thought it was a Peronista come for the corpse, so he shot her dead. Hmmm.
Another story of marital disharmony was reflected in a large elaborate tomb. White marble man seated pompously, looking like a nineteenth century business man. Seated behind him, back to back, white marble wife, looking like a satisfied and respected materfamilias. She was a very extravagant woman, and he became so frustrated that he put a legal notice in the paper: ‘I will not be responsible for any debts incurred…’ She was so angry that when she had the tomb built she said she wanted to face away from him for eternity.
The sky was deep blue, the sun hot but the air dry. I loved all the stories, loved the puzzle of following the map and locating the tombs, peeking inside, looking at the statues. A guard came through, ‘fifteen minutes to closing,’ so I made my way to the entrance. I glanced at a very new tomb on a corner, brown granite with a full-length metal bas-relief of a rather glum woman with leaves above her. The family name was Dellepiane. I was stunned – that was Elisa’s name, Elisa who had been for me some combination of grandmother and aunt, who spoiled me and Luli in the kitchen, who shared the mate gourd with us in the afternoons.
Elisa, Liz, Luli
For a few moments I thought, My God, could it be Elisa’s family? I looked for names and dates, but apparently nobody was buried there yet. I was pretty sure Elisa’s family was not of the class that would be buried in Recoleta. Sure enough, when I googled it, I found a famous general, an Avenida Dellepiane, a Dellepiane Bar listed under gay bars, and all kinds of Dellepiane’s on Facebook, far too many to try to track her down. With all my thinking and grieving about Mother as I wandered in Buenos Aires – I only just then realized and remembered that this was Elisa’s life too.
Memory comes in scraps and bits, woven together by imagination. The stories I imagined as I wandered around Buenos Aires weren’t even my own. I pictured Mother with my baby carriage in the square in Belgrano, Don and Dick and Esther in the white uniform smocks that children wore to school, Elisa returning to her niece’s family when she retired.
School uniforms
It is all fiction, but if I were rich, I would go back to Argentina for a month or two, and dream more memories.
Jan 5, 2015
“I love traveling and I hate traveling.” – Amanda the Wise
For over thirty years I have celebrated Christmas at home with family and friends. But none of my family were coming this year, and Joe finds the traditions a little tiresome, so we decided to try Christmas away from home. We arranged a trip to Argentina: six days in Buenos Aires, where I was born, and two days at Iguazu Falls. We arrived in Buenos Aires at nine-thirty at night on December 23.
We had rented an apartment in Recoleta, a posh neighborhood filled with trees, parks, cafes and shops. The manager, Mariana, let us in and showed us around. She had stocked the kitchen with coffee, oranges, and chocolate alfajores, cookies filled with dulce de leche. I loved the apartment, with its huge windows, wood floors, hundreds of books and an impressive collection of CDs, mostly American music from the sixties and seventies.
After Mariana left we went out to find dinner. I was amazed to find myself out and about at one in the morning. Amanda was impressed to see families with children in all the cafes and restaurants at that hour. After filling up on empanadas and pizza, we returned exhausted to the apartment, ready for bed.
Now we met our first challenge. The key to the building worked fine. The elevator worked fine, though it was barely bigger than a phone booth, and landed each time with a most disquieting shudder and thud. We were on the fourth floor. At the tiny landing shared with one other apartment, Joe took out the ring of three old-fashioned keys. He tried each key in every lock. Ten minutes of trying. He couldn’t open the door.
We went back downstairs to take the rear elevator to the back door. We couldn’t open it. “I’m at a loss,” Joe said. It was past two o’clock. We had been traveling since 6:30 the previous morning. Everything we owned was inside the apartment, including contact information for Mariana. I pictured us lying down to sleep on the landing. Going out to find a hotel. Finding a friendly police officer to help us.
Can I find a friendly one?
We went back to the front door, Joe tried and tried, as did Amanda, as did I. No one was pleasant, though Amanda and I were smart enough to hold our tongues as Joe struggled. Finally, he did it. Within a few minutes, we were all in bed. The lock was a problem when we came home the next afternoon too, but Joe figured out the proper combination of jiggling and turning and pulling, and we all mastered it.
The next morning I made great coffee, and we feasted on oranges and cookies. Our first and very urgent job was to change money. We knew that stores and everything else would begin to close about noon, and stay closed through at least Christmas day.
Argentina is once again suffering terrible inflation. The official exchange rate is 8.5 to the dollar, but the unofficial “blue’ rate, published daily in the newspaper, is about 13, so no one goes to the bank to change money. People keep and carry huge amounts of cash, and assault and robbery have become more common. (There is a video on You Tube of a tourist being robbed at gunpoint by a man on a motor scooter. I didn’t watch it, having been sufficiently spooked by all the articles I read on the internet.)
Money-changers on the street call out their rate, but they are likely to give counterfeit pesos, so you go to an exchange office, or casa de cambio. I am befuddled by the ethics of all this, uncomfortable at taking advantage of another country’s economic mess, uneasily telling myself “when in Rome.”
Mariana had drawn us a map for the best casa de cambio – in a gallery-mall next to the snazziest hotel in BA (rooms start at $600 US/night). It was a very long walk, but she said the taxi would wait while we changed our money. We should call first to be sure they were open.
I called – it went to voice mail. I called the snazzy hotel to ask if the mall and cambio were open today, on Christmas Eve. No. The snazzy hotel clerk went off to inquire, and returned to tell me that no casas de cambio were open December 24 or 25. Banks were also closed. They would all open on Friday. But on Friday we were being picked up at 8:30 to spend the day on the Pampas, in gaucho country, and we wouldn’t be back till 8 at night. Cambios don’t open till 10am, not to mention that we needed pesos Wednesday and Thursday.
I called Mariana. “Let me call Carlos.” I’d never heard of Carlos, but that was okay. She called Carlos, who called someone else, and then Mariana called us back with the following instructions. We were to go to a lottery shop in Belgrano, ask for Lucas, although he would not be there, and tell them Carlos sent us. “It’s a code,” Mariana said.
The lottery shop closed at noon, and it was now just before 11. As usual, Amanda was getting a slow start. We told her she could stay behind, but then reconsidered. We could be getting into any kind of mess, and if we didn’t come back, there she’d be all alone. So she had to come with us.
It was easy to hail a cab. Thrilled that my Spanish was quite fluent, I had a long chat with the taxi driver. His son had just graduated from medical school, and they would soon return to Barcelona, where they had lived a dozen years and his four other sons still lived. I told him about my parents, my brothers, our trip to Africa. All the while the clock and the meter were ticking. I asked Joe, “Is that a decimal point after the 82?” Yes, thank God, so the fare so far was only about seven bucks at the blue rate.
We got to the lottery office about 11:45. It was a tiny office, filled with colorful posters listing the numbers you should play depending on your dreams. A man stood at the counter behind a grid. “I’d like to speak to Lucas, please. Carlos sent me.” Briefly I became a willowy blonde in a suit with padded shoulders, smoking a cigarette.
The man said Lucas was not there; how much did we want to exchange? I said 500 dollars. He unlocked the gate. ‘Thank God it’s working,’ I thought. ‘We’re going to be robbed and murdered,’ I thought. But no, he told us he’d give us 13 to the dollar, and pulled out huge wads of 100 peso bills, holding them below the counter so they were not visible from the office or street, and asked us to count them. We exchanged some amiable remarks and walked out with 6500 pesos.
The next day was Christmas, a family holiday. For tourists, it’s a good day to visit parks and the famous Recoleta Cemetery. I searched the internet to see what was open. All the parks run by the city of Buenos Aires would be closed; the list included the Lakes of Palermo and the Botanical Garden, but the zoo wasn’t on the list, and the cemetery was open from 7am to 6pm.
While I searched the internet, Joe had mapped our route. A short walk, he said. But Amanda refused to come. The New York Times had an article the other day about the Obamas facing the challenge of traveling with teenagers – I was amused and reassured, as it resembled our experience, though of course the article contained none of the painful details of the sulking, grumbling and carping. And I imagine when the Obamas leave Malia and Sasha to sleep late in a foreign country the girls are under heavy guard. Nevertheless, forcing her to go to the zoo didn’t seem wise, and I wanted to send the message that we knew she would be fine on her own. With some trepidation, we left her, with strict instructions not to go out. I had gone to the supermarket the day before so there were plenty of sandwich fixings in the refrigerator.
We had no security guards for Amanda
It was a beautiful day, with an intensely blue sky, hot sun, cool breezes, and the temperature in the eighties. And it was lovely to be alone with Joe. We walked and walked and walked through Recoleta and into Palermo and finally came to the botanical garden, which looked beautiful through the locked gate. Joe couldn’t understand why you would close a park; it’s not as though you need staff there. I held my tongue.
The zoo entrance was beyond the garden, another long two blocks. It too was locked. I stopped a young couple to ask, and they confirmed that it was closed. “But I looked on the internet and it didn’t say anything about the zoo being closed.” They had done the same; they were also tourists, from Brazil. “I can’t believe this,” said Joe. “That’s because you expect things to work as they should; I assume things will go wrong.” He thought I was criticizing his attitude, but we resolved that. The little frictions of travel are so much easier to smooth out without an adolescent third party observing and commenting.
The elephants were on holiday
We walked on past the zoo, which was surrounded by a low stone wall topped by a fence. Graffiti on the wall called for ‘Liberacion de animales’ in red spray paint. ‘Zoo = carcel.’ Then a dialogue: another red ‘Zoo =,’ followed by a swastika. A black border had effaced the hooks of the swastika, leaving a simple box with a red cross inside. Had the second artist been offended by the swastika, or by equating the animals’ imprisonment with the Holocaust?
Dense bamboo blocked our view through the fence. I could hear strange bird calls and monkey screams. Then a gap in the bamboo revealed three llamas standing in the sunlight, necks erect, long faces disdainful. We watched them a while; they never moved. It was their day off.
The zoo is in a tree-filled city neighborhood of tall apartment buildings. I imagined living in the penthouse. I would sit out on my balcony behind my red geraniums, eating medialunas with my excellent coffee, and look down into the whole zoo. I wondered about the animal racket. Joe wondered about the smell.
Alas, our trip to the zoo included very little zoo.The challenges of travel are exhausting and frustrating. Novelty is exhilarating, but familiarity is a comfort. When we arrived back in Miami Amanda said, “Yes! Everything is in English.” I haven’t decided whether for the holidays you can’t beat home sweet home. Next Thanksgiving we’re planning to hike the Grand Canyon. Maybe we’ll spend Christmas in Gainesville.
Nov 29, 2014
My brother Richard Eder died last Friday, after a long illness and two final days in the hospital. I have just come from three days with family – his wife and seven grown children, six grandchildren, two great-grands, and assorted mates – and a funeral mass and burial in Mt Auburn Cemetery. We spent the days together in Dickie and Esther’s apartment overlooking Fresh Pond Reservoir in Cambridge, talking, crying, laughing, singing. Lots of coffee and tea and wine, lots of food.
Mt. Auburn Cemetery image:bostoncalendar.com
And now I’m sitting in Logan Airport on Thanksgiving Day, with my sister Luli, in front of a television with three bright and smiling news announcers. The airport is fairly empty, the flights are fairly full. They are talking about Black Friday, interviewing a man who’s first in line at a Best Buy. He’s been camped there for a week. ‘What are you planning to buy?’ Two tablets, a laptop, a 55-inch TV…I lose track. And they speak in doleful tones of the dying out of the American Black Friday tradition. The thrill of the deal. Families camping out together. The great tradition is being eroded by sales that begin on Thanksgiving day, Internet Saturday specials and on and on.
Black Friday image:protectamerica.com
Black Friday has never been part of my life. It has been going on for about fifteen years. How can anyone call it a tradition, how can anyone mourn it, even in jest? It is a celebration that horrifies me, a celebration of buying stuff, stuff and more stuff, like eating contests where contestants down 60 hotdogs in ten minutes. I am not alone. Adbusters, a Canadian magazine, promotes Buy Nothing Day, and urges people to stage creative protests in stores and shopping malls. click
For me, Thanksgiving tradition is families coming together from near and far, eating too much of the foods they have always eaten, a long spell of digestion in the living room with desultory conversation, a long walk together, and then a return to the kitchen for sandwiches of leftovers and more slices of pie. It is consumption, but not consumerism. If I had my druthers I’d introduce a custom of going around the table with everybody saying what they’re grateful for. And if I were religious I’d surely include prayers that directed our thanks to God.
Postprandial walk
Like Thanksgiving, weddings and funerals bring families together. Thanksgiving usually includes somebody aggravating somebody. click Weddings primarily glorify the bride while providing plenty of material for gossip. In my happily limited experience, funerals focus on love and grief. They are a time for family to be kind, to take care of each other. Hearts are open, faces are naked. We remember the dead and dwell on what we loved about them.
I didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving this year. I celebrated and mourned my brother, surrounded and supported by the family I love.
Richard Eder image:washingtonpost.com -upi
Oct 30, 2014
Lipstick plant, tibouchina, and salvia
The chrysanthemum is almost open.
The mushrooms are cool, but I wish they weren't all over the yard.
The weird phallic Victorian plant I showed you in Garden in August has detumesced, and bloomed.
Look how they've grown since August!
