The Courageous Life

I just did some late 'spring cleaning' - gathered up several bags of clothing and 'stuff' that needs to be either given to the Red Cross, stored in the basement, sold in a yard sale or dumped. We have too much. When I used to travel for my job, I used to love living from a suitcase for the two weeks. It was liberating.

Grasses in Arizona - January '07

And, when I would go to Arizona for yoga camps - I would relish packing the bare necessities: 5 white tee shirts, 2 pairs white 'ghee' pants, 5 pairs socks, 10 pairs underwear, deodorant... and a flashlight. When I got back home from these trips, and even from vacations - everything I came back to seemed excessive - so many drawers of clothing, so many shoes. It was so much simpler just living out of a suitcase.

Arizona, January '07

My brothers and I grew up very modestly, and the few things that we had, in retrospect, have taken on the luster of holy grails for their simplicity, functionality, integrity and lack of pretension: an all-metal folding dining set that my father painted a different bright color every few years; a wooden stool that was set just outside the back door looking out onto the vegetable garden; the beautiful mosaic tile floor of the back patio that we somehow never properly appreciated as children; the bedsheets, printed with little ditsy floral patterns that I would recognize in an instant even now. I find that the more prosaic these things are, the more 'background' they occupied in the past, the greater their power to call forth feelings and impressions almost Lazarus-like from our memories.

Berries on a tree. Catskills, NY - Nov'09

We didn't have a store-bought artificial Christmas tree which most people used in the tropics. So, my father would cut down a small live tree. He had to strip the leaves because it was not an evergreen and the leaves would dry and fall off anyway. After stripping the leaves, he painted the whole tree with a layer of glue and we used cotton balls to stick 'snow' on all the branches. Then we decorated it with multicolored string lights and thin multicolored glass foil balls. It was beautiful, it was bold. So bold that we didn't want our friends to see it. Conformity does kill courage. Now that I look at the one existing photograph of one of his Christmas trees, I marvel at my father's creativity and our stunning lack of appreciation.

Arizona, January '07

Here in America, we have so much that appreciation is almost extinct, and poor courage, like a refugee has had to seek higher ground. These days courage has to make the news to make the news, and the simple art of 'making do' is now riding the leading edge of a new 'creativity' that glamorizes frugality and  homespun unsophistication. This is now in vogue and therefore smacks of (no!) conformity. And, did I mention conformity kills?

Photos: Mine

Love

I'll freely admit

to not knowing

how it works -

what it provokes,

or prevents,

what it soothes,

what it upends, 
and neither what 
sustains or suspends

it, what begins and
(God!) what ends it.

- Lorraine Robain

Up in the Air

My fingernails are almost grown out. Only about 2 millimeters or so remain before the deep ridges disappear from the nails of my left hand. I don't know the cause for sure, but every time I've had them there has been a preceding period of intense stress or grief in my life. This time they were the result (I think) of the tough time I had in February-March of this year. After February I found myself dropping things I didn't have the energy for. I eased out of situations in which I felt uncomfortable, and focused mostly on work and my son's upcoming 6th grade finals. I debated whether I should even plant a garden this spring. I almost didn't. 

In the movie "Up in the air", George Clooney's character Ryan Bingham is a corporate downsizing expert, a traveling executioner. In his spare time, he gives seminars on the merits of downsizing one's life. He encourages people to examine the contents of their life's 'backpacks', to unpack them and repack only what is really essential. That's a compelling notion, except that some things are not quite so black and white.

What about those things that bring you enough of both pain and happiness to keep you weighing them in the balance forever? 

"How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you're carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life... you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, then you start adding larger stuff.Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV... the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home... I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office... and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sister, your children your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other, to live symbiotically over a lifetime: star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks." 


- Ryan Bingham

Collateral

 I had been watching the tomato patch for a few days now - staring, trying to pick out the tomato vines from the rest of the plants in between. My neighbor to the right had given me the seedlings which I'd neglected to plant till at least 2 weeks too late. Then I'd neglected to stake and tie them till another couple of weeks beyond the optimum time, and now the weeding - similarly delayed. My neighbor to the right hates weeds, hates disorder and even disdains her vegetable plants that fail to perform. My neighbor to the left, whose yard also bounds mine is another prude who will snip anything hanging over her fence. I think she barely tolerates my tomatoes which lean on, and gain some support from the pristine chain-link fence which divides us. That leaves my neighbor directly behind my backyard, God bless him. His yard is a jungle. There's his pool bounded by roses, clematis, blackberries, honeysuckle, plus other assorted beautiful unidentifiable species of greenery. All of it tumbles over my back fence, made of unpainted, weathered picket and covered with an evergreen vine which grew over the top and through the spaces between the slats years ago, and stayed. In the Spring I get pink clematis, followed by the honeysuckle, sprays of cherry red roses, followed by the blackberries. The whole thing is covered by the white flowers of a vigorous and 'pesky' potato vine (a morning glory variety) that my neighbors to the left and right abhor - but which I cultivate for its flowers. I have stakes and shepherd's crooks for it to clamber on, and have fantasized about letting it run up the pole to the birdhouse, except my neighbor to the left might not look too kindly on that. But, back to the tomatoes. I had put off the weeding until today. But the thing about tomatoes is - once the flowers set, you have to be very careful with them. They fall off with rough handling as do the tomatoes themselves once they've grown in- which is what happened as I did my weeding and supplementary (extremely tardy) staking and tying today. And that is what brings me to my little bowl of green tomatoes.

The Bright Side

Never mind that the kites got stuck, 
don't their colors look pretty against 
the flowers on the tree?



Photo: Queens Park Savannah,
Trinidad - 2008

After the Long Winter

Some dreams need to die

so you can live without

Unfulfilment its worse 
than just Having nothing 
impossible impractical

expired dreams Need to go

If all they do Is ache

they need to be Extracted

like a sick tooth or broken
into a Million pieces and
scattered to the four

winds As dust and lost

like you'd Lose a tailgater or

Your patience for nonsense

shaken like you'd Shake a bad

bug or any Other sly microbe

That weaseled in uninvited or 

like You'd shake the drapes off

pretty somewhat but laden with

your Sloughed-off skin After 
the long winter.

Lorraine Robain


Photo - kites over Shanghai 2006

Default to Duty

 So, I'm back to one of my earlier strands of thought. This idea of self determination versus fate or destiny and to what extent these two overlap or dovetail, or don't. I've just gotten up from a cosmic smackdown. Yup. I'm against the ropes catching my breath. I tried to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee but my Cosmic Dance Partner wasn't having it.

The CDP has very definite ideas about what steps I should be taking and when I get too creative, he/she/it reminds me that I'm not in charge. What the CDP seems to uphold as far as my initiative is duty-driven activity. If I'm doing duty or, even better, double-duty - then voila there's a yellow brick road and I can sashay or rhumba or cha cha  to my heart's delight.

But when I set off on some little side trip, we've got trouble - a la the aforementioned smackdown.
The smackdown itself is a curious, unfathomable thing.
I don't get hurt. Not really. I just get neutralized. I get a 'game over' screen and I'm right back where I started. The music just stops.  Its like you roll the dice and draw the card that says: Go to jail, go directly to jail... When the new game screen comes up, I usually hit the 'duty' button in a hurry.

My life hums along when I'm doing the big D which includes all the motherly, wifely, jobly, and gardenly things that I've signed up for - or that fall into my lap for my attention.

I have tried to change my life a few times: or add some things that I thought would enhance my life experience, but they've never stuck. Maybe through lack of will or perseverance, frustration, bad luck, bad timing or, sometimes via the good old smackdown - I've been 'delivered' from these 'distractions' from duty. Some examples of non-duty activities: the yoga kick I was on for 6 years, the poetry kick I was on for about 12 years, an outrageous plan to leave my family for 3 months and just be alone - these things, have come to naught. Or the pinnacles I imagined I'd reach, just weren't reached, or didn't exist, or were shrouded in cloud...or, who the hell knows.

There is a sense of resignation at this point - that nothing outside of certain parameters will be supported or condoned by my CDP. So, making lemonade, I reason that its for the best, that I'm probably being protected from unseen and unknown dangers, that my duty is my destiny, so why fight it?
It's a good life all told, and I am happy when I view it as such, though sometimes it just doesn't feel like mine. So, if I want smooth sailing I say: Give me duty or give me death!        But on the inside its more like a rumble from the belly of the Amistad: Give us frickin' free.

Resisting Arrest

They say it takes 21 days to form a new habit, or more darkly, to break a bad one. I've been a hopeless Coke addict for several years.The most helpful insight to my situation was contained in the question posed to me on a plane to Shanghai. The man next to me, with whom I'd struck up a conversation asked, "Is it the caffeine, or the fizz that you really crave?" He said that these were Coke's two most addictive components - the taste and the temperature being the others. I stopped, stunned at this truly new perspective. I didn't know. I knew that I could take coffee or leave it. I knew I couldn't drink a flat coke or a hot (room temperature) coke. I knew the latter because that's precisely what they had me drink when I was pregnant to test for gestational diabetes - a room temperature super sweet, super concentrated black cola drink - without the fizz. I hated it. Could it be that I was in it just for the fizz? If that was true then I should be just as happy with a seltzer. I tried drinking Perrier for a while, I loved the refreshing cold fizz, but then I got tired of the blandness. What does this mean except that sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The net result is that with the exception of some periods of time when I seem not to crave it very much, I am still an avid Coke drinker. It was so bad (or so good) that I developed a system of grading or rating Coca Cola depending on its source. Coke currently comes in the 12 oz can, the 20 oz bottle, the 1 liter bottle, the 2 liter bottle, the mini glass bottle, and the soda fountains at fast food restaurants. The best tasting Coke ( to me) comes from the soda fountains -- if it is freshly dispensed. I never accept a cup of Coke that's been standing (as happens when they pre-dispense during the lunchtime rush). Besides the fact that all soda fountains are not created equal, each soda fountain is also subject to variation. A Coke pumped early in the morning from a machine resting all night tends to be syrupy and less fizzy than one pumped at lunchtime from the same machine when all cylinders are firing and the seltzer/syrup ratio is optimal. I'm serious.The best tasting Coke is also extremely cold - loaded with ice or just shy of freezing.

My son and I have rated the Mc Donald's in our vicinity and there is one in particular that we will not buy from - reason being the Coke tastes 'soapy' - which means that oil from the fryers must have condensed somewhere in the works of the soda fountain. This is truly spit-worthy.

The next best Coke comes from a can which has been chilled to the brink of freezing. The 2 liter will not taste good for more than a few hours after its opened. The 16 oz bottle is oddly gassy -- way too much fizz and not enough 'Coke' taste.

That being said -- my habit is one 12 oz can a day, or one medium soda fountain drink a day, but not more than 2 cans a day. I like the soda fountain option because the amount of ice they put actually leaves less room for soda. Beyond 2 cans per day, the caffeine gets to me. I guess I shouldn't be too hard on myself. I know a man who drinks two 2-liter bottles of Pepsi in a sitting. Really. He chugged that down during the course of a 3 hour writing class that we both attended, so God knows how much he really consumes in a day. Maybe I'm not too bad, though it is unnerving to see what Coke does to car paint and I've heard that it can clean toilet bowls. My insides must be squeaky.

Of Passwords and Prestige

My 12 year old son is a video game junkie. This I say without a smile or even a hint of one. There is nothing I like about the fact that he prefers to spend many hours a day on his PS3 rather than doing any other activity. It used to be that he would play FIFA soccer or NBA basketball, but lately its just one game: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II - aka MW2.  He plays this game with his friend down the block, his cousin in Queens, a friend in Florida, and his cousin's cousin in Austria - at the same time. The ridiculous result of this arrangement is that these boys would rather sit at the game console in their own homes than meet in person to play. Meeting in person has a major drawback - they are away from their own machines and profiles - i.e. they are away from their game 'identities': their K-D ratios, and their 'rank'.

If your K-D (kill to death) ratio sucks, you are labeled a 'Noob'(slang for the slang: newbie). That's such an undesirable state of affairs that if one of your friends is a really good player, you may consider giving him your password, so that he can play 'as you' and raise your rank or prestige. The other way this can go is - someone who knows your password and wants to ruin your rep can play 'as you' and destroy your rank.

Recently my son's account was hacked, basically hijacked. Someone signed in, changed the password and locked him out. Since he had shared his password with a couple of his friends, he had at least that many suspects. His level of distress was greater only when he learned that the 'OpTic Nation sniper clan' he'd been invited to was a fake (a whole other story). The process of smoking out the offender was unsettling for him to go through, and painful for me to observe.

It did turn out to be one of his friends, though not the one he suspected. The deed was done in retaliation for an imagined slight - but my son made light of the incident to keep the friendship. We reset all his passwords and I told him never to share them again, which translated to 'fight your own battles and don't trust anybody'. In the end it was this that he had the hardest time with.

    

Thunderbirds are Go!

July 23, 24 and 25, 2010
32nd Annual Thunderbird American Indian

Mid-Summer Pow Wow
New York City 's oldest and largest powwow will feature three days of inter-tribal Native American dance competitions to which the public is invited. Over 40 Indian nations are represented at this spectacular event held in the apple orchard on the farm grounds. A large selection of quality Native American art, crafts, jewelry and foods are available.
Admission: Adults $9.00 (all weekend pass $15.00), children: $4.00 (age 12 and under) (all weekend pass $5.00) 

Performance Times	Gates Open
Friday	7:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m.	6:00 p.m.
Saturday	12:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m. 7:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m.	10:00 a.m.
Sunday	12:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m.	10:00 a.m.

http://www.queensfarm.org/events.html

Photos: mine from various Thunderbird pow-wows

The Good Doctor

I just had what can only be described as a wonderful experience. About an hour ago, I had my wisdom tooth pulled. I'll pause here for effect... Yes - I had a beautiful time at my extraction! All week I'd been apprehensive, having nightmarish visions of the doctor standing on the armrests of the chair, yanking and being unable to dislodge the tooth, but like I do in all stressful situations, I started my abdominal breathing exercises as soon as I sat in the chair and tried to visualize a good outcome.

As I sat breathing from my belly, in walked Dr Moore. Doctor Marlon Moore. A tall, beautiful black man whose first words to me as he looked at my chart were: "Wow! We were born on the exact same day!" Same day, same year. He was pleasant, gentle, positive and bright and talked me through the whole process, being very patient and not at all condescending. He got my icky wisdom tooth out literally before I knew it.

What was very remarkable about him was his touch. I've been to periodontists, endodontists, regular GP dentists and cosmetic dentists and their "hand manners" were all very clinical and sometimes even downright hostile. My periodontist treated my face as an obstacle to his work - that's the only way I can put it. But Dr. Moore was so very caring in his touch, I couldn't believe it. After he was done, I gave him a crooked smile while biting down on gauze, shook his hand and thanked him as profusely as I could with jaw full of novocaine.

It was by far the most pleasant experience I've ever had in a dentist's chair. In fact as I left the office I was raving to Dexter (my husband) that I was in love with my dentist (actually, he's an oral/maxillofacial surgeon).I told him how sexy and handsome he was- and how could he not be, being born on the same day as me. He was also married - the lucky girl! So, I've got the ice pack wedged between my jaw and my shoulder as I type, but otherwise I'm great. Thank you, Dr. Moore!