I’m an arrival/departure junkie.

There’s really nothing sweeter than coming back to a place I left a year ago. Fights and grievances evaporate, everything appears shiny and new, and I find myself appreciating details I might never have noticed if I lived here all the time. People are happy to see me, and instead of uncomfortable conversations about what I’m doing to make a living, we chat about my fabulous tan.

One of these days I’ll have to settle down. Pick a country and stick with it for a few consecutive years. Like a grownup.

But not yet.

1. I never thought I’d say this, but I haven’t done much of anything on the internet for the last year. I still post from time to time, but I haven’t written anything of substance (here) in ages, and lately I go weeks without even checking my email. This time last year I was posting fifteen times a day.

2. I still think about the internet – and the people in it – all the time, it’s just no longer in the same kind of demented fervor omigawdimmamisstheparty breathlessness. I’m quite sure this means I’m no longer addicted.

3. Now that I’ve overcome my internet codependency, I’m slowly paving a digital path for myself, one that I can travel in a healthy manner. I’m in no hurry.

4. The internet and I can’t be codependent any more than my favorite scarf and I can, but still. I project and personify because it amuses me, not because I don’t know the difference.

5. I really hope Donald Trump runs for President, because his humiliation will be awesome to watch.

6. The other day I was craving Starbucks, which, naturally, does not have a franchise in Grenada. So I melted a candy bar and added it to a cup of instant coffee, and BOOM. Tastes just like home.

7. I don’t even drink Starbucks. I also don’t eat McDonald’s or Pizza Hut or Taco Bell or any fast food, really, but I crave all of them like crazy when I see commercials. That’s why I learned to make deep dish pizza from scratch.

8. Thirteen years ago in Paris, I met Margaret Atwood and had a chance to talk to her at length, but I didn’t, because I was scared and also somehow thought it was an opportunity I’d have again. Past me was silly, and should’ve worn more comfortable shoes.

9. Speaking of Margaret Atwood, I just finished Oryx & Crake. I highly recommend it, especially if you enjoy love stories about the end of the world.

10. To Bean, everything on TV is either cartoons or the news, except for Futurama, which he says is both. I think I’m going to appropriate that, and refer to everything in life as that’s fun or insipid as cartoons and everything else as the news. Except for this post, which is both.

P. had been living in Grenada for over five years the day she got the first water bill.

At first, she thought it was a bookkeeping error, one that the utility would sort out on its own. But the bills continued to arrive, and she decided that even though she couldn’t possibly be the responsible party, this was a situation she could not ignore. So she called customer service, and explained her problem, that they were charging her for water even though every drop of water used by her household came from the rain that fell into her water collection tank, that she wasn’t even connected to the municipal water supply.

After much transferring and even more holding, she finally got a manager on the line, who explained that the utility had rights to all the water on the island, so they were billing her for her estimated water use. Her rain barrel, the manager insisted, was besides the point.

For a moment, P. got so angry she thought her face might spontaneously combust. But she’s a clever lady, so she thought for a moment, slowly let out a cleansing breath, and said,

“Fair enough. If you control the water, cut off the rain over my house.”

This happened about four years ago, and I’m happy to report that the sky still rains into her tank.

I was standing in my kitchen, contemplating a sink full of dirty dishes and admitting to myself that I’d really love to put the chore off by calling a friend to chat, but that I can’t – easily – because I’ve been out of touch with everyone for over six months, long enough that the only person who still emails me is Al Gore.

I felt tears burning in my nose, and I let myself feel sorry for myself for about 90 seconds, but that’s all, because I have better things to do, and if I wanted a birthday party, dammit, I should have planned one.

Bean, the almost-five-year-old amateur psychologist, looks up from penmanship practice to ask me why I’m crying.

“Mommy’s only crying a little bit. I’m OK. I’m just sad because my birthday is tomorrow.”

He nods, wise and understanding. “You’re sad because it’s not your birthday right now.”

Which wasn’t the problem at all, but it was funny, and I laughed, which banished my tears for real. Then I washed the dishes, and we both got dressed for the beach, even though it’s raining, because we are not easily distracted from our dreams.

I’m trying to find my “just right”.

I’ve always been sensitive about how I write about Grenada, the things that happen to me and around me, and especially the other people involved. There are some tales that I’ll never tell, and others in which I give once-real-life characters fictional cloaks that I hope will protect them in the unlikely event someone who knows them discovers my stories.

It was easy to do this when I was in the States, writing from a distance. It felt safe. But now, back here on the island, it doesn’t.

For example. I’d love to vent the whole horrible and hilarious story of trying to get the police to take an interest in my stolen laptop, but I don’t want to become a target. (They never did take an interest. I got it back without their help.)

I’d also enjoy sharing today’s indignities, suffered when I went to Immigration to get my visa extended, but as angry and righteous as I might feel about the utter lack of professionalism I encountered, I’ve learned not to bite the hand that’s holding my passport.

I hate Word with a burning, unbridled passion. Not only is it clunky and slow, it makes inane “corrections” to my spelling and grammar.

So, mostly I used TextEdit. TextEdit is my jam. TextEdit and I like-like each other. TextEdit and I are kissing in a tree. 

Alas, TextEdit has a fatal flaw. No word count, and sometimes a girl just really needs word count. For ages now, I’ve been meaning to find a simple, light text editor that also has a word count function. But I never actually looked, because I figured it didn’t exist, and that if it did, I’d have to pay for it, and it wasn’t *that* important. So I kept using TextEdit, and whenever I really needed to count my words I’d copy and paste into Word, giving myself a french pedicure during the time it took the program to load. 

This has been going on now for over a year. Until last night, when I decided I’d actually do a thorough search for the kind of program I need. In under ten minutes, I found it. It’s perfect. It has word count and a few other useful features, but it’s light and loads really quickly. It’s also free.

And it’s called Bean.

My grandfather was a veteran of World War II. He’d been on the Normandy coast, though he missed the gruesomeness of D-Day proper. 

In 1998, when I visited the graveyard there, I walked down to the ocean and collected some sand for him. I filled an empty film canister. (Remember those?) 

It was an eerie experience. I’m sensitive to psychic disturbances, and I could almost hear the crush of souls hovering in the air over Omaha Beach. When I got back to New York, I visited my grandfather and told him what I’d felt there. He was something of a mystic himself, so he understood. He believed in stuff like that. He was an inspired carpenter, and he often said that his creations just sprang forth from the wood. His hands were tools, he said, but whose tools, exactly, he was never quite sure.

One night when Bean was about eight months old, we took the subway from my dad’s house in The Bronx to my friend’s apartment on the Upper East Side. He was still Snugli-bound back then, so it was an easy trip. Pleasant. Fun. 

We had a good night. He found her stash of cat food and stacked, knocked down and restacked the cans with unbridled glee. They were the best blocks he’d ever seen, and to this day my friend jokes about stocking up on cat food before Bean comes over. 

We left after dark, and walked from her apartment on 77th Street to the 86th Street Subway Station, where we caught a Uptown 6. It wasn’t too cold and I’m totally comfortable in New York City, so I didn’t hurry. I couldn’t see my son’s face, because he was facing out, forward, which was one of his requirements by that time, that he be allowed to see as much as possible of the world around him. 

The lights and the people, the shouts and the music, the squeal of the trucks and crosstown busses and the rumble of the subway beneath our feet. These were all things Bean drank up, but his favorite thing by far was all the people, especially the ones walking their dogs. I am certain of this even though he was too young to speak, because my boy’s face has always communicated on a plane far beyond mere words. 

He was used to being popular. He was born in Grenada, where everyone knew his name. Neighbors called to him when they passed our house and saw him out on the verandah. People, as far as he knew, were always friendly, bringing him a mango, or a cookie, for no other reason than they had one to share and thought of him, the infant mayor of Westerhall Bay.

That night I saw New Yorkers through his eyes. Their heads down, their eyes hooded, their pace quick; busy, busy. He tried to engage them all. He threw out the only hooks he had, hoping to catch them with his eyes, bait them with his toothless grin, reel them in with his tiny, gummy, waving hands. 

Not a single person even made eye contact. 

Finally, in frustration, he turned to me and asked with his eyes. Why, Mommy? Why don’t they want to play with me?

I brought my lips close to his ear and whispered, Because it’s cold and dark, and they want to get home as soon as possible. They don’t know any better, baby.

West Indian slang for ejaculate (both the noun and the verb) is “break”. I thought, at first, that this was kind of weird, but the more I thought about it, the more it made perfect sense.

Break? Break. Break! Yes. Exactly.

There’s also a saying, something that you ask people who are just not hearing what you’re telling them. If you find a person is obtuse or bull-headed or just needs to be reminded of the same damn t’ing over and over?

“Break stick in your ears, or what?”

I was so proud of myself when I sorted that one out. And I thought it was pretty hilarious. To ask someone if they had semen in their ears that was keeping them from hearing properly? That’s a real knee-slapper. I wondered if such an idea could be acceptably translated into the American lexicon. I made tentative plans to appropriate the concept, incorporate it into my personal idiom.

About a year later I realized that I’d completely misunderstood, and that the break stick question is actually asking if someone stuck a stick in your ear and broke it off, leaving the end of the stick in there, making you half-deaf. There’s some subtext there, and its juiciness is eclipsed only by its yuckiness.

I wasn’t proud of that realization, but rather relieved that I’d never explicitly stated what I had thought the slang phrase meant.

The learning curve when you live in another country actually gets steeper as you reach the top. When you first arrive in a foreign land, you’re overwhelmed by all the differences. The accents, the food, the daily words and actions that are small to you but hugely insulting to the lady in the market who sells you breadfruit or the taxi man who picks you up at the airport. After six or so months you get to a point where you think you’re on the level. You know the secret handshake. You get the joke. You stop worrying about embarrassing yourself. And it feels great, understanding and being understood. You breathe a sigh of relief, and you get comfortable.

But then a year or so later, a funny thing happens. One day you’re minding your own business when a memory is triggered, something that happened in your early days, probably something someone said to you, and suddenly you understand what they really really meant. The details aren’t important, but it’s a facepalm moment for sure. You groan, wonder what else you missed and try to convince yourself that your faux pas has been forgotten.

That moment when you first truly comprehend the steepness of the learning curve is a mixed blessing. Because from then on you know enough to know that you’re still a lifetime of layers away from truly getting the joke, and that maybe, just maybe, you always will be.

My brother has one of those video cameras with a little screen that you can flip around.

I guess so that you can use it to tape yourself? Yeah.

He brought it out on Tuesday to record Bean blowing out his birthday candles and opening his presents.

At first he kept the monitor where he could see it, but then he turned it to face Bean, who got a huge kick out of seeing himself.

He started monologuing.

My brother asked him if he knew who he was talking to. Bean just looked at him. I think he sensed it was a trick question.

My brother said,

“The future, Jack. You are talking to the future.” He paused. “Do you have a message for the future?”

Bean thought for a moment and then grinned, obviously pleased with his answer.

“Yeah! NO BITING.”

I’ve been analog for four whole days. Four. Whole. Days. Weird at first, but then I got over myself and it actually felt pretty good. And it’s going to be the norm for the next couple of months or so. Some big things are in the works. I’m taking a class, self-publishing a little book and planning a major move. These are all steps forward for me, but they’ll require a lot of my attention, so I will be scarce in the digital world for a while. But only for a while.

I had a lovely Mother’s Day, and I hope you did too. I’m all personal-essayed out at the moment, but I did want to share this photo, which is one of my very favorites from Bean’s first few months. And if you’re looking to get misty-eyed about maternal love, please read the post I wrote on my mother’s birthday.

Last week I wrote a post in which I described getting ready to go to work in Grenada. I included this sentence: 

I wear a white sleeveless linen blouse and jeans that reach my ankles, because only tourists wear shorts, and I am not a tourist.

In response, an American friend asked:

I’m curious why only tourists wear shorts in Grenada. It seems like being cool (and holy cow, just the thought of jeans in a hot, humid environment make me break out in heat rash) would outweigh being “cool”, if you know what I mean. What’s the dealio?

The following was my response. 

Grenadian locals do wear shorts sometimes, but not to work. This, like every declaration I make about the island, is a general rule and there are exceptions. *I* never wore shorts to work because as one of the only women and THE only foreign woman employed there, I needed to get a lot of things right if I wanted to be taken seriously. Most of the Grenadians I worked with took great care with and interest in their appearance. They were extraordinarily polished, even when dressed very casually. I tried to take my cue from them. 

Regarding the heat? I got used to it.

Also, I really hate shaving my legs. I’m pale like my Scottish grandmother but dark and hairy like my Puerto Rican grandfather.

Speaking of whom. The shorts thing kind of reminds me how my Puerto Rican grandfather would get upset if one of us kids just bit straight into an apple, instead of peeling it and cutting it with a knife. It took me a long time to figure that out, but I think it’s because when he was growing up, that was something he associated with being poor. Eating fruit right off the tree.

But if he had grown up having money, he probably wouldn’t have cared about how we ate our apples. You know? It just wouldn’t have been an issue. And I suspect, though I have no way of knowing for sure, that that also explains why the only (non-tourist) guy  I knew who regularly wore shorts to work was the owner of the place.

He loves brooms, mops, the dishwasher, all varieties of soap, buckets and sponges.

Mommy, I want to wash. Mommy, I want to sweep. Mommy, why don’t you use the dishwasher? These are some of the first sentences he ever spoke.

He was about eight months old when I went back to work. Carol, whose primary task was ostensibly to take care of my grandmother who was dying of Parkinson’s, decided that her time at our house would now be dedicated to Bean. And since her third primary task was to cook and clean, Carol and my son spent many days together mopping, sweeping and doing the laundry. Since he was fourteen months old, he has been helping us hand-wash dishes.

After Carol went home for the day and before I got home from work, Bean would spend time with his grandmother. If you’ve ever spent more than three weeks in the tropics you know that the cleaning is never done. Our house had about thirty non-consecutive feet of verandah, and windows that were always open, letting in the breeze but also the insects and the salt that rose up from the bay. Always open unless it was raining, of course. The first tippling sound of rain quickly became a trigger for just jumping up from whatever you were doing and running around the house closing all the doors and windows. My mom often did it with not-yet-walking Bean tucked under her arm.

Then, on weekends, he’d watch his father clean. Bean’s daddy is Jah’s gift to laundry. So much so that I was banned from washing his white shirts. Banned! I couldn’t get them bright enough.

The point of this random Grenada memory is that right at this very moment I’m sitting at my desk, looking through the sliding doors at him in the driveway, happier than a clam because he’s carrying one of those enormous brooms that’s like three inches by three feet. And I’m thinking that because he spent so much time when he was very little cleaning with people he loved, he’s likely going to be all about cleaning for the rest of his life.

I can’t relate. I might even be a little jealous.

The other week I was looking for my debit card. It wasn’t where I left it. I *know* I didn’t take it anywhere, and it’s not like me to put things away in a place other than the place I always put them. (Note to young people: This is a good strategy for remembering things. Do what you’d expect yourself to do. It eliminates some guesswork.)

I looked for the card for a few hours. It was nowhere to be found. (I even looked in my sock drawer.)

So I called my bank and arranged for a new one. That was on the Tuesday. It arrived early Thursday morning, which meant that this mishap did not, after all, ruin my trip to Chicago. (I don’t use credit cards. Only debit cards. Note to young people: This a good strategy for avoiding spending money you don’t have on things you don’t need.)

You wanna guess what happened Wednesday morning? (It’s totally cool if you don’t feel like guessing. I wouldn’t feel like it either.) Wednesday morning my mom found my debit card. At the bottom of her laundry hamper. Clearly that Bean was the culprit. And so it goes.

This incident reminded me of something funny that happened a couple of months ago. I left my debit card on the kitchen table. Bean grabbed it and ran off to his playroom with it.

“Honey,” I called. “Please bring Mommy’s card back. Mommy needs it.”

His reply? “No! I am going shopping.”

“Really,” I said. “And what, if I may be so bold, are you shopping for?”

“Presents for Mommy.”

And with good reason. Ironing your clothes / cooking your lunch / mopping your floor are activities best performed before the rise of the day’s heat.

I sleep in on Sundays, until maybe 8:30. I get up to pee and while I’m in the washroom, he takes the sheets off the bed and puts them in the washing machine. So I have to stay up. Which is just as well, because half an hour after that, it’s too bright to keep your eyes closed.

Also I have to drink hot coffee. Hot something. It took me three years to convince Bean’s father that drinking diet Coke first thing in the morning wouldn’t give me a stroke. That coming from a cold place, my issue was the heat of the sun, not the ice in my drink.

Today is a working day, and so I bathe and then stand naked in front of a fan until I manage to dry my skin. The fan is set on high and I have to squeeze most of the water from my hair with a towel, because the water has nowhere to go. There’s no room for it in the moist air. I dress gingerly, trying not to get sweaty before I leave the house. I slick my hair back with baby oil and pull it into a high ponytail. I cover my hairline with a piece of batik. The top of my forehead is already covered with enormous, brown freckles. I don’t want it, or my scalp, to get burned, so I’ve got baby sunscreen all over my head. I wear a white sleeveless linen blouse and jeans that reach my ankles, because only tourists wear shorts, and I am not a tourist.

We walk down a dirt road, and then down the concrete road, to the gap that marks the intersection with the main road. We stand in the gap, on the curb. I watch the tethered goats, who are well into their daily verge-trimming chores and completely oblivious to the morning traffic. I know for a fact that these two goats can see just fine, and will also move out of the way if any genuine threat presents itself, but in the absence of external enervation, they might as well be blind, for all the reaction to visual stimuli they exhibit. I am wearing my prescription sunglasses and yet I’m squinting against the sun. I curl my neck, lowering my eyes and offering my shoulders to the heat. It’s heavy, like a just-ironed shirt, and feels like a vaguely angry massage.

There’s a man standing on the far side of the road. He’s butchering an enormous tuna. The flesh of the fish is intensely pink, and he uses a machete to cut it free from the dark grey skin. He holds the machete the way I hold a paring knife.

The bus crests the hill, and I signal for it to stop using a hand signal that announces – again – that I am not a tourist.

The main road is made of asphalt, and today they are patching it. The bus, which is really just a very big van, slows at the bend right before the Governor General’s house. I look to the right, where there’s a steep cliff and hundreds of feet of air between the vehicle and the valley floor. I think of Left-Eye Lopez, The story is she was the only one wearing a seatbelt.

We are packed tightly in the bus, with special cushions made to sit in the open spaces between the seats. The passengers are a team. We are efficient. We make the best possible use of the available space. I am sharing a row with three secondary school boys. They are fifteen, I am guessing, and narrower than my purse, so they fold themselves and sit two deep in the bench seats. They are in uniform, long pants that are polyester and forest green and white collared shirts that are awesomely stain-free. I am not good with bleach. I try to imagine the mothers of these boys, who are probably younger than I am yet quite good with bleach, and a million other tasks at which I do not excel.

Other days, when the bus is full, I’ll take a seat and squeeze myself into a space that’s smaller than I am. That’s just what you do. Then the bus drives for a few miles and you’re jostled around a bit. And you find yourself somehow magically sitting in that impossible-that-you-fit space.

The wet asphalt smells worse than burning tires. The scent is bigger and has more personality. It drifts softly past my face, and I think it’s not going to trouble me, but when it reaches my nostrils it grabs them with both hands and flows sharply, urgently upwards into my nose. I hold my breath rather than allow myself to inhale any more of what I picture as Tinkerbells of tar, flitting kamikaze fighters determined to interfere with the child growing inside me.

It started when he was newborn. 

It’s funny, you know? Because you’re pregnant for nine months, waiting for the baby. Anticipating the baby. Imagining the baby. Et cetera. And then! Labor and delivery, which is basically like military basic training, except condensed and in your vagina. And then you bring home the baby!

And what does the baby do? The baby SLEEPS.

Or at least Bean did. He slept for hours and hours on end, and all I could do was sit there and watch him. I watched his chest rise and fall. I listened to him breathe. I watched his nose wiggle and wondered if he was dreaming. I saw him smile and said to myself, I don’t care what “the book” says, that’s not gas. 

That phase lasted for maybe four weeks. Four weeks in which I couldn’t wait to look in his eyes, talk to him, play with him, but couldn’t because you wake a sleeping newborn like you simply walk into Mordor.

Also, because he was a newborn, his limbs were still all tucked in while he slept. I hear this is typical, that most babies spend their first weeks still sleeping the way they did in the womb, where they had to make the best possible use of the available space, and so tucked their limbs in, neatly folding them against their bodies. 

Try to picture that. He WAS a bean. The same shape, anyway. And so I, in my post-birth quasi-delirium, in this weird state of grace where words were just coming to me, seemingly out of the ether, started calling him bean. 

I started calling him bean, which evolved into Bean, and it stuck.

His full, complete and official nickname is Joaquín the illustrious Bean. 

Lucky for both of us, he likes it.

In May of 1999 I had gotten my BA from Cornell University. I had double-majored in History and French Lit and harbored vague dreams of graduate school, but I had no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, or even the next five years. And so, in a sequence of events best described as coasting along the path of least resistance, I took a job at the not-for-profit health care agency where I had worked every summer since graduating from high school. I rented an apartment two blocks from my mother’s house. I got engaged. 

Over the next few years I became an expert time waster. I watched a lot of TV. I took a lot of baths. I ate a lot of fast food. I did a lot of online shopping. I stopped opening my mail and answering my phone. I fell out of touch with most of my friends. My fiance and I were a perfect pair of unhappy, frustrated hermits. I knew this was, to say the very least, a profoundly unproductive way to be spending my twenties.

By the summer of 2001, I had woken up. I had made a commitment to myself. I was going to dig my life out of the rubble. I was, after all, only 24. I got well started and for the first time since college life felt promising. *I* felt promising.

Then September 11th happened, and I drowned. My lungs filled with water. I sank.

By terrible coincidence, my mother had just sold her house, moved onto a sailboat, and left for the Caribbean. She and her husband had taken an early retirement. They’d been planning it for years. For the very first time in my life, I needed her, and she wasn’t there. 

Two years and all sorts of inertia later, I’m no longer engaged. I’m living in a new place, full of light and the best tasting well water on Jah’s green earth. I quit my job, and have enough savings to stay unemployed for a while. I am planning to write. Finally. 

I am barely two months into this brave new world of mine, when a fire destroys nearly everything I own, including my computer and my books and every single word I’ve ever put to paper. It is far and away the worst thing that has ever happened to me, but it is only the beginning. 

After that I ended up in Massachusetts. I moved in with my brother, who was a student in Amherst. I spend my days on campus, in the library, reading. I spend my nights drinking and smoking and plotting precisely how I would like to relive my life. I want a do-over.

I need a do-over, you know? Because in a few short years I’ve managed to go from promising Ivy League graduate to wannabe hippie loser. It’s earth-shattering, how far I’ve fallen. Or how far I *think* I’ve fallen, because the bottom is still leagues below me. 

So. It’s now January 2004. I’ve moved back to New York. I’m living with my dad. I am employed. I am seeing friends I haven’t seen in years. I am, wonder of wonders, doing it right. But I get impatient, which is I guess why I end up getting back together with this guy I dated in college, and moving in with him almost immediately. He’s precisely the same person he was when I broke up with him in 1997, but! But when I’m with him, I am almost the same person I was in 1997. The person I was before everything went wrong. 

Clearly, this is not going to end well.

After she left I consciously thought to myself, OK, you can start grieving now. But I didn’t even know where to start, so I just drank myself as senseless as humanly possible. I craved oblivion. 

I suddenly realized I hated my job. I hated working in the Financial District. I hated living on the Upper East Side. Everything irritated me. I had no patience, I did not care, I did not want to be bothered. Food disgusted me. Questions annoyed me. I was angry, I was empty, it was all so fucking tragic. I’d never lost a family member in my entire life, and now, in less than six weeks, I’d lost three.

Here’s what I remember about that December. I remember walking along 79th Street, mesmerized by the grinding hum of the crosstown busses, idly considering throwing myself in front of one, weighing the question the way I’d weigh what kind of sandwich wrap I wanted to order, pesto or sun-dried tomato. I remember sitting my boss’s office, slamming my hand on her desk, telling her she was wasting my time with her frivolous interruptions, adding that I would have finished that project by now if she’d only let me work in peace. I remember a rooftop party in midtown, where I stayed far from the edge because I knew I might jump accidentally, by reflex. I remember pounding can after can of sugarfree Red Bull and still feeling sluggish. I remember sleepless nights of staring into the darkness, listening to my boyfriend breathe beside me, and resenting him and his easy, careless slumber. I remember sobbing in the shower. I remember the yawn of fear in my gut. I remember thinking that if I starved to death, they couldn’t call it suicide.

That’s how I spend my days. I spend my nights drinking and smoking and reading and plotting precisely how I would like to relive my life. I want a do-over.

I need a do-over, you know? Because in a few short years I’ve managed to go from promising Ivy League graduate to wannabe hippie loser. It’s earth-shattering, how far I’ve fallen. Or how far I *think* I’ve fallen, because the bottom is still leagues below me.

Leagues.

My housekeeper is a champion phone-talker. All day, she does her work, one of three attached to her ear. Usually she’s just gossiping, catching up with one of her sisters, aunties, or friends. Sometimes she’s venting about her husband. Every once in a while, she’s moaning about her eldest daughter. This is the most infrequent topic, but it’s also the best time to eavesdrop. Tracie’s 15.

“You know Tracie, you know what she go and do? She got a Harry Potter book down there at the school. Can you imagine dey have dem t’ings? And they give them to children? Only wickedness comes from reading devil book. She hide it from me. Wickedness! Auntie saw her wit’ it and told me. Otherwise I don’t know when I’d a know. You remember what the pastor say about that Harry Potter? Now Tracie, she wicked. Wickedness she got from that book. And she run from me, you know? She run and she hide and for that I had to beat she.”

All while she’s talking she’s mopping my kitchen floor. Her neck, I think, must get sore, cricked to the side like that all the time. 

I almost don’t say anything to her, but then I do.

I’ve read Harry Potter, I tell her. I really dig those books, actually. You see I’ve got all of them here on my shelf, hardcovers that I carried all the way from New York on the airplane? I went to that trouble because I love to read them over and over. There’s no evilness in there. It’s about bravery, and sticking up for your friends… 

She’s not hearing me, I can tell. She’s grinning wide, wide and she’s looking down at the floor, her toes turned in towards each other, like she’s some lickle schoolgirl being scolded by she teacher. I can’t see her eyes. 

I’m doing this wrong. Carol’s three years older than me, and the mother to six children. She can make a quarter pound of flour and a banana last for a week when she has to. And I’m standing here in front of her with my education from up the road, embarrassing her. Beating a child for reading isn’t right, but neither is this. 

I take a deep breath.

“All I’m trying to say is that maybe all Tracie’s going to remember about this is that you beat her for reading. And maybe that’s not the message you want to send.” 

Yes, Miss Maria, she says. She smiles at me, and then walks down the hallway to my grandmother’s bedroom. Her back is straight and her head is held high, and she sways when walks, regally.

I am mother and daughter, teacher and student, writer and reader. I’m woman and lover, but never have been – and likely never will be – a wife.

I am a traveler, and I am fearless. I wear flip-flops in the security line, because it saves time, and I never check luggage if I can help it. I carry my cream rinse and lotion in a Nalgene travel set. The little bottles hold 3 ounces each, and I appreciate their simple, finite shapes. My passport and tickets and cash are in a pouch that swings resolutely from my neck, and thus my hands stay free, always available. 

I am sometimes surprised, but I’ll never let it show on my face.  

My hair is long and thick and coarse, Aslanesque, and looks better the less I wash it. I fix it by feel. I have no need for mirrors. When my shirt gets dirty or my socks feel sweaty, I change clothes in the filthiest train station rest room, never letting my feet touch the floor. I can take a shower at a sink. I eat the local food and speak the popular slang. I collect colorful phrases, words that tickle me, and I incorporate them into my personal lexicon. 

No one can ever figure out where I’m from. 

I’m not rootless, it just seems that way. Give me a little time, and I’ll match the pattern of my chair’s upholstery, even if it’s paisley. Give me a lot of time, and you’ll swear I was born to sit there.

I met Nick first. He was Canadian, from Toronto. Maybe he was 50, but he could have been younger. It’s hard to gauge the age of the white-haired. He walked around the yard with his shoulders titled slightly back, as if he were getting ready for his turn under the limbo stick.

He was cute. My mother and I agreed on this point, which was awkward and made me glad neither of us was single. 

Strictly speaking he had been hired as an electrician, but he was also a mechanic and a rigger. He lived on his boat, alone, and sailed from island to island. Unfettered. He was younger than most of the yachtie retirees. He was different from them in other ways, too. He hadn’t come to the Caribbean to enjoy his sunset years, but rather to escape the suffocating rat race up North. 

Bean’s father liked to say Nick and I came from the same place. No, baby, I explained to him. Canada’s not the United States. 

Whatever, he said. Both allyuh from up de road. Which was true. We were both in full possession of our dipthongs.

Isabella was from Colombia and – to borrow a phrase from Virgil – spent her days wandering around aimlessly yet with great effort, like a deer with an arrow stuck in her flank. She was wounded, grieving. Later she told me why. She told me that her brother had been murdered in Bogota, something to do with drugs. He had been her only sibling and she was heartbroken. 

I don’t know how Isabella and Nick got together. One night I noticed the two of them sitting, heads close, in a corner of the beach bar. He had his foot on the bench of one of the picnic tables. His head was raised and his shoulders were loose, and he laughed as be brought his bottle of beer to his mouth. I’d never heard him laugh before. 

Nick’s Spanish was terrible, the remnants of what he’d learned in high school, and her English was slightly worse. But they were both utterly unembarrassed by their clumsy verbalizations. Their language barrier did not impede their communication, but rather enhanced it. They listened hard and they spoke with their bodies and faces as well as their mouths.

I envied them. They were the oddest couple, sure, but they were also deliriously happy together, like puzzle pieces who’d been lost to each other for lifetimes. Whenever Isabella said Nick’s name, she blushed a little bit. I found her joy contagious. It filled my heart.

You’re too big to climb on my back but too little to monkey up the tree.

You’re too big to be carried everywhere but too little to make any of your own decisions.

(Except for maybe sometimes you get to choose between chicken nuggets and sunflower butter.)

I never said life was fair. Or that it made sense.

Adults have lots of ridiculous constructs. From zoning laws to fluoridation to money to weekends and back again.

But. We also have chocolate. Weigh it.

I used to take lots of videos. Short things, nothing too special. The idea was to capture a minute’s worth of what my life in Grenada was like. What Bean was like as a baby.

For a while I forgot about the videos. I was busy with other things. Primarily, being miserable. But recently I’ve been on a mission to get my digital life organized. To back up files I absolutely cannot lose. Like this one. Watching it, I’m re-inspired. I’m even thinking about getting one of those iPods that takes video, specifically so I can record my Bean playing in his sandbox. 

Because someone expressed concerned regarding the girliness of Bean’s curls in the video I posted the other day. That video is over a year old. At the time the child was a few months shy of his third birthday and had never, not even once, had a haircut. That plus the moisture and warmth of the tropical air left him with long and bouncy ringlet curls, the kind of natural ‘do that forcibly reminded one of Mariah Carey circa 1992.

This photo, on the other hand, is as recent as it gets. I took it just a couple of days ago while we were in the car on the way to my uncle’s for Easter. As you can plainly see, his hair is significantly darker and straighter now. 

The camera I used  the lovely kiddie camera that my dad got Bean for Christmas. Mind you, I say “kiddie camera”, yet it has 2 megapixels and takes lovely shots. It’s also simple enough to use that even though he’s not quite four he was able to figure it out by means of an hour or so of trial and error.

I only discovered the wonder that is Flickr less than a year ago, and only now is my photostream starting to look like a Christmas goose of Bean photos. He’s even got his very own “set”. It’s the perfect antidote to Bean-withdrawal.

The summer I was 16 I went skin-diving in Hawaii. Have you ever? Propelled yourself as deep as possible, greedily seeing all you can see before your breath expires? Before the trip I practiced and practiced. I learned all the tricks. I exercised my will of iron. I got to the point where I could hold my breath for nearly two minutes. And it was worth it. Enveloped in the cocoon-like world of the ocean, with its brilliant colors and flashing shadows and utter silence, the sense of euphoria was so profound, it seeped into my very soul, like the saltwater through my hair, and remained even when my oxygen finally ran out and my lungs felt fit to burst. Then, and only then, I would calmly push off from the ocean floor, raise my arms above my head, and shoot to the surface. Upwards I went, effortlessly, and it felt like flying. The sunlight grew brighter and brighter, then turned to warmth on my skin. Sound came, clearer and clearer, and in the bare, slender moment before I burst through the surface, my sense of sound was utterly exquisite, superhuman. And then I was in the air again, filling my grateful lungs. I’d shake the water from my hair, already losing my grasp of the sensory wonders that lay mere seconds away in the past, but were simply too much to remember.

That’s what it was like waking up in the hospital. Well. Not exactly. But the bursting through the surface of the ocean part? And being greeted by sunlight and sound, rushing in as if desperate to fill in a vacuum? And then not being able to clearly recall where I’d just been? That part. That part was exactly the same.

My eyes were crusty and my mouth tasted awful. Metallic. Dusty. My wrist was a dull, throbbing ache. But other than that I felt OK. Groggy. Stiff. Sore. But OK.

My mother stood on the other side of the room, in front of a window, with her back to me. I could see that she was hugging herself, rubbing her own shoulders as if she were very cold.

“Mom?” My voice cracked. She turned and I saw that there were tears on her face, but she wiped them away as she moved towards me, and by the time she stood next to me her face was pink but dry and she was smiling.

“Why am I so thirsty?” I asked. She began to laugh. And didn’t stop. Just when I was starting to get annoyed, right when I was about to ask her just what was so funny, Gregory walked into the room. His face was smudged with dirt and there was a leaf stuck in the zipper of his leather jacket, but he was smiling slightly and oh wow was he beautiful. My mother saw him and her laughter turned hysterical. She clapped Gregory on the shoulder, and left the room. I heard her giggles get fainter as she walked down the hallway.

“She’s stressed. She was worried. And now she knows everything’s OK. So she’s laughing. Because she’s relieved. Even though it’s totally inappropriate. That’s a quote. Her quote, I mean. That’s what she said. She’s been doing this for the last couple of hours. Laughing. And then explaining. Your mom’s a good time, Zoie.”

I rolled my eyes in mock horror. “I’m glad you two enjoyed your alone time.”

“Yeah. Totally. It was a real bonding experience. I’m pretty sure I’m back on her Christmas list.”

He looked down, sheepish suddenly. He reached for my wrist and rubbed his thumb gently against the plaster. And then… Well, what happened next is private. None of your business. But let me assure you: IT WAS BETTER THAN CHOCOLATE. And it was only the beginning. 

[originally posted at Too Many Cooks]

It started about two years ago when Bean first figured out that neither his grandmother nor I have a penis. He was AMAZED.

For a while afterward, he’d randomly point at one of us and say, “No penis?” He’d ask me. Then his grandmother. And his babysitter if she happened to be there. Once we had all admitted that we did not have a penis, he’d point at himself and proudly declare, “I have penis!”

Anyhoo. He forgot about that for a while. I guess the novelty wore off. Every once in a while, though, I hear him say something like,

“Grandma? You’re weren’t even BORN with a penis? Are you sure?” The subtext there, I guess, being that perhaps once upon a time she had one but then she was naughty and it got confiscated. 

Sometimes he tells me that girls don’t have penises. You know. In case I forgot. What’s truly precious about that is that he says it so very gently while looking right in my eyes, as if he’s trying to soften the blow of the news. 

There’s no punchline to this story.

A few weeks ago Bean was really into Batman. George Clooney-Batman, believe it or not. He saw the movie and he thought Poison Ivy was “so pretty, especially her hair”. He also informed me on more than one occasion, in a very SRSBSNS tone of voice, that “this is why Superman works alone.”

So I asked him. I said, “Honey, do you know who Superman is?” No. He did not. But it just so happened that one of my friends has a little boy who had an awesome Superman costume – the fancy kind with the fake chest muscles – that he was, sadly, outgrowing. So Bean inherited it and wore it all. over. the. place. To Stop & Shop. To Target. To vacuum the sofa. 

But he still didn’t know Superman’s story. So I told him. I’m not a comic book girl, really, but, hey. I’m AMERICAN. I know about destruction of Krypton and the little escape pod with the baby that crash-landed in a field in Kansas and got rescued and adopted by the Kents who named him Clark and loved him as their son and forgot that he was, in fact, an alien. An alien who grew up to be humanity’s superhero protector, a nietzschean figure who loves those weaker than he more than that lion does. The one with the thorn in his paw.

(In the version I told to Bean, I left about the part about Nietzsche. But you knew that already.)

So he’s got the costume and he has heard the story, which he likes even more than the one I told him about Wolverine. (I’m accepting recommendations, by the way, for any reading material resembling superhero slash comic book Cliff Notes®.)

But he’s not even going to be four for a few more months yet, so he really needs to see Superman to get Superman. So I found a cartoon, the one the WB did a while back, I assume as a companion to Smallville. It’s pretty good, especially the part that takes place on Krypton, even if Jor-El looks nothing like Marlon Brando. It’s not bad. Bean digs it. We watch it together. More than once. Life is good. 

That was a few days ago. This morning he informs me:

“Mommy. You know how Batman was my favorite? He was, he was. But now Superman is my REAL favorite for real. And you know WHY? Because SUPERMAN CAN FLY ALL BY HIMSELF.” 

My child, he is wise.

Because, really?

We should all be able to fly unaided.

Just in case.

It’s just a little over a year now since we left Grenada. I considered writing an epic post about the cold, reverse culture shock and how diet Coke doesn’t really matter to me as much as I thought it did. But I figured I’d spare both of us that discomfort and instead share a video that Bean and I made just a few days before our departure on March 15, 2009. (Yes, the ides of March. Oh, the humanity.)

It’s not super-special. It’s just me and Bean, chilling on the verandah. Taking a quiet moment together during the storm of our preparations to the States, a.k.a. the land of ice and afternoon sunsets.

You’ll see that Bean looks way younger and had never had his hair cut, and that I’ve got a killer tan. It ends abruptly, but it does do what I hoped it would do, which is bring back in visceral full force what is was like there. Watching it now I can almost feel the sun and the breeze.

Enjoy.

One of my uncles is celebrity entymologist. He lives in Hawaii and once upon a time he was crawling on his belly in the rainforest and discovered a carnivorous fly. All the other insect nerds got very excited, SO excited in fact that that fly was named after him and then he and his fly were the subject of National Geographic special.

That was more than thirty years ago now. He still lives in Hawaii and he still does stuff with bugs. (“Stuff with bugs” being the technical term.) He’s the funny uncle. He’s super-smart but also a total manboy and my cousins and I joke that it’s a family rite of passage to go hiking with Uncle Steve and come face-to-face with our mortality. It has happened to all of us. He gets lost. He doesn’t bring enough water. He misses the ferry off the uninhabited island and has to be rescued by helicopter. My personal contribution to the almost-get-killed-by-Uncle-Steve canon is the time when I was 16 and visited him in Hawaii and found myself being forced to hike up a live volcano. It was so hot that the ocean was evaporating which rendered the air full of salty steam. I have never been so thirsty in my entire life. 

There are too many stories I could tell about him, like the time he came to visit us in New York while I was in high school and he turned our kitchen into a persimmon jelly farm. Or the time twenty years later when he came to visit us in Grenada and started trying to recruit local moth hunters and also got my mom involved in a project funded by the Defense Department that had something to do with natural insect radar and the caves of Afghanistan.

Steve’s on my mind right now because I was just looking through my archive and discovered this photo that he took. I’m not particularly fond of insects but this one in particular freaks me out because you watch stuff like A Bug’s Life so you KNOW that walking sticks exist but to see one in real life and realize that it really does look like a stick? And that potentially you could get one in your hair and mistake it for part of an innocent tree? Gah.

There are two other creepy things about this photo. First, that it was taken on my kitchen table. And second… There are actually two walking sticks. Two! Maybe it’s just me but I did not immediately notice the second, smaller one. I don’t even know what they are doing but I can only assume it’s some kind of nookie and I am never letting that man use my camera again.