Now Boarding

Bird by Bird was my flight book and I needed a day or two to think through it before picking up something new.  (I thoroughly enjoyed this read.)

So then Pulitzer-Prize-winning Less by Andrew Sean Greer became my weekend book, and in following his round-the-world trip to avoid a wedding, I could not help remembering my decade old round-the-world trip and how it did (and did not) relate to love.

I flew from Nashville to Houston to Tokyo to Singapore to Shanghai to Beijing to Bangkok to London to home.

Arthur Less heads from San Francisco to New York to Mexico City to Turin to Berlin to Morocco to India to Japan to home.

I smiled at anecdotes that rang so true like clapping on an arriving flight (which I did last Wednesday finally dropping my resistance to this quirky travel habit). “Less German” left me laughing aloud in several places and I could not help but to sigh with his few hours in Paris and missed love while enthusiastically shouting “yes!” in identifying with the VAT form. (I think I’ve only once or twice been able to manage this refund in two decades of overseas travel.) I also enjoyed having to pick up a dictionary for a word or two while reading.  [Also true was the impulsive overseas clothing purchases... but I happen to think that flowy pieces from a Florence, Italy summer collection were quite apt for the Alabama heat.]

It is interesting how our travels inform us, challenge us, change us and yet also, how in some ways we stay the same precisely due to some of these experiences abroad.  We follow Less but I followed me too.

Singapore, 2007
Shortly after taking this photo, the table beside
me at dinner would catch on fire.

Supper

We sit and we watch the birds, the groundhog, and the turkeys.
We recount the moments shared over suppers long before.
We linger over dessert.

I listen to the things that happened before I was born.
I had not heard some of these stories.
I know more now.

We laugh together.
We are quiet and look off into the trees, pretending to follow something
Other than our own thoughts.

The clock, the heat, the restlessness.
Something makes us move from the table
Drifting back to chores, to phones, to the present.

Michael

You showed me archives, and I learned about my responsibility to represent.
You showed me two snowmen, and I learned about my responsibility to preserve.

You shared stories, and I learned about my responsibility to be kind when I travel.
You shared architectural details, and I learned about my responsibility to my neighborhood.

Your car was available for use, and I learned about my responsibility to protest.
Your knowledge of history was freely shared, and I learned about my responsibility to community.

Your leather jacket taught me about style.
Your care of ALL the cats taught me about compassion.

Your laugh echoes in my ears.

You showed me love, every time we met.

Guardian, explorer, reader, neighbor, friend.

Windy Day

The wind is howling.
From the South.
Change comes tomorrow.
Temperatures falling.
Temperatures rising.

Affect more the top
than the bottom
of the building.
Affect more the bottom
than the top
of the open spaces.

You can’t hear it.
When it’s next to you,
The wind.

Only if there’s a hole.
Or if you move into it.

Never Stop

I had a hiatus in reading while I was walking.  I was writing.
I had a hiatus in writing while I was recovering.  I was reading.

I have just watched Christina Rickardsson’s Ted Talk and felt anew a moment of gratitude for my life, the lottery that I've won (to use her words).  Her book is even more powerful. Never Stop Walking: A Memoir of Finding Home Across the World found its way to me via Amazon and algorithms.  Its title intrigued me and her life in two different countries (one neighboring) made me want to know her story.

Christina, born as Christiana in Brazil, shares her memoir with courage.  I have had glimpses of life in the street, but in googling "favela" and reading her story, a door opened into poverty the likes I have been blessed not to know.  She writes that as she looked for food she was called a rat and wondered whether it was better to be noticed or ignored.  "Being totally ignored was like not existing at all, as if you weren't a human among other humans." (p. 64)

In parallel with news events, I've been thinking a lot about this thought.  We should not be looking away from the things that are hard to see, and as she reminds us, we should take actions to help where we can.

The book walks us not only from her journey from jungle cave to favela to orphanage to Sweden (yes, you read that correctly) but also her return back to Brazil in 2015.

Never Stop Walking is not an easy read  but I would love to see it on as many reading lists as possible with the hopes that someone who has no idea what it's like to have everything taken away could have a window into empathy, into kindness and into love for a neighbor.  "We never know our strength until life tests us. But most of all, we don't know what strength and power another person has until we follow them for a while on their journey." (p. 199)

The Ties that Bind

Now that I am reading books in another language, I think a lot more about translations.  To convey not only the facts but the emotional context around a story requires more than just a dictionary.  It's an art.

At the end of last year, I read P.S. From Paris by Marc Levy, translated from French by Sam Taylor.  The protagonist, Paul, is a writer and his relationship with his translator is complicated.  There's a love story (or two) which develops along the way and a plot twist which answers the question of why Paul's books are so popular in South Korea.  (I'll let you work your way through the resolution of that.)

So these threads of translation and Korea drifted into selections of two books I read earlier this month.

A River in Darkness by Masaji Ishikawa is the memoir that opened my eyes to the history between Japan and North Korea.  Mr. Ishikawa returned to his father's native North Korea at the age of 13 with the promise of a better life for their family but soon after arriving, the grim reality that would meet them was hard to read.  Lack of work and housing, the perception of being "lesser than" due to Japanese heritage, and starvation were threads throughout his memoir and the decision to leave was his choice between imminent death and a slim chance of survival.  It is not a happy story but it is one which is important for all of us to read.

Go: A Coming of Age Novel by Kazuki Kaneshiro follows a young boy through adolescence and on the first page tells us that "The story that follows is a love story.  My love story."  If A River in Darkness opened my eyes, Go pushed me in deeper and set me off in search of more details between the history of Japan and Korea.  In each of these stories, our characters feel in various points as "in between" countries and subject to the prejudices of both.   Go is a relatively short read and while it is about love, it's equally about loss.  This kid is a fighter and as a reader you will find yourself rooting for him and hurting alongside him.

vida, muerte, y español

In the course of five days, I would receive texts to let me know that two Aunts had died.

These are the moments when the ~35 degrees of latitude on each side of the equator distancing myself from my family feels like the roughly 6,000 miles it is.

These are also the occasions when language falters.

I could purchase lettuce but the first time I was asked "Which type?", I stumbled, not knowing if I wanted romana, francesa, or hola de roble.  Learning a lot of words broadly was the easy part.  It is the depth of a topic that is my "tell" in Spanish.

And so it was with death.

It would be the first time that I would need to share this type of news and answer questions:  Was it sudden?  Was she sick?  Was she the oldest?  The sister of your mother or father? How do you feel?

Some questions I was better equipped to answer than others, but "how are you feeling" was one that I could not quite escape.  My vocabulary limited me to the basics and so there was no flowery descriptions or vagueness that I could use to skirt the issue, forcing me to say the obvious:  I feel sad.

And there was no Spanish lesson that prepared me to receive condolences.

I had a friend on the Camino who liked speaking in English because it gave her more freedom to say things that she could not say in her native Japanese due to norms in culture.  I think about that sometimes as the tears leak from using another language to express the feelings of the heart in a very base way.

I am also grateful for laughter through tears moments when I try to answer these questions, invariably using at least one wrong word causing the questioner to both want to give condolences and a Spanish lesson.  I think both Aunts would have gotten a kick out of that.

Remembering Aunt C here.

March into the Night

Saturday night.
The dogs won’t stop barking.
It is right on this day.

Don’t let us be quiet and sit in a comfortable space.

Hold our attention!
Be loud! 

Cry out!

We have been complacent.
We have forgotten.
We have been scared.

Don’t let us be!

Remind us of youth.
Remind us of hope.
Remind us of the power of big love.

Leave arms for embracing.
Leave the branches shaking.
Leave silence for no one.

March on, children, march on!

Hours

It is a long flight from Buenos Aires to Miami. It is (glorious!) uninterrupted reading time so I try to save this space for a book I expect will be a treasure.  In this case, I both wanted to read and hesitated to read because I already knew the ending.  The Bright Hour:  A Memoir of Living and Dying by Nina Riggs was beautiful.

I first became acquainted with Nina Rigg's story via a 2016 NYT "Modern Love" column about a couch.  This short anecdote, her writing style, and her Greensboro, NC base caught a piece of my heart and didn't let go.  In early January, I read another article about her husband, John, and Lucy, wife of Paul Kalanithi, in the Washington Post and knew Ms. Riggs' book would be the book for this journey.  [I've heard a lot of great reviews about "When Breath Becomes Air" but this year I've primarily been reading women authors and I wanted to give this heavy topic a woman's view first.] 

Chapter 22 is entitled "Faith" and I was particularly affected by:

"For me, faith involves staring into the abyss, seeing that it is dark and full of the unknown--and being okay with that.  And if I can achieve that--BREATH, STOP BREATHING, BREATHE--even for a quick moment, that is truly something. - p 276 (Kindle version)

I was unprepared that in reading the Afterword, I would finish the book exactly one year after her last breaths.  (I'm eternally grateful that the Delta flight crew is un-judging to crying readers.) Rather than being left with a feeling of sadness, this book is a wonderful reminder of our fragile moments, the wonder of laughter, and the gift of love. 

Add The Bright Hour to your reading lists.

A Book Review, or Three

I haven't experienced many rainy days here in the South side.  The middle of the night or afternoon thunderstorms that break the heat are more common so this morning's dreary summer weather is a Friday gift. The persianas* are down to guard the windows so it is dark and quiet with the smell of rain from the west that has somehow made it ten floors high.  Visibility is only a couple miles so anything happening beyond a small arc, I just cannot see.  These are the type of days that make me nostalgic.

When I was a kid, I sat by the dining room sliding glass window to watch the rain and read.  In Nashville, I had lots of windows for viewing so just about anywhere was a great spot to read.  Here, the couch near the balcony (with the persiana half-raised) is my best spot to watch the rain, listen to the tires move the water on the streets, and wonder what book I will move through next.

To finish 2017, my company was A Tangled Mercy: A Novel by Joy Jordan-Lake.  In her "Author's Note", she highlights that this book really began with her dissertation research and while she writes that "she ought not even be a candidate to tell this story" (p. 441) , I'm glad she did.  I was unaware of the 1822 Denmark Vesey attempted revolt.  This story line along with the 2015 story of Kate are weaved through this work of fiction as she tries to "honor the memory of those in nineteenth- and twenty-first-century Charleston" (p. 442).   She's originally from the East Tennessee mountains and lives just outside of Nashville, both points that resonated with me and her author's bio (read this morning) made me all the happier that I gave time to her book.  It's discounted on Amazon this month if you're interested to add this one to your list.

2018 began with A Beautiful Work in Progress by Mirna Valerio.  I agree with other reviewers in that at times, there is a lack of cohesiveness or jumpiness to the story as she moves through anecdotes, but her journey is pretty amazing.  She's not your normal size ultra-runner; her heart is much bigger.  I empathized with her start-at-the-back-of-the-pack race days and appreciated her story and at times her struggle to move toward longer and longer distances.  A half-marathon was just about enough for me and I have no desire to run through hard, long mountain trails.  But she does, and it's fun to share the trek with her.

I've also just finished Coming Clean, a memoir by Kimberly Rae Miller.  Her childhood was a mess.  She walks us through what it was like growing up in a family where her dad struggled with hoarding. We have all witnessed "collecting" to various degrees, but this insight into her home life was my first experience to a challenge of this magnitude.  It was an extraordinary story.

I'll spare you my review of The Client by John Grisham and Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller for now.  Both of these were "found" books and because they were in English, ended up in my hands.  I moved through them pretty quickly between the two memoirs.

Secret Sisterhood is still a work in progress (like me) and I've just realized that the majority of my recent books were by women authors.  I think I'll have another cup of coffee and find another.

*Persianas are in the top 20 of great home inventions.  They're heavy wood blinds outside the windows that completely block out the sun (for amazing sleep and a cooler home) and keep the weather at bay.  They're also a deterrent for the would-be robber.

Having Cake and Eating It Too

Freshly Washed Measuring Cups and Spoons

After learning the stove ignition, I've been pushing myself a little more in the kitchen but it's sometimes tiring to take a US standard units recipe and convert it to the metric system.  (The conversion itself is not actually the challenge, rather the ability to measure it.)*  So my goal last November was to return with measuring cups and spoons.  

Since then I've been thinking quite a bit about the way I measure.

I hit a milestone the second day this year when I guided a taxi driver from the airport to home and in this 45 minute journey with direction and random conversation, he did not ask that perennial question:  "De donde sos?"  A first.  A relief.

There have been other milestones, measures, that I've been moving forward on paper.  Photos and meetings, and numbers assigned and all the while, I'm learning.

It is quite a different sort of feeling in that in every day, there is guaranteed to be something new.  Perhaps this was one reason I was keen to make something old and familiar.

I converted my typical 8x8" and 9x9" go-to pans to centimeters so I could go in search for a pan.  There were three possibilities and my Spanish is still not to the depth to understand the specific details of metal fabrication for comparison when the sales clerk explains them.  I understood enough to select and he didn't ask me "the question" which was as perfect of an experience that I could have in a store right now.  I think the pan is aluminum.

Saturday afternoon chocolate cake.  

I was alone so any cake failings could be whisked away sans evidence.  Not knowing the exact temperature of the stove,  I sat beside it in the afternoon sun, glistening while waiting for an odor of chocolate that would signal I was safe to open the oven with low risk of a falling cake.  I took a series of photos along the way as I'm prone to do these days, marking another milestone.  

After 35 long minutes and multiple timers, I had a cake.  The cocoa powder was also an experiment because there was only one option available.  The look on the owners face was not reassuring when I said I would use it to make a cake.  I really had no idea how it would taste.  

Making the icing was an adventure sans mixer.  A hand blender doesn't really do the trick but after laboring twenty minutes, it was deemed good enough and the kitchen was covered with light sugar so lingering marks for an earnest effort.  

The cake lasted three days.  

*I'm an engineer so of course it's possible with a scale and other items that I could do it, but who wants to go through all that effort on a Saturday evening for cake?