Category — Messing with Me

Today was an up/down/up/down kind of day.  I believe that this what they call a roller coaster. (I’ve heard of roller coasters; I think they exist in that mythical land called The WEST.)

First I had some highly skilled parenting moments in which I had the following conversation:

Me: “Kid A, will you please water the garden for me?  We need to go and meet Claudia at the beach and I’m running late.”

Kid A: “I can’t.  I’m too tired, and I don’t want to.”

Me: “Fine then!  Just wait until the next time you want help!  I’m not going to help you!”

Kid A: “What?”  (Genuinely baffled.)

Your welcome for the stellar example of boundary setting, including a nice wallop of impossible consequences. No help for you, kiddo!  That’s what you get for being so unhelpful!  Of course, I blame my lapse on the fact that I sometimes turn into a nine-year-old, without warning. It’s not my fault!

But then the kids and I made it out and met my friend for breakfast on the beach.  She was leaving today to go traveling to other places in India (with Renee! Ack, Renee-less and Claudia-less!  Double blow!) and we had coffee and peered at the ocean in the distance and tried to tell each other how much we mean to one another. (That was an awkward sentence, that.)

The kids played, and Solo tackled the other babies, just like I’ve trained him to.  I’ve tried to warn him, though.  Go for the toddlers that have elder brothers and sisters!  Because those first-time parents can be lethally protective.  To his credit, he doesn’t mean to attack the toddlers.  He just gives really big hugs and then if you start pulling him away because the other kid is shrieking, he kicks at them, for good measure. Sigh.

A man yelled at me for getting in his way in traffic.  I cried.

Then we ate grapes and cheese and bread and I had a blissful hour of doing embroidery work on a skirt I was making for Claudia while listening to This American Life.  I think it may be my favorite way to spend an afternoon.

Then Solo pulled a mayonnaise jar off of the counter and it shattered on the floor.  Let me tell you, my friends, that you haven’t experienced the true bliss of life until you’ve combed your fingers through gelatin-like mayonnaise on a marble floor, pulling pieces of glass out. There is nothing to equal the greasiness, the potential danger, the pure fatty sharpness of it.

And then it was time to say goodbye at the taxi.  Big hugs and kisses and Claudia and Renee spun off, a little late, to catch their train. I love my friends.  I will miss them.

Back to the house and while I was making dinner, Solo broke my favorite coffee cup, which was nice because I loved it and I didn’t want it anyways!  Stupid coffee cup!  So smooth in the hand, so brown, so perfectly sized and shaped.  I’m glad I’m rid of it!

But around the dinner table I was filled with this warm rush of love for all their crazy selves.  I love this family.  I love these kids.  I even love these kinds of days, when Solo makes me crazy, and then runs into the room, teeth first in that way he has, just to throw his arms around my legs and try to kiss my knee cap. I love that he lets me pinch his cheeks (gently and ceaselessly) and I love the conversation that never stops swelling and ebbing all around me. I love goodbyes sometimes, because we try to say what we feel shy to say at other times.

Also, I love Ira Glass and my blooming bougainvillea and going to the vegetable stand to find the perfect purple cabbage. Life, in other words.  God and His eternal goodness.

Here’s a conversation that I eavesdropped on:

Leafy: “What if I cut a bear in half?”

Kid A and YaYa in unison: “That would be really terrible, Leafy!”

Leafy: “But I would clean the knife!”

Kid A: “No, not terrible for the knife. (Laughter) Terrible for the bear!”

YaYa: “A bear is an animal, Leafy!”

Kid A: “Yeah, how would you feel if someone killed you!”

YaYa: “It would hurt the bear.”

Leafy: “It’s a bad bear.  If it tried to kill me I would cut it in half!”

YaYa: “A bear is a wild animal!  We can’t kill wild animals!”

Kid A: “If you kill a bear, then you should be killed.” (Overkill… heh heh)

Leafy: “MAMA! Kid A SAID…”  and then I stepped in.

*

A conversation I was a part of:

Leafy: “What’s for breakfast, oatmeal or mu-sell-li?”

Me: “I just woke up, I don’t know wait-and-see.”

Leafy: “What? (Laughter) “Who’s Andsee?”

Me: “Nooooo.  Wait. And. See.”

YaYa: “Yeah.  And Antsy is the lady who’s visiting Cate.”

Me: (Laughter) “No, YaYa, that’s Nancy.”

*

Chinua put together some beautiful calendars this year, and it’s not too late to get them before the New Year!

One is based on Color in India.

One is a year of India Faces.

And one is a beautiful abstract collection of photos of a carnival he happened upon, back in Canada.

*

And here is a photo of a very strange poster that I saw in Manali this summer.

I think I’ll call it: Rae’s Red Floor. Because what happens when you paint a floor red and then regret it? You cannot unpaint it, that’s what happens.  So everyone agrees to live with it.

The floor in the meditation center on my rooftop was a mixture of paint powder and cement, and it was lovely, but almost impossible to clean.  Cleaning it was like trying to clean a piece of sandpaper, so we ran around holding our hands under people’s plates as a preventative measure to anyone dropping anything on it. And then the painter was telling me that it was impossible to seal, which now I’m thinking – hmm? Because isn’t concrete lacquer a thing?  We had a concrete floor in the North, and it was sealed with something. Or something else. I don’t really know my terminology.  It might be some whatsit compound.

(I don’t have concrete floors now.  I have fancy marble floors, with the emphasis on the fancy- they have large orange stripes and veins running through them on the diagonal.  It was too late, when we realized that we could have had more input on the floors in the house.  We could have said, “something whatsit grey and plain!” but instead we showed up with slack jaws, turning our slack-jawed selves into smiling nodding slightly stunned foreigners when our landlords proudly wanted to know if we loved our floors.  Marble floors are quite the thing, here. And marble is cheaper than wood.)

Anyways, so I wanted to do something nice while Cate and Chinua were gone, and the floors needed to be dealt with.  Somehow the paint happened.  I don’t know. It wasn’t me.

No, no. That’s not true.  It was me, there’s no use trying to fool anyone.  It’s nice.  Just a little… shiny. And red. We like it.  Really.  Cate has been very gracious, considering the fact that I tattooed her baby that she oversaw being built from the very first step, last year. Rae’s Red Floors.  I’m a little down about it.

In other news, there was a pig slaughtering party in our front yard this morning! Which means that a Goan Catholic Feast Day is going on, and I believe this one is the feast of the Holy Cross.  I asked my neighbor what the feast was, and she looked blank for a minute, and then said, “Jesus.”  I don’t know how I feel about the pig butchering.  On one hand, I have no problem with people raising and harvesting their meat.  No problem at all.  These spoiled pigs have the run of the village and the surrounding jungle, they lead happy lives, and then someone eats them. As far as meat goes, though I find pork disgusting, it’s very conscious, this free range animal that helps to keep snakes away.  And then there’s the beauty of all the guys in the neighborhood getting together and hacking away with choppers. It’s camaraderie!

And it’s disgusting.  And very close to my house. And my kids love to watch.  I draw a line at the actual butchering. (Remember Laura plugging her ears so she couldn’t hear the squealing?)

It will go on, with or without my approval. As it should.

Here’s another tangent.  Yesterday, just before I called Chinua for my sanity, we were eating at a restaurant here, and one of the dishes came with (surprise!) black mushrooms in it.  There is nothing more disgusting than black mushrooms to me, and I couldn’t eat it. YaYa tried it, and her input was that it tasted like millipede, at which point I nearly sprayed the table with my food, I found that so funny.   Millipedes are filled with juices that come out if your baby pulls one apart or someone accidentally runs over one with a scooter (we don’t do these things on purpose, we are insect lovers around here) and YaYa has never eaten one, but they smell terrible.  She was astutely inferring that the black mushrooms taste as bad as millipedes smell.  That’s my girl.

Just as an aside:  I stopped having Kid A read aloud to me, since you made me feel better about his little reading bumps becoming smooth over time.  Now he is speeding merrily along.  I hand him a book which is supposed to be the week’s worth of reading, and an hour later he says he’s finished.  It was just the tediousness of reading aloud that was making him sigh and pretend to fall asleep, even when I told him that it wasn’t funny, repeatedly, ending with an elbow in the ribs. I’ve been concerned about his reading and writing abilities being so far apart, but I guess I’ll just let him run off with it, and treat them as totally separate things.

The end.  One new member of our little community just arrived, so I’ll go to say hello now.  I love you all.

(Every night I feel that I don’t have anything to write, but then I seem to ramble on so.)

I planted four of the rose bushes today.  They are blooming, to answer my mom’s question.  They smell lovely, but I still have to get right up to them and stick my nose inside the flower to smell them.  Not that I’m complaining.

So here’s something strange.  I bought Ratrani, which I told you about- the Queen of the Night flowering tree. My house owner and next door neighbor were happy to see this lovely flower, but a little agitated, because they say it brings snakes. So I googled it. On one site I saw mention of it bringing snakes (in India) but they said that the cure is to plant a C Diurnium plant beside it.  When I looked into it a little, I found that it is called Dinkiraja in Hindi, meaning King of the Day.  So, apparently the king and queen will keep one another in line. I’ll be looking into it.

I’m learning to ask for help. IF that’s what it is.  The kids and Renee and I parked down by the cliffs tonight, and then walked along them, to the fresh lake that is here in this town. We swam for a while, and Solo learned to blow bubbles in the water. (I swear the kid is turning into a fish.) Then we headed back for a bite to eat, and I called my husband.

I called my husband to come and help me reverse the car from the precarious parking space I had found for it.  Imagine a very old tiny van, parked facing down hill on a narrow Indian street, just after a T intersection.  To get out I needed to put it into reverse with the stick shift, and the clutch is always funny in reverse, while turning into a busy intersection, (ha ha, I can’t believe I just called it a busy intersection.  Not a busy intersection, but one with people standing around in it, just standing around) while not hitting anyone.

I was dreading it while we were swimming, dreading it while we were walking, dreading it while we were eating.  And then the realization came to me: I don’t need to spend my life in dread! I can phone a friend!  A friend who loves to help a wife in trouble.  And he rode the scooter down, in the rain, just to back the van up (it wasn’t easy, even for him) and then I hopped in the driver’s seat and we headed away. I could have done it, I know I could have. But I’m learning that even if I have the capability to do something, I can still ask for help.  And then at the end of the day there isn’t even anybody keeping score, ready to say, “You used up your coupons on that one. You should have saved them for when you really needed help, because now you have a flat and no spare.”

I’m thankful that the lessons I’m learning are good ones, about love and trust and admitting when you are weak and you need someone to floor the gas and let off the clutch and speed backwards without running anyone over.  Because for whatever reason, you just can’t do it yourself.

I have two things to say.

One is that I am obviously getting sick.  I have a stiff neck, a sore throat, and I’m sneezing with increasing violence. This relieves me.  I hope to head it off with some vitamins and some sleep, in about another five minutes. The reason that it relieves me is because it explains the darkness and sadness and exhaustion.  Often, when I am depressed and can’t see through it, I find myself coming down with cold or flu symptoms just a few days later. (Fascinating! you say.  Tell us more about your cold and flu symptoms!) It’s all intertwined, the emotions and the wellness and the lack of sleep and the ability to retain patience.

The second thing is that today was a very good day.  We weeded the garden. And we declined an invitation to a wedding that YaYa and I really wanted to go to. It was a Goan wedding, and we did go to the something something preparation of the bride or something. I don’t know exactly what it was.  We were at a lovely little village home, I was told to sit, and we were given soda and these lovely hearty coconut cookies.  My neighbors refer to them as “this round” so I am not sure what they are called.  Then the dress was brought in, and photographed with some fancy gold jewelry, and other fancy things, and then the bride came in wearing the dress and we all sat and watched (me and all the family) while someone roughly applied the bride’s makeup (at least, it looked rough to me, the makeup lady kept smashing the bride’s nose against the side of her face) and then there were more photographs.  It was fairly similar, in a way, to the weddings that I have photographed, except that all of the family, male and female, was standing and watching the makeup being applied, and then the tiara put on, and the gloves, and the bangles over the gloves, which was surprising, and it was all done with a very serious Indian ceremonialness. (I think I just made that word up.)

This was not the red sari and tying of the bride and groom and the horse and all that, if you are familiar with Indian weddings.  This was a Goan Catholic wedding.  The only way I can think to describe it is… fancy. Lots of sequins. And some cool bejeweled mafioso fishing village suits, if that makes any sense at all. (YaYa was astounded. “Something very very strange has happened, Kid A!” she yelled. “Rosario is wearing clothes!  I’ve never seen him wearing clothes before!”  The attire of my neighbor and his brother, who is the father of the bride, seems to be a towel around the waist, that’s it, most of the time.)

My neighbors even lent me a sequined fuchsia sari to wear, since apparently my beautiful batik cotton sari is not the thing for a wedding.  I would have loved to go.  I would have loved it, all those outsider feelings notwithstanding.  But I can’t think of much that would be more torturous than chasing after a writhing Solo-gone-mad, for four hours after his bedtime, while wearing a sari. Oh, actually, yes I can. Having Kid A, YaYa and Leafy wrestling beside me while I chase the frothy-mouthed Solo would be even worse.

After trying to get my friends to understand this, (Me: they will be very tired by midnight, and my husband is not here. Them: They can sit down! Me: Blank look, thinking, you really have no idea, do you.  They could destroy the wedding!) I just said, in the end, “no.”  It was beautiful.  It is the hardest thing for me to do, in the world. (My husband usually does it for me, which isn’t necessarily good, because although he does know my limits better than I do, if he’s gone, like now, it can be problematic.)  And with that “no,” the dread of an impossible evening lifted off of me and we had a great day.

That may have been more than two things. And now, off to bed with some ginger lemon honey tea.

I’m so exhausted.  There doesn’t seem to be anything left of me.  I search in my sleeves, after the kids have fallen asleep, and my arms have fallen away.  I can’t carry a single thing, and I slip through cracks in doorways, even when I not planning to enter. I wonder if there is anything remaining, anything that has not been taken by cooking and talking and staining furniture and teaching.

The phone rings.  I cringe.  When it is like this, I know I am in a bad way.

And yet, things are not bad.  There is always another stone to leap on, just in front of me, whether or not I am in spectral form, whether or not there is any solidity to me. I jump from stone to stone. I take my time.

Small fish make their way through the river below. The sun is blinding me as it flashes off their scales.

Solo really started walking today. Flash!

YaYa drew a beautiful picture of Jason and the Golden Fleece.  Flash!

Leafy said, “What if I took my head off, and it grew small little bones that became feet, and small little bones that became arms, and it walked around all by itself and drank water?”Flash!

And there is this picture of Kid A:

Which reminds me to watch for fish. Flash! Don’t stop seeing their beautiful, rainbowy scales, even if you are just barely able to stumble from stone to stone.

Also, check out this awesome website, and this one. (Made by the same people.)  I fell in love.

I had just finished cooking when the boys showed up. The rajma was bubbling away, and everything else was ready.  They brought a drum, a violin, a guitar, and Oshan with a fistful of flyers.  “All right, kids!” he shouted when he had some breath back in him, after they tackled him. “Time to color flyers!”  We sat down around the table and started in on the concert flyers.

“You color very neatly, Oshan,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.  “I’m the best colorer in the whole world, pretty much.” I love British hippies, because they may look wild, but their accents give them away.  When I was having juice with Oshan and Darius last week, they used the words “mollycoddle” and “persnickety” in a ten minute span of time. Not to mention that when I walked up, Darius was eating baked beans on toast; a food that is utterly mysterious to me.

“Well,” I said, feeling that he’d better be brought down a peg or two, “you’re not very creative at coloring, are you?”  He held out his work and looked at it. “No, no I’m not, am I?  I’m more simple, really.”

The boys and Chinua discussed where they would practice for the upcoming concert, and the rest of us sat at the table with our crayons.  When they decided to go to the nearby restaurant with the Nepali cooks, Darius asked if the art entourage could please accompany them. I hemmed and hawed, since I had just finished dinner, but in the end, decided that time spent with these friends was time well spent, and we could eat the food I’d made tomorrow.  So we all rounded up jackets and left.

And we colored more flyers, and we ate.  And there was a hailstorm, and it grew increasingly cold, and you can sense the impending doom, can’t you?

On the way back, Chinua lovingly hiked back up the hill with me, so I wouldn’t have to do it alone in the dark, and we all shivered (when we leave in three days we won’t shiver again until perhaps next April) and I thought thankfully about the fact that our house had been warming up all day in the sun, and would be pretty warm, compared with how frigid it was outside.

And then we reached our door, and we smelled the smoke.  Chinua and I looked at each other, wide-eyed.  “I didn’t… I’m not… I thought,” I said, cleverly, and dashed into a huge cloud of smoke which escaped when I opened the door,  pursuing the children around the deck. First I turned off the stove.  Then we began to open every window, every door, to let the horrific smell out.  Not only the smell of burnt beans, but the smell of burnt pan.  We gathered around outside, glumly, looking into the pot which Chinua illuminated with his flashlight.  Nasty black bubbly beans, all charred and stuck to the bottom of the once-pan.

Bummer.

Now our house is refreshingly chilly, and still smells of something you’d rather not be close to.  YaYa said, very distraught, “We should check all of those things, before we leave, shouldn’t we?”

“I did check, I looked a few times.  I didn’t realize it was still on.”

“What about looking under the pot, to see if the fire is going?”

“Yes, that would be the best thing, wouldn’t it.”  Yes, yes it would.

The other day was a writing day for me.  Chinua has been giving me all of Friday to write and get some work done on the book and another project I’ve been working on, and I LOVE it.  I feel like for the first time in seven years I can really focus.  Or, focus as well as one can when one’s children keep opening the door and asking if you are done with the computer yet because they’d like to watch a movie, or as focused as one can be when one’s baby crawls to the door of the room that he KNOWS you’re in, and when it doesn’t open, bangs on it, yelling, with two open palms.

I take what I can get.

This Friday, however, I needed to try to get a truck up to our house to pick up the boxes that we are sending to Goa by mail. (Since we travel by train, the post is the easiest way to get things like our books, toys, and anything else we don’t want to carry on our backs to our house down south.) I really didn’t want to do it on a Friday.  It’s my special day, see?  But I also saw the wisdom in not putting it off.

Chinua said, “I don’t want you to do anything that’s going to make you angry later, because I don’t want you to be angry.”  Fair enough.  I needed to do what was necessary and deal with it in my own cantankerous soul, rather than letting everyone know how put out I was by doing this work for them, and they’d better appreciate it, because my whole DAY was ruined, practically my whole LIFE. Also, it was raining.

I made myself a list:

Tips for Making a Lame Day Better

(by me)

1. Draw stuff

2. Take photos

3. Talk to people

4. Notice things

*

Well, I couldn’t take the camera because it was raining and I was walking, and my little camera is broken, so we only have the big one. And I didn’t draw anything.  But I did talk to people.  And I did notice stuff.

I noticed a cow walking down a steep flight of stairs, onto the street below.  I’ve never seen anything like it before!  I peered up the stairs, to see what the attraction was.  Nothing up there. When I asked her what she was doing, she totally ignored me.

I also noticed, when I took my mobile phone to the shop to have it looked at (it’s not working), that the man checked to see if my battery was full by ducking his head down and putting it in his mouth. The battery, not the phone.  I thought this was odd.

I bought scarves.  And I talked to the man in the shop where I bought scarves.  (I can’t find the link to the post, but me buying scarves is a big deal! I have a hard time buying anything for myself.) He showed me some nice wall hangings, but I didn’t buy any.

I talked to my pregnant friend when I bumped into her on the street. I noticed that her eyes are a very brilliant blue.

I talked to the jeep men about bringing the jeep to my house.  I asked them how far they could bring it, and they said, only to the upper road. I asked them to bring it down the steep sort of road and along the non road and up the stairs and over the definitely not a road, but they stared at the ground and muttered.  So I asked if they could just bring it down the steep sort of road, and they stared off into the air and muttered.  My problem in India, you see, is that I am far too polite.

I loitered all day, waiting for the rain to stop because we can’t move our stuff in the rain. The rain never did stop, but I talked to a few more people, including a couple of begging kids, a Tibetan tailor, and a man from Mumbai whose wife teaches a cooking class.

Finally (when the rain let me know it was not a day for me to move boxes) I went home and found my family.

So I didn’t get anything done, but I noticed some things and I talked to some people.  All in all, not a bad day.  And at the end of it, I wasn’t angry.

Epilogue

This morning the sky was a big bowl of glazed blue pottery, and our neighbor, who is moving his stuff as well, persuaded a taxi driver to come all the way to the definitely not a road.  Chinua and Cate loaded the boxes up, had them stitched in white cotton in the Indian way, and had them sent off at the post office by noon. I spent the morning drinking two tiny cups of coffee and cleaning, and that was that.

Oh dear me, am I ever in a funkedy funk funk.

An I-fed-my-baby-kidney-beans-and-he-didn’t-fall-asleep-until-4:30-in-the-morning funk.

An I’m-worried-about-money funk.

A look-at-the-big-stack-of-work-in-front-of-me-and-no-brains-left-to-do-it funk.

An I-miss-my-family-and-friends funk.

A NON STOP RAIN AND FOG funk.  The monsoon is romantic, is necessary, is green, but gets old with cabin-fevered kids and very little space.

Thank God for water colors.

Other things I’m thankful for include:

* food on our table

* the lush beauty all around me

* the many impromptu hugs that Kid A has been giving me

* Chinua playing the mandolin in my living room right now

* the prospect of sleep (maybe) tonight

* coffee and chocolate

* Tripta

* train rides, long walks, learning about space, movies, cuddles, a cat appearing in my house, drop-ins from friends, the cheesecake Cate recently discovered that actually tastes like cheesecake, muesli, chilies, and Jane Austen.

(Deep breath, dive into the day, don’t sulk in the corner, give more because there is always a spring welling up for you and you will not be empty.)

I thought there might be nothing better than a couple of photos to show that although Solo is recovering from amoebas, he is certainly all right.

Better than alright, even.  Thriving, crawling, wrestling alligators, trying to steal bread from my plate, learning how to use his teeth and not to use his teeth, smashing me in the face with his mouth when I ask for a kiss, drooling on all of us, making friends everywhere he goes.

Yelling “No!” Attempting escapes out the front door. Wriggling and shrieking if he catches sight of one of his siblings. Cuddling up in bed. Dancing.

And laughing.

I have my hands FULL for the next year.  (Because obviously, my life has been too boring up till now.)