Category — Messing with Me

*Cherries for you to drool over.

*We all have a song on our heads that lists off the various countries in Western Europe. It’s from a book and CD combination called Geography Songs. Seriously excellent homeschool material, since we can’t get it off our brains. We walk around singing “Luxemborg, Liechtenstein, Switzerland…” and so forth.

*Kid A has just successfully destroyed a small sleeping tent that I paid quite a few pennies for. It’s Solo’s, you see. Both of the cribs that I bought for him in India were apparently made of matchsticks, because they fell apart, and then while we were traveling, he was just sleeping on beds, until it drove me mad because of the number of times I had to put him back in bed before he would fall asleep. My friend had one of these for her daughter, and it turned out to be perfect for Solo, until tonight, when Kid A made a Solo-sized hole in the mesh.

Why do boys do stuff like that? Where is the reasoning? Is there any moment when they think: This is needlessly destructive and I’m probably going to be in big trouble?

ARGH.

ARGH.

Okay, I’m over it. We’ll figure it out.

By the way, I highly recommend these tents in place of the back breaking piece of luggage we carried around with us, the dreaded Pack N Play. They keep bugs out too. Just make sure that your seven-year-olds know that ripping holes in them is highly inappropriate. Because you know, IT ISN’T OBVIOUS.

ARGH.

No, no. Moving on.

* I think I tweeted this but didn’t write it here.

I was accepted to the Squaw Valley Community of Writer’s Workshops, which happens from August 7th to 14th. To say that I am excited about this would be a massive understatement.

I am over the moon.

All I need to do now is finish this revision that I’m working on. Being in our own house is helping, but Chinua is working full-time and I am homeschooling, which leaves approximately negative 2 hours a day to become absorbed in writing.I’m working on solving this problem by getting up before the kids. I was getting up at 6:00, but Solo insisted on getting up at 6:30, so now I’ve switched to 5:30.

I also need to find a babysitter and raise the rest of the money for the conference. Tonight I had the brainstorm of doing some babysitting trades. Finding three different families who want to trade a day of babysitting or two. Which will mean that I only have to work off five days of babysitting when I get back. Heh heh.

So my manuscript will be treated by other writers, and I’ll have a chance to read and offer ideas on theirs. My hope is that I’ll learn more about how the book can be helped, and get into the kind of streams that will work toward traditional publication.

We’ll see.

*I ran the first day of the Couch to 5K today. I’m very proud of myself. I’m not exactly a couch potato, but I’m definitely not a runner.

*We had spaghetti for dinner tonight, and I suspect that I put cinnamon in it instead of pepper. By accident. But I couldn’t really tell. I detected a faint cinnamony taste, but maybe I’m having flashbacks of this morning’s oatmeal.

*This concludes my ramble tonight. Have lovely dreams.

We’re swooping through the ranch to get our stuff out of storage and say hello, and along the way what is better than harvesting a few potatoes and cooking them up for dinner?

Well, it’s true that Tj is way cooler than me, and here’s the proof.

Oobleck. It’s cornstarch and water, mixed with a little food coloring, and I have to say that I shudder away from such mess, but Tj doesn’t. She’s not afraid of a little mess when kids can enjoy themselves like this!

We had a messy day… lots of clothes being changed, lots of dunks in the bath. Oh, oobleck. Oh, basement storage. Oh, muddy hills to slide down. Oh, harvesting chickens.

All I know is that I am plopping these children straight into the van in the morning, before Tj and Mark can get their hands on them again.

It was just all so weird.

That’s what we kept thinking, anyways.

Two days ago we went to San Francisco. We were getting ready to see our friend Amy, the famous Amy who taught me how to knit (the first time: ring the soldier’s neck and throw him off the cliff, or something equally violent) and taught me how to make fudge the old-fashioned way, and taught dozens of people at the land about good coffee in a mason jar, and fudge, and fresh cranberry sauce, and how to tell if a turkey is done (shake the turkey’s hand) and in the middle of all that: living life.

I have many Amy-isms in my head that I pull out and sort from time to time. Like buttons.

Anyways.  We decided, while we were waiting for Amy to finish up with what she was doing, to get amazing Blue Bottle Coffee and sit in the park nearby, the Octavia Park. (I found this photo of the incredible sculpture that has recently been erected there.)

We walked into the park and ran into another friend.  Our friend Remy, whom we met in India, was sitting on a park bench, and called Chinua’s name as we strolled along. Crazy!

So there we are. In the sun, drinking Blue Bottle coffee, watching the kids climb on the great set of monkey bars, talking with an old friend.  Amy decided to just head on over to the park.

And blam and kerpow, a kerfuffle and I’m not sure what’s happening, but three kids are running toward me crying- which one’s hurt? It turns out to be Kid A.

Bitten in the face by a dog.

When I told my mom this later, she asked, “So was it a pit bull?” and I laughed, because the long emergency room stint was over, and said “No mom, it was a dachshund.”And she laughed too.

So what happened was a man was pulling a wagon with three little dogs in it, and kids were walking over to pet the dogs, and my kids asked first and then went over too.  And the owner was making conversation with them, and Kid A pet one of the dogs, and then leaned into the wagon and the dog freaked out and bit him in the face. He put a hole through his upper lip.

Oh my word. The dog owner got mad and yelled at us while we were trying to comfort our son, saying, “He put his face in the wagon!” and “What do you want me to do, I’m not a doctor!”  Meanwhile there was a fair amount of blood and Kid A was freaking out and Leafy was nearly hyperventilating in empathy.  People were trying to help us. Remy was helping with the kids and then suddenly Amy was there, and we decided to go to the hospital.  The dog owner had taken Chinua’s dismissive, “It’s alright,” when he was trying to get the man to stop reacting in anger so that he could comfort his son as, “it’s fine to just walk away from this.”

Amy decided to pursue the dog owner.  Chinua got the van so that we could drive to the nearby hospital.

At the hospital I worked at calming Leafy down while Kid A was in the room with Chinua.  Amy had called the police because the man wouldn’t give her his information, and they headed over to take a statement.  I’m not sure what we’ll do with it, but at least it’s all recorded now.  The man’s story had changed from, “He put his face in the wagon!” to “He pulled the dog’s tail!” Something that Kid A assures us he did not do.

Oh, it was all a bit of a nightmare.  And also a blessing, since it was not so bad.  One stitch and some super glue, and Kid A’s lip, which is extremely disfigured while we wait for the swelling to go down, will be okay in a few days.

He needed to be wrapped in a big white sheet and held down by one of the larger male nurses, to get the novocaine shot. And then he was surprised by how it really didn’t hurt that much.  He told us afterward that he thought the whole needle had to go in. Which would be scary, I’ll admit. Poor Kid A. His face is so swollen.

I was amazed by how good it was to have friends there, even unexpectedly, when we needed them. Popping up all over the place, wonderful, wonderful people.

I suppose I will emerge from the jet-lag wrapped cocoon of sleepiness and culture shock that I’ve been tucked into.  Today I actually feel a little more normal.  My eyes aren’t stinging as much and I respond when spoken to. Which is a good sign.

Don’t underestimate the power of jet-lag on children, either. Goodness. We’ve had a rough few days, but everyone is getting better. Solo is leaving the non-stop cranks for sunny fields of cheerfulness, thankfully. And there is nothing like a little voice, shouting through the house at 4:00 am, “Can I please have some BREAD!!!”

But we are adjusting. There have been many hugs and kisses and so much love. My parents picked up all the required car seats and booster seats from their storage space, and they’ve done so much to welcome us. I have a new baby niece, which is amazing. We had dinner with her parents (my older brother and sister-in-law) on our second day here. And I have a baby niece or nephew on the way.  A little Uncle Matty and Auntie Lara.  It’s pretty awesome to have a baby in the family that isn’t mine! And we had some Auntie Becca squeezes and hugs. Did you know that she’s in fashion design school?  I’ll have to do a post about some of her creations soon.  I told her, “I love your hoodie,” and she said, “Really?” with this mischievous glint in her eye. “What do you like about it?”  I thought she was joking until she told me she’d designed and fabricated it. Wow.

The thing about reverse culture adjustment, or whatever you call it, is the understanding, always vibrating through you, that you should be more aware of the differences around you.  But you just switch back to what you grew up with, except for moments of awareness.  For instance, there are at least fifty six things in this room that have no part of my life in India. Soft chairs! A stove with four electric burners. A real oven. A microwave. Wood flooring. Cupboards. A fireplace. Ceramic dishes that we eat off of! Light switches that go up rather than down.  Hot water coming out of the faucets.  And I could go on and on.  But instead of being continually in wonder, I just click back into life in North America.  How strange.

I do have my moments. Mostly it’s had to do with space.  Space on the streets, which seem empty and uncluttered. Too empty. Is anyone alive?

And personal space.  I stepped up to an ATM, to get in line behind the man who was there, standing about a foot behind him and to the left, looking over his shoulder without thought, until he shot me an alarmed glance.  ATM etiquette!  At my ATM in the closest village to mine, (we have to drive 20 minutes to get there) there is a security guard who lives there. If I arrive in the morning, he is singing and ringing a bell, burning incense for his puja, shirtless, wearing his nighttime dhoti. He gets dressed soon after, I assume, because the rest of the time he is wearing his uniform, and ready to help should I hesitate in my transaction.  Push this button, he’ll indicate, leaning over me and pushing a button on the touch screen.

I need to relearn ATM etiquette.

Yesterday we wandered around downtown a bit.  We are in Victoria, a beautiful city where my parents live right on the water. I paused beside a bus stop to call back to Chinua, asking him if he had something.  I didn’t even realize that I had paused with my face just six inches from a man’s face, a man who was waiting for the bus, until he leaped back in discomfort. Whoops.  It may take a while to reset my personal space parameters.

Other than that, what are we loving?

Soft, cozy couches.  I loooooovvvvee soft cozy couches.

Grass!

Grandparents.  Also fast internet.

Thrift stores.  Yesterday we went looking for some much needed warm clothes, and found that the Value Village in Victoria is like a clothing heaven. There were books, too, more books than I’ve ever seen in one place in India.  I was too overwhelmed to look for myself, but I happened to catch a glimpse of one of my favorite books of all time, so I got it for Kid A.

And then there is the Leafy kiddo. He has chosen to fixate on one aspect of the scenery here that is different for him.  Since he recently watched “Over the Hedge,” it is, you guessed it, Hedges!  We don’t really have hedges, where we live, at least, in India.

Every time we are in the car, he is a non-stop narrator of Hedge Activity. “A Hedge!  A HEDGE! A hedge!” he says, over and over.  I’ve learned that there are a lot of hedges in Vancouver and in Victoria, something I may not have known if it wasn’t for my Leafy boy.

(I wrote this on Friday.)

Today I’ve been ignored, sneered at, ogled, patronized, put in my place, and confounded. I’ve also been smiled at, spoken nicely to, helped, and complimented. I may have thrown a small fit at the foreign registration office when I was FINALLY driven over my limit at one too many obstacles in my path. This is after I returned to the xerox shop three times, drove back and forth between different departments in different cities seven times, and filled out two forms in triplicate. At one point, I may have had tears in my eyes, muttering under my breath, “This is it, they’ve beat me.”

There are certain rules you have to relearn, in India. I know this, and I’m skilled at it.  It won’t do to get angry at people crowding a counter in an office, for instance, because the concept of a queue (or a line) is not prevalent. So don’t yell and get angry!  You’re wasting your breath!  Or take staring, for example. Staring is a perfectly acceptable social recreation. There’s no point beseeching the heavens over it (although you can ask a group of rowdy men to leave you alone, or threaten them with your shoe, like my friend does to particularly naughty ones) because people watch each other here. They will stare at you, a car accident, a cat in a tree, children on the playground, or a foreigner tying his shoe. (There is a whole other meaning to rubbernecking here, as I saw the other day again when I witnessed dozens of men parking their scooters to peer at a car that had driven off the road.)

One rule that I find hard to unlearn, in the area of bureaucracy, is that a well-ordered list of requirements, including needs in the future will be given to you, when you apply for something. For instance, in my world you are told that to get the exit permit that you need for your son, you will have to visit the Secretariat with copies of your passport and visa, a copy of his birth certificate, and a printout of your plane ticket.  Then you will need to wait four days and return to start the application here, after paying the visa fees at the Secretariat. Make sure you bring three passport photos with you.

Sounds reasonable, right?

This is the way it really goes.  These are the rules I’m wasting my breath, trying to change.

I show up at the Foreign Registration Office. “I need an exit permit for my son.  He was born in India.”

FRO: “Go to the Home Office, in the town directly north over the bridge.”

I go to find the Home Office (Secretariat) and drive around for a while before finding it.  The man there ignores me for a while, then finally demands to know what I want.  I tell him. He is a low-talker, hard to understand. He tells me to hand write a request for an exit permit and give it to him with copies of my passport and visa and Solo’s passport. Oh Good, I say, I already have those.

I hand write the request. I bring it back to him with the copies.  He looks through.  “Where is the copy of the birth certificate?” he asks.   I look blank. “You didn’t ask me for one,” I say.

“You need a copy of the birth certificate,” he says.

I leave the compound, drive out to the little town, and make a copy.  I bring it back. He looks at it. (There is a whole lot of ignoring and feet shifting and sighing going on in these interactions, but I’m not including all of it.) “Where is your airline ticket?” he asks.

“You’ve got to be joking,” I say. Okay, I don’t say it.

“You didn’t ask me for one.”

“You need a copy of your airline ticket.”  These rules are beginning to feel very arbitrary to me, and they just might be, because I know that this man can make anything happen that he wants to happen. I leave the compound again, drive out to find an internet café, find my airline tickets, print them out, and bring them back.  The man looks through everything again.

“Come on 27th and pick up a disk at the FRO,” he says. “Then come and pay your fees here and you can pick the permit up at the FRO.” This means driving back and forth between the two towns again.

“All right,” I say, doing some mental math while I walk away. I return to the desk. “The 27th is a Saturday,” I say.  Are you open on Saturday?”

“The 27th is a Saturday?” he asks, surprised.  He changes the date on my documents to the 26th. “Come on 26th,” he says.

When I arrive at the FRO on the 26th, they don’t have my paperwork.  “You will have to go back to that town to the north to ask them about it,” they say.

“And then I can take my permit today?” I ask.

“No!” they say. “The Home Department always makes it sound like that, but now you start the application process here, once you get the paperwork and pay your fees.  You will have to fill out the applications and make copies and give us three passport photos. Then we will submit your application.”

“But I don’t have any passport photos.  And this is for my son, who is an hour and a half away, at my home.”

They shrug. This is when I throw the fit.  I’m not ashamed of getting angry.  It’s a normal part of doing work in India. Sometimes you have to get angry. But I do think I sounded pathetic.  “You should give people a list of everything they will need, so they can come prepared!  I have come back and forth so many times! Now what should I do? Drive all the way home this afternoon to get passport photos?”

“First get the paperwork,” they advise.

So anyways, my fit earned me a compromise.  I drove back and forth four more times, filled out the application in triplicate, xeroxed many documents, and paid my fees. I earned the right to bring the passport photos when I arrived to pick up the documents, on Monday.  Despite the fact that I hadn’t planned to come back into the Capital the day before we leave (!) I almost kissed the man’s hand.

* In other news.  If you want a Leafy fix, you can get one at Fly Fishes Fly. We’re churning out the videos around here.

My daughter turns six today!  She is such a delightful person, such a confident and winning and loving girl. I’m amazed that I get to be in her life. She told Kid A that he can have the first turn with any toys she gets. That’s the kind of girl she is. (And that’s how much she loves her big brother.)

Solo has almost never worn shoes, while he’s been growing up.  If we are out together, it is at the beach, and otherwise I am carrying him.  As a result, he is obsessed with shoes.  He feels like the coolest thing in the world when he’s wearing them.  Oh the simple pleasures of life.

I am wading my way through all the packing and bureaucracy (I am simultaneously embroiled in trying to get my van back on the road, despite the obstacles.  The DMV may also be a run around, but at least they tell me what I need to do, from start to finish.) We leave in two and a half days!  Egads!  And I have another trip to the Capital and a birthday party as well!  Packing right now for me involves putting everything into plastic bags or tubs or metal trunks to keep it from molding during the monsoon. I have my work cut out.

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.