Today 200 people ran, cycled and swam past or near my hotel. Men and women braving the heat, to compete to win, or at least finish. I admire them and recognize the madness in them. I know all about endurance I have been in training for my own personal endurance event for some time. My event is called life.
In my endurance sport I brave the terror of regularity, the horror of uniformity, the sameness of knowing that there is no end in sight, that there is no finish line, that there is no escape. I’ve been at work every day since November 4th, it’s March 18th, a date calendar tells me that’s 136 days, or 4 months 15 days or an intolerable number of minutes. The only day off I have had was the day I drove to see my dad in hospital so my kids could say goodbye to him if he died. That stands out in my mind as the best day this year.
I drove there after work into the darkness, a 5 hour drive through narrow winding mountain roads with both my children sleeping behind me. And at 1:30am in the middle of the mountains the man who doesn’t know he loves me called me, and I didn’t get the call because I was too tired, but it woke me up and gave me the strength to keep driving. At 7:30 in the morning the man who doesn’t think that he loves me paged me to see if I’d arrived safely. He didn’t wake me up when he called because I’d woken up only seconds before thinking of him. That’s how it is, he doesn’t know he loves me, I don’t let him know I love him and yet I think about him all the time.
I spent the day with my dad, watching him lie helpless in a hospital bed knowing that there was nothing I could do, knowing that I had to pretend like everything was all right. And then we left to drive back into the night and my daughters, never really understanding that this might be the last time they ever saw their grandfather wanted to shop, and we did. We stopped at the mall and they bought me beautiful clothes that I hoped would make the man I love come back to me, hoped would make him want me again because a month before I’d said goodbye to him and I had regretted it every day since. And as I shopped I wondered why I was wasting my time shopping when i should be with my father, why I should be shopping and enjoying life when my dad could be in a hospital bed dying and I called him to talk to him guilty and sad and I wished my father goodnight like he was one of my children and I pretended that everything was alright. Because that is how you endure, that is how you survive. And I smiled for my kids and I enjoyed an ice cream because you must enjoy the moments that you can or there is nothing to go on for.
Then I drove home through the darkness wishing he would call but he didn’t. And I endured.
And then I went back to work, every day with him, and we didn’t talk and then he said he’d quit, and I kept going because that is how you endure. And my father recovered and my children kept growing. And my daughter turned into a teenager who learned to hate me, and my youngest cried every day because she was tired and sad and was at work too late at night every day with her mother. She cried because she hated school and she hated life and I told her everything would be alright and I hated myself because a nine year old should not have to be at school at 8 in the morning and get home from work at 11 pm. And it was my fault, this was my endurance event and she was only a spectator caught up in the monotony of existence.
And then we went out, he, his cousin and I and he got drunk. It was a farewell drink because he was only going to work till payday. And he got so drunk. And all his anger at me for dumping him came out, all his hate, all the hate he’d ever had for anyone who had ever hurt him, for any woman that had ever hurt him was laid on me. And I felt his words cut through my heart and then he left me bleeding. And I fired him and wanted to hate him, wanted so much to hate him. I didn’t want to have to endure the pain, I just wanted to fill the holes in my heart with hate because it would be so much easier. And I couldn’t. All I could do was think about him, and worry about him, and love him and hate myself for being so weak.
He called, he texted and I ignored him. Too busy trying to endure to need any more pain. Too busy trying to survive to want to feel anything else. Finally I acquiesced and he apologized. And said he wanted to be friends. And I drove away from him crying even more.
And then his cousin quit, my other waiter. And I had no staff left. And if felt like the end. Like there was nothing left, no reason to go on with anything. Like I’d lost my last tie to him.
And then he came back. Not every night, but enough, he’d come to the restaurant. And I knew he was thinking of me too. He’d show up and help serve clients, help make drinks. And then he said he’d come work for me and quit his new job. And I was happy. So happy. Stupid happy but I pretended I wasn’t. And then he didn’t come. And I survived, I endured as always and I hired new staff. More new staff, more new staff. I don’t even want to know their names, I don’t want to know if they have kids, I don’t want to care.
My father returned to the US and he’s fine. Except that he’s not. Not really. He’s old and he will go one day. They say he doesn’t have cancer, but is is having mini-strokes, they say his gall bladder operation went well, but he may need another heart operation. They say he needs his cataracts removed but his retinas have reattached. All I know is that he is no longer my father, no longer the man I can lean and rely on, and that soon, sooner than I wish he will be gone from this world.
Only rocks endure, and so I became. Then last week he agreed to go out with me. I asked. And we didn’t go out. We went to bed. And I was happy for the first time in three months. And I’d like to think this was the start of something new, something more but I don’t know that it is. And now I don’t know which direction the road goes from here. I only know that I will endure. I only know that the path ahead keeps going and this is not a race for winners, this is only about getting to the finish. And hopefully arriving with a life filled with more love than monotony, more joy than pain. But in the end one must brave the heat, and the pain and embrace the madness if one is to get to the end.
Sunday, November 4, 2012
Saturday, November 3, 2012
New Zealand my home
When I think about growing up in New Zealand I think about cold. Not the kind of cold where there is snow on the ground and ice on the windows, not the kind of cold where you need to dress for the climate and all the houses have central heat. The cold I remember is the kind of cold where you don't want to get out of bed in the morning. Where since it's never that cold or that hot the houses have no central heat, or air.
It's the kind of cold where in the morning there is sometimes frost on the ground, but not usually. In the morning I would fall out of bed from beneath the feather comforters and away from my electric blanket then crawl muscles still and aching to the one bar electric heater. This I would sit as close to as I could without setting fire to any part of my pajamas. Slowly the heat would burn a toe while my whole foot still stayed cold, and I would dress.
My fingers would always ache from the cold while I pulled on my underwear and my uniform socks. Grey woolen socks that reached almost to the knee. These were my favorite part of the uniform, for all the cool kids wearing your socks pulled up was a sign of conformity, of nerd-ness of being a dork. For me they were simply the only thing that kept my legs from freezing, I would sooner be labeled a dork than be cold. My uniform tunic was below my knee in Form 3, when I was thirteen on the first day of High School but by Form 5 it was above my knee, not indecently short like the poor or skanky girls, just short enough that my fat little knees could shake with cold beneath it. Then on top the sweater, the regulation sweatshirt, dark blue and thin of acrylic and polyester. I wouldn't wear this tied around my waste or drape it artistically across my shoulders I was never warm enough for that.
The hard leather shoes, still too big after two years of growing into them were strapped on last, pulling my almost warm feet away from the heater in order to slide them into the clumpy black shoes.
It was thus attired that I would face the world. Later I would convince my parents to buy me thermal underwear and the top of this I would wear beneath the uniform tunic, far too ugly an outfit to be called a dress it was supposed to make us all the same. As if uniforms create uniformity. The boys would wear grey shorts and shirts and we girls had tunics. On the first day of school you already knew who was cool and who wasn't. The cool girls had their uniforms tailored to show off their legs and their waists and whatever breasts they could boast of. The girls like me had new uniforms 3 sizes too big bought by mothers who wanted to make sure we had room to grow, large tents of pale blue tartan, with no visible body geographical features, and poor kids had their sister's uniform, passed down already one too many times, material washed thin and even paler in a size either much smaller or much larger than they were. Yes true uniformity had been created.
It was thus clad that I would leave the house and walk to school. This was not really true, or often true because I could and would convince my parents to drive me to school as they had since I was 5, either because I was too late to get there on time unless they drove me, or because it was raining, or threatening to rain.
It rains a lot in Auckland. "Four seasons in one day, sun shines on the black clouds hanging over the Domain." I know exactly where the songwriter was standing when he wrote this. If it's not raining, wait. In one day it will be hot and sunny, overcast and gloomy, pouring with rain, showering rain while you are simultaneously getting a sunburn. Most days I would walk home from school. Most days I would arrive home wet. Now I should have carried a raincoat or an umbrella, this would have been sensible but I learned when I was young that these devices require a certain type of co-ordination I do not possess. I find nothing more irritating than encasing myself in rubber only to have water pour down my neck. So I tried to practice a type of zen rationalism. The water will not hurt you, just don't fight it. And thus I would walk back in rain and shine from school getting wet but trying not to be angry, getting cold but walking faster to be warm, holding my hands deep in my pockets or arms folded around back hunched sheltering beneath the nylon of my schoolbag head down into the wind trying to warm up trying to stay dry enough that the water did not pour in streams down the back of my neck but only fell in gentle soaking drops evenly distributed, trying to avoid the puddles and the squelching damp of wet feet, trying to get home as quickly as I could to the one orange bar of heat in the living room.
When I was about 8 I set fire to my bedroom. Not intentionally, I just tipped over the little heater and burned a hole in the carpet. A nice square hole for which my parents claimed insurance and got enough money to replace our entire carpet and instead they kept the money and patched the hole. When I was 9 I set fire to the living room. Again not intentionally I'm not even sure if it was me, the dog or one of the other kids who actually did it. All I really remember was that the heater in the living room was on (on high of course) and the flames shooting up the drape which had ended up in front of it. My mom put it out before the house went up. The remarkable thing is that despite small burns on my fingers and toes I never caught fire to myself. This was before the days of flame resistant pajamas and mine probably would have gone up like a torch except that for some reason it didn't happen.
I remember my classrooms as a child not by how pretty they were or where they were located but rather by how cold they were. Standard 2, Grade 2 in the US I think, was spent in Mrs Tombes class. She was a lovely lady but we were in a prefab classroom. A small box made out of gypsum board with a tin roof, the kind of portable classroom that gets added to a school because the school is growing and then is never replaced with a real building and is used forever because the school doesn't shrink again. Four or five long one bar heaters had been put in the room to heat it. For safety they were obviously attached to the ceiling. Even at 7 I knew that was a bad idea, heat rises, you don't need to be a engineer with a degree in physics to know this you just have to try to get warm in a classroom without insulation and with the heating on the ceiling.
The year I started High School the headmaster decided to deal with the budget cuts by cutting back on the heating. He would only run the furnaces in the afternoon. All morning I would sit in the concrete block rooms on my plastic and metal chairs sitting on my hands. Recess would be spent with my friends who were as cold as I in whatever piece of sun we could find warming ourselves in it's rays and at lunch I would rush to the library. There the warm water would now be slowly circulating the radiators. I would sit on the radiators as they heated up, all lunchtime if I could. My brother would tease me that I was such a nerd and I spent all lunchtime in the library, he did not feel it the way I did, he could not understand the damp cold that ached through my bones and filled me with a gentle despair. He was too busy, playing soccer, or cricket, or rugby or tennis, he was too busy being popular while I and my small circle of good friends would take our blue hands into the library daily and hold them to the radiators until we felt human.
PE class, physical education, was just more torture. Stripping down in an ice cold locker room to shorts and a t-shirt then being sent outside to run, play hockey or whatever. Sure the exercise would eventually warm you but not before you sat on the cold damp grass being told what to do, running was always a joke for me. I would fall over with cramps and breathing problems long before I ever reached the finish line. I thought that everyone hurt when they breathed, when they ran, I thought it was just that I wasn't fit and if I could just run long enough and get fit I wouldn't be falling on the ground gasping for air, sucking shallow breaths of pain. I was 26 when I had my first full blown asthma attack, I called my parents and I said "I had an asthma attack last night" to which my dad responded that "I always thought you were asthmatic." My cousin was an asthmatic, her parents drove to to the hospital often. My own mother would say "well you know that's what you get from coddling a child, making a sickie". I wasn't coddled, I was never diagnosed an asthmatic and when I never got fit enough to run, when I never did any athletic activity, when I couldn't swim a lap in the pool but my younger brother and sister could it was because I was a bookworm.
Of course the worst PE classes were those where they tried to teach us to swim. Swimming in cold water is not my idea of fun to this day. Jumping into a swimming pool in November in New Zealand is my idea of cruel and unusual punishment. Summer in New Zealand starts in December, late late December and the warmest days of the year are always in February right after we went back to school. Swimming lessons were always in November so we could learn to swim before we went to the beach with our families for Christmas. If it wasn't sad and humiliating enough to get my fat (I can't run or do any exercise so I'm a bookworm) thighs into a swimsuit the only thing sadder was trying to make me swim.
Most of my lessons were spent on the side of the pool wrapped in a towel shivering waiting for the kids who could swim to do laps. I was put in the "can't swim" group in high school because after years of throwing my asthmatic ass into ice cold water I had never learned to swim. I had learned to drown, I had learned how to relax while I was rescued and I had learned how to panic in any water that was deeper than my head.
The ironic thing was that we had our own swimming pool. My brother and sister could swim like fish but the only stroke I could do was backstroke because any time I put my face into the water my airways would close up and I would panic and gasp down water while trying to get air. We also had a hot tub. My father had made both. The hot tub was a wooden culvert which he had turned on it's side and poured cement into the bottom of, he'd built the seats, attached a pump and a heater. The pool was a large Para pool of the type that was popular in the seventies with a metal frame and a plastic liner. Ours was 28 feet long, 10 feet wide and 4 feet deep. This meant we had the coolest pool in the neighbourhood, in fact one of the only pools in the neighbourhood. It was however too cool to enjoy most of the year. We used it as a plunge pool to cool off from the hot tub and we used it as a dare in the winter. Swims in the winter were not measured in hours but in steps. How many steps could you do before you had to get out. The trick was to stay in the water long enough to get numb, long enough that the pain would end, long enough that you couldn't feel your feet touching the ground. But the pain would continue, each step splashing water onto your not quite numb torso. I usually won this game, not because I dealt with the cold better than my brother and sister but because I couldn't bear to lose. And when I got out I would stand in front of the full length mirror in the hallway, the only full length mirror in the house, one given to my parents as a wedding present and I would watch my body in amazement as feeling returned to my toes. My feet were blue, my teeth were chattering, and it was not just an expression, my knees did knock, hard and fast with a rhythmic thumping that both surprised and fascinated me.
In an effort for us to use the pool more often and make his pool maintenance worthwhile my father built a plastic greenhouse over the pool. Constructed of plastic sheeting and bent PVC pipes I did not at the time realize the ingenuity and brilliance of his design, I only thought it looked silly and that we still needed to get a heater for the pool because it still wasn't warm enough for me.
Of course most of our swimming was done at the beach, because like all Kiwis this is where every holiday was spent. Although the ocean was cold this was where everyone was and so I followed, crying as the water hit my knees, then groin, then chest, then dive under through a wave before your nerve failed you. Since I couldn't really swim I became adept at understanding waves, understanding my own limits and staying within them. I only had to be rescued 2 or 3 times by my brother, always because I had fallen into the temptation of trying to follow him out to where he was. We always went to surf beaches because my parents love body surfing and all of our family had beach houses at surf beaches.
The first house I ever lived in in New Zealand was the family beach bach (as all beach houses are called). It was a white clapboard house built by my great grandfather when my grandmother was still in her 20s. Set on a huge lot the house had a large pohutakawa tree in the back yard (and even as an adult this tree is still enormous). I climbed that tree when I was four. I don't know how high I went, in my mind it was miles up, up past the big branches, up to where the little twigs start. And somewhere up there past the big branches I stepped on a rotten branch and down I went. Down miles, flying backward through the air watching the tree fall away from me until all was black. By the time I regained consciousness my mother and brother were over me, I didn't know how they had got there so quickly, I had broken nothing and I was fine, so no need to take me to a doctor or anything. My mother was not a fan of taking us to doctors, my father would rush us to one for antibiotics at any opportunity.
The family bach was three bedrooms on the east side, a living room/kitchen with a fire on the west side, a small sunroom in the front of the house, south facing and in front of the living room (the sunroom was the only room that ever, ever got warm), the bathroom was behind the laundry room and it contained the old iron bathtub stained red with the vile dirt colored water that came from the town and a large laundry room at the rear of the house where the antique ringer washer and refrigerator were housed. Then attached right to the back the room that had been added last, the ultimate after thought, the toilet. Behind that was the back yard, the porch, the large iron tank to collect rain water to drink and in the yard a hand water pump and the tree.
When I was little water still came out of the pump with only a few cranks, but no-one used it, why should they when we had both town and rain water. When I was about 10 the well stopped pumping water and I was sad at it's loss, an era had ended.
The old house was painted in white paint back then, a lead based paint that washed off slowly over time and I would run my hands along it turning them white. The bach except for the old log fire had no heating. It was only built to be lived in for the summer. We rented it from the family over the winter, there was no money. No money to buy anything unnecessary. My mother had to ask her mother for money to buy a heater, she was refused. Most of that winter I don't think we had heat. I would play outside when I could, it was warmer outside than in.
For my birthday that year I got a beautiful doll sent to me from my godmother in America. It had a bath, you could wash it, it ate and drank, peed and pooped. At least while you feed it the special food. When that ran out I feed it whatever I had and it did not work anymore. Then I feed it toothpicks stuffing them down in an attempt to clean out the wrong food. After that I washed her in the wrong soap and her hair was ruined forever, so I cut it to fix it and she was never the same again. The dolly still had beautiful clothes which is more than what I had all I had was funny smelling clothes bought at the second hand shop and hand me down sneakers from my brother with holes in the soles and toes. Everything beautiful came from America and when we had lived there I had been warm.
It's the kind of cold where in the morning there is sometimes frost on the ground, but not usually. In the morning I would fall out of bed from beneath the feather comforters and away from my electric blanket then crawl muscles still and aching to the one bar electric heater. This I would sit as close to as I could without setting fire to any part of my pajamas. Slowly the heat would burn a toe while my whole foot still stayed cold, and I would dress.
My fingers would always ache from the cold while I pulled on my underwear and my uniform socks. Grey woolen socks that reached almost to the knee. These were my favorite part of the uniform, for all the cool kids wearing your socks pulled up was a sign of conformity, of nerd-ness of being a dork. For me they were simply the only thing that kept my legs from freezing, I would sooner be labeled a dork than be cold. My uniform tunic was below my knee in Form 3, when I was thirteen on the first day of High School but by Form 5 it was above my knee, not indecently short like the poor or skanky girls, just short enough that my fat little knees could shake with cold beneath it. Then on top the sweater, the regulation sweatshirt, dark blue and thin of acrylic and polyester. I wouldn't wear this tied around my waste or drape it artistically across my shoulders I was never warm enough for that.
The hard leather shoes, still too big after two years of growing into them were strapped on last, pulling my almost warm feet away from the heater in order to slide them into the clumpy black shoes.
It was thus attired that I would face the world. Later I would convince my parents to buy me thermal underwear and the top of this I would wear beneath the uniform tunic, far too ugly an outfit to be called a dress it was supposed to make us all the same. As if uniforms create uniformity. The boys would wear grey shorts and shirts and we girls had tunics. On the first day of school you already knew who was cool and who wasn't. The cool girls had their uniforms tailored to show off their legs and their waists and whatever breasts they could boast of. The girls like me had new uniforms 3 sizes too big bought by mothers who wanted to make sure we had room to grow, large tents of pale blue tartan, with no visible body geographical features, and poor kids had their sister's uniform, passed down already one too many times, material washed thin and even paler in a size either much smaller or much larger than they were. Yes true uniformity had been created.
It was thus clad that I would leave the house and walk to school. This was not really true, or often true because I could and would convince my parents to drive me to school as they had since I was 5, either because I was too late to get there on time unless they drove me, or because it was raining, or threatening to rain.
It rains a lot in Auckland. "Four seasons in one day, sun shines on the black clouds hanging over the Domain." I know exactly where the songwriter was standing when he wrote this. If it's not raining, wait. In one day it will be hot and sunny, overcast and gloomy, pouring with rain, showering rain while you are simultaneously getting a sunburn. Most days I would walk home from school. Most days I would arrive home wet. Now I should have carried a raincoat or an umbrella, this would have been sensible but I learned when I was young that these devices require a certain type of co-ordination I do not possess. I find nothing more irritating than encasing myself in rubber only to have water pour down my neck. So I tried to practice a type of zen rationalism. The water will not hurt you, just don't fight it. And thus I would walk back in rain and shine from school getting wet but trying not to be angry, getting cold but walking faster to be warm, holding my hands deep in my pockets or arms folded around back hunched sheltering beneath the nylon of my schoolbag head down into the wind trying to warm up trying to stay dry enough that the water did not pour in streams down the back of my neck but only fell in gentle soaking drops evenly distributed, trying to avoid the puddles and the squelching damp of wet feet, trying to get home as quickly as I could to the one orange bar of heat in the living room.
When I was about 8 I set fire to my bedroom. Not intentionally, I just tipped over the little heater and burned a hole in the carpet. A nice square hole for which my parents claimed insurance and got enough money to replace our entire carpet and instead they kept the money and patched the hole. When I was 9 I set fire to the living room. Again not intentionally I'm not even sure if it was me, the dog or one of the other kids who actually did it. All I really remember was that the heater in the living room was on (on high of course) and the flames shooting up the drape which had ended up in front of it. My mom put it out before the house went up. The remarkable thing is that despite small burns on my fingers and toes I never caught fire to myself. This was before the days of flame resistant pajamas and mine probably would have gone up like a torch except that for some reason it didn't happen.
I remember my classrooms as a child not by how pretty they were or where they were located but rather by how cold they were. Standard 2, Grade 2 in the US I think, was spent in Mrs Tombes class. She was a lovely lady but we were in a prefab classroom. A small box made out of gypsum board with a tin roof, the kind of portable classroom that gets added to a school because the school is growing and then is never replaced with a real building and is used forever because the school doesn't shrink again. Four or five long one bar heaters had been put in the room to heat it. For safety they were obviously attached to the ceiling. Even at 7 I knew that was a bad idea, heat rises, you don't need to be a engineer with a degree in physics to know this you just have to try to get warm in a classroom without insulation and with the heating on the ceiling.
The year I started High School the headmaster decided to deal with the budget cuts by cutting back on the heating. He would only run the furnaces in the afternoon. All morning I would sit in the concrete block rooms on my plastic and metal chairs sitting on my hands. Recess would be spent with my friends who were as cold as I in whatever piece of sun we could find warming ourselves in it's rays and at lunch I would rush to the library. There the warm water would now be slowly circulating the radiators. I would sit on the radiators as they heated up, all lunchtime if I could. My brother would tease me that I was such a nerd and I spent all lunchtime in the library, he did not feel it the way I did, he could not understand the damp cold that ached through my bones and filled me with a gentle despair. He was too busy, playing soccer, or cricket, or rugby or tennis, he was too busy being popular while I and my small circle of good friends would take our blue hands into the library daily and hold them to the radiators until we felt human.
PE class, physical education, was just more torture. Stripping down in an ice cold locker room to shorts and a t-shirt then being sent outside to run, play hockey or whatever. Sure the exercise would eventually warm you but not before you sat on the cold damp grass being told what to do, running was always a joke for me. I would fall over with cramps and breathing problems long before I ever reached the finish line. I thought that everyone hurt when they breathed, when they ran, I thought it was just that I wasn't fit and if I could just run long enough and get fit I wouldn't be falling on the ground gasping for air, sucking shallow breaths of pain. I was 26 when I had my first full blown asthma attack, I called my parents and I said "I had an asthma attack last night" to which my dad responded that "I always thought you were asthmatic." My cousin was an asthmatic, her parents drove to to the hospital often. My own mother would say "well you know that's what you get from coddling a child, making a sickie". I wasn't coddled, I was never diagnosed an asthmatic and when I never got fit enough to run, when I never did any athletic activity, when I couldn't swim a lap in the pool but my younger brother and sister could it was because I was a bookworm.
Of course the worst PE classes were those where they tried to teach us to swim. Swimming in cold water is not my idea of fun to this day. Jumping into a swimming pool in November in New Zealand is my idea of cruel and unusual punishment. Summer in New Zealand starts in December, late late December and the warmest days of the year are always in February right after we went back to school. Swimming lessons were always in November so we could learn to swim before we went to the beach with our families for Christmas. If it wasn't sad and humiliating enough to get my fat (I can't run or do any exercise so I'm a bookworm) thighs into a swimsuit the only thing sadder was trying to make me swim.
Most of my lessons were spent on the side of the pool wrapped in a towel shivering waiting for the kids who could swim to do laps. I was put in the "can't swim" group in high school because after years of throwing my asthmatic ass into ice cold water I had never learned to swim. I had learned to drown, I had learned how to relax while I was rescued and I had learned how to panic in any water that was deeper than my head.
The ironic thing was that we had our own swimming pool. My brother and sister could swim like fish but the only stroke I could do was backstroke because any time I put my face into the water my airways would close up and I would panic and gasp down water while trying to get air. We also had a hot tub. My father had made both. The hot tub was a wooden culvert which he had turned on it's side and poured cement into the bottom of, he'd built the seats, attached a pump and a heater. The pool was a large Para pool of the type that was popular in the seventies with a metal frame and a plastic liner. Ours was 28 feet long, 10 feet wide and 4 feet deep. This meant we had the coolest pool in the neighbourhood, in fact one of the only pools in the neighbourhood. It was however too cool to enjoy most of the year. We used it as a plunge pool to cool off from the hot tub and we used it as a dare in the winter. Swims in the winter were not measured in hours but in steps. How many steps could you do before you had to get out. The trick was to stay in the water long enough to get numb, long enough that the pain would end, long enough that you couldn't feel your feet touching the ground. But the pain would continue, each step splashing water onto your not quite numb torso. I usually won this game, not because I dealt with the cold better than my brother and sister but because I couldn't bear to lose. And when I got out I would stand in front of the full length mirror in the hallway, the only full length mirror in the house, one given to my parents as a wedding present and I would watch my body in amazement as feeling returned to my toes. My feet were blue, my teeth were chattering, and it was not just an expression, my knees did knock, hard and fast with a rhythmic thumping that both surprised and fascinated me.
In an effort for us to use the pool more often and make his pool maintenance worthwhile my father built a plastic greenhouse over the pool. Constructed of plastic sheeting and bent PVC pipes I did not at the time realize the ingenuity and brilliance of his design, I only thought it looked silly and that we still needed to get a heater for the pool because it still wasn't warm enough for me.
Of course most of our swimming was done at the beach, because like all Kiwis this is where every holiday was spent. Although the ocean was cold this was where everyone was and so I followed, crying as the water hit my knees, then groin, then chest, then dive under through a wave before your nerve failed you. Since I couldn't really swim I became adept at understanding waves, understanding my own limits and staying within them. I only had to be rescued 2 or 3 times by my brother, always because I had fallen into the temptation of trying to follow him out to where he was. We always went to surf beaches because my parents love body surfing and all of our family had beach houses at surf beaches.
The first house I ever lived in in New Zealand was the family beach bach (as all beach houses are called). It was a white clapboard house built by my great grandfather when my grandmother was still in her 20s. Set on a huge lot the house had a large pohutakawa tree in the back yard (and even as an adult this tree is still enormous). I climbed that tree when I was four. I don't know how high I went, in my mind it was miles up, up past the big branches, up to where the little twigs start. And somewhere up there past the big branches I stepped on a rotten branch and down I went. Down miles, flying backward through the air watching the tree fall away from me until all was black. By the time I regained consciousness my mother and brother were over me, I didn't know how they had got there so quickly, I had broken nothing and I was fine, so no need to take me to a doctor or anything. My mother was not a fan of taking us to doctors, my father would rush us to one for antibiotics at any opportunity.
The family bach was three bedrooms on the east side, a living room/kitchen with a fire on the west side, a small sunroom in the front of the house, south facing and in front of the living room (the sunroom was the only room that ever, ever got warm), the bathroom was behind the laundry room and it contained the old iron bathtub stained red with the vile dirt colored water that came from the town and a large laundry room at the rear of the house where the antique ringer washer and refrigerator were housed. Then attached right to the back the room that had been added last, the ultimate after thought, the toilet. Behind that was the back yard, the porch, the large iron tank to collect rain water to drink and in the yard a hand water pump and the tree.
When I was little water still came out of the pump with only a few cranks, but no-one used it, why should they when we had both town and rain water. When I was about 10 the well stopped pumping water and I was sad at it's loss, an era had ended.
The old house was painted in white paint back then, a lead based paint that washed off slowly over time and I would run my hands along it turning them white. The bach except for the old log fire had no heating. It was only built to be lived in for the summer. We rented it from the family over the winter, there was no money. No money to buy anything unnecessary. My mother had to ask her mother for money to buy a heater, she was refused. Most of that winter I don't think we had heat. I would play outside when I could, it was warmer outside than in.
For my birthday that year I got a beautiful doll sent to me from my godmother in America. It had a bath, you could wash it, it ate and drank, peed and pooped. At least while you feed it the special food. When that ran out I feed it whatever I had and it did not work anymore. Then I feed it toothpicks stuffing them down in an attempt to clean out the wrong food. After that I washed her in the wrong soap and her hair was ruined forever, so I cut it to fix it and she was never the same again. The dolly still had beautiful clothes which is more than what I had all I had was funny smelling clothes bought at the second hand shop and hand me down sneakers from my brother with holes in the soles and toes. Everything beautiful came from America and when we had lived there I had been warm.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
I started a blog because.... don't worry I'm fine
I started a blog because....
Because although most of me would like to hide in the corner and cover my face so no one notices me the other part of me craves an audience. Part of me is a little girl screaming "LOOK AT ME! DAMN IT, LOOK AT ME." In general my two parts are at war. I usually strangle the little girl and let the wallflower tuck herself into the corner hiding away from everything.
The thing is I want to be a writer. That is I want to make my money from writing. I have my name in print in three separate books and I don't promote them, I don't tell anyone I've written anything. People don't know that I write at all because the wallflower would prefer that I fail as a writer than that I am noticed.
I would like my entire life to be private, but at the same time I realize there is no privacy in the modern world. I am not looking for sympathy, or comments, or help. I would prefer I didn't know who my audience was and that they did not know me. I would love to walk out onto the spotlight with the darkness hiding the audience from sight. However in the real world you need to promote any endeavor first to your friends because strangers will never seek you out.
I write because I can't help myself. It's how I think, it's how I process what is going on in my life. A friend once said that "If people read what you wrote they would know exactly what is going on with you." Most of what I write is personal. Too personal perhaps to share but at the same time I'm proud of the words, I enjoy writing for an audience and I enjoy fashioning my experiences into stories. I think that true stories contain the most real emotions but they are stories.
As stories I shape them and suck as much emotion out of them as I can. If you only read my stories you would probably believe I'm a terribly depressed person, but I'm not. The stories are my way of channeling the emotions, of exercising my demons. If you want to read chipper little stories about how lovely life is and how shopping at the mall was so uplifting this probably is not the blog for you. If you want to read stories about getting your teeth kicked in by life and getting up again, well have I got a story for you.
Just realize these are stories, and I am a storyteller.
Once upon a time I was telling a story about seeing a rat and my arms were stretched out, my husband at the time had to reach out and push my arms together because "the rat was never that big, there are no rats that big." Well these are stories, they are true stories, but only within the context of a story, because sometimes the rat isn't that big except in your mind.
Because although most of me would like to hide in the corner and cover my face so no one notices me the other part of me craves an audience. Part of me is a little girl screaming "LOOK AT ME! DAMN IT, LOOK AT ME." In general my two parts are at war. I usually strangle the little girl and let the wallflower tuck herself into the corner hiding away from everything.
The thing is I want to be a writer. That is I want to make my money from writing. I have my name in print in three separate books and I don't promote them, I don't tell anyone I've written anything. People don't know that I write at all because the wallflower would prefer that I fail as a writer than that I am noticed.
I would like my entire life to be private, but at the same time I realize there is no privacy in the modern world. I am not looking for sympathy, or comments, or help. I would prefer I didn't know who my audience was and that they did not know me. I would love to walk out onto the spotlight with the darkness hiding the audience from sight. However in the real world you need to promote any endeavor first to your friends because strangers will never seek you out.
I write because I can't help myself. It's how I think, it's how I process what is going on in my life. A friend once said that "If people read what you wrote they would know exactly what is going on with you." Most of what I write is personal. Too personal perhaps to share but at the same time I'm proud of the words, I enjoy writing for an audience and I enjoy fashioning my experiences into stories. I think that true stories contain the most real emotions but they are stories.
As stories I shape them and suck as much emotion out of them as I can. If you only read my stories you would probably believe I'm a terribly depressed person, but I'm not. The stories are my way of channeling the emotions, of exercising my demons. If you want to read chipper little stories about how lovely life is and how shopping at the mall was so uplifting this probably is not the blog for you. If you want to read stories about getting your teeth kicked in by life and getting up again, well have I got a story for you.
Just realize these are stories, and I am a storyteller.
Once upon a time I was telling a story about seeing a rat and my arms were stretched out, my husband at the time had to reach out and push my arms together because "the rat was never that big, there are no rats that big." Well these are stories, they are true stories, but only within the context of a story, because sometimes the rat isn't that big except in your mind.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
What nature teaches you....
Things nature teaches you::
1. Mosquitos do not die in the refridgerator.
I really thought they would. Don’t they say that colder climates aren’t bothered by mosquitos because it’s cold? Yet when I open my fridge they fly out at me quite unharmed and moving as quickly as ever. It’s not like I deliberately placed the mosquito in the fridge, I do catch them regularily but then I squash them, the only reason there are so many mosquitos in the fridge is that there are so many mosquitos in my house.
Mosquitoes are more than annoying. A mosquito bite could mean weeks ill with dengue fever and possibly even death. It’s a fact of life, one of the things you live with in the tropics, one of the things you learn. It’s a wet wet season, there’s 70 cases of dengue checking in daily at the local hospital, it will be a bad year. I’ve had it once, I don’t want it again.
2. Vampire bats are cute
The first bat entered dead, and after it stopped moving my cat left it in the middle of the floor for me. It was so cute, with a little turned up nose and two canines like my kitties, it’s body about the size of a small mouse. My oldest googled it, vampire bat, carrier of rabies. Time to throw out the corpse after photos.
The second bat was alive, alive enough to escape the cat that brought it in. It was bigger, flapping around my living room. We couldn’t see what kind of bat it was, its flight path was completely eratic. The kids and I went into animal eviction proceedure, usually used for large toads, basically we all grab brooms and chase the animal out the door. It was harder with a bat, I have 16 foot ceilings with wood beams, so the bat decided to perch upside down on the highest beam. It was Julie’s idea to lob a pillow at it, and just minutes later we had it out of the house.
Since then we’ve had three more bats in the house, in case you’re wondering fruit bats are ugly, only the vampire ones are pretty.
3 Coral Snakes are less aggressive than house cats.
My little cat, 1 year old but not bigger than a large kitten (she was the runt of the litter) was playing with something right behind me. I saw it from the corner of my eye, some movement, I kept doing the dinner dishes, last thing before I could go to bed. Then a hiss, cats must be fighting over this latest prize. I turned around. Three feet in front of me three of my cats were taking turns at poking a 3 foot long coral snake. At least I thought it was a coral snake, I ran to the computer to see if it was a look alike I could let them kill. NO, no such luck, it was a real coral snake. Coral snake in the kitchen, three cats who would probably be dead by morning. Deadly poisonous snake in the kitchen, two children in bed.
I walked up to the hallway to try to get the cats away from the snake. I screamed at them, threw my shoe, the coral snake turned slowly to look at me. My daughter climbed out of bed to see what was wrong. I screamed at her to back off, she listened, the cats didn’t, they were having far too much fun with their new toy, multicolored and wiggly, so much fun.
Two kids were out to see the fun now, I ordered them to stay back and I ran outside to find a bucket. I had a 5 gallon paint bucket somewhere. There, grabbing it I ran inside and dropped it on the snake, missed the tail, lifted it and dropped it again, wiggled it a little to get the last of the snake under the plastic. The cats surrounded the bucket whacking at it with their paws, mommy had hidden their toy but they knew where it was. I grabbed a propane tank and put it on the bucket. I called the vet’s emergency number but she told me that she had no anti-venom, and it didn’t really work anyway, the cats would die. I hoped that the bucket would hold till morning, then I took my children, and went to bed, shutting my door knowing that in the morning I would not only have to deal with the snake but also three dead cats.
I woke, children in my bed, because where else would I fell they were safe and opened my door. No corpse on the other side, I walked into the kitchen, bucket still in place. I looked around, no cats. I opened a can of tuna and before I’d even done the dinner call I had three cats eating out of the can with no sign of any damage.
I called my business and asked for my handyman to come with a machete to kill a snake. He walked in took off the propane tank, lifted the bucket and dropped it back down quickly. “That’s dangerous” he spat at me.
“Yes” I said, “or I would have just let it escape.” I stepped back while he lifted the bucket again. The snake was angry this morning, a suppose a night in a bucket could do that. He used his machete to lift it and throw it out of the house, then as the snake slid back into the garden he hacked it to pieces. I was a little disappointed, it was so beautiful, but I couldn’t really take it to work for show and tell now that it had been chopped into bloody steak sized pieces.
Of course in the process nature teaches you something about yourself as well. I’m more afraid of mosquitoes than I am of venomous snakes, I judge things by appearance, and like vampire bats more than fruit bats simply because they look cuter. And that the thing that scares me most is that Costa Rica is where I will live the rest of my life because in many ways I have a dream existence, the problem is that this wasn’t my dream.
1. Mosquitos do not die in the refridgerator.
I really thought they would. Don’t they say that colder climates aren’t bothered by mosquitos because it’s cold? Yet when I open my fridge they fly out at me quite unharmed and moving as quickly as ever. It’s not like I deliberately placed the mosquito in the fridge, I do catch them regularily but then I squash them, the only reason there are so many mosquitos in the fridge is that there are so many mosquitos in my house.
Mosquitoes are more than annoying. A mosquito bite could mean weeks ill with dengue fever and possibly even death. It’s a fact of life, one of the things you live with in the tropics, one of the things you learn. It’s a wet wet season, there’s 70 cases of dengue checking in daily at the local hospital, it will be a bad year. I’ve had it once, I don’t want it again.
2. Vampire bats are cute
The first bat entered dead, and after it stopped moving my cat left it in the middle of the floor for me. It was so cute, with a little turned up nose and two canines like my kitties, it’s body about the size of a small mouse. My oldest googled it, vampire bat, carrier of rabies. Time to throw out the corpse after photos.
The second bat was alive, alive enough to escape the cat that brought it in. It was bigger, flapping around my living room. We couldn’t see what kind of bat it was, its flight path was completely eratic. The kids and I went into animal eviction proceedure, usually used for large toads, basically we all grab brooms and chase the animal out the door. It was harder with a bat, I have 16 foot ceilings with wood beams, so the bat decided to perch upside down on the highest beam. It was Julie’s idea to lob a pillow at it, and just minutes later we had it out of the house.
Since then we’ve had three more bats in the house, in case you’re wondering fruit bats are ugly, only the vampire ones are pretty.
3 Coral Snakes are less aggressive than house cats.
My little cat, 1 year old but not bigger than a large kitten (she was the runt of the litter) was playing with something right behind me. I saw it from the corner of my eye, some movement, I kept doing the dinner dishes, last thing before I could go to bed. Then a hiss, cats must be fighting over this latest prize. I turned around. Three feet in front of me three of my cats were taking turns at poking a 3 foot long coral snake. At least I thought it was a coral snake, I ran to the computer to see if it was a look alike I could let them kill. NO, no such luck, it was a real coral snake. Coral snake in the kitchen, three cats who would probably be dead by morning. Deadly poisonous snake in the kitchen, two children in bed.
I walked up to the hallway to try to get the cats away from the snake. I screamed at them, threw my shoe, the coral snake turned slowly to look at me. My daughter climbed out of bed to see what was wrong. I screamed at her to back off, she listened, the cats didn’t, they were having far too much fun with their new toy, multicolored and wiggly, so much fun.
Two kids were out to see the fun now, I ordered them to stay back and I ran outside to find a bucket. I had a 5 gallon paint bucket somewhere. There, grabbing it I ran inside and dropped it on the snake, missed the tail, lifted it and dropped it again, wiggled it a little to get the last of the snake under the plastic. The cats surrounded the bucket whacking at it with their paws, mommy had hidden their toy but they knew where it was. I grabbed a propane tank and put it on the bucket. I called the vet’s emergency number but she told me that she had no anti-venom, and it didn’t really work anyway, the cats would die. I hoped that the bucket would hold till morning, then I took my children, and went to bed, shutting my door knowing that in the morning I would not only have to deal with the snake but also three dead cats.
I woke, children in my bed, because where else would I fell they were safe and opened my door. No corpse on the other side, I walked into the kitchen, bucket still in place. I looked around, no cats. I opened a can of tuna and before I’d even done the dinner call I had three cats eating out of the can with no sign of any damage.
I called my business and asked for my handyman to come with a machete to kill a snake. He walked in took off the propane tank, lifted the bucket and dropped it back down quickly. “That’s dangerous” he spat at me.
“Yes” I said, “or I would have just let it escape.” I stepped back while he lifted the bucket again. The snake was angry this morning, a suppose a night in a bucket could do that. He used his machete to lift it and throw it out of the house, then as the snake slid back into the garden he hacked it to pieces. I was a little disappointed, it was so beautiful, but I couldn’t really take it to work for show and tell now that it had been chopped into bloody steak sized pieces.
Of course in the process nature teaches you something about yourself as well. I’m more afraid of mosquitoes than I am of venomous snakes, I judge things by appearance, and like vampire bats more than fruit bats simply because they look cuter. And that the thing that scares me most is that Costa Rica is where I will live the rest of my life because in many ways I have a dream existence, the problem is that this wasn’t my dream.
Three Stories
I went into it thinking it would be good for three stories. Three stories. If I am honest I knew I would get hurt, if I am honest I thought that at least I’d get a story, or three, out of it. If I am honest I have to ask how crazy am I to think of life in terms of whether an experience will be story worthy or not. Someone said to me the other day that people couldn’t possibly tell stories all the time about their lives because they would have nothing to say and it would be boring. I didn’t tell her that life is never boring, that there is always something to say among friends and that in the hands of a good writer a walk across the room could be a great story. I didn’t say how privileged I’ve been to hear wonderful stories. I didn’t say that maybe her life is boring but not everyone’s is. I didn’t say anything. What could I say?
Three stories, that was my thought. A story for the beginning, a story for the middle and a story for the end. I knew it would end. I went into it knowing that it would end. I went in to it expecting it to end. I did not know I would fall in love. I did not know I was capable of love. That was a surprise. And so this is possibly the last story, not the third, the fifth. Maybe the last because I need to let it end, I need it to be over. And yet I want nothing more in the world for this to be one of the first stories, one of the early stories about a relationship that lasted a lifetime about a relationship that mattered. Not just a fling worth three stories. Not just a short interlude about a little sex.
It’s been four months. Four months where we don’t talk. Four months where I slam the phone in his ear. Months of listening to the voice of reason, months of listening to my friends, knowing that it will stop hurting one day. One day, when is that? Four months should be long enough shouldn’t it? Four months should be enough to forget, enough to dull the edges of the pain, to reduce the bleeding, to stop the aching, to stop missing him all day every day. I thought it would be enough. Four months since I cut him off to save myself, four months since I cut out my heart in order to cauterize the pain. But I can feel the hole aching within me. I can feel how good it should have been, how good it could have been, I can still feel his presence in everything. I know he misses me as much as I miss him.
But I know it needs to be over, that it was never going to last, logic tells me it was nothing more than a stupidity. He’s a young kid wanting to party, wanting to stay free of commitments, wanting to avoid commitment, terrified that someone else will try to control his life, while he himself spirals out of control. Logic tells me that I need to stop this before it kills me. Logic tells me that I need to let him go before he hurts me again, logic tells me that every time it hurts more, logic tells me he’s too young, too scared, he’s not ready for this. My heart tells me otherwise, my heart tells me how good it felt to be with him, my heart tells me that it’s learned how to beat listening to the sound of his breathing, my heart tells me it will love him forever no matter what he does or has done. So I take my heart and I cut into it, letting it’s secrets and knowledge bleed away.
He calls me and asks me not to hang up. He says he wants to meet me. He says he’ll come to my house at 10am. I say ok. I don’t sleep all night worried that he won’t come, I don’t sleep all night worried that he will come. At 10 he’s not there, at 10:30 he’s not there. I’m too tired to cry, too numb to scream, I try to sleep and I don’t, but I do think. And at 11:15 as I am drifting in that land between sleep and awake he comes.
On his motorbike with no muffler. On his little boy’s toy. On the same motorbike that has almost killed him many times, the one that has given him his scars, the knee, the shoulder, the lip, below the eye. God how I long to touch his scars.
He comes in and we talk. I ask him why he wants to do this. He says he wants to be with me. That he doesn’t understand it but with me he feels peace; I don’t understand it either but with him I feel peace too, until he leaves and then I just feel desolate. I tell him I can’t do it again, that I can’t stand the emptiness. He tells me it will be ok, he tells me he’ll call me.
For the next day I am happy, stupid ridiculous happy. Happy like I haven’t been in 4 months. My heart restored beating in my chest, no ghosts following me I enjoy my day. And that night I wait for his call.
He doesn’t call me.
And the next day I wait for his call.
My brain starts to scream. This is why you shut him out. This is what I was trying to protect you from. You can’t trust him, you can’t do this again, you haven’t finished bleeding yet, but you would have and now you are just picking the scab off the wounds. You don’t need a heart, you can live without it. Stop now. Stop trying to feel, stop trying to capture the happiness, it only comes with pain.
So I call him. He has nothing to say. He doesn’t talk. He claims he lost his phone.
I know better.
I know that I need to not only remove my heart but destroy it, destroy any piece of it that is left, so that it can’t cry out. I need silence, the silence that comes from a lifetime of being alone, the silence that doesn’t interrupt the loneliness with feelings of peace and love.
And now this is story five, I don’t know if it’s over, I don’t know how much more I can take if it isn’t. I still want more, I want to risk it all to get what I want. But I know in the end it will probably only be material for a story.
Three stories, that was my thought. A story for the beginning, a story for the middle and a story for the end. I knew it would end. I went into it knowing that it would end. I went in to it expecting it to end. I did not know I would fall in love. I did not know I was capable of love. That was a surprise. And so this is possibly the last story, not the third, the fifth. Maybe the last because I need to let it end, I need it to be over. And yet I want nothing more in the world for this to be one of the first stories, one of the early stories about a relationship that lasted a lifetime about a relationship that mattered. Not just a fling worth three stories. Not just a short interlude about a little sex.
It’s been four months. Four months where we don’t talk. Four months where I slam the phone in his ear. Months of listening to the voice of reason, months of listening to my friends, knowing that it will stop hurting one day. One day, when is that? Four months should be long enough shouldn’t it? Four months should be enough to forget, enough to dull the edges of the pain, to reduce the bleeding, to stop the aching, to stop missing him all day every day. I thought it would be enough. Four months since I cut him off to save myself, four months since I cut out my heart in order to cauterize the pain. But I can feel the hole aching within me. I can feel how good it should have been, how good it could have been, I can still feel his presence in everything. I know he misses me as much as I miss him.
But I know it needs to be over, that it was never going to last, logic tells me it was nothing more than a stupidity. He’s a young kid wanting to party, wanting to stay free of commitments, wanting to avoid commitment, terrified that someone else will try to control his life, while he himself spirals out of control. Logic tells me that I need to stop this before it kills me. Logic tells me that I need to let him go before he hurts me again, logic tells me that every time it hurts more, logic tells me he’s too young, too scared, he’s not ready for this. My heart tells me otherwise, my heart tells me how good it felt to be with him, my heart tells me that it’s learned how to beat listening to the sound of his breathing, my heart tells me it will love him forever no matter what he does or has done. So I take my heart and I cut into it, letting it’s secrets and knowledge bleed away.
He calls me and asks me not to hang up. He says he wants to meet me. He says he’ll come to my house at 10am. I say ok. I don’t sleep all night worried that he won’t come, I don’t sleep all night worried that he will come. At 10 he’s not there, at 10:30 he’s not there. I’m too tired to cry, too numb to scream, I try to sleep and I don’t, but I do think. And at 11:15 as I am drifting in that land between sleep and awake he comes.
On his motorbike with no muffler. On his little boy’s toy. On the same motorbike that has almost killed him many times, the one that has given him his scars, the knee, the shoulder, the lip, below the eye. God how I long to touch his scars.
He comes in and we talk. I ask him why he wants to do this. He says he wants to be with me. That he doesn’t understand it but with me he feels peace; I don’t understand it either but with him I feel peace too, until he leaves and then I just feel desolate. I tell him I can’t do it again, that I can’t stand the emptiness. He tells me it will be ok, he tells me he’ll call me.
For the next day I am happy, stupid ridiculous happy. Happy like I haven’t been in 4 months. My heart restored beating in my chest, no ghosts following me I enjoy my day. And that night I wait for his call.
He doesn’t call me.
And the next day I wait for his call.
My brain starts to scream. This is why you shut him out. This is what I was trying to protect you from. You can’t trust him, you can’t do this again, you haven’t finished bleeding yet, but you would have and now you are just picking the scab off the wounds. You don’t need a heart, you can live without it. Stop now. Stop trying to feel, stop trying to capture the happiness, it only comes with pain.
So I call him. He has nothing to say. He doesn’t talk. He claims he lost his phone.
I know better.
I know that I need to not only remove my heart but destroy it, destroy any piece of it that is left, so that it can’t cry out. I need silence, the silence that comes from a lifetime of being alone, the silence that doesn’t interrupt the loneliness with feelings of peace and love.
And now this is story five, I don’t know if it’s over, I don’t know how much more I can take if it isn’t. I still want more, I want to risk it all to get what I want. But I know in the end it will probably only be material for a story.
RIP
“Are you alive” read the text message. He’s been sending me a message every day. Two yesterday. Two yesterday, none today. I keep looking for it. I know why he texted me this question, because I’m not responding, because I’m ignoring his texts, because it’s a question I texted him once when he stopped responding to me.
Am I alive? I feel like responding, I want to respond. I want to answer. “NO. It’s not possible to live without a heart. You took mine and broke it then gave it back to me in pieces. And then when I finally thought I had all the pieces together you decided to start talking to me, to start texting me. And the pieces in my hands fell to the ground and shattered and now I don’t know where to start. Of course I am dead. I have been dead since the day you stopped talking to me. You remember that day? It was the day after you said you loved me and wanted to be with me. You’d broken my heart before, taken little pieces and crushed them beneath your feet but this was the grand slam knock out tour de force, this was the piece de resistance. I gave you my whole heart to hold and you threw it to the ground.
No I am not alive. Part of me wants to Rest In Peace and the other part, the scattered fragments of heart still hope, still want, still yearn for you to return. Those scattered fragments know you could make them whole again with just a word, just a touch. The shards of my heart want you back but my head knows that if you throw my heart away again I may not survive at all, that perhaps being dead is better than dying. That pain fades, nerves die and numbness, being the living dead, a heartless zombie is possible. My head wants to crush the last of the shards, to shut them down, to Rest in Pieces.
Am I alive? I feel like responding, I want to respond. I want to answer. “NO. It’s not possible to live without a heart. You took mine and broke it then gave it back to me in pieces. And then when I finally thought I had all the pieces together you decided to start talking to me, to start texting me. And the pieces in my hands fell to the ground and shattered and now I don’t know where to start. Of course I am dead. I have been dead since the day you stopped talking to me. You remember that day? It was the day after you said you loved me and wanted to be with me. You’d broken my heart before, taken little pieces and crushed them beneath your feet but this was the grand slam knock out tour de force, this was the piece de resistance. I gave you my whole heart to hold and you threw it to the ground.
No I am not alive. Part of me wants to Rest In Peace and the other part, the scattered fragments of heart still hope, still want, still yearn for you to return. Those scattered fragments know you could make them whole again with just a word, just a touch. The shards of my heart want you back but my head knows that if you throw my heart away again I may not survive at all, that perhaps being dead is better than dying. That pain fades, nerves die and numbness, being the living dead, a heartless zombie is possible. My head wants to crush the last of the shards, to shut them down, to Rest in Pieces.
So you're French?
My daughter's class in school has nine students, and nine nationalities: Canadian, Isreali, French, Costa Rica, Italian, Dutch, Argentinan, Chilean, and my daughter, the American. Most of these kids have lived in Costa Rica almost all their lives, some of them were even born here. My daughter at 13 has been here for 7 years, more than half of her total existence on this planet. They are all bilingual, Spanish and English these are the two languages they need for school and many of them are tri-lingual speaking a different language at home than they do at school. And yet they still identify themselves by the nationality and language of their parents.
The private school my children go to stresses that their students are citizens of the world, while at the same time bragging about how many different nationalities the school encompasses. Last week the music teacher decided to teach all the children that they were Costa Rican. He argued that they had lived all or most their lives in Costa Rica, that they spoke Costa Rican Spanish, that they were part of the culture of Costa Rica thus they are Costa Ricans.
The French boy in class said, "Sir, didn't you say you lived in Paris for five years as a musician, and you speak French?" The teacher replied to the affirmative. "Then Sir, you are French." The music teacher shocked responded, "Of course I'm not French, I'm a Costa Rican" at which point our little French smartass said (to the joy of the entire class). "Yes Sir, you're a Costa Rican and I'm French."
Nationality is a hard thing. I hate nationalism as a concept. Nationalism has lead to more blood shed than anything else except religion. At our wedding my future ex-husband made a nationalistic speech for Quebec to break away from Canada. I hated him for it. I was born in the US, to New Zealand parents. When I went "home" to New Zealand at 4 I already had an American accent.... I was already different. I was an American, and proud of it. When I left "home" at fifteen to go back to the US I had a Kiwi accent, I was always a foreigner. I've lived most of my life out of New Zealand but when people hear me speak they know I sound different and ask me where I'm from. Whereas California would be a more accurate answer I answer "New Zealand' because that is where my accent comes from and as I grow older I find myself with more of the New Zealand culture in me than American.
American's are proud and arrogant. They are proud of their country, proud to be Americans. It's written everywhere. America is the greatest country on earth. Dear God who came up with that? Is it because they recited the Pledge of Allegiance too often at school or is it in the water, or the coca cola (because American's don't really drink water except from a polluting plastic bottle)? Why they hell do they believe this? Costa Rican's hate that Americans refer to themselves as Americans and their country as America. America is a continent, say the Costa Ricans -- we are Americans too. How dare they be so arrogant as to believe that they are the only nation on a continent of 36 countries? Costa Rican's are taught that the entire Americas is one continent (and why isn't it? And for that matter why aren't Asia and Europe one continent?) Why do we insist to drawing arbitrary lines to say who belongs where? Why do we need a nationality?
Someone once said that the only thing New Zealanders were proud of was that they weren't Australians. My daughters born in the US to a New Zealander and a French Canadian and having grown up in Costa Rica are Americans. Their accents are Californian American, an accent neutral in this world of pigeon holing, an accent broadcast worldwide on almost every television show that is not reality TV from Jersey, or from a red-neck neighborhood They have chosen an accent that makes them stand out to no one. When they speak Spanish their accent is of Costa Rica and Nicaragua from the Nicaraguan employees we have. They have learned their Spanish accent from their companions but their English accent is not from their friends or their family, it is from cable tv.
The other day I gave a ride to a boy from school. He's 16, lived here 9 years. He spoke to me in English with a Californian surfer boy accent and to my daughter's boyfriend in Costa Rican Teenage slang accent. He's German, sometimes a word would sneak out with a German twist, but not often. But I know if you asked him what he was he would say German. He will probably never live in Germany his whole life but he is German.
I hate nationalism. Yet at the same time I understand the need for a nationality. The need to know where you belong, where your people are from. It's always been important. Robin Hood's real name was "Robin of Locksley". People were identified by a name and then a place. The Duke of Salisbury, last names were carved out of place names even today many names in French and Italian still contain the "of" (de Laurentis, di Caprio). You needed to know your place in the world. So you could either be of (enter town home here) or someone's son (Jack's son) or from a profession (Carpenter). Knowing where you come from is vital, everyone needs a point of origin.
Costa Rican's are supposed to be the happiest people on earth, I think this may have a lot to do with the fact that they don't leave home. They grow up in a little village and they stay there, they don't go to a different state to go to College, they don't meet up with a woman from another part of the country and go to live in yet another part of the country. They marry the girl next door and build a shack next door to mom. There is something to be said for knowing exactly where you belong and knowing everyone around you.
I envy those who know their nationality. Who state it with pride. "I'm not Costa Rican, I'm French." I wish I shared such certainty. I feel the lack of a nationality, the lack of a true belonging to any place. The country of my accent has been my home for so little of my life; the America of my adulthood repels me in its arrogance and the Costa Rica of my middle age will always be a place in which I am a gringa with a horrible accent.
World Citizen is a nice idea, but a lonely existence where one is cut off from any real stability, from any real sense of place. I long to have a last name that tells all where I am from, to have a last name that reflects where I am from instead of an absence of belonging in my very soul. I long to proudly proclaim my nationality to know with certainty where my place in the world is, to know that somewhere there is a home to go back to.
The private school my children go to stresses that their students are citizens of the world, while at the same time bragging about how many different nationalities the school encompasses. Last week the music teacher decided to teach all the children that they were Costa Rican. He argued that they had lived all or most their lives in Costa Rica, that they spoke Costa Rican Spanish, that they were part of the culture of Costa Rica thus they are Costa Ricans.
The French boy in class said, "Sir, didn't you say you lived in Paris for five years as a musician, and you speak French?" The teacher replied to the affirmative. "Then Sir, you are French." The music teacher shocked responded, "Of course I'm not French, I'm a Costa Rican" at which point our little French smartass said (to the joy of the entire class). "Yes Sir, you're a Costa Rican and I'm French."
Nationality is a hard thing. I hate nationalism as a concept. Nationalism has lead to more blood shed than anything else except religion. At our wedding my future ex-husband made a nationalistic speech for Quebec to break away from Canada. I hated him for it. I was born in the US, to New Zealand parents. When I went "home" to New Zealand at 4 I already had an American accent.... I was already different. I was an American, and proud of it. When I left "home" at fifteen to go back to the US I had a Kiwi accent, I was always a foreigner. I've lived most of my life out of New Zealand but when people hear me speak they know I sound different and ask me where I'm from. Whereas California would be a more accurate answer I answer "New Zealand' because that is where my accent comes from and as I grow older I find myself with more of the New Zealand culture in me than American.
American's are proud and arrogant. They are proud of their country, proud to be Americans. It's written everywhere. America is the greatest country on earth. Dear God who came up with that? Is it because they recited the Pledge of Allegiance too often at school or is it in the water, or the coca cola (because American's don't really drink water except from a polluting plastic bottle)? Why they hell do they believe this? Costa Rican's hate that Americans refer to themselves as Americans and their country as America. America is a continent, say the Costa Ricans -- we are Americans too. How dare they be so arrogant as to believe that they are the only nation on a continent of 36 countries? Costa Rican's are taught that the entire Americas is one continent (and why isn't it? And for that matter why aren't Asia and Europe one continent?) Why do we insist to drawing arbitrary lines to say who belongs where? Why do we need a nationality?
Someone once said that the only thing New Zealanders were proud of was that they weren't Australians. My daughters born in the US to a New Zealander and a French Canadian and having grown up in Costa Rica are Americans. Their accents are Californian American, an accent neutral in this world of pigeon holing, an accent broadcast worldwide on almost every television show that is not reality TV from Jersey, or from a red-neck neighborhood They have chosen an accent that makes them stand out to no one. When they speak Spanish their accent is of Costa Rica and Nicaragua from the Nicaraguan employees we have. They have learned their Spanish accent from their companions but their English accent is not from their friends or their family, it is from cable tv.
The other day I gave a ride to a boy from school. He's 16, lived here 9 years. He spoke to me in English with a Californian surfer boy accent and to my daughter's boyfriend in Costa Rican Teenage slang accent. He's German, sometimes a word would sneak out with a German twist, but not often. But I know if you asked him what he was he would say German. He will probably never live in Germany his whole life but he is German.
I hate nationalism. Yet at the same time I understand the need for a nationality. The need to know where you belong, where your people are from. It's always been important. Robin Hood's real name was "Robin of Locksley". People were identified by a name and then a place. The Duke of Salisbury, last names were carved out of place names even today many names in French and Italian still contain the "of" (de Laurentis, di Caprio). You needed to know your place in the world. So you could either be of (enter town home here) or someone's son (Jack's son) or from a profession (Carpenter). Knowing where you come from is vital, everyone needs a point of origin.
Costa Rican's are supposed to be the happiest people on earth, I think this may have a lot to do with the fact that they don't leave home. They grow up in a little village and they stay there, they don't go to a different state to go to College, they don't meet up with a woman from another part of the country and go to live in yet another part of the country. They marry the girl next door and build a shack next door to mom. There is something to be said for knowing exactly where you belong and knowing everyone around you.
I envy those who know their nationality. Who state it with pride. "I'm not Costa Rican, I'm French." I wish I shared such certainty. I feel the lack of a nationality, the lack of a true belonging to any place. The country of my accent has been my home for so little of my life; the America of my adulthood repels me in its arrogance and the Costa Rica of my middle age will always be a place in which I am a gringa with a horrible accent.
World Citizen is a nice idea, but a lonely existence where one is cut off from any real stability, from any real sense of place. I long to have a last name that tells all where I am from, to have a last name that reflects where I am from instead of an absence of belonging in my very soul. I long to proudly proclaim my nationality to know with certainty where my place in the world is, to know that somewhere there is a home to go back to.
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