Sherry L Huckabee

New Year Wishes

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Grace and Grit

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The alarm pierces the silence, startling me.  It is hard to believe just 11 days ago, I jumped up in panic when three seconds passed without an alarm, certain my grandfather had flat lined.  It took me a moment to find my bearings and realize silence meant his heart was okay for those three seconds, it was all those other moments, the incessant beeps and squawks that said all is not fine.  Funny how frequency determines normalcy and bad can seem good when it is consistent.  

 

That was the day the doctor told us my grandfather was going to die.  Well, he tried to tell us.  We were standing by my grandfather’s bedside and my mother almost hit the little cocky SOB upside the head for trying to say that in front of my granddad. He was eager to tell us, like he’d gotten an A in Breaking-Down-Families 101 and wanted to prove how cool he could be when he told a family their loved one wasn’t going to make it.  We scuttled out into the hallway, insisting any conversation be carried on out there. 

 

I can’t say whether he wanted to prove to us that he didn’t do any wrong talking in front of the shriveled up dying skin of a man in the bed beside us or if he realized maybe he was out of line and wanted to prove his A in Bedside-Manner-second-term, but as we left the room he turned to address my granddad.  “I see you’re a Cowboys Fan, Mr. George”  (guess he gets points for noting the obvious since my granddad had his Cowboys hat firmly pulled over the wires and electrodes attached to his head).  “Well, we’re just gonna have to talk about that when you get to feeling better.  I’m a Giants fan myself.” 

 

What I would have given to have been  on the other side of the bed where I could see the expression on that doctor’s face when my granddad went to sit up and give the doc a piece of his mind!  Giants indeed!  Keep in mind, twelve hours earlier my granddad was dead on the table, code blue, brought back with the paddles.  He had been on what the nurses nicknamed the “milk of amnesia” for the intervening twelve hours, but death and drugs sure wouldn’t stop him from putting some cocky little shit in his place when necessary, especially if he was insulting the Cowboys! 

 

The doctor stepped out of the room, clearly flustered that my granddad was as with it as he obviously was.  He then continued to tell us what he had started to say before.  Granddad wasn’t going to make it.  Three hours later he went code blue again.  They rushed us all out of the room as half the hospital blue pants poured in.  We held each other outside the glass windows - at worst certain, at best fearful, that this was it.  And then, before a single paddle was touched, Granddad’s heart got itself under control. 

 

Two days later we took him off life support.  And a day later off the oxygen that had replaced it.  With no more tube down his throat, he got off the milk of amnesia.  They put in a temporary pacemaker while we waited and prayed for the fluid in his lungs to clear and the fever to go away.   By day 11 he was breathing on his own, sleeping through the nights, flirting with the nurses, and keeping everybody in stitches.  Monday they put in the pace maker. Tomorrow he will go to a rehabilitation to get his strength back in his legs.  He’ll be home in time for his 89^th birthday. I guess we showed that cocky little doctor a thing or two about good living and stubborn spirits!

 

My mother and I have kept a 24 hour vigil these last 17 days, passing the relay between us.  I would sit at my grandfather’s bedside for 24 hours while she got some sleep and worked at the office then she would take bedside duty while I did the same.  Hospital vigils can make you a bit crazy – they call it ICU psychosis.  Trying to keep together a struggling business that demands both of us 16 hours a day at the same time didn’t make it easier.  But what an amazing 17 days those were - seeing cousins I hadn’t seen in years, coming to know my grandfather in a way I never have before, standing by my mom, being a family. 

 

I never thought of us as that tight-nit of a family.  My grandparents were farmers and when my mother left their small town for the big city, she began a very different life from her brother who remained a good ol’ country boy.  I spent many holidays with my grandparents, fascinated by my cousins who roped cows and rode horses and worked the fields.  It was such a different life from anything I knew and I dare say a great deal of my solidness comes from that bit of country in my blood and soul. 

 

My cousins and I haven’t kept that close in touch – our worlds are, well, worlds apart.  We went on with our lives, raised our children most of whom have now had children of their own.  There are rifts in the family and issues that some picture in my mind of a “good family” didn’t include.  But boy I’ll tell you, when push came to shove, we were all there, standing by each other and the man who we all owe our lives to, literally.  One of the nurses stopped my mother in the hall one night and told her what a beautiful family we were.  “Unfortunately, we don’t see a lot of good families around here,” she said.  “I go home every night and say my prayers for Mr. George that he will get better and share many more years with you all.”  Well her prayers and ours must have found a voice in heaven. 

 

You know I would have never found the “time” in life to go spend two weeks with my Granddad.  Only a tragedy could slow any of us down enough to just sit with each other day after day.  And what a beautiful blessing that tragedy has been.  I had no idea my granddad was so witty.  He kept everybody in stitches all the time.  Watching him handle with such impeccable grace being hooked up to machines, poked and prodded, unable to move, depending on everyone for everything was an amazing thing to behold.  He taught me something about grit and grace that I will carry forever.  Seeing the sweet love between him and his girlfriend (my grandmother died 10 years ago just before their 60^th wedding anniversary) and her never wavering presence by his side is a testament to love that can bloom at any time in life.  Listening to his joy in life, even now as his sight is fading and life is running down to the end told me I have much to learn about what living is all about.  

 

We have stories from these weeks that we will tell and laugh about for years, long after my granddad has left us.   And I am left with an appreciation for what a “good family” is – a gathering of people with all their flaws and strengths standing by each other with grace and joy and gratitude for one another and life. 

 

Thank you Granddad, for living through such pain and giving us such joy. 

 

 

 

 

Home At Last

“I feel as if I have come home, not to this place necessarily, but to myself.” This was the last line of an email to a girlfriend telling her of my time settling down here in Sighisoara. I didn’t put much thought into the words, they just flowed through my fingers to the screen as if they belonged; a seemingly simple sentence no more significant at that particular moment than recounting the marvelous strudel I had for dessert the night before. It would be two more days before I would actually, fully comprehend the significance of what I had written, of what I felt.

At the same moment I was writing that line, a reporter from the New York Times was writing me an email through the couchsurfing system. She was doing an article related to couchsurfing and wondered if I would contribute. But of course! It took us a couple days to connect between email and ornery Romanian telephones but finally Wednesday evening I settled into one of our lovely orange armchairs at the NGO for my telephone interview with Penelope Green. As it turned out, she was doing an article not on couchsurfing per se, but on the idea of what was ‘home’ for nomads like me. What was it like to give up home in the physical sense? Did we carry some sense of ‘home’ on the road and if so how? What was it like as couchsurfers (or hospitality clubbers) to surf or to host and how did hosts and surfers welcome or fit in to the home around them? And what was it like to come back to a physical place of home?

We talked, I should say I talked, for two hours as Penelope typed madly trying to catch all I had to say. I liked Penelope from hello – she has one of those bright, bold telephone personalities that immediately puts the other person on the line at ease. It was more like catching up with an old friend than doing an interview with a woman I had never met before. Now of course, anyone who knows me knows I can talk forever about anything, but she had a knack for teasing just the right tangent out of me, taking me deeper and deeper into this concept of ‘home’ and its significance to my journey these last two years.

The two hour conversation was cathartic. I sat in silence for a moment once the plastic green phone settled into the cradle. I feel like I have come home, not to this place necessarily, but to myself… I heard the soft click of the universe, the sound the sky makes when something falls into place, when a sudden realization radiates with clarity something hidden in shadows for years, perhaps a lifetime. It is what I had been searching for all along. I thought I was searching for the “place” home – for someplace where I felt like I really belonged. Or, if I never came upon such a place, as seemed more likely the case, I thought maybe I would reach a place in time when I had traveled so long that settling in a place, any place, would not leave me feeling as if I had settled for something. I had often joked that I was searching for my own back yard - I just needed to go all the way around the world to get to it because if I just walked out the back door I’d feel like I was missing something. When people asked me how long I would be a nomad, I would answer, “Until I’m so tired of traveling that all I want to do is be still.”

But how do you sit still if you aren’t comfortable in your own skin?

You don’t. You fill your life with tasks and to-do lists, bigger, better things to buy, new classes, more books, maybe take on a cause. You change cities, change jobs, change partners, create a constant sense of upheaval, of things that demand your attention. You do anything, anything to silence the ticking of the clock, because the last place you want to be is trapped alone with yourself in a room so quiet you can hear your own heart beat against the tick-tock of life passing by. This was my life ten years ago. I dare say it is the life many of us lead, especially in America.

We hide. We hide in busy-ness, in fantasy, in sex, in artificial worlds, in the legally-induced stupor created by television or alcohol or prescription drugs, or worse... And what exactly is it we are hiding from? The same thing we hid from as children. The dark. That terrible place where monsters lurk, where known things take on unknown shapes. That place where bad things happen. But this darkness is within.

We all have our own abyss, our own dark places – the untouched, unshared spaces in our soul. The places we fear to tread within ourselves, and certainly never dare show others. The monsters that live inside our thoughts, the storms that brew in our feelings, the deep, dark unexplored catacombs of our hearts, the sorrow in our souls. Our fear, our anger, our hurt, our gnawing sense of unworthiness, of purposelessness, the terrible suspicion that we are living a life that has the significance of a piece of lint on the underside of an old abandoned armchair in the forgotten corner of an unused room.

We convince ourselves it is all okay – even when we know inside it isn’t. We hold up our trophies, our diplomas, our pats-on-the-back-by-the-boss, our manicured lawns, and pretty homes, and well-behaved children. We check off our lists – good spouse (or no spouse to bother you), check; good job, check; nice car and home, check; a garden, or hobby, or something we can say feeds our soul, check. But does it really? Or is it just another check mark on the list? We look at our lists and say, “But of course I’m happy. Look, I have everything a person could want.” The echo of sardonic laughter rises from the abyss. We drink another drink, watch more TV, take on another cause, have an affair. We deafen our ears, silence our souls, and drive ever forward, never pausing to consider if we are actually on the road we want to be on, living the life we want to live; never daring to ask are we really living at all or just going through the motions.

Every man, every woman chooses to face or not to face their own abyss. The question is not whether we have one; the excavation begins the day we are born with a sudden inexplicably cruel, though arguably necessary, smack as we begin to gasp for breath, for air, for life. We are poked and prodded, yanked back and forth from the love of this beautiful woman’s arms and that familiar, soothing man’s voice to the realities of life – blood letting, circumcision, vaccinations, things done ‘for our own good.’ Necessary things perhaps – but to a new little body with no capacity to understand this concept, it is simple cruelty. The excavation continues with loving parents who mold more than see us, teachers who lecture more than tease out the natural curiosity within us, friends who betray us, lovers who leave us.

Even the luckiest person with the most loving home, friends, encouragement, confidence; even they have an abyss to face – the injustices of life that they have buried somewhere in a time when they did not have the tools to understand or deal with them. Those of us less lucky, well, we bury more. And maybe in a sense that makes luckier, because the abyss feeds itself, and the larger it becomes, the harder it is to ignore it. But until the day comes, if it comes, that day when we can no longer avoid our own pain, no longer silence our own tears, no longer pretend that a perfect life on the outside does not necessarily reflect a perfect life on the inside, we do ignore it. We do anything we can to avoid this yawning cavernous, possibly bottomless space. We skirt the edge, avert our eyes from the darkness, for to face it feels, well, terrifying. What if we lose control? What if we get lost in there? What if it simply swallows us whole? What if we just disappear? What if we die in there, in the dark, alone?

I could feel it, that place, that darkness, that yawning waiting to swallow me whole. Anger, depression, fear were feelings I rarely had, or I should say rarely acknowledged. I bounced through life with a smile, sleeping four hours a night, playing superwoman, keeping an impossible schedule; a bundle of energy that amazed everyone around me. I lived for that “How do you do it all!” exclamation. Of course you can’t, not forever. The energy runs out and you have to sit still to recharge – and there it is, the abyss, just waiting for you to sit down, to turn the lights out, waiting to call to you in the night as the clock ticks beside the bed and your heart hammers in your ears. Eventually alcohol or sleeping pills will fill in those quiet places, or you’ll just bury deeper in work, in something you can say gives you purpose. As if there is ever a purpose in hiding, except not to be found. And how do we begin to live if our purpose is not to be found?

I knew it was there, yet I avoided it, hid from it, ignored it. Anger was too risky, a floodgate that might never shut once opened. And tears, you could drown in tears. Only weak people got depressed of course and only cowards get scared. These feelings all live in those dark places; those places we are taught to avoid. But when you spend your life avoiding something it becomes the very thing you live your life around. Avoidance creates a void - and everything else centers around emptiness...

If I were to choose a metaphor looking back, I would say I was like a beautiful crystal vase – specially cut, unique, shimmering in the light, admired, a treasure, really, if you looked at it sitting there on the mantel. But the bottom was cut out and every rose placed in me died, because I quite literally couldn’t hold water. Water – the archetypal element that symbolizes feelings, emotions, the rise and fall of the tides that carry us from happiness to sorrow and back again. These things were dangerous. Logic was safe - reasonable, defendable, predictable. And rationalization? Oh glory be to the Gods, what a beautiful tool is rationalization! If you are smart enough, and I was, you can rationalize away every bad thing that ever happens to you. Your mind can anyway. But your heart? Your heart buries the pain that you never dared to feel and the abyss grows.

I was empty inside because I couldn’t hold water, wouldn’t hold the truth of my own sorrow, my own pain, my own anger, my own despair. No I wasn’t raped as a child. My father didn’t beat me and we had plenty to eat. I’m not talking about the gross injustices of the world, I’m talking about simple sorrow that is as natural a part of life as the rain. My life wasn’t a bubble-bath of rose petals, but it wasn’t a briar patch of thorns either. It was like most, a lot of good, a lot of bad….

But I bought a bill of goods that we get sold in America – that it is supposed to be all good and never bad. That if we are doing it right, it is smooth sailing, it is happily ever after, life will be a bowl of cherries, pitless cherries of course. We are taught that bad is bad, and should be ignored, pushed away, forgotten. Big boys don’t cry. Don’t let the turkeys get you down. Forward march. Think positive. Be positive and the sun will always shine on you. But the sun doesn’t always shine and if someone told you it did, you would think them a fool. So why do we believe this? Why do we believe if we just change our attitude, find the right love, design the perfect home everything will come up roses? What is so wrong, really, with one day simply being sad? No reason, just sad? Or mad? Or scared? Something in our culture tells us that is not allowed. That we’re weak if we feel. Unreliable. And so we try to prune the thorns and leave the roses, which of course is impossible, and then we wonder why there is nothing left, no roses, no thorns, nothing but these shears in our hand and this constant need to prune.

I was well pruned. I was the best at “Understanding” with a capital U; so good at not needing, at never being disappointed. Being independent I called it. Being strong. Standing on your own two feet. Don’t lean on anyone and no one will let you down. Don’t trust anyone and no one can betray you. Stay in control. Stay reasonable. Don’t feel and if you cry in the night, just don’t tell anyone. This was my life – not so different I think from the life of many these days. Silence your heart. Silence your soul. Get through the day and stay away from the abyss. But somehow I knew I was just a stub of a rose bush, just an empty, bottomless crystal vase. Some still quiet voice kept saying softly, where are your roses? You should be full of roses.

Something was wrong, something so deep I didn’t know how to define it much less get to it. But I could feel it – in what little feeling I had left, in what little intuition that could still whisper through all the deafening noise I created in an effort to silence anything that wasn’t positive, I could feel it. I was empty inside and all the accomplishments in the world, all the love in the world, all the checked off to-do lists in the world couldn’t fill the void – every moment of fulfillment died like a rose in a vase without water, leaving me empty again.

And so the universe, being the loving supportive place that it is, kindly gave me a couple of wake up calls. The first was a DUI. Thank God for that kick in the proverbial ass. My grandmother had died. It was the first time in my life I went on a drinking binge for solace - the first and the last. I truly hate to think which way my life would have led if not for that experience - funny how the worst experiences in our life are often the best. That was the first step on the path, though I didn’t know it at the time. I lay on my bed after a night in jail and consciously walked the see-saw back and forth between rationalization and responsibility. Rationalizing meant I could dismiss it, like I did everything that had a bad taste. Blame it on someone or something else. Laugh it off. Mimimize it. After all everyone gets one now a days. Responsibility meant not only taking responsibility for the action but for the feelings that came with it – the embarrassment, the shame, and, most importantly, the unacknowledged pain that I was trying to drink away in the first place - a pain that went much deeper than the death of my grandmother. If I faced that pain I knew it would be like pulling the tip of a root that you didn’t realize was connected to the acorn tree across the yard.

It would be five years before the next switching track in time. During these years I was a simmering pot - water about to boil, building heat and steam for the effort ahead, not realizing how much they would be needed. They weren’t significant years. A few loves, a few losses, but I was slowly stepping into myself. The moment I chose to take responsibility for the DUI had opened me. I was creating ground to seed. Still avoiding the abyss mind you. But a bit more aware it was there; walking occasionally to the edge, with a slight nod of acknowledgment. One day, when I’m ready. Not yet. Not now.

And then the day came. It was a brief moment - just three or four little seconds in the eternity of time. I had had a fight with the man I was seeing – in my head of course because I would never actually fight, never yell all the things I wanted to yell, never, ever, ever lose my temper or my cool. I would leave but I wouldn’t fight. You can imagine how much leaving I did in my life – if you can’t fight in love you can’t be in love. I was driving home at three in the morning on a 35mph residential street. I don’t know why the eighteen-wheeler was driving so fast. Late for his drop I guess. But there he was barreling toward me at about 70mph. It would take just a tiny movement of the wrist. No one was on the street. No one else would get hurt. The driver would be fine. His truck would crush my little convertible like a bug – he would barely even feel it. I held the steering wheel and said out loud to myself, “Sherry, it is time to either get in to this life or get out.” I couldn’t keep living searching for love I would never hold, avoiding the corners of my heart, silencing my soul, avoiding everything dark, every pain, every conflict, every disappointment; avoiding anger. Somewhere inside of me I was seething and it was eating my soul. And somewhere inside of me a little girl was weeping and she desperately needed my acknowledgement.

I think the world actually stopped. It was as if time froze, waiting for me, as I calmly considered the options. I was not suicidal. I was not depressed. It was a simple question. Do you want to live or not? If not, there is no real reason to stay. If so, well, let’s get on with it. I pulled the wheel to the right and sealed the pact with my soul. I would face my abyss. It may be big and dark and scary, but suddenly I realized there was one thing I could think of that would be worse - facing death knowing I had never really, truly lived my life.

It was five years. Five long, hard, exhausting years. Almost two thousand days of facing me, staring in the mirror, studying the face that looked back; every day, learning the contours of myself, the good, the beautiful, the strong, the dark, the bad, the terrifying, the weak. It was the hardest work I have ever done and I will not glorify it. There were far more lost moments than found, far more tears than smiles, far more sadness than joy. There were angry, bitter parts of me I had no idea existed. I shook hands with them all and to my surprise many of them waved farewell and left forever. There was more pain inside of me than I could have imagined – tears unwept for a lifetime. I cried them all. And then, do you know what? They were gone. Do you know how much less weight you have to carry through the world when you cry all the tears you never gave yourself permission to cry?

For six months every night I lit a candle and closed my eyes searching for the little girl inside of me. I let my mind wander, drawing in my imagination her world. When I first saw her she was hiding in the crawl space under a house in the country. She was scared. Scared of the dark and the spiders, But she was more scared of the open, and of me. Every night I would just sit there, by the beam in the center where it was high enough to sit without crouching. I didn’t really saying anything, didn’t demand she talk or come out. I just sat there. It was weeks before she came out of the recesses - not too close mind you – but at least out of the tiny space where the earth rose to meet the edges of the house. Sometimes we talked, often we just sat. Eventually the fear-filled tension became a companionable silence. Then one night I asked if she wanted to sit on the steps to the porch, she looked at me, scared, but nodded, yes. I thought I saw trust in her eyes. I reached for her hand and she silently slipped her tiny fingers into mine as we stepped into the open and walked to the steps. Weeks passed and sometimes we would take walks, moving further and further into the open. Sometimes we would run or skip, sometimes we talked, sometimes we just walked hand in hand in silence. It was six months before I heard her laugh. We were playing in a field – a field of flowers. That was a beautiful sight. The scared, lonely, sad little girl inside of me laughing in the sunshine. She didn’t really need much. She just needed to be acknowledged, accepted, seen. That is what we need most as children… and is what we give least as parents.

I learned a lot over those five years. I learned convincing others you are okay doesn’t mean that you are. I learned that what you feel is what you feel and it is real, whether you want to admit it or not. I learned that it is not so important what you decide as living the decision with a fullness of heart. I learned that when you avoid pain, it doesn’t go away, it hides - inside your body, inside your soul. But when you face it, when you sit right down in the middle of horrible swamp of yuck and muck and pain and sorrow, eventually, you’ve had enough. You want to go for a walk, and you do. And then you’re not in the swamp anymore.

Most importantly I learned that I was made up of darkness and light – and that the darkness was every bit as important to what makes me me as the light. Music isn’t a note playing forever. Music is the dance between notes and silence. We are the dance between light and dark – our strengths, our weaknesses, our pain, our joy. It takes all this richness to create a unique single individual.

Through this process I began to have the sneaking suspicion that the universe is after all, a supportive place. That it longs, yes longs, to cradle us, to love us, to help us. It is we who stand in the way. We run, defend, hide, protect, guard, close ourselves to our dreams, keep secret our deepest desires. All the while the universe calls to us in the soft supportive voice of a loving parent– follow your heart, I will be there to help you find your way.

The years of learning, of listening, of being with myself, all of me, the dark and the light, had quieted the chatter in my mind, erased the need to fill my seconds with busy-ness and bustle. In turn, the whisper-soft voice of intuition had become audible again. Whatever you want to call it – your higher self, your soul, God, your guardian angel, whatever, there is a wisdom in each of us, a source tapped into All That Is that can guide us and direct us, if we can slow down and quiet down enough to hear it.

I did not know why I needed to take the next step; I just knew, with a knowing too deep to question, that it was what I needed to do. I needed to take a leap of faith; faith in myself, faith in my dreams, faith in this universe. I needed to let go of everything that was comfortable on the outside and trust in what was on the inside. Josh Groban’s song from Cirque du Soleil ‘Let Me Fall’ played again and again in my mind and on my stereo – “Someone I am is waiting for courage; the one I want, the one I will become will catch me….”

I knew I couldn’t jump with a safety net; it had to be a free fall. Over the years, I had created around me all the peace and comfort I never felt inside myself in our little bungalow cottage. The living room was a cozy scene from the Thomas Kincaid paintings that decorated the walls. A white-manteled fireplace, wonderful, oak colored wood floors, a big cushiony couch and loveseat covered in the rich colors of Tuscany, set in the traditional L shape around a cherry wood and glass coffee table, a vase of flowers, pictures on the mantle, soft lighting, a rich maroon accent wall that offset the beige walls complementing the colors in the furniture. Warm, inviting, comforting, safe; a sanctuary from the world. Too safe. Too warm.

While I had confronted myself over the preceding five years, I had not challenged myself to stand as myself in the presence of others. I had not learned to know myself, where I began and ended, in relation to others. If I wanted love in my life, and I did, this was the next step. For an only child, a loner by nature, an introvert trained in the ways of an extrovert, forcing myself into the space of others to learn my contours in relation to them was a tall order. It would never work if I had a home to, well, run home to.

As warm as home was, I knew too that it was holding me back from stepping fully into myself. There were too many constructs of what I was supposed to look like, supposed to do. Images drawn by parents, by society, by expectant lovers were tucked subtly in the pictures on the wall, the books on the bookshelves, the scale under my bed, the files marked ‘failures’ in my basement.. I was stepping into the second half of my life – in both years, and, more importantly in experience. I was twenty when I became a mother. I would be almost forty when my birth-son and the youngest of the three children who had called me ‘mom’ left the proverbial nest.

The timing was perfect, as it always is at such moments in life. My oldest step-daughter was in Dallas where she had stayed after her father and I divorced. My younger step- daughter, who had moved to Charlotte to live with my son and me in 2001, had recently moved to Chicago. My son was moving to Houston. I had never known myself as an adult outside the context of being married and raising children and it was a terrifying prospect. I had a lot to learn about who I was when the day was not built around the needs of children. The circumstances had lined up. There was nothing to hold me back, nothing to keep me in Charlotte, no need to keep a home, and without a home, no need to keep a job, and without a job, all the time in the world to write. I could jump, and I did.

It is a strange, terrifying, amazing, wonderful, debilitating process that I would never wish on anyone and would wish for everyone – this “giving up” house and home. I remember the night the process began. My son put the last box in the car at three in the morning, settling our dog, Buffy, in the front seat. He hugged me goodbye, then he was gone. I didn’t even make it into the house. I crumbled right there on the driveway, crying deep soulful tears for a life I knew I was saying goodbye to forever. He resents me to this day for giving up his home. He could not understand the only real thing in that home was him. I built for him what I had never known for myself. Without him, it was nothing. I don’t think there is a silence more deafening in the world than a home no longer filled with the laughter of children and warm pitter-patter of a pup’s feet on wood floors. I would have died in that silence. Nothing, nothing would ever be the same, and there was no point in pretending it could be.

I don’t know how long I lay there – I could feel nothing but the pain inside, pain I had spent five long years learning how to feel. I cried until there were no more tears, sat up to see the sun breaking across the horizon, brushed myself off, walked into the house, and began.

For the next four weeks I cried and laughed, mourned, raised my fists to the heavens, danced, smashed things to smithereens, and sang as I sifted and sorted through everything tangible in my life. I picked up everything I owned, held it in my hands, and asked myself: “Why do you have this?” Does it empower you or pull you down? Does it belong to an identity that parents or society or time has put on your shoulders or is it part of your essence, your very being? Is it practical? Replaceable? Necessary? What will it mean if you let it go? Why should you keep it?

I was the phoenix preparing the fire, quite literally. The most amazing discovery was just how many things I kept to remind me of failures, shortcomings, hurts, and losses. I had cried these tears. It was now time to burn the things that continued to chain me to the pain. A veritable bonfire grew on the living room floor. It took six hours to burn it all, feeding it piece by piece into the fireplace. Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor played on repeat as the fire blazed, reflecting its light on the warm wood floors. I purged my self, my soul, releasing resentment to create room for acceptance, releasing pain to allow room for joy, releasing hate so that I could love more freely. When the pile was at last gone, I threw the clothes I was wearing onto the flames, and, standing naked in the glow of the firelight, declared myself reborn.

That weekend I had a “Please come take my stuff!” party, the next a garage sale, and the last a charity pick up. At the end all that remained were a dozen or so boxes of books, half a dozen boxes of photo albums and memorabilia, the Thomas Kincaid paintings I would one day hand down to my children, a couple boxes of cherished things - my great grandmother’s ceramics, special gifts from the years, things precious to my very soul, and some clothes. I had distilled myself, boiled my material world down to the essence of me - left no trappings to define me except what was core – my love of books, of family, and my memories.

I was cleansed, free of everything that had held me down. Free to find who I was from the inside out rather than the outside in. I had a plane ticket to Italy, a dream to write, a few thousand dollars, and the most important thing, faith, in myself, in my path, in the world.

I spent two years as a nomad - six months in Italy, four in New York, months upon months in the homes of strangers who became friends. Traveling by train, by bus, by car, by foot. Waking up everyday to myself, not as a mother or a wife or an attorney or an employee, just myself, as me. Wide-eyed and curious in a new world, learning every second - new languages, new cultures, and this person called me. Embracing my dream, valuing myself, reaching for life. Reaching…. Living…. Really, really living.

I learned in the end that really living doesn’t mean happily ever after, it means simply being real. When I laugh, I really laugh and when I cry, I really cry. I don’t avoid the tears and I don’t force the laughter. I think back to the superwoman days all those years ago. To anyone looking from the outside in, I was happier then, I smiled more, cried less, laughed a lot, sometimes I honestly miss the pretended perfection. In many ways, life then was easier. But life now is real. I feel real.

The garden of my soul, the beautiful cut vase on the mantel are filled with roses now, as that voice whispered they should be all those years ago. Yes I cut my fingers when I tend them, and I bleed, and I cry, and in the blood and the tears I know I am alive. And then I smell their beautiful scent, see their rich and varied colors, and I know too that I am blessed to be alive. And then my lover takes one and brushes it against my face, looking at me through eyes that see the soul I came to know and am not afraid to share with him and I know I am truly loved, loved as much for those dark places as for my light. I have learned the contours of my soul. It has become familiar to me, like a favorite armchair shaped to your body through years of cradling you.

Shortly after I left house and home behind, I wrote an email to friends asking “What is Home?” The compilation of responses came to this:

Home is a place where you do not have to pretend; where you can lay aside the armor you face the world with and rest. It is the place where you are comfortable, at ease, relaxed. A place that is safe and warm and filled with tenderness. Where you love and are loved. Where even the darkest corners do not scare you because you know every inch like the back of your hand. Home is something known, trusted, real, familiar, safe. It is the place where you are at peace.

“I feel as if I have come home, not to this place necessarily, but to myself.” The import of the words now were clear - I had indeed, at long last, come home.

What's In A Name?

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Friday, July 13, 2007

It is an odd thing. You hear these strange names of foreign lands where wars are being fought. You see news clips and imagine a world unlike your own, people unlike those you know, if you bother to think much about it at all. One day you hear the war has ended and occasionally there is a news story about how the countries involved are doing, how they are recovering, what governments are being put in place. You don’t pay much mind. It is a different world.

Then you find yourself traveling near these countries, these odd names you remember hearing once upon a newscast. You look at your guide book, a curiosity brought about by proximity, but you see only a vague outline of these lands. Eastern Europe books would include all of the Balkan Peninsula, except perhaps Greece, wouldn’t you think? But no, Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Albania appear to be a no man’s land – unmapped regions, blank patches of white showing in contrast to the detailed maps of the countries surrounding them. Certainly you wouldn’t venture into an unmapped region? Or would you?

The familiar calls the vacationer. The unfamiliar calls the traveler. So you start asking around. What are these places? Belgrade? Sarajevo? These names only familiar from newscasts a decade ago. “Oh no, a woman shouldn’t travel there alone,” you hear. “It is still dangerous,” they say. “There is no infrastructure; travel by public transport is nearly impossible.” But you talk to travelers, those on the road, and you get a different story. “Oh definitely go. Belgrade is great, a lot of fun. Sarajevo is beautiful.” And so you go.

And then you find yourself walking down Kralia Milana, one of the major streets that leads from Slavija Square toward the center of town. Cars hurry past, with the buses and the trolley trams. Couples walk hand in hand. Women are walking their dogs. Men jog by wearing sweat pants. Puppies for adoption play on the grass with potential new owners. There is a Dolce and Gabbana marquis on the side of the building, a pizzeria every other block, McDonalds. The language is different, even the letters are different, but the life is the same. People. People getting on with the business of living. Are these the same people who did the atrocities Serbians were accused of during the war? If so, it doesn’t show in their eyes. Or do you put war atrocities behind you like you put away yesterday’s dirty dishes, like last week’s lost love, like the shock of the World Trade Center attack. Man is amazing in his capacity to heal and move forward. That is one of our greatest strengths, though sometimes, from the outside, it can look callous.

It strikes me more and more as I travel. We are all the same – searching for love, reaching for happiness, striving, trying to survive, find peace in our souls, be true to our gods, raise our children, care for our parents, hope for tomorrow. Where do the wars come from? Why do they come? I don’t understand. Don’t understand how mankind can find so much reason for separation when we share so much in common.

Belgrade is a magnificent city. The ravages of war still show in places – skeletons of bombed government buildings stand aside busy thoroughways. Dilapidated buildings reflecting a bare memory of their glory straddle brightly renovated jewels of architecture. The side streets and sidewalks are still in a state of disrepair, evidence of a budget not yet thriving. Fifty euro is worth 4,000 dinar and change is worthless in an economy still struggling for stability. Yet layered above these whispers of a war not so long ago is a vibrant, bustling energy; a strange energy I have not felt before in my travels. Is it the reborn hope of a city rising from the proverbial ashes, again? As it has time and time before?

High above the city, standing watch over the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers below, stands the Belgrade Fortress. In these now peaceful, lovely rolling ridges of green, one can see the remains of fortifications that were razed to the ground and rebuilt over and over – by Romans, Byzantines, Hungarians, Serbs, Turks, Austrians. It is a difficult concept for an American. The wars fought on our lands are romanticized concepts of presumably principle-driven battles of long ago, rather than a redundant reality of our entire cultural existence fighting to maintain its own ground.

I sit in the waiter-serviced internet café, unworried by the cost at about a dollar an hour for internet, sipping an almost undrinkable Turkish coffee while Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” plays on the speakers above. What exactly did the people who warned me not to come think I had to fear? No the city is not shiny and new. I splurged on the hotel with internet access, needing a little solitude and time to catch up on my writing. It is a five star hotel for only $50 a night with all the accoutrements - a casino, internet, salon, restaurants, convention center - and yet the walls are crumbling in the hallways, the carpets stained, and the tiles around the toilet in my room have fallen out, leaving a gaping hole revealing the crumbled plaster of the wall. There is nary a single cheap art print and the only light sources are weak spots of light hung in the wall. I’ve seen Motel 6’s in a better state of repair, reminding me again, as I am constantly, how spoiled we are in America with our bright, shiny, clean newness everywhere - in our buildings… and in our history. Still the people are friendly, the room comfortable, and the internet café is open twenty-four hours a day.

Prices are unbelievably cheap and here they do not seem to see tourists as walking wallets to try to take advantage of. It was disappointing to me how often this happened in Bulgaria and Romania. Perhaps tourism is still too new here. You see backpackers about the city, but it does not have the tourist bustle of most historically laden metropolitan cities. It is a living city. The museums and parks and monuments are blissfully uncrowded, lending them some sort of real-ness that the great steps of Sacré-Coeur or the lawns about the Coliseum cannot recall. There is an energy much like New York, lusty, vibrant, excited but without the frenetic pace that hardens the Big Apple. Even along the Knez Mihailova, the pedestrian walkway adorned with its beautiful neo-renaissance and art nouveau architecture and bustling sidewalk cafes, there is a calmness, a peacefulness in the midst of the pulse.

I have still seen little of the city, buried in the work that will pay for Russia in September and writing. Still I have fallen in love with the place that belongs to that name I heard once upon a newscast. I dare say over the next few years this city will follow in the footsteps of Prague and Budapest, calling people from all over to wonder at this other world along the Danube, different, yet so much like our own.

We're Not In Kansas Anymore Toto

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Tuesday, July 10, 2007

This train was a trip! (Pun intended.) It is five in the morning when I board my third train at the Romanian border town of Timisoara on the way to Belgrade, Serbia. Pulling back the curtain to my cabin, I am delighted to see there is only one backpack inside and no person attached to it. It seems a bit peculiar someone would just leave their backpack, but I don’t think too much of it. I open the curtains and settle into the prime seat, the one next to the window, where you can watch the countryside as it comes rather than as it disappears, and say a quick prayer that it will just be me and the partner of the unattended backpack for the ride to Belgrade.

Suddenly, a wiry man bursts into the compartment dressed in a t-shirt and warm up pants with a cover up jacket. He reaches past me without a word, whips the curtains closed, and jumps up on to the seats, placing a foot on each bench for balance, and proceeds to unscrew the vent shaft above. I would like to think he is the electrician fixing the light, but there is no light overhead. A moment later he has wriggled his body half way into the shaft and is tossing down small rectangular shaped somethings wrapped in black plastic trash bags. Terrific… Of all the seats on this train, I get the one where they are smuggling illegal goods across the border. I don’t want to know what the goods are. I politely turn around and face the corner, waiting until his rummaging stops.

A minute later an older, decently dressed, and seemingly educated man starts barking at my wire terrier friend from the aisle. WT (let’s call him) is rushing frantically now and I am suddenly concerned that maybe it is better I not see everyone involved in this transaction. I pray for the safety of my backpack, strap my purse around my shoulder, bow my head, and step past the man in the aisle. I feel him glaring at me. I pray again.

The older man is exasperated. He hands a large plastic tarp-like bag to WT, barking more unintelligible commands. I hear scurrying in the compartment and wonder if my backpack will be raided as well. I think for a moment if I should enter and retrieve my pack but decide this is probably not a good idea. Just then the old man steps out, a full bag in his arms, and genteelly saunters down the aisle and off the train.

I take my seat and open the curtains. The wire-terrier bounds off to the next compartment and I hear rummaging again. I look at the dismantled vent shaft above me and wonder if I should change cars. Could I get arrested for turning my back to a cross-border smuggling operation? I begin to wonder if I shouldn’t have stayed on the train to Budapest. Being interrogated in Serbia just doesn’t seem like that much fun to me. At least whatever it was is gone, I think to myself.

As I’m pondering what they were smuggling across Romania, my yapper friend pops back in, his arms filled with more of the black plastic wrap containers. He closes the curtains again and proceeds to climb back into the shaft. This time I’m not moving. He finishes the last screw and steps off the bench, brushing his dusty footprints off the seat, just as the passport control opens the curtain to ask for my passport – they greet each other like old friends. I would love to ask exactly what is going on, but it is doubtful he speaks English and probably better I don’t know. So much for my future as a war correspondent.

Passport control barely glances at my passport – I guess you are on the inside track if you’re in the smuggler’s compartment. The officer leaves. Another guy comes to the doorway and slaps my yapper friend on the back. WT says something in response then pulls out a two-liter bottle filled with a thick brown substance which he pours into two plastic cups. Handing one to his friend, they toast what appears to be a success toast. Hmmm, a nip of liquor would actually be quite nice right now. I guess he saw the longing in my eye for he turns to me, gesturing with the bottle, “Kafa?” I nod yes. He smiles and pours me a cup, hands it to me, opens the drapes, and disappears with his backpack out into the aisle. Now we are bonded.

I sit back in my seat, sipping the thickest, strongest coffee I have ever tasted, watching the sunflowers turn their heads to the morning sun as the concoction begins to eat through my stomach lining.

I barely breathe the hour and a half we are at the border. My heart stood still in my chest as the investigator lifted the benches in my car then glanced at the vent above. He searches the outlines, checking the placement of screws I presume, before leaving the cabin. I try not to exhale audibly as relief swept through me. Thank God WT had picked up the screw he had dropped on the floor and climbed back up to replace it. Whew… The train was moving on. I breathe freely again - for a few minutes anyway. Then WT comes back, opens the vent, and begins taking stuff out again! Jesus Christ! I step out in the aisle to let him work.

Standing there I see train security coming down the aisle as WT is tossing stuff down from the vent to the floor. Shit! What should I do? I feel a complicity with my friend, the coffee-sharing wire-terrier, a fear of ‘the goods’ being discovered in MY cabin, a desire to be a good citizen, and a desire to be invisible, all at the same time. Indecision grips me and I stand there silently, heart pounding, as the officer walks the corridor, checking each compartment. I’m sure the look on my face was classic when he opened the curtain to my cabin, and said, I presume, “Hey! How’s it going?” to WT while he is standing on the benches with his hands in the vent shaft! Train security was in on it! For the next twenty minutes, WT and the other smuggler are running up and down the aisles in a frenzy taking stuff down and filling up bags, while everyone, security included, walks around like nothing is happening. It was absolutely bizarre.

When we pulled into the last station before Belgrade, I laughed literally out loud. Looking out on the platform I saw dozens of people walking away from the train with these tarp like plastic collapsible bags – all filled to the brim just like WT’s. The entire train must have been smuggling something! At the beginning of the ride in the dark of the night in the littered border town, my mind was racing with thoughts of what they might be smuggling. Cocaine? Weapons? False papers? I actually had a nanosecond fear at the beginning that I was going to have my throat sliced for “knowing too much” – a dispensable American tourist with bad timing and bad luck caught in the web of a multi-million dollar drug smuggle. In the light of day, as hundreds of bags were carried across the tracks, I realized they were probably smuggling Charmin tissue and bed linens! Guess I won’t get my throat cut for toilet tissue….

The Ties That Bind

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Friday, June 21, 2007

I often wonder what it is that brings people together. Is it destiny? Chance? Timing? Chemistry? Why does it sometimes take years to open the door to our hearts and sometimes only seconds? Do we recognize others from lives we have lived before? Or does the universe simply bless us with love we need when we open to the possibility of its blessing? I have had so many serendipitous encounters these last two years - places where I opened the door and knew I belonged, knew I was with people I would come to love. Friendships have been forged in moments that have gone on to span thousands of miles and dozens of months.

I will never forget Antonella’s soft soothing voice, like cold hands on a feverish face, telling me when I was in the middle of a near nervous breakdown that I should come to Ascoli Piceno. She was a stranger across an ocean but something in her voice compelled me to go. She became one of the most precious people in the world to me, more precious than she will ever understand. Shellen’s email too called me. I already had a host in New York but changed plans to go to Shellen’s place instead. I opened the door to a sense of coming home, not knowing at the time it would actually become my home. She was my soul sister. We knew it the moment we met.

It was a spur of the moment decision to go to Sofia. An unplanned, luck of the draw choice, thanks to a google search and a cheap flight on an airline named, of all things, Wizzair. Who wants to fly with a company that would come up with that name? It was last minute so I only sent three surf requests out. One was to a family new to the site. They had no references, having not yet hosted or surfed. Though it is of course risky, I will sometimes surf a new host, knowing it can be difficult for them to get a first surfer.

It was actually their wedding picture that convinced me to send the request. It was a candid shot, as Orlin reached out for Ralitza’s hand. There was such genuineness in their eyes, such love for each other. I closed the pictures and sent the request. Within hours they had responded, offering not only to host me, but to pick me up from the airport. The airport to the host or hostel is generally one of the hardest parts of traveling. You don’t know the country or the language or how anything works; taxis are overpriced and after hours in lines and a pressurized tin can, negotiating mass transit while toting all your possessions is the last thing you want to do. An offer to be picked up personally at the airport, in a car, is like manna from heaven to someone on the road.

I knew Orlin immediately, though he was even larger than he appeared in his photo. A giant of a man – tall, broad, heavyset, and balding. If I didn’t see the twinkle in his eye, I’d be scared of him. But oh what a twinkle he has in his eye! He is the proverbial big teddy bear. He looks like he could crush you with one finger but is a lot more likely to crush you by hugging you too tight. Ralitza had run to the restroom. She came gliding across the terminal just as Orlin and I turned. She too I knew instantly. Long amber hair cascading to her waist in a light wave. She was wearing a beautiful black blouse of chiffon that danced with her every movement. Her spirit was light and sparkling, twirling almost, while her stride was strong and grounded. I liked them both instantly.

We chatted on the way home. Ralitza relying mostly on Orlin’s English though it would turn out she could express herself just fine. They had left work to meet me at the airport and had an important meeting they had to return to so we only chatted awhile at the house. I made the mistake of answering that yes, I was a little bit hungry, before I went to the bathroom. I returned bare seconds later to a table half covered with food – rice, sweet Bulgarian beans, pork, yogurt, muesli, milk, an apple, a tin of chocolates and they were still pulling things out of the fridge! I had to beg them to stop. They gave me keys, apologizing all the way out the door that they had to leave, and told me to call if I needed anything, and left me to settle in and get comfortable (it took me two hours to eat all the food!)

That night I had arranged to meet Rositsa and her surfers for a stroll through Sofia. Orlin and Ralitza had insisted on returning home to drive me to my meeting and were all but frantic when the business meeting kept them late. On top of that, the baby was running a fever. Still when I came home that night there was another full meal waiting for me. We talked into the early hours of the morn about Bulgaria and America, sharing stories of our lives while little two year old Angel and his big brother, Vlady, played around and with us.

Vlady is a beautiful boy; eight years old with deep, dark almost black eyes, black like olives they say in Bulgaria. He was proud to speak what little English he could and would patiently sound out words in Bulgarian for me. The instant bond only grew stronger through the days that followed. Angel has curly, red hair like his mother but the same deep dark eyes like Vlady and the most expressive little face. We communicated with smiles and funny faces, language being beyond the grasp of us both. They are both such well-behaved boys. Orlin is a devoted father, filled with love for both boys, and Ralitza a great mother. She gives her boys strong, present love but not too much coddling – one of the hardest balances for us as mothers. You’ve heard the phrase Kodak Moment? Their family is so beautiful together, virtually every moment is a Kodak moment. I took hundreds of pictures of them while I was there.

Tuesday I was off with Rositsa and her surfers for a day trip. I returned again to an incredible home cooked Bulgarian meal – salads galore (Bulgarians love their salads), potatoes, veggies, meat in a delectable hearty but light sauce. Another surfer, Loic, had joined us. A Frenchman living in Romania, he was on his way to Istanbul and would just stay the night. He went off to do computer work while Orlin washed dishes, laughing his big hearty laugh as he watched Ralitza, Vladi, Angel and I dance to Bulgarian MTV. It was a beautiful, fun, family evening – much like the crazy nights I remember with Mike and the kids when they were little when we would kick off our shoes, dancing, swinging, tickling, and laughing the night away. Such beautiful memories and the moments of my life I miss the most….

Ralitza is a musician, one of only two women in Bulgaria who plays the Kaval, a traditional instrument found throughout Bulgaria, Turkey, and parts of the middle east that dates back to the Egyptians. She had lived in London a few months working as a street performer and thus learned her English. She is an amazing woman. Beautiful long hair, twinkling eyes, a womanly body, the vivaciousness of a five year old with the business mind of a maverick and the understated sex appeal of Penelope Cruz in

‘Vanilla Sky’. I realized as I watched her how much she reminded me of Victor Hugo’s Esmeralda.

Wednesday they took me to their office. They run an advertising agency together that is becoming quite successful. They are immersed in a huge exhibition for the Plastic Surgery Convention next year. Plastic surgery, of all things, is one of Bulgaria’s biggest booming industries. Their big coup is a diplomatic ball which will be held in October. As he showed me around the lovely, well designed and technologically impressive office, Orlin told me how he had fallen in love with Ralitza when she was a street performer. It was love at first sight for them both and they were married in short order. Orlin laughed his big hearty laugh as he told me he thought he would be supporting Ralitza, the poor little street performer girl raised in an orphanage. Much to his surprise she turned out to be an exceptional saleswoman and skilled business manager. He looked at her with both admiration and adoration as he explained that the new car, the new office, the plastic surgeon’s account, everything was thanks to her brains, wits, and go-get-em determination.

Next to the advertising agency office is the internet café Orlin opened just before meeting Ralitza – the first internet café in Sofia. Outside was an actual café with beer and food and coffee, a fountain, and little umbrella covered picnic tables scattered around tree lined green space. The offices were part of an underground passage way that opened to the café, creating a lovely reprieve from the bustling street just above. I spent the day there happily writing until dinner time.

For dinner they took me to a beautiful restaurant high on a hill overlooking the city of Sofia below. Sofia is the capital of Bulgaria, about the size of Charlotte with a population of 1.2 million. The outskirts reflect the abuse and decay of communism but the downtown area is an architecturally diverse thriving political center where Sofia’s importance in days past shines brightly in the glistening sun and off the yellow bricks that make up the King’s Road – a gift from Vienna in Sofia’s heyday. From our perch above you could see how far the city sprawled beyond its pristine center.

Dinner was amazing. Whenever possible I ask others to order for me when I am traveling. I try not even to look at the menu. When you order for yourself, you will tend toward the familiar things you know you like. When others order, you try things you might never have considered. Orlin did an awesome job ordering. I couldn’t tell you what all I ate, but I can sure tell you it was all good. We ate and laughed and talked, bonding over good food and special company.

Thursday was another road trip with Rositsa and a late night with fellow couchsurfers, one of whom was headed to Plovdiv Saturday. Orlin, Ralitsa and I had already planned a road trip with the kids to Plovdiv on Friday so I decided I would stay there Friday night to meet up in Plovdiv on Saturday. Part of me really didn’t want to leave, but I was too comfortable and knew I would linger too long. It was time to get on the road. I tentatively asked Orlin over coffee if it was okay if I stayed in Plovdiv. His deep voice resounded in the room. “NO!” I actually thought he was mad for a moment. Then his face softened, “It is not okay, we are going to miss you.”

As I was packing my bag, Ralitza walked in. “I want you to have these,” she said, extending her hand. The first day I was there I had admired the earrings she was wearing. Not earrings actually, but ear hoops that hook around the back of your ears, with long drop chains studded with pearl pieces and crystals. She handed them to me. “No.” I told her. “I can’t. You bought these in London, they are special, it is too much.” “That is what makes a true gift,’ she replied. “Something special to you that you give to someone special to you.” She placed them in my hand. Tears pooled in our eyes though neither of us let them fall as we hugged each other in the knowing embrace of friends who will see each other again. I will cherish those forever.

Our last day together was easy and soft like a spring day despite the sweltering summer heat. A tender, precious sharing of final moments – savored like a decadent dessert shared with a good friend. We lunched at an open air restaurant while the kids played on the playground next to it. We had water fights in the fountains and with the water gun the restaurant had given Vlady. The call came while we were at the restaurant that they would have the backing of a very high diplomat for the upcoming ball. Ralitza did a jig right there in the restaurant – she was so beautiful and happy she reminded me of Miss America the moment she is announced the winner. We ate ice-cream walking down the pedestrian avenue that leads to old town, as Angel ran ahead. His shoes had long ago gone to the wayside, as had his shirt and the pants would soon follow. Everyone smiled watching this little diapered cherub run barefoot down the walk before us.

Then Raliza tied the final knot between us. She reached down and took of her shoes there in the middle of the crowded, public walkway. Those who know me know I abhor shoes. I never wore them around my neighborhood in Charlotte. I was granted an exception to the no bare feet rule at Starbucks by the general manager. It was a moniker of sorts. The neighborhood knew it was spring when Sherry was running around barefooted again. When Ralitza slipped off her shoes in the center of town, I knew we were bonded forever. I’m usually self-conscious to go barefoot in foreign countries. Some places it is insulting and I try never to be the oblivious obnoxious traveling American. It didn’t take long for the envy to out weigh the self-consciousness. Ralitza laughed as I joined her barefooted delight. “Now we are not crazy. Wherever there is at least two, there is sanity.” A policeman stopped Ralitza and said something in Bulgarian. I thought he would scold us but in fact he was a comrade. “Don’t the stones feel good under bare feet?” he had asked her. Oh yes, they did. We crested the hill of the old town looking out over the ancient Roman amphitheatre that is still functioning today. It felt so good, walking these stones laid thousands of years ago side by side with a woman I had met days before but felt like I had known for lifetimes. Perhaps we did walk these streets together in Roman days long ago. We sat looking out over the amphitheatre drinking our cokes. Words could not be found and did not need to be spoken.

Night was falling when we returned to the car. They had insisted on helping me find a hostel and then on driving as close as possible so Orlin could carry my pack the rest of the way. I hugged Ralitza goodbye at the car, again holding back the tears. I kissed Angel, closing my eyes to inhale his soft baby smell. Orlin and Vlady walked me to the room. Orlin gave me a big bear hug making me promise to call if I had any trouble and to let them know where I would be. I assured him I would then turned to little Vlady. He was standing quietly next to us, eyes downcast. I picked him up and held him tight. He hung in my arms like a potato sack. He didn’t know how to tell me good-bye to say what he felt. He could only show me he was sad. The last hour of the day when he knew I would soon leave, he would look up at me every few minutes, his dark, almost-black eyes penetrating mine and would whisper with the deepest intent the only English word he know that expressed feeling, “Thank you”. He whispered it again now in my ear as I squeezed him tight and set him back on the ground. When they left, I raced to the window to watch them down the street until they disappeared from sight. Vlady’s small hand lost in Orlin’s big grasp as he shuffled along beside his father. The tears fell silently down my cheeks, as they are falling now while I write this. I will miss them so much, my little Bulgarian family…

Postscript…

Three days later I decided in Plovdiv to send a small box back to Italy. My budget includes sending computer disc backups home every three weeks as a precaution, along with whatever brochures and things I have acquired on the road. My pack still weighed in at 15 kilos and I was going through it once again to see if there was anything I could take out and ship back. In the stack of brochures and matchbooks was the little vintage licorice tin I had bought in the airport in Rome. I can’t stand licorice but loved the design on the small inch by inch tin and had the strongest compulsion that I would need it to store some small thing on the road. Tossing the tin in my hand a couple times, I put it in the box to ship back. It was not necessary. Two minutes later I removed it again, saying to myself, ‘There is some reason you bought it, you will find it useful for something, keep it until you know what you bought it for.’

The next day I was packing to leave for Burgas. As I tenderly picked up my dangling ear hoops to pack with my other jewelry I realized they would tangle and possibly break if put them loosely in the little jewelry bag. I began searching for something to wrap them in or a safe place to tuck them away. I was exasperated, finding nothing. They were too precious to my heart to risk damaging. Suddenly the image of the tin flooded my mind. I opened the pack, scrambling to retrieve it from the bottom of the zipper bag I had placed it in. I opened it and carefully lay the hoops inside. They fit, perfectly. It was as if the box had been made specifically for them, a box I bought waiting for the plane that would take me to meet the woman who had gifted them to me. So you tell me. What is it that brings people together? Is it Destiny? Chance? Desire? Or just the soft sweet smile of Lady Luck?

Bulgarian Hospitality

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June 21, 2007

I remember Boshidar. A short, stout man, rather non-descript, with the work ethic of a master mason and the heart of a silent suffering saint. His accent was so thick I could barely understand him. Not having yet traveled or learned the frustration of new languages and cultures, I despair to think how impatient I was with his efforts to communicate. I knew he was from Bulgaria, wherever that was. Fifteen years ago if you had narrowed the map down to Eastern Europe alone, I still couldn’t have pointed to Bulgaria.

Boshidar worked for my mother’s photographic lab and was one of the most dedicated, devoted employees she ever had. He had a cat named Rocky who he adored; actually adored isn’t a strong enough word. He lived for Rocky. I remember him telling me how Rocky would kick him out of the bed at night. A cat. Kicking a fifty year hold, stocky man out of bed. Imagine. We used to laugh about how Rocky ruled the house, never really thinking about the man who had no one else with whom to share his overflowing love and generosity.

He loved soccer perhaps almost as much as he loved Rocky. He saved his money for years to go to the World Cup. He had to buy a suitcase to carry back all the souvenirs he brought for the other employees of the lab. He even brought a soccer jersey for me and one for my son, just four years old at the time. I can’t imagine how much money he spent on all the gifts he brought. The lab was decked in World Cup paraphernalia for years to come.

Boshi, as we used to call him, died a few years ago. He had no one in America; no one but Rocky. One of his co-workers, concerned when Boshi did not show up for work, found him dead in his own bed with Rocky watching over him next to him. It was my mother who saw to his funeral arrangements. We never knew his story, what he had suffered or why he had come to America. He never talked about his past. Despite the fact he was always kind and smiling, he seemed to have no life, no friends outside the job he devoted day and night to.

Boshi always wanted to take me and my mother out to dinner. I would dread it but I would go, mostly for my mom, partly for some immature pity that only twenty-somethings can feel when they look on people who have actually lived a life and think they are in any position to judge where that life has brought those people to. I remember that Boshi would always pay the bill, when we went out, always. No matter how my mom and I tried to get the bill from him, he always won. Mom and I are both pretty stubborn and rarely lose a dinner-check war, but she never won against Boshi.

Little did I know then that this is the Bulgarian way. They are the most gracious, generous, giving people I have met. Wrestling a bill from their grasp when they are your host is virtually impossible. It does not matter to them that their average monthly salary is less than Americans spend on a oak-walled steakhouse dinner, what matters is you are their guest and hosts take care of their guests.

Rositsa, one of Couchsurfing’s most active members, already had two surfers with her when she received my request to surf her couch in Sofia. She explained, apologetically, that I could have the other bed in her room if I didn’t mind sharing a room. I received her kind offer the same time that Orlin and Ralitza emailed that their family could host me. Not wanting to put Rositsa out, I accepted their offer. But that wasn’t the last of Rositsa. Not only did she meet me the night I arrived to show me around town with her two surfers, but she took me under her wing for the rest of the week, driving us Tuesday to see the charming town of Koprivshtitsa and then all the way down to Rila to see Bulgaria’s largest monastery on Thursday. Her boyfriend, Emil, joined us for both road trips. Between the two of them, and the fact we couldn’t argue in Bulgarian, they always managed to snag the check. At one point, the other surfers and I had to stand at the table and all but threaten physical abuse if they didn’t let us pay for something. Their generosity in the time they shared with us, the insight into their country, and their spirit, not to mention food and beer, was amazing.

And then there was my new Bulgarian family. I cried when I parted ways with Orlin and Ralitza in Plovidv. It was the first time leaving a host truly broke my heart. From the moment they picked me up at the airport, half an hour from their home, to the moment Orlin placed my pack, that he had insisted on carrying, in my room at the hostel, they were the kindest, most genuine, generous, caring family that I have ever met. They cooked for me, took me to special places to eat, shared their home and their business, their hopes for the future, the joy from an important success that happened while I was there, their children, their trust, and their love. I will never understand how life blesses me with such beautiful people.

When I left the states, I asked around where Boshi was from so I could pay my respects to his homeland on his behalf. No one knew for sure. I don’t know if anyone had ever asked. I lit a candle at the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia to wish him well on his journey, wherever he may be now, and to tell him I was sorry for not being more patient, not doing more to see the man inside, not caring enough to connect. As the candle burned, I cried tears of regret for having been so impatient with an immigrant’s fumbling English and unknowable past. Now, I am the foreigner, forever in strange lands, who relies on the patience and kindness of others. I deeply wish I had given Boshi even just a fraction of the acceptance and consideration when he was in my country that his countrymen have given me in theirs. If spirits hear our hearts, I hope he knows somewhere that he is loved and missed.

Stolen Moments

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I took the first step. A shiver passed through me in the warm Italian sun. It was not cold. I was scared. Of someone following me? No. Of finding a place, being stranded, dying alone and unloved? No. I was scared of what was inside of me, or, more accurately, what wasn’t. It has been a week since I left American shores and I have not written one word. Sure I have opened the computer to write, but I have lingered over emails and CS profiles and whatever else I could justify doing until the open door of time slipped away. I have not written, not from the place where I must go, deep within myself to write.

I took the second step. “Why are you so scared,” I asked, myself. “What if I can’t?” I responded. “What if it is no longer there? What if I have no words to express what I see. Worse, what if I no longer see?” Such strange questions, really. “No longer see.” Do we reach a point where we no longer see? It looks to me as if many do – those who have dulled themselves through work or alcohol or mere habitual existence to the world around them until it seems there is only one dull grey world to know. Or maybe, that is just my perception. People tell me all the time I must be so brave to do what I do, live without a plan, a home, a safety net; travel the world with the freedom of the wind to go wherever I am called. They do not understand - that does not scare me; that is easy. It is the mediocrity of existence that scares me. How would I keep alive whatever this spirit is that is me chained in the redundancy of a formalized existence?

I continued to mount the stairs. So many voices, so many me-s, a cacophony rising in my mind. The scared self, the wise self, the confident self, the doubting self, the nag, the abuser, the victim, the woman, the lover, the unloved, the writer, all expressing their reasons why I should and should not continue. There were other things that needed doing. There always are. Even on the road. Even in a life without so-called responsibilities. In the every-day world my writer voice cannot stand up to the voice that demands. It asks quietly and like a small child is told “in a minute” “maybe tomorrow” “later” again and again and again. It accepts meekly, as powerless children must. But the road, the road belongs to the writer. Here she knows it is her right to rule for I have carved this space for her. I knew she was waiting for me at the top of the stairs. Her quiet yet strong voice gently calling me upward.

The hesitancy in my step began to dissipate. An excitement took over. Three hours all my own to write from my favorite perch at Fortezza Pia high above Ascoli. I had gone there many times in my days here. It was my first proverbial writer’s garret in the sky. The thoughts began to run in time with the blood pumping through my body from the exertion of the long upward climb. With the thoughts came the fears. Could I catch the twisting thoughts in time? They run like forest nymphs, darting in and out amongst trees. They come with force and clarity, swirling around you so close you almost feel their touch, and then dance away, taunting and teasing you to find the words to express them. Sometimes you do. Often you don’t. Would I today? Could I clear the cobwebs of this space, untouched for six months? Could I thrust open the windows of the tightly shuttered tower room in my mind, filling it with sunshine, and illuminate some darkened page with words that flow through my fingers?

The transition is always difficult for me; moving between the two worlds within which I live. This place between some formalized existence of work and money, taxes and to-dos, specified identities – lawyer, bartender, tenant, New Yorker – and the road where these things are mere memories and my purpose is only to inhale life and breathe out in words what has passed through me; the sights, tastes, sounds, smells, the feelings beneath my fingers and within my heart.

Something within me knows that some people live in both worlds simultaneously. They find the stolen moments of spiritual ecstasy, intellectual inquiry, philosophical perusals, and the lingering light of love somewhere between the laundry and the mail. I do not know how to do anything but die second by second in a day that resembles the day before and the day before that, my spirit flickering like a candle beneath a slowly descending glass.

Perhaps we all feel as if we are missing something in that other world where we do not live. I wonder what it is like to descend deep into a single place, just as others wonder what it is like to be carried on the wings of the wind to so many. I envy you who sit in your warm homes, reading this now from the same room as you read your emails yesterday, greeting the day with your love by your side or your familiar favorite pillow beneath your head, passing the evenings with friends who sit before you rather than across some wireless signal from the sky. And I have seen envy in the eyes of those who have these things for the excitement of the unknown that I face everyday. It seems the best we can do is embrace the lives we have chosen for they are indeed our own creation.

And so as I look across the rolling hills of my beloved Italy, my thoughts turn to the road ahead, the places waiting to be seen, the experiences waiting to be had, the words waiting to be expressed. As I move toward all that is new, my heart is warmed by the love I carry for those who wish me well from all corners of the world. Unfettered by the descending glass, the candle that is my spirit burns with the hope that in some small way I bring to those who have the courage that I do not - those who face the every day world, who keep the wheels churning, the taxes paid, the world moving - a stolen moment between the laundry and the mail that makes them smile or think or burrow safely and joyfully into their own familiar bed with visions of a world beyond and a heart that is happy to be home.

With love and light,

Sherry

Riding the Waves of Humanity

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Of all the joys this wonderful city has to offer, the greatest for me has been simply walking her streets. I have long heard people say that New York is unlike any other city in the world. I always thought they were referring to its pace, its flare, its 24 hour bright light bustle. Wall Street, Times Square, Central Park – these names are almost iconic; developing archetypes of the industrialized age.

What I have found walking these city streets is a very different perception of New York’s uniqueness. It is unlike every city in the world, I think, because in a strange way, it IS every city in the world. Everything is here. Everybody is here. All of humanity – in all its glory, beauty, despair, tragedy, hope, sorrow, and strife. Remember that old Olympics commercial? How the announcer bellowed in time with clips from the games – “The glory of victory and the agony of defeat!” I’d bet those of you who do remember the scenes that went with those lines. That is what you see here in New York. The glory of victory. The agony of defeat. In every context, in every subtle shade, nuance, aspect. I have never felt so at one with the human race as I do in this city.

When I used to walk in Charlotte it was one of my funny quirks to say hi to everybody I passed. I would try to wait until the person happened to raise their eyes to me. Normally I had to reach out for their eyes with mine and often even then they continued to look down, or glanced quickly and looked away. About fifty percent of the time I got a ‘hi’ in return. The rest of the time I was avoided. New Yorkers stare you straight in the eye as they pass – not with animosity as you would perhaps think likely in this reputedly “cold, hard city,” but with a strange sense that they are searching in you for a reflection of themselves, for your place in their world and their place in yours.

I’ve been to virtually every major metropolitan city in the US and Europe and I’ve never seen this phenomenon, this willingness to connect candidly with a passing human being. Sometimes it is just a passing acknowledgment. Sometimes the eye contact transforms into a bright smile – like the doorman I passed today as I was thinking about this article. He smiled at me as if I were his sister coming in for the holidays from my home in Europe – such a genuine, beautiful, bright smile. Sometimes the smiles morph into conversation. As I sat here typing at one of those window-facing computer bars in Starbucks, an attractive young Asian man passed. I was off in my writer’s world searching for a right word when his eyes caught mine. He smiled, dimples forming in his cheek as the smile moved from his eyes to his lips. I couldn’t help but beam back. He turned right around, walked in, bought a coffee, sat down next to me, and introduced himself. Paul and I chatted as he asked about my writing and I about his art until he had to leave to meet friends. I so admire people who make a connection, however fleeting, and then actually stop to see what it is about. Every person with whom this has happened in New York has become a friend to me here. And it has happened, a lot. Sure I met people on the road while I was traveling, but travelers can spot one another; they share a common bond, a reason to commune. In New York the only bond we share is this city and our place in the tribe of man, yet this bond ties people enough to look, to smile, to stop and chat and befriend.

I find myself riding waves of humanity as I walk these streets and traverse the subways – smiling tenderly at the lady in her wheelchair with her poodle in the basket on the front, riding the path by Central Park as they stare, both of them, misty-eyed at the sun setting beyond the trees; feeling profoundly saddened at the middle-aged man, his clothes worn, his hands swollen from edema, so intoxicated for so long you could tell the effort to bring the brown paper bag to his lips was so habitual he needed be neither awake nor aware to do it; filled with the innocence of the occasional toddler, bundled stiff-armed in his parka or wrapped in her stroller; rushed by the memory of the thrill of life unfolding as I listen to the excited chatter of the many adolescents wondering the streets on school field trips from around the world. I revel in the music of the subway musicians, appreciate the efforts of the street entrepreneurs, mourn the elderly with expensive shoes and lost eyes still parading for long defunct social circles along Park Avenue. I watch the yuppies, and boy are they everywhere, with a strange mix of jealousy and pity. I smile at the lovers and wonder about the women in their furs and the men in their limos – are their lives as empty as their pockets are full? And what of the men and ladies with torn coats and smiling eyes? Are their lives as full as their pockets are empty? I especially admire the doormen (and they are always men) who stand in the same place all day long and yet are ever alive and alert and happy to share a smile, as if they all know some secret to happiness. There is all this life and love and joy, all this glory, countered by just as much sorrow and sadness, by agony and defeat. The screamers are the most poignant of these – the lost people on the subways who yell their despair to whoever is or isn’t listening.

Today I found myself crying on the subway for all the suffering I see here – the homeless asleep on the bench in the church I had just left, the mentally ill riding the subway up and down the track just to have a place to sit and be undisturbed, the retarded man who looked so lost in life with worn clothes and none of the spark of innocence they often have in their eyes. The tears were streaming down my face as the subway emerged from underground and into the bright sunlit day. As the sunlight struck my face, I realized I too was on this stage of humanity – the blonde lady in the subway with silent tears streaming down her face. “Why is she crying?” I heard the young boy across the way ask his mother. “I guess she is sad, hun,” she responded. Others glanced around to see who he had spoken about. I felt their looks of empathy for my undefined pain, knowing they couldn’t know that my pain was empathy for theirs. Sometimes I feel the pain of man so deep in my soul I don’t know if I can survive to the next second. Sometimes I feel the joy of man so profoundly I wonder if my heart will simply explode; if I will vanish, subsumed by light, gone, leaving a glimmer of glitter shimmering in the daylight. In New York I feel these things from one minute to the next, riding a roller coaster of human glory and defeat and realizing in the ride what I have known since a time before I can name, that they are one in the same.

I love this city – its filthy rich, its dirty poor (funny those adjectives are the same), its lost and found, and those who don’t know they are the other. I love the seekers, the obnoxious know it alls, the extremists, the apathetic, the young, the old, the beautiful – actually to me they are all beautiful, beautifully alive and real and here, struggling to find their way through this thing we call life. New York in its strange beautiful way is a microcosm of all the world. And I love this world – the suffering, the joy, the struggle and fight, the moments of reprieve, the shadows passing, the light breaking, the dawn and the night. I love the people who call this our home – this one glorious planet upon which we are all born and to which we will all return. This truth beats in the heart of New York – that we are all fighting the same fight, praying the same prayers, crying the same tears, laughing, loving, living. Here. On these city streets. The ones we walk together.

Where's George?

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Wednesday, December 13, 2006

So, there I was in one of those ‘movie moments’ – the world frozen around me as the pain shot through my wrist and out in the form of a scream. Petite blonde lady, in a business suit, collapsed in the shape of one of those chalked body outlines, travel buff pantyhose ripped and marred where I had landed on the dirty street, briefcase and one shoe lying on the ground next to me, just outside the Wall Street subway exit just after 9am on a rainy Wednesday morning. My shoe had come off on one of the lower steps in the human-cattle call that is Wall Street at pedestrian rush hour. Self conscious that I had held up the stream of people behind me in the process of trying to get my shoe back on, I had run up the last few steps. My toe caught the underside of the last step and I went flying. As I tried to get my feet under me, it only increased my momentum, sending me airborne in one of those classic arms-flailing-vertical-bodied diving falls. I landed over ten feet from where I tripped – left wrist first. That would be the left wrist that I had wrapped in an ace bandage the night before. Why? Because the inexplicable pain that I had woken with the morning before had turned into unbearable pain that night. Did I interrupt the time continuum or what? How is it that your wrist begins to hurt the day before you injure it?

I was only aware of two things as people crowded around my contorted body on the dirty pavement – the excruciating pain enveloping me and this little foreign man’s voice saying over and over “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” He must have seen me take flight and the ultimate crash. Once the pain had ceased to blind me, I did a mental scan of my body and realized I was fine except the wrist, which I prayed wasn’t broken, a ruined pair of pantyhose, and an ounce of lost pride. Some New Yorker I am!

I never saw any of the people around me,...

The Journey of Creation

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I awoke this morning to the cock’s crow – a rooster, seemingly outside my second floor window, was crying out the arrival of day. How strange they sound when heard in the remote hills of Italy; nothing like the cocka-doodle-doo we mimic on Saturday morning cartoons and children’s movies. I was dreaming of monsters for a few minutes before I realized it was merely the song of a rooster, not the cavalry call of aliens. I arose from the bed, the first bed I have had to myself in a room of my own in a house of my own for almost a year now. The journey, for now has ended. It is time to write.

Over the last month the story has taken shape. It is good. If I have the talent to bring it to life, it will be a worthy piece of literature. I believe there are few things in life more terrifying than having a dream and stepping up to play, unsure if you have what it takes to see the game through. We feel this standing upon the altar, holding a new born babe, walking into a first day of school, a new career, or a new town. And oh how keenly we feel it facing a blank canvas or musical sheet or computer screen. Perhaps in some ways even more so, for the test is between you and you alone.

I opened the window to look out at the hills beyond. It is beautiful here. A few houses clinging to the edge of a hill. Dogs bark, bees hum, a distant tractor can be heard, an occasional voice, and the wind. If you listen hard at night you can almost hear the sound of the moon rising over the mountains beyond. And now, the sound of church bells chiming from some distant hill town. I fixed my breakfast of yogurt and muesli, my morning coffee, and carried my computer to the table on the terrace looking out over the hills. From the heavens above, I heard a hearty “Buon giorno, Senora!” I looked up to discover an Italian woman about 50 leaning out a window of the same building I was in. I had not noticed that I only had one half of the house when I arrived as the sun set yesterday. “Buon giorno!” I responded. “Come mai vuoi venire a un posto isolato cosi’?” She exclaimed. ‘Why in the world would you come to a place isolated like this?’ I explained I was writing a book and the isolation served me well. She had a hearty voice and the bright eyes I so love about Italians. We chatted a few minutes before her phone rang and she excused herself, disappearing from the window of this hundred year old stone building.

I faced the computer. “Just notes, Sherry. Just start with notes. It will take form. Just write, don’t worry, just write.” Every time I sit down it is like this. The fear descends. I write a few words. The fear grips tighter. What am I doing? How can I possibly do this? The words are jumbled. The ideas clear but the words stumble and fall. How can I possibly write the jumble, punctuated by the occasional honey-silk passage, and then detangle it into something clear, concise, intriguing; something that leads the reader always forward with curiosity and desire.

I always made C’s in English. A’s for my ideas; F’s for my writing skill leaving me with an obdurate C average. I remember the paper I wrote when I was 17 in my first college writing class. I so loved my books and loved to write. I spent hours with a thesaurus pouring love and heart and soul into that paper. I was so proud of it. The teacher gave me an F. It was “overdone” she said. It would be over ten years before I would write anything again that wasn’t for a grade or an assignment. Almost twenty years before I would try again to pour love and heart and soul into a written creation.

The owner of the house arrived with prosciuto and salami and focaccia bread. How I love the Italians and their hospitality. Eat, drink, laugh, be merry. Pia-ah-no, pia-ah-no. There is time in life for all things. We chatted awhile over lunch and wine, coffee and biscotti before he left with a promise to return later with firewood and a map. I still have no idea exactly where I am.

There sat the computer on the table when I turned around. Waiting for me again. Was it this hard for the rest? The Hugos and Hemmingways, the Clancys, the Rands, and Coelhos, and Shakespeares. Not that I’m putting myself in their category, mind you, but was it this hard? I borrowed a book from Antonella yesterday. I had never read Virginia Woolf’s – A Room of One’s Own. I actually had no idea what it was about. When I pulled it from the shelf I was ecstatic to see it was actually in both English AND Italian. English on the left page, Italian on the right. How glorious! I am fluid enough in my speech and understanding now but still haven’t developed a skill for reading Italian. This would be wonderful practice. I asked Antonella if I could borrow the book. After several admonishments about not having it near fires, heaters, or water she acquiesced.

I walked around the table, the computer staring at me, daring me to find something else to do. “Perhaps Miss Woolf has something to share with me?” I said out loud to the empty room. I often do this. When I find myself unable to move or decide or take some kind of action, I pick up a random book, turn it to a random page, and ask for guidance. I cannot tell you whether there is a white bearded man in the heavens answering prayers, but I can tell you that when I have asked the Universe for guidance in this way, rarely has it ever remained mute.

This is what I read:

And one gathers from this enormous modern literature of confession and self-analysis that to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer’s mind whole and entire. Generally material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down.

I had to laugh at this point for the dogs outside were performing a raucous symphony, my host was clearly intent on stopping by every morning and night, and I was eating only at the grace of a friend who had loaned me money to see me through this last month. I ate last month at the grace of my Aunt who received a bonus and insisted on giving it to me. My knee has gone out from four months of too much walking and not enough stretching and sitting in any position for long brings on sharp searing pain. So far it seemed I was in the ranks of all the great authors! I continued on:

Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world’s notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want. And so the writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers especially in the creative years of youth, every form of distraction and discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony, rises from those books of analysis and confession. ‘Mighty poets in their misery dead’ – that is the burden of their song. If anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived.

How right she is. It is the indifference that challenges me the most. So many friends and loved ones don’t have time to read my words, why would the world? And why would I write what the world will not read? How many times I have turned off the stats site dejected because despite the words of encouragement and praise from friends and loved ones, only a handful are actually reading the posts. There was a time the world would freeze me with its indifference, solidifying me until I too was indifferent. Somewhere in this journey it lost its grip. I continue to write because I must, because I am the only person who can give birth to the idea in my mind; the dream in my heart. I must write this story. I hope fervently with all my heart that it is a work of genius, that it will touch the world, change lives, but in the end it doesn’t matter whether it does or not. What matters is that I do all that I can do to bring my own vision to reality. That I can hold in my hands my own creation. That I can bring into this world and leave to it something that was not there before. This is what it is to live – whether you birth a strong marriage, a happy home, a charity, a band, a career, or a book, it doesn’t matter. Whether anyone else sees it, knows it, praises it, doesn’t matter. What matters is you take a dream and make it a reality, you create, adding fibers to the tapestry that make up this world; adding your own current of creative energy to counter the currents of destruction all around.

And so I will face this fear, this computer, my own soul and I will write this book, whether you will read it or not. I will give it to you, to the world, freely, to do with it as you wish with only the hope that it can fill you with the love and possibility that I feel as I give birth to this dream.

Couchsurfing, Connections, and Community

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Sunday , September 17, 2006

I wish couchsurfing had been around when I was in my twenties – not that I had much party time between being a single mom in law school or married with three children, but it still would have been nice to have some place where I felt such a deep sense of belonging. When I was growing up, communities were built around geography - towns, schools, neighborhoods. If you were a little different, you just didn’t fit and that was it. You might could find another outcast but often your only bond was the fact that you were outcast and you knew the bond was built on shifting ground.

I could talk for hours about the amazing changes the internet revolution has brought to our world, but one particularly interesting change is the sudden ability to create communities out of connections based on common interest rather than common geography. Twenty years ago if you wanted to find the hundred other people in the country who recreated Land of the Lost scenes in miniature - good luck. Chances are you didn’t even think they existed – you sat alone in your strange little world wondering why you were so different and playing with Sleestak and Pakuni action figures. Now, a few clicks of the button and you can find every Land of the Lost cult classic member in the world and be chatting with them in minutes about whether there was incestuous sexual tension between Will and Holly.

Couchsurfing.com is built on this sudden ability to connect and be connected to anyone, anywhere. It is truly an amazing community, built around a simple love for exploring new worlds and belief in connecting our world. Parties and meetings are held all over the world and you know when you walk into one that chances are there will be someone there you know and if not you will have no problem making friends or finding something to talk about. A simple “who have you surfed?” or “who have you hosted” will start an endless conversation and almost inevitably lead to the discovery of someone or many someones you both know or places you’ve both been.

Case in point. I met Tiina in Finland – a cute-as-a-button blonde with shining eyes and a bright smile that can light up any room. She is originally from Finland but had just relocated to Amsterdam. When I decided to head to Holland, I dropped her a line to see if we could meet up. She told me there was a CS party in Rotterdam that Saturday. I did a search for hosts in Rotterdam and saw Urbian’s profile and sent an email asking if he could host me for the party. “Sure,” came the reply. I ended up not making the party, but Urbian and I hit it off so well with our teasing relationship, I ended up staying in Rotterdam a few days. Thursday a couchsurfer-turned-friend, Leila, calls to say she’s on her way to visit. She had surfed Urbian a year before, and they developed a big brother – little sis relationship. At 20 she is well traveled, multi-lingual, quite mature, and about as much of a-know-it all as I was at 20; a prerequisite I think to early maturity. I liked her instantly though our obstinate characters challenged our interaction a bit. Meanwhile Tiina told me there would be another party in Paris for another couchsurfer, Antoine’s, birthday and invited me to come. When Leila arrived from Portugal it turned out Antoine had hosted her previously and had invited her to come as well. Little did I know at the time that I had actually met Antoine at the collective in Vienna two months ago. So Urbian, Leila, and I load up in the car and head to Paris. Much to my surprise I knew a fourth of the people there personally and knew the rest by no more than two degrees of separation. So it took a random meeting in Finland to bring me to Paris where I met friends I had made in Vienna. Do you know how small that makes the world feel? How connected our human race can be?

I envy these kids their ability to make these connections, see these lands, build this community, and participate so intimately with this world. The possibilities are endless, the opportunity for connection incomprehensible. One of the features of the couchsurfing site is the “how you know this person” field. When I pull up a profile on a search, it will show me if I know the person within four degrees of separation. If my friend, Kim, hosted a surfer, Mike, who was friends with Sammy, who stayed with the guy whose profile I am now looking at, it will show me the connection. Imagine if you could see the whole world that way? The person you know who knows the person who knows a person you think you are unconnected with. Could we still drop bombs? Would we still need to? I believe in the possibility of a single tribe called mankind; I believe in a community that includes everyone – because whether we would like to think of it that way or not, we have one. These kids are changing the world by connecting it. It is beautiful to watch.

The party was great – typical in that it involved beer, a bar, and twenty-somethings – but different in that it involved a shared spirit not for a sports game or college or job, but a shared spirit of man. At 3am Leila took off to see the Eiffel Tower while Urbian, Helene who we had met, and I took a taxi to our hosts’ apartment. We had not even met one of our hosts and had talked with the other only a few minutes at the party. They had left us a key under the mat to drop off our stuff and freshen up when we arrived, never having laid eyes on us. We let ourselves in and in moments I was sound asleep on the couch. I remember the kindness that exuded in the energy of someone pulling a blanket over me. I was too deep in sleep to open my eyes to see who it was and instead began dreaming about the kindness of angels. The next thing I saw was Mhenna, our host, as he carried a tray filled with French croissants, jam, yogurt, and tea into the living room. He told me when he had come in a few hours before, I was curled up like a cat and he had covered me up – so that was my kindhearted angel. Leila had returned during the night and was on the couch across the room with Urbian on the third couch between us. We roused our hungover selves and chatted with Mhenna. A few minutes later the bell rang, it was Antoine, the birthday boy, and his American surfer, Marnie, who hails from my alma mater city of Austin, Texas. The ease with which friends and strangers alike can sit in a room most have never seen before, hungover, some in clothes some still in pajamas, all from different countries, sharing croissants, tea, conversation, and camaraderie is an astounding testament to the community of man. The only community we all belong to and one, thanks to the internet, we can all find ways to connect to.

It's The Little Things In Life

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Sunday, August 12, 2006

The greatest sacrifices in traveling are often the little things we take for granted in everyday life - curling up with a good book wrapped up in your favorite blanket, renting a movie after a long hard day at work, having a drink with a friend, doing laundry, home cooked meals. Copenhagen was full of these things for me. Lars is a rarity as a person. Despite the fact he is damn good looking and built to boot, he was, as they say, easy like a Sunday morning. We quickly slipped into a comfortableness with each other – sometimes teasing, sometimes talking deeply, and generally sharing a light fun banter. We spent a fair amount of time together the four days I was there and developed precious beginnings of a friendship.

When he opened his door to me, I was met with a bright smile, striking blue eyes, and the delicious aroma of stir fry. Vegetables are few and far between on the road and I crave them constantly. Lars chased me off to take a hot shower and wash away the long travel day. If I ever get to heaven, I want to kiss the feet of the man who invented hot running water. When I returned refreshed (and probably smelling a bit better) Lars poured me a glass of wine and we talked for hours over a delicious dinner. There is something about a home cooked meal and a glass of wine that a restaurant can never replicate.

Later that night we had drinks with friends at their new home. I felt part of their world sitting in the sparsely decorated home – sparse in part because they had just moved in and in part because the vision of “Scandinvaian” design – straight edged metal and wood in minimal quantities – is the only design in Copenhagen. Languages flew around the room – Danish, English, even Italian as everyone laughed in the glow of candles and soft lights. Danes, it seems, love candles – their way to keep away the gloom of the long overcast winters I guess. I was surprised to learn it doesn’t snow much in Copenhagen, only once or twice a year, but the winters are filled with overcast and rainy days more often than not. I was exhausted after the short night’s sleep and long travel day, but stayed to enjoy the sound of longtime friends enjoying one another – something you don’t often get to be a part of when you are traveling.

Saturday we took the socializing out on the town – heading to the Grill Bar for drinks. Kenneth, who I had met the night before, met Lars and I there. Grill Bar was the thirty/forty-something bar I wish Charlotte had. Hopping with hotties, the music rocked and the conversation never stopped. It was interesting watching the Danes. Certainly they were “playing the game” – who do I want to pick up and how do I do it – but unlike Americans they seemed to genuinely enjoy it. You know how some cocktail parties seem forced with everyone talking just enough to make their appearance and get the hell out? While at others everyone seems to genuinely be having a good time? American bars, especially the older pick up bars, always seem to have that forced quality. The Danes though all seemed to genuinely be enjoying the whole pick’em up process. I, on the other hand, was enjoying just watching. The best part was watching the girls swoon for Lars. They would bat their eyes and look at him doe-like while surreptitiously glancing sideways to give me a dirty who-the-hell-are-you look. I haven’t seen such cattiness since a TJ Ross clearance sale in the states.

We were just tipsy enough to think a whopper sounded really good, so Lars and I trekked in the direction of central station after the Grill Bar closed. Wow, what a contrast. You see Sweden’s alcohol tax is absurdly high and with the new bridge that connects Sweden and Denmark, the young’uns from Sweden can grab a train and head to Copenhagen for a few brewskies. And a few brewskies they had certainly had! There were drunk teenager and twenty-somethings everywhere. Quite the contrast from our high-falutin’ bar of perfectly coifed older types. We got our whoppers and a taxi and headed home, eating our whoppers and laughing about the look on my face when the bartender told me my drink was 190 Kroner – uh, that would be thirty American greenbacks. I nursed that baby for over two hours! Copenhagen is a great place to visit but you better have money if you want to eat or drink there!!

Ah but Sunday… Sunday night was the greatest night of all. We ordered take out Thai food and watched Lord of War. It was sheer heaven for me – to dine on take out by candlelight with a friend and watch a movie at home. That is one of the things I miss most in this new life. Patrick and I used to call them snuggle movies when he was young enough to spoon with me on the couch. It was one of our favorite forms of evening entertainment. As he got older, the snuggles stopped but the movies continued, always with a pizza or Chinese food. It was our way to enjoy each other’s company even when teenage tensions ran high and our relationship was challenged. No one’s company will ever match snuggle movies back in the day, but just the experience of sitting at home and watching a movie takes me back to the joy and the beauty of that time in my life.

Monday was laundry day. Doesn’t sound romantic does it? Wash clothes for five people and laundry day is a burden. But when you have had only a couple laundry days in the last year, it is sheer pleasure. There is something about pulling fresh clothes hot out of the dryer that just makes the world seem fresh and new again. I paid bills and took care of problems online while listening to the familiar and unappreciated song of jean buttons clanging in the dryer. What a delight. Monday night I got to wear my fresh, soft clothes to one last dinner with Lars. We talked about love and life and the roads that lie ahead. Later I snuggled into the warm down comforter one last time, listening to the soft patter of rain outside the open balcony door, hoping that whatever paths we are on, one day they will cross again.

The Pilgrimage to Santiago

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June 16, 2006

I woke well rested to my first full day in Santiago. A little yoga, a little free breakfast (I love that free food thing!), a quick check of the emails and I was off. I wandered the city streets awhile making my way to the Cathedral where it was suggested tourists attend the high noon mass. There is an amazing energy in the air here in Santiago. Something of joy or maybe it is just an aliveness I haven’t seen many other places in the world. I entered the old town through the Arco de Mazarelos, the only gateway that has been preserved from the old city walls, and entered the University area. With young twenty-somethings drinking coffee at little outdoor tables, running around with books, and sitting on benches talking deeply about the important matters of life, it was filled with the same vitality any university area anywhere in the world seems to have. The youth carry such hope – of life ahead, of loves to come, of all the many possibilities that lay before them. Whenever they are gathered together in the pursuit of learning (as opposed to drinking), there is a certain energy that permeates everything around them. Santiago was no different in this regard.

The difference is that you continue walking, wandering through stone streets that weave like tangled yarn, staring wide-eyed at each new façade of the Cathedral that you come upon, feeling that energy all the while until suddenly you realize the energy is the same but you are no longer surrounded by students. Everywhere you look there are people in their 50’s and 60’s and even 70’s with backpacks and walking sticks - some alone, some in groups, some on bikes, some laying prostrate on the pavement, but all of them there, sharing a camaraderie, a spirit, a sense of having done - of having made the pilgrimage to Santiago. It is truly an amazing sight. I have never seen so many older people with such excitement and energy and enthusiasm. Every ounce of spirit that pervades university areas filled the air of Plaza Obradorio but with the occasional exception of a lone solo pilgrim like me, I would say the average age in that square was at least 55.

I made my way with these hundreds, if not thousands, of happy folk into the cathedral. Words cannot do the Cathedral justice, from neither the outside nor in, and I shall not try where Hemingway and others have failed. I can say that the energy, the excitement, the very essence of life was palpable as predominately older people sat in benches, on confessional steps or the edges of the many columns, and even kneeled or sat on the cold stone ground waiting for the mass to begin. An ancient nun came out and asked for silence, a request relatively well met for a cathedral filled with excited people from all over the world, and began to sing in one of the most angelic voices I have ever heard. It was a full mass with song and prayer. Some parts were translated into other languages but most was in Spanish. I was beginning to get a little restless by communion and so wandered off to kiss the mantle of St James as hundreds of thousands of pilgrims have done before me. I was about to leave, figuring whatever I had heard about some incense burner being swung through the air - to cover up the smell of those hundreds of thousands of (can you imagine) unbathed pilgrims who had hiked cross country for days generally timing their arrival for this mass - couldn’t be that impressive. Fortunately, I followed the advice of the guide book and stayed. Wow.

It doesn’t sound like much, but this was an impressive sight indeed. The priest finishes the mass then eight men in traditional monk robes take up these large ropes suspended from a pulley mechanism in the ceiling that looks just like the ones you saw in your second grade science book when you learned how inventions like the wheel and the rope and pulley changed the life of man. Attached to the other end of the rope is a beautiful silver larger than man-sized incense burner. The men pull on the rope, hefting the incense burner that is now spilling over with smoke and the light smell of incense (I unfortunately didn’t recognize what kind) and begin pulling so that it swings from side to side. Not that impressive. Then just as you are about to yawn, the burner extends past its centrifugal point (I think that’s what it is called). Remember the way the swing would drop when you went higher than the bar as a little kid? Now imagine this gigantic silver incense burner falling straight at you out of the rafters in what looks like a free fall then suddenly catching the rope and swinging off in the other direction to do the same thing on the other side. Now remember that you are in one of the greatest and largest cathedrals of all time. Imagine the immensity, the height of the rafters, the sheer impressiveness of the building from the inside and then picture the size and length of the rope and distance it can travel – far enough to require eight men to control it! I was impressed. Everyone was impressed. As the sweet smelling silver urn plummeted toward you and your fellow travelers there was a sensation much like riding the Wild Claw at the carnival – you just know you are about to die when suddenly the laws of physics sweep you out of harm’s way. You know that exhilaration you feel when you get off one of those rides? That’s what you feel inside the Pilgrim’s Mass. I’ll bet you never thought a Catholic church service could be exhilarating!

I love this about traveling – not just the chance to have these experiences, see such things, but the experience of camaraderie that naturally grows around them. Mankind is, I believe, at his best when engaged in sharing the spirit of joy, of accomplishment, of common experience. This is an everyday reality in the little town of Santiago de Compostela. I feel blessed to have been a part of it.

Some Goodbyes Come Too Soon...

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Friday, June 9, 2006

I am riding the train from Madrid to Avila – home to St. Teresa. The landscape has changed from the wild patchwork quilt of cornsilk yellow, deep green, and ochre browns and oranges to a solid blanket of green formed by tightly woven trees. They are not like the trees of Charlotte but short, round balls of trees – I have no idea what kind. The earth is covered with them, leaving only occasional glimpses of the yellow grasses and collections of boulders that seem to make up this countryside. I am reflective now, as I always am when I finish a book. It is a strange mourning as a good book comes to an end. These people, places, ideas that have filled your life for days you find have suddenly finished their role in your life and moved on. Funny, I realize in this moment as I write this it was the same feeling I struggled with this morning. Two new couch surfers arrived at Max’s last night – Carey and Carrie. One blonde, one brunette, both 23, they took me back to the time when it was Cheri and Sherry all those years ago. Strangely enough both their mothers are named Sherry as well. After finishing college, they decided to sell their few belongings, even their cars, and spend the next few months traveling Europe.

Carrie was full of questions about life and we sat on the porch drinking wine from a 48 cent carton until the not so wee hours of the morn. It took me back to younger days when we search with intensity for the answers to life’s questions – is there a God, a hell, life after this one? What is happiness, love? How do we find it, know it, keep it? How do we survive in relationship - both keeping our own spirit and accommodating the spirit of another? It was a timeless conversation, had millions of times beneath a blanket of stars on patios and mountaintops, in trains and airports, quiet hotel rooms and hidden staircases. I doubt Carrie will remember my name or the place in years to come, but she will, as I do, remember the way time stands still when two strangers share their beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and their stories. Somehow the things I shared will become part of the fabric of her life, of her vision of self and world, as the things she shared will become part of mine – long after the memory of where that particular thread was added to the tapestry of our lives has disappeared into the void of our life’s felt but unrecalled moments.

It was difficult to leave today after touching their lives for that brief moment, but I knew I had long overstayed my time at Max’s and it was, in any case, time to move on. The transitions are always so difficult for me. Perhaps that is one of the things I hope to learn on this trip. I argued with myself all morning as I tried to sleep off the 48 cent wine hangover, not wanting to leave this new connection – I could ask to stay another night, could take them to Toledo, go to the bullfight tomorrow with them. In the end, I knew the still, quiet voice telling me it was time to move on was the one I needed to listen to and so I packed my things, gave them my leftover metro pass and some motherly advice about pickpockets and staying safe, and said good-bye in the train station.

Not wanting to use my computer in the busy, thief-ridden train stations of Madrid, I instead pulled out my book to read. I had not read it in a couple days, knowing it would soon come to an end and not yet wanting to say goodbye to the characters I had come to know. The book is Paulo Coelho’s latest – The Zahir. I had bought it my first day in Ascoli Piceno, excited that I would soon be able to read Italian and wanting my first book to be by my favorite author. Little did I know in my naiveté to languages how difficult it is to learn a language well enough to read with any kind of dexterity. The book was eventually loaned to my dear, sweet Georgio. It wasn’t until I was standing in the bookstore in Madrid that I remembered there was a Coelho book that I had yet to read. By great grace, I found a copy in English.

It never ceases to be strange to me to see yourself again and again in the pages of a book. Books have always come to me in uncanny ways when it seemed I needed a certain answer or insight or simple solace. The book, which I bought in Madrid, begins in, you guessed it, Madrid, and follows what seems to be a somewhat biographical journey of the writer through his search to write, to fill an insatiable hunger for newness and adventure, and to find the meaning of a love that doesn’t merely exist but moves with the ebb and flow of life and time. The book settled in my soul, even more so than his books usually do, as he was writing from the perspective of a writer searching. I was sad to close the book, to say good-bye to the characters, to say good-bye to Carrey and Carrie and Max, to think of the many goodbyes to come – and yet exhilarated at the people, adventures, experience, dare I hope even love, that may lay on the tracks ahead. It is a strange thing this life we live. I guess it is in some way finding out for ourselves how to hold on forever to the sense of being alive – like the feeling that comes in those long conversations under the stars - while still saying goodbye to the places and people that add a little color to the tapestry of our lives, leaving an imprint on our selves our souls, and at the same time and finding for yourself the places and people you want to be forever woven and weaving with…

Do We Care?

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Do we care? We see the reports. Thousands dead here, hundreds there, a couple somewhere. Bombings in London, tidal waves in Shangri La, military troops killed every day. We see the pictures, hear the reports. Sometimes something is so grave we shudder. High-schooler kills friends and family on graduation morning. “My god. What is the world coming to?” we ask before folding up the paper and driving the suburban to the office listening to some morning talk show. What is this malaise that has settled over our country? Is it man’s nature not to care? Or is it just an American way of life?

I was attacked by a dog two weeks ago and on instinct had jumped in my car and headed to someplace safe. It didn’t dawn on me until the world went yellow, that my body was going into shock and if I passed out behind the wheel I would have more trouble than the puncture wound in my hand. It was raining and the top was broken on my car. In my typical defiance of all matters ridiculous in our society, I refused to pay the $6,000 to replace it when the car itself was only worth $6,000. As the world swam before me, I decided better wet than dead and pulled over.

I laid my seat back, the world coming in and out of focus as the cold sweats took over my body, quaking in that horrible, nauseating, light-headed feeling as consciousness battles with unconsciousness. I heard a car stop and a voice call out, “Miss, are you okay?” A middle-aged gentleman was walking up to my car, being careful to circle and come from the front so as not to startle me. I must have been a sight. - pale white, hand bleeding, eyes half-lidded, laying in the driver’s seat of a convertible with the top down in the rain. “I was attacked by a dog,” I managed to mumble, “was going to faint, had to pull over, I’m, I’m okay.” I reached for the dignity we try to show in the face of strangers that we are fine, just fine, but I didn’t have the strength to pretend.

He was next to the door now, but I couldn’t open my eyes enough to focus. “Would you like some water,” he asked. Such kindness in that voice. “Yes, yes, water.” What is that desert-like thirst that comes over us in shock? He disappeared for a moment and came back with a bottle of water. He cradled my head lifting it as I put the water to my lips to drink, then gently laid my head back and stroked my hair. His caress was so very genuine, filled with compassion and caring. I finally could open my eyes and seeing his eyes smiling at me whispered, “thank you”.

He stood next to my car, stroking my hair, and replied, “This is what we are supposed to do. This is what we are here for. To care for each other. To take care of each other.”

I truly felt in that moment that he was an angel descended from heaven. His presence was so comforting, so soothing, so filled with love for another human being. He asked if I wanted to sit in his car as the rain was coming down harder. I wasn’t sure I could stand up without fainting and, probably more significantly, couldn’t ignore a lifetime of propaganda that people can’t be trusted and you should never get in a stranger’s car – even if you thought they were an angel sent from above.

Instead he went to his car and returned with an umbrella. He stood next to my car holding an umbrella over my head as the rain poured down on my broken convertible. He teased, “Don’t you wish you had a picture of this moment?!” “Ah” I responded, “if you only knew how many moments like this there are in my life! It would make quite the scrapbook!” He stayed with me, protecting me from the rain, holding my head as I drank his water, tenderly stroking my hair, until the friend I had called arrived.

Every time someone is mean to me, or short, or cross I see his face now. Smiling eyes looking down from above under the patter of rain on an umbrella. He is humanity to me. Not the cold, cruel people hiding their sad desperation behind a mask of anger. He was right, we are here to take care of each other. So why, why don’t we? Why are we so caught up in our own little lives? Do we just not care? Is he different for what he feels inside or was he the only person who upon being concerned did something about it?

It is now two weeks later. I just watched less than an hour of the movie “Sometimes in April” about the Hutu uprising in Rwanda before having to turn the movie off and the phone on. “How can we do this to each other?!” I cried out to my friend on the other line. “They couldn’t even tell who was who to know who to kill. They had to look on lists. They didn’t practice different religions, didn’t have a different belief sets, they were just born of a different lineage a century ago. They couldn’t even tell each other apart but they could kill whoever wasn’t of their lineage. How can we do this?! How can we continue to do this to each other?!”

My friend has heard me go into these furies before. Trying to calm me down was pointless, despite the gum surgery I just had and the fact I wasn’t supposed to talk. He mostly listened, occasionally making a point. “Man has always killed,” he said, “for money, for power, for religion, for land, for differences in philosophy, in looks, in beliefs.” “I know, but why?! Why can’t we see how absurd it is?!” In a plaintive wail ever so reminiscent of my teenage daughter in the backseat of our mini-van when her sister and brother were fighting, I cried, “Why can’t we all just get along!”

It breaks my heart, truly breaks my heart that we continue to judge those different from ourselves at all, much less that we continue to kill them for no reason but their differences. We talked on of senseless slayings, of the often senseless political responses, assuming there was first a self-interest in responding at all, and of our response in this society. “I doubt most people in America even know what happened in Rwanda,” he declared. “Most people just don’t care.”

That sentence stopped me in my tiger-like pacing back and forth in the dark. Most people just don’t care. Could that be true? But we do care. Don’t we? We must care. The image of the kind stranger standing next to my car holding an umbrella to protect me from the rain flashed through my mind. I know we care. Inside every person is empathy for every suffering human being. We are born with it. It is hard-wired into us. You see someone bang their toe and your toe hurts. You watch a pretend surgery on TV and you wince as the knife enters the skin. Why do you think we cry at movies? We feel what other people feel – even when we know they are acting! Other people’s experiences are a vehicle for our own emotions – we feel for them because somewhere inside, no matter how many differences, we are them and we know it.

So why this malaise in our country? What has happened to rewire our circuits? Why can we react to movies but not to thousands of senseless deaths half-way around the world? I don’t think it is that we don’t care. I think we are paralyzed. You slice the arm of a paraplegic, he will just lay there. His body may be perfectly capable of fighting you off but his mind can’t tell his body how. Fortunately, for him his body can’t tell his mind about the pain either. The only thing worse than not being able to protect oneself is having to feel the pain of that which you can’t protect against.

We are like that, we Americans. The press feeds us fear for breakfast and dinner everyday. We can’t walk alone at night, can’t leave our children at the bus-stops, can’t trust our priests, our teachers, our police. The average person in our society makes the majority of his or her decisions based on fear, not knowledge, not desire, fear, and the press gives us more than enough to be scared about. We are scared to stop and help each other.

I remember when I was a child I couldn’t wait until I got old enough to hitchhike across America, for back then people really did. If you didn’t have money for a bus or a train you could count on the kindness of strangers. Not today. Today you are a fool if you hitchhike and a fool if you pick someone up. Neither one trusts the other. Why? Did the nature of people change or our perception? I know this, perception is easier to change than the nature of man. But how long before the perception becomes the reality? The new physics says we create our reality by what we expect. If that is true, what will come of a country that lives in fear - fear of the dark, fear of the unknown, fear of each other? Won’t we bring to pass the very things we fear?

And then there is this growing sense of helplessness. Why do you think people don’t vote? It’s not because we don’t care. Of course we care. It’s because we don’t think our vote will make a difference. We don’t believe we can affect our world. This insidious amorphous entity simply referred to as “The System” now feeds upon itself and us and we are helpless against it. We don’t even know what It is. To fight it is like battling a nameless, formless dragon of mist.

I have always been a fighter. When I was young my grandma would tease me that I would argue with a post about where it was standing. When a company made a mistake – an overcharge on a credit card, an absurd provision in a boiler plate contract, a mistake by a CSR, a promise unfulfilled – I would fight until they corrected it. I knew for every person who said there was nothing they could do, there was a person above them somewhere who had the authority to remedy the situation. I would take it up and up the corporate ladder until the issue was resolved. Now there is no corporate ladder, there is a corporate whirlpool. Nobody has the authority to fix anything.

The night of the dog bite, for just $491 at the local emergency room, I was given pain pills, a tetanus shot, and x-rays and told by the doctor who never even touched my hand to run it under water while pressing all around the wound. I thought it was odd no one cleaned it or disinfected it, but I had never had a puncture wound to the bone and thought it was just treated differently. The doctor told me that normally they prescribe an anti-biotic in case of infection but he wanted me to come back in thirty-six hours so he could look at it and make sure it wasn’t infected. After five hours, a Lortab, and two Motrin, anything made sense to me.

The next day as my hand swelled to the size of a plum and turned bright red it became rather apparent it was infected. A doctor friend, appalled that the wound hadn’t even been cleaned, told me I absolutely had to get on antibiotics that night or I would risk losing my hand. He couldn’t prescribe the antibiotic for fear he would lose his license if I lost my hand because of the first doctor’s mistake. I called the emergency room but was told even though antibiotics were standard protocol for dog bites and even though the doctor had indicated I would need antibiotics if it became infected, they couldn’t prescribe them unless I came in again. So the night of July 4^th I went back to the emergency room along with the firecracker fools and dozens of people injured in a riot downtown.

Every nurse and technician, with genuine compassion, agreed it really was absurd that I would be stuck there until the morning waiting for a doctor to look at my pulsating, red, plum sized hand to prescribe an antibiotic that should have been prescribed the night before but there was just “nothing they could do.” I spoke to yet another counter person in yet another waiting area. “It’s crazy, yeah, but that’s the way the system works,” she said. “But don’t you understand? I can lose my hand if I don’t get on antibiotics now!” I pleaded. “ I’m sorry but there is nothing I can do, you’ll just have to wait.”

When she told me it would be morning before a doctor could see me, I demanded I be released and my records reflect I had been told I wouldn’t be seen until morning. I may as well give my body the night’s sleep and go to an urgent care in the morning. She did a quick back peddle, declaring she hadn’t said it would be morning for sure after all it could just be twenty minutes. I was told I could walk out but they would not discharge me. I was charged $100 for that visit – oh, well I guess they did take my blood pressure and temperature.

Who was this System protecting? It certainly wasn’t protecting me or my hand at that moment. And why did no one have the authority to exercise judgment to do the right thing? Because The System had taken that judgment away and what do they have instead of authority? Fear. My doctor friend cared, but what could he do? He couldn’t risk his license. The nurses cared, but what could they do? They were just nurses.

I cried walking home from the emergency room. America the free, home of the brave, the greatest power in the world, and I might lose my hand because no one had the authority to give me an antibiotic. I was helplessly caught in a web of helplessness. What is happening to us? My hand has all but healed now. Fortunately. But this pit in the bottom of my stomach won’t go away. Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong.

It is not that we don’t care, we are scared to care, and either convinced we can’t act or scared of the consequences if we do. We are the paraplegic who sees the knife cutting into his skin but can’t do anything about it. Our brain screams out, “this is wrong, this is wrong,” but our bodies are immobilized, helpless. So how do we handle it? We rewire, just like the paraplegic. We cut off the feeling as well, or at least we try. We drive our suburban to a job most of us don’t like, doing things most of us don’t believe make a difference. We come back to our homes, turn down our blinds, turn up our TVs, and tune out our world. We cut off. We try not to feel. We empathize with the characters on TV because they are safe, but not with people dying the world over. That’s just too close to home. What can we do anyway? Send a few dollars, appease our conscious. Maybe run a fundraiser.

We can rally financial for a tidal wave but not get out and vote for a political candidate. Why? Because we are convinced money can fix problems but we can’t, we don’t have the authority, we don’t have the power, we can’t fight. As a society we actually disdain those who do fight – activists are looked down upon as being a little off their rocker, extremists with a cause. Necessarily non-materialistic, we see them mostly as idealistic fools. And mostly they are. Not because of what they believe in but because we can’t believe in them.

It’s not that we don’t care. It is because we care. We care so much the only way to survive the fear and the helplessness is to hide. We convince ourselves that as long as our home is there to come home to, our family, our things then everything must be okay. We bury in a pursuit of materialism, of evidence that all is fine. As long as the internet is working the world must be just fine. Sure there’s this gnawing pit in the bottom of our stomach that so many things just aren’t okay, but there’s nothing we can do anyway, so let’s just push that aside and focus on our job, our garden, our to do list. Whatever you do, don’t look in the mirror where this scared, sad, helpless person is looking back at you asking, “Don’t you care?”

For me, I want the face in my mirror to reflect the smiling eyes of my angel from the road. I never had to ask if he cared. He stopped his world to change mine.

Recuperare

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One of the things I admire most about the Italians is the art of recuperare. In simple English this means to “recover” but after reviewing the seven-odd definitions in Italian, one sees that there is far more to the word than to simply recover. When you “recover,” in the sense of the information age, you find or bring back to life data you believed to be lost. For the Italians it is more than recovering what is lost but also what might be lost if it is not used - this means using the stems of the tomatoes, five types of recycling bins, including organic, using roof tiles to create art, never making too much pasta. Do you know they actually use methane here? Did you know cars can run off of methane? It was abandoned as a source of fuel in America (except for use by motor homes) long ago as “inefficient” – yeah, inefficient for the government to lose the tax on gas. Even the American Government would have a hard time justifying the taxation of shit (maybe). Italians live the Paratrooper motto – adapt, improvise, overcome. Unfortunately, while it is a beautifully quality, they live it to a fault. They have become so adept at the art of ‘making do’, that they continue to improvise rather than innovate. What do I mean? Well, I’ll illustrate my point with a story.

Daniele and I were making pasta for lunch the other day - something that happens in virtually every kitchen in Italy at least once if not twice a day. The strainer was in the sink. I was next to the sink. Daniele was taking the pot of boiling water from the stove to drain the cooked pasta. He nodded at me, hands full with the pot of boiling water, and told me to turn on the water. You know, the turn-it-on nod, tilt your head down then up like a horse trying to nuzzle you for a carrot. I understood the gesture. I even understood most of the words that came along with it – something about water anyway (even Helen Keller understood wa-wa). Yes, he seemed to be suggesting I turn on the water. Of course this couldn’t be right. I KNOW, contrary to popular American opinion, an Italian would NEVER run cold water over just cooked pasta. There was the nod again with the words, yep, definitely water, and open, or something like that. Now you get the picture. Dumb non-Italian-speaking blonde standing next to the sink, dazed and confused (as usual), head tilted sideways like a golden retriever who just heard a strange whining noise, and poor Italian man holding a pot of boiling water, probably burning his hands, emphatically braying his head like a horse and repeatedly asking the oblivious blonde to TURN ON THE DAMN WATER. We were stuck. Blondes should never think. They should just do. Things would be easier.

Finally my concern for his hands that were now smoking through the pot holder convinced me to turn on the water even though I didn’t understand why. He pushed the faucet out of his way, water running, and gratefully dumped the boiling water (well, not anymore) and pasta into the strainer. I tilted my head the other way, still confused. Come mai, aqua? (why, water?). He tapped the sink. Plastico. Scolgia. I got that - Plastic. Melts. Well I pretended like I got it. Later that night I did my own investigation of the sink. It was certainly not plastic. Not metal exactly but not plastic. No way they would make a sink out of plastic. I dismissed it as another strange and unnecessary thing that Italians do, like build condominiums out of cold-conducting, and noise-conducting (as my neighbor not so kindly reminded me in the middle of my party last night) concrete.

Two days later (life always has such a sense of humor about timing) I discovered in the midst of washing dishes a large and growing puddle of water around my feet. I squatted down to find water spraying in all directions under the cabinet, soaking all five different recycling bags. A few minutes of sifting soaked recycling and mopping up water later, I began to search for the source of the problem. Ludmilla was adorably 25 as I began to dismantle the guts of the sink plumbing – “Sherry, are you sure you should do that?” “Sherry do you know what you’re doing?” “Sherry shouldn’t we call the plumber, the landlord, the president, Antonella, someone?” In a moment of pure Scarlet O’hara-ism, she put her hand, palm outward to her forehead, rolled her head back, closed her eyes, and wailed, “Oh why us! What did we do wrong? Why do these things always happen to us!”

I feel sorry for Ludmilla having to live with me sometimes. It has been so long since I was first on my own I have little appreciation for the upheavals that are life at twenty-something. I’m sure she and my son could have some great conversations about what an intolerant-curmudgeon-pain-in-the-ass I can be sometimes. “Ludmilla!” I snapped, very mother-like, “No one died, it‘s a broken sink, for Christ’s sake.” I continued to dismantle the sink. When I had everything taken apart I deduced the problem. There was a long screw that went through the drain cover on the sink-side into the hole beneath the drain cover and through the bottom of the sink that attached to the bowl unit. It was this single screw that held the bowl unit tight against the underside of the sink. The water pooled in the bowl unit before flowing down into the pipe and off to wherever-land. (Think picture on Drano bottle – snake attached to a carburetor casing, with a goose neck that emerges in the sink above).

For some reason the long screw wasn’t holding its place in the center of the bowl unit piece. The bowl piece had come loose from the bottom of the sink and water was coming up over the edges and spilling out. What I couldn’t figure out was what was supposed to hold the screw into place in the bowl piece. This took a few more minutes of concentrated study (Ascoli is always in peril that I am going to think too hard one day and spontaneously combust). Ah-hah! The bolt at the end of the screw was supposed to be encased in a plastic covering that held it in place, then the bolt held the screw in place, which held the drain cover above in place, and so held it all together tightly enough that the water didn’t seep out.

Plastic covering ---- flashback to Daniele holding the boiling water with exasperation. Yep… We had poured so many pots of boiling water down the sink, we had melted away the plastic covering around the bolt. One $3.00 bowl piece with plastic encased bolt and 15 minutes of screwing (with a butter knife) and we were back in the dishes. How common is this sink part? So common that it is carried in some grocery stores.

Now let’s really think about this. Every kitchen in Italy makes pasta once if not twice a day. That means every single kitchen in the country pours one if not two large pots of boiling water down the kitchen sink at least once, if not twice, a day. Millions of liters of boiling water poured every single day into what? A mechanism that is held in place by a PLASTIC COVERED BOLT! What do the Italians do? Do they make a different casing for the bolt – maybe something that wouldn’t melt on contact with hot water? No. They all, in some secret pact unknown to outsiders, turn on the cold water while pouring the hot water down the drain. When even this eventually melts the plastic, they buy a new part, install it, and wait for it to melt again. This is the back hand of recuperare. The tendency to go around a problem rather than solve it. I think Bush should give the country a few million metal bolt casings for Christmas. Maybe they’d like him better.

Love Actually (Not Really)

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I love the international arrivals terminal of airports. It is one of the few times in life you can mindlessly follow the herd and it will take you on the most efficient path to get where you want to go (that is simply because it is the only path). It is also the last few minutes of un-perplexed sanity you are granted in a foreign country. You traverse glassed-in hallways and carpeted cattle-pathways that twist and turn like the streets of any trading-village-turned-city, until you are fed into some amusement park cue where you await your moment at the passport control window, praying you didn’t land in the line behind the family of 14 from Kuwait (not that borders officials ever profile).

There are two types of people who work behind these glass windows. There are the ones who make you feel warm and fuzzy about this new adventure in this foreign land. In their smile you see candle-lit dinners in cozy restaurants or strolls in springtime gardens, depending on what time of year you are traveling. The welcoming embrace of their eyes fills you with anticipation for the days ahead. They ask some pleasantry, eyes beaming, stamp your passport, smiling genuinely, and wish you a pleasant visit. You leave your first experience in this foreign land knowing you are going to have a wonderful time.

Then there are the ones who bring to mind images of prisoners wasting away in terracotta walls deep in the bowels of countries that have never heard the phrase “prisoner’s rights” or “cruel and unusual punishment”. You hold your breath as they flip through your passport, terrified they’ll see the stamp from that trip to Turkey and throw you in a cell until some distant day when they get around to interrogating you - sometime after the war with terror, or oil, or whatever it is with, is over. You realize with absolute certainty as you stand there, sweating the results of their narrow-eyed study of your passport, that you are going to spend the first day in their country lost, perplexed, scared, and dazed and the remaining days of your vacation safely hiding in the hotel room, which probably has neither heat nor air conditioning, which wouldn’t matter since there will be no doors or windows.

Interestingly which of these people you get seems to have nothing to do with the country. There are no more Commandants in Germany than there are Twinkle Eyes in Italy. It is luck of the draw. I got Twinkle Eyes today. Thank God. Given the mental state I was in, I may have just crawled into my luggage and suffocated myself if a spider stared at me, much less a passport-scoping prison guard from Auschwitz

From passport control, you are dumped into a pasture of luggage belts. If you are in the lucky thirty percent, your bags actually arrive about an hour later and you wind through rows of green “no declare” lanes, wondering when the man with the oozy is going to step out from a corner and demand to see what you really have in those bags. Why is it we feel guilty when we haven’t done anything wrong? When my office manager would ask me if I left the coffee pot on, I would declare emphatically I hadn’t, know that I hadn’t, and feel so guilty I just knew that she could tell I must have done it because I obviously felt guilty. How do you escape this trap? Every time you say “No, really, I didn’t!” you look, and feel, even guiltier.

So you walk through the green coded ‘nothing to declare line’ (probably with nothing to declare since you are arriving and haven’t bought all the things you are going to illegally carry back to your own country), certain you look guilty and are going to be seized and searched by Rottweillers and women dressed in uniform who look just like the Rottweillers, except with lipstick. You let out a sigh of relief as you spill out through the double doors into a sea of humanity. Neon signs everywhere, cafes, shops, people rushing, wheeled luggage and carts running over your toes. Now begins the fun. You do know, don’t you, that all airports have a secret observational deck above where the employees take their breaks? They drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, and laugh as they watch the incoming tourists follow the information signs which the employees have intentionally and strategically placed to lead you in a circle (or at least the long way around) without seeming like they are leading you in a circle. If you’re lucky the signs are at least in English. But then how often are you lucky?

(By the way I never declare anything. My brother taught me at 25 a very important lesson - it is easier to get forgiveness than permission. I wish he had been around to teach me at 15 - I probably would have had a lot more fun. Not real sure this idea works with border control. Hopefully I’ll never find out.)

Philadelphia has a brilliant international arrivals trap for those with connecting flights – one of the better ones I’ve seen. You are fed through passport control, baggage claim, baggage re-check, and then enter this small area with three elevators and four escalators. There are always about two hundred people waiting for the elevators. Now being good Americans, we don’t have time to wait if there is another way to go, that doesn’t require additional energy. We might not take a set of stairs, but escalators - hey! why wait for an elevator where you will be packed in like a sardine when you can take three extra steps and ride the escalator? Because in Philadelphia, the escalator bypasses the floor that leads to the connecting terminals and, after winding a few times, dumps you right, can you guess where? The ticketing area for Terminal A. Know what that means? You have to go back through security to get to your connecting flights. Know what that means in Philadelphia which has a reputation for the longest security wait times in America? Chances are very high, you ain’t gonna make your connecting flight.

I’ll let you in on a secret. Should this ever happen to you – take the sky walkway across to the train stop, turn right and start walking, look up at the next skywalk, if you can see people, keep walking - they are in line for security at Terminal B. If you enter here, you’ll be in line at least one hour, possibly two. It doesn’t matter if your flight is leaving from Terminal B, keep walking! Look up at the next skywalk (Terminal C). Chances are there will be less people. If you can’t see anyone, enter here; otherwise keep on chugging until you get to Terminal D. Terminal D is the terminal for the miscellaneous airlines. Generally, this means there ain’t no one. You will walk straight through security, take a right and make your way back to Terminal B in less than a fifteen minute walk. You get a bit of sunshine, a smoke if you smoke, and an excuse to not feel like a fucking idiot for taking the escalator since you needed the walk anyway, right? How do I know all this? It took me three times before I figured out what the hell I was doing wrong, much to the delight, I’m sure, of the employees above. Now I do it on purpose, pull out my cigarettes and flip them off on the ride down.

Etiquette v. Ettichette

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Such a shame it is I have no natural capacity for learning a foreign language. I find the differences between languages and the reflections they make of their cultures absolutely fascinating. How wonderful it would be to devote a lifetime to this study, traveling the world, learning different languages, finding keys to cultural differences within the words and manner of speech and writing. The only drawback is I think it will take a flipping lifetime just to learn Italian. I think God damned this language when he realized how beautiful he made it sound. Certainly any language that sounds so beautiful should defy all logic, like any good art does. Can you tell I’m still frustrated that every two year old in the world is smarter than me right now? Little bastards…

Yesterday, Daniele and I were having a good ol’ traditional American breakfast - pancakes and syrup. I had brought back four packets of Bisquick and a bottle of syrup in my never-ending effort to find something truly American to make for the next ethnic dinner at Accademia Italiana. Have you ever noticed how little we Americans have contributed to the world in terms of ethnic food? The Italians gave the world spaghetti and lasagna; the Japanese, sushi; the Chinese, sweet and sour pork and moo goo gai pan; the Mexicans, enchildadas and burritos (God I miss Taco Bell). Do you know what the world knows us for? Hot dogs and peanut butter sandwiches. The richest, most powerful country in the world and the best we can do for food is press together leftover pig parts. I don’t know about you, but I’m just a little bit ashamed by this.

So, Daniele picks up the bottle of Log Cabin syrup – you know the one, made in the shape of a log cabin with a picture, of course, of a log cabin on front, nestled in the snow covered hills, smoke drifting up into the sunlit winter’s day – and asked me which mountain range produced this brand of syrup. Uh? The conversation was something like this (except in Italian, without all the sidetracks to figure out what each one is saying):

Daniele: “Where was this made?”

Sherry: “In the United States.”

D: Yes, I know, Sherry,” (with a slight tone of studied sarcasm) “but where in the United States?”

S: “How would I know?”

D: “Well, obviously it is made in the mountains.”

S: “It is?”

D: “Certo! Guarda al etichetta.!” (Certainly, look at the etiquette.)

S: “What does manners have to do with anything!?”

D: “How do you know it is good if you don’t know where it was made?”

S: “I don’t know where they make Oreos either, but I know they’re good!”

By this point I was thoroughly confused and unnecessarily exasperated (though my head was beginning to hurt from talking Italian for three hours). How the hell was I supposed to know where they made Log Cabin syrup? And why was he so frustrated that I didn’t know? And who the hell cares where they make the damned syrup. And somebody please remind what the hell I’m doing here trying to learn this god forsaken language in my god forsaken apartment which is always @$*#! FREEZING! (Funny the places our frustrations emerge sometimes.)

Daniele has a way of calming me down – he looks at me, ten years his senior, like I am seven and a self-imposed twit. I calm down. We backtracked through the conversation to find the places where our cultures diverged. In America we buy by the brand name. We know Log Cabin, Aunt Jemima, Peter Pan, Hershey’s, Oreos, Tropicana, Coca Cola. Of all seven of these top brand names, I know Hershey’s is from Pennsylvania and I’d bet Tropicana is from Florida – but I wouldn’t bet much. Hell, even our non-brand names that sell on the fact that they do not employ marketing techniques have brand names! (i.e. Harris Teeter’s “President’s Choice”) We know nothing about where our products are generated, probably because they are generally generated from a factory and it doesn’t really matter where the factory is. Our marketing images speak not of where the product is made or even what the product is, but rather bring to mind some fantasy, desire, wish, dream – like selling turkeys with Norman Rockwell paintings. We sell food with images of warm, cozy cabins and kitchens, cool moms with Koolaid, perfectly formed athletes who I’m sure got those bodies from drinking Gatorade.

Food is not (yet) a factory made, marketing production in Italy. The best food comes from “contadina”s – a handful of farmers that have been making the same product probably for hundreds of years. Italians know not only the name of the food but which region it comes from and often a history of the production process. The best lentils in Italy come from Castellucio. Norcia is known for its black truffles and exceptional meats. If you ask someone their favorite salami they will likely answer not with a name but with a place – salumi Milano or salumi Romano. Who can forget one of the greatest cheeses in the world – known in Italy as parmigiano reggiano. We use food names never recognizing they are meant to indicate the place something is from. True parmesan cheese – parmigiano – comes from… can you guess it? Parma. We eat fake imitations. I’ll bet money you know the brand name of your preferred parmesan cheese, or at least the colors on the package, but I’ll bet you don’t know where it is made. We fabricate food. Italians produce food. For a product to claim it is from a region, it must obtain a Denominatzione di Origine Controllata – DOC. A sort of legitimacy license. I had heard ‘DOC’ a hundred times in passing conversations before I finally understood what it meant. It is a stamp of quality in the name of the region that the product is of the quality known for in that region. No wonder the food is so much better here… We sell a concept. They sell food.

The conversation had settled now with both of us explaining to the other, Daniele in his best kindergartener Italian and me in my best Tarzan Italian (me-like-salami), the way food is thought of and chosen in our countries. The idea that we use image to sell food was lost on Daniele. Several times during our discussion, he picked up the log cabin bottle and again used the word etichetta – obviously it was from the English word etiquette, but I could not follow the relevance of the word to the discussion. Finally, I trudged off to get the dictionary. Etichetta¹ – label; etichetta² – etiquette. I started on another tirade about the stupidity of the Italian language using the same damn word for two entirely different concepts - label and manners what the fuck – when Daniele made the very wise point, sporting the look that said I was a seven year old self-imposed twit – “A label is the way a product presents itself, someone’s etiquette is the way a person presents themselves.”

Oh…. Didn’t say much for my label, did it?