Summertime

[credit]

My life, tomorrow, will errupt with activity. I will be teaching an English camp in the morning from 9am-12:50 pm, and then I'll be heading to work as usual from 2-9. The camp is 10 days long and I must have temporarily lost my mind, because it coincides with our summer break here at ELP. Which means that instead of a week off, I will have a week of teaching middle schoolers who can barely say their ABCs English. But I will have my afternoons free. And I will have a nice chunk of change in the bank afterward. I'm also this week catching up with my running plan. I'm living in week 5, but running week 4. I think I will sleep well. So, there's that.

Also, I wanted to tell you that last night I was propped up on my elbows, lying on my stomach in bed, reading Why I Wake Early, a collection of poems from Mary Oliver. And after I read page 43, I had to flip over onto my back, sling one hand over my chest, and let the tears soak back up into my eyes as I stared at the ceiling. This poem devastated me. Just devastated me. 91% of that devastation was from it's beauty and perfection. The other 9% of the devastation stemmed from the fact that I didn't write it first. Not that I'm capable of Mary Oliver quality. But whenever I read good writing, really good writing, there's some twinge deep in my chest. It's related to regret and I think it's a cousin of jealousy. But not quite. Anyway, back to being devastated. It was just that good.


It's the middle of summer, so I will share this mid-summer poem with you. Be careful. You might have to flip over onto your back and take a few deep breaths. I plan to live in this poem for the next two weeks.

Luna

In the early curtains
of the dusk,
it flew,
a slow galloping

this way and that way
through the trees
and under the trees.
I live

in the openmindedness
of not knowing enough
about anything.
It was beautiful.

It was silent.
It didn't even have a mouth.
But it wanted something,
it had a purpose

and a few precious hours
to find it,
and I suppose it did.
The next evening

it lay on the ground
like a broken leaf
and didn't move,
which hurt my heart

which is another small thing
that doesn't know much.
When this happened it was about the middle of summer,

which also has its purposes
and only so many precious hours.
How quietly,
and not with any assignment from us,

or even a small hint
of understanding,
everything that needs to be done
is done.

~Mary Oliver

P.S. I wrote this post instead of scavenging for my dinner tonight. Because sometimes, poetry trumps hunger.

[More on Middlemarch]

'You must be sure of two things: you must love your work, and not always be looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honourable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not always be saying, There's this and there's that- if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. No matter what a man is - I wouldn't give twopence for him' - here Caleb's mouth looked bitter, and he snapped his fingers - 'whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn't do well what he undertook to do.'

George Eliot wrote these words  found on page 562 of my 1994 Penguin Classics copy of Middlemarch borrowed from the school's library. And it got me thinking about "my work." What exactly is my work? Surely it isn't teaching. I enjoy it and it suits me, mostly because it feeds my self esteem to have someone looking at me for at least 6 hours out of everyday. It's nice to have a room full of people listen to you, and sometimes to write down what you say. There is some satisfaction in feeling a bit more important than I know I truly am. But this work is not what I love to do. And I do find myself, more often than I'd like to admit, looking over the edge and wondering when I get to play.

I've been absent for a while. I've been silent for a few weeks, with random posts stuck in here to hold my place in your mind or your Reader. And I have missed something. I've missed the way I feel at home when I think about things in words. I've missed the way I make miniscule but important self-discoveries when I try to fit everything flying through my head into paragraphs. I've missed the joy I find in the dance of my fingers over the keyboard. And it makes me hope that this is my work. That writing is my true work. I find that I have pride in my writing in a way that is not found in any other area of my lfe. Not a pride that sets me above others, but rather one that makes me thankful and sure of myself.

I guess I am still trying to find a balance in my life. A balance that creates a space for my husband, for housework, and for writing. (We won't mention that I have a full time job). I'm not balancing those things well. It seems I am either an exceptional wife who writes little but remembers to clean the litter box, or I am a writer who does little else exceptionally. This writing thing is powerful and time-consuming. And I can get lost in it.

But when I find myself lost in writing, I found myself missing out on my life. I'd like to be worth twopence, though. I'd like to be able to devote myself fully to my passion. I've been given the gift of actually knowing what I'd like to do with myself. So many people are still wandering about, trying to figure out what they're suited for. But I know. I know! I'm wondering when I'll be brave enough to try to feed myself with these sentences.

Until then, I will be mindful of not saying "There's this and there's that- and if I had this or that to do, I might make somehting of it." I have this and I have that. And I can make something of it. I think.....

Excuses, Excuses

I've got a bunch. And as soon as I catch up with my own life, I'll tell you ALL of them! For now, I'll leave you with something from Middlemarch, my current nighttime reading:


We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, 'Oh, nothing!' Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts- not to hurt others.


Be back soon, my lovelies! Missing y'all. 

Journal Week: In the slum

April 4, 2009

Kolkata, India

"Walk to Work"

To get to Mother Teresa's house, we leave our hostel and walk down a long lane for close to 15 minutes. The street is lined with shops of all kinds and intersected by many dirt lanes and one large paved road that the tram rides up and down in its grooves on its line. It is always busy, even at seven in the morning. The taxi drivers are all lined up washing their cars, the cows are already busy on the sidewalks chewing their cud.

Boys and men are wrapped in their dhoti at the waterspouts, rubbing their bodies into a white froth of soap that seems not to clean anything. Old men are already lined up at the shop counters for their daily betel leaf smeared with paan, which will ensure a red smile all day long.

We walk down this dusty lane, avoiding the motorcycles, bicycles, and cars that zoom by. There is a butcher section where large sides of meat hang, dazzlingly red and white in the early morning sun. The smell is already overwhelming, the insides of animals being unceremoniously exposed

to the outside world, then hacked, chopped, and ground. I try not to look too closely because I can't stand the thought of the animals that used to be whole, healthy, wearing their guts inside their skins. I also don't want to feel sick. The smell is almost too much.

There are too many dogs. They are almost as numerous as the beggars, lying alongside them in the gutters and digging with them through the piles of trash swept out of the street. Today, one dog had stopped on the side of the lane. He was brown, with perky ears and his tongue interminably hanging out the side of his mouth trying to find some relief in the Indian heat. He was simply standing, alert. Perhaps he, too, couldn't escape the smell of fresh meat, blood still dripping off knives into drains. He was facing us as we picked our way through the lane.

A young man wearing a white tank top on top of his blue dhoti came walking in our direction, swinging a long thick chain. The links were close to 2 inches long and were round, thicker than a pencil. Both ends of the chain were in this man's hand as he walked down the street. He came up behind the dog- the frozen, all-alert dog. He first brought the chain up, his hand reaching back toward his ear, and then down onto the back of the dog, the long graceful curve of his spine breaking the chain into a squiggle. the dog jumped up and let out the most heart-rending squeal, a plea for mercy and a cry of confusion.

The man who hit the dog was amused by the pain he inflicted. I immediately yelled, "Why?" and turned around to look at the man who had just passed us seconds after his crime. I looked at him as if he were the devil and Kenny also watched him. He was laughing, a full open-mouthed smile on his face, truly filled with glee at his power.

The moment I turned back to continue walking to work, I was undone. could not stop thinking about how unprovoked and senseless the act of brutality was. I cried almost the entire way to Mother's House, unable to stop imagining the way the dog's back must still be stinging from that metal kiss. Everything else was thrown under the bus of this impression- this completely colored my day. Kenny says that my compassion for animals far exceeds my compassion for the people here. And perhaps that is true. I have always felt that as humans, we can understand and rationalize our pain, a gift that dogs don't have.

When the bottom of society are treated as less than our pets back home in America, when the poorest of the poor have less property than my sister's dogs, and the babies sleep on a sidewalk I wouldn't let my cat nap on, how do I expect these people to treat animals well? The dogs are competition. They compete for food and for attention from foreigners. And maybe the dog had won and the chain empowered a man to feel like more than an animal.

Journal Week: At Mother Teresa's House

April 3, 2009

Kolkata, India

Modern Lodge Room 21, aka The Sauna

I was nervous about my first day @ Shanti Dan. I picked a home for mentally challenged women because I wanted to love them. And it was very easy to love them. When I walked in the door with 2 other workers, we were smothered by hugs and kisses and "Good morning, auntie!" coming from all directions of the courtyard. There was one woman with her hair very short, sticking out in small tufts all over her head. Her face was severely disfigured, most likely by fire, her left eye wide open without the protection of an eyelid. Her bottom lip was turned down and melted into her chin giving her a baby's line of drool running down her front. But she showed her teeth and her wrinkled, scarred skin became even more creased and pulled taut across her cheek bones as she gave us her own sort of smile. She came straight to me and wrapped her arms about my waist. I hugged her to me as she lay her head on my shoulder and stared up at me with her eternally open eye. What a warm and lovely greeting. I felt that these women were taking care of me. What could I possibly do to take care of them?

My morning assignment was to clip nails. I was given a super-duper large pair of clippers and one of those hospital issue half-moon bowls you throw up in. When I walked out the door of the Sister's office, there was already a line of women waiting on me. I felt awful cutting their nails. I was overwhelmed by my inability to do it well, something so simple as clipping nails! I can't even clip my own nails without making a mess. But I kept at it, sometimes clipping just for clipping's sake because some of the women had recently had their nails trimmed.

Later, an elderly frail woman whose nails I had clipped, hands and feet, was sitting outside on the concrete balcony that ran round the inside of the 2nd floor of the complex. Many of the women lay out on this balcony instead of their beds. Perhaps it was much cooler in the open air. She was sitting and reached for me as I walked by. Being generally lost as to what my exact task was supposed to be, I sat down next to her. She was wearing a scarf, sari too, over her head. This made her head look even smaller. Her gray hair was pulled back at her neck underneath the scarf. Her blue eyes were sunk very deep into her face, her cheekbones scaring them back into her head. She was weathered.

She began to speak to me, holding my hand. Of course I couldn't understand her, but I felt it was only my duty to listen. I nodded at her and looked into her eyes and hugged her and listened. She began to become quite agitated and began to cry. I felt she was begging me for something. I just hugged her and rocked her tiny frame back and forth. I held her face and her head, feeling how small she had become. She was so tiny.

One of the other volunteers came to fetch me. I unwrapped myself and hugged her once more and squeezed her hand. I told her that everything would be okay. But maybe it will never be okay. I will remember her. It was my only day to work with the women and I was shy and uncertain about what was appropriate behavior. I was terrible. But I listened to her. And maybe she hasn't been listened to in a long time.

Journal Week: At the Planetarium

This week, I've decided to share more of my travel journal with you. Most of the entries for this week are from our time spent in Kolkata. 

April 2, 2009

Kolkata, India

Modern Lodge Room 21

"The Angry Old Woman"

Because Thursday is the day of rest for the volunteers at Mother Teresa's house, we had the day to ourselves. So we decided we'd go to the Planetarium in town to amuse ourselves. The review in the guidebook wasn't great, but it would be indoors with AC, so that was that. I expected some really cheesy light show, but it was an extremely formal affair. We got there just in time for the English show to start. 

We fell back into movie theater-like chairs that reclined way back, but somehow weren't comfortable. A few seats down, a white woman and her 4 or 5 year old son and an Indian man came in together and sat at the end of our row. The ceiling was a big dome with black cut outs of the cityscape around the bottom where the dome met the walls. The seating was circular as well, following the shape of the ceiling. In the center of the room was a large unattractive machine. Balanced on the end of a long arm was what looked like a disco ball.

The lights were dimmed and an aged voice with a hint of a British accent addressed the audience, her R giving away her native Indian tongue. She was first just a voice- the lights were off completely. She made a very stern announcement about turning off your mobile phone and keeping it off until the end of the presentation. The voice was extremely measured and I felt that perhaps the speakers' back was very straight and that maybe she had to fight to keep her shoulders from creeping up in tension around her ears. 

The lights come on as the disco ball in the middle of the room reproduces a sunset. The stars eventually appeared in all their pinpoint glory. Sometimes the voice called forth lines that connected certain stars, making the constellations, turning the ceiling into a grid of lines and dots. The voice patiently tackled each constellation in its turn and in the middle of a sentence the voice immediately grows even more authoritative and suddenly shouts, "Who turned on their mobile?"

She pronounces mobile with all the vowels long so that she chops it in two: mow-bile. The voice continues, firm and righteous: "Did I give you permission to turn it on? Why would you switch on your mow-bile? Who gave you permission to turn the mow-bile on?" 

By this time I am extremely uncomfortable because the voice is direct, instead of being politely neutral and addressing the entire audience. I am embarrassed for this great trespasser of the mow-bile rule but am also annoyed because he has brought the show to a complete halt. I look down the aisle and see the Indian man with the white woman and boy, his face aglow in the green light emitted from his mow-bile screen.

The voice switches on the house lights, enraged by this person's defiance. She appears, an old woman with her grey hair parted down the middle and clasped tightly into a tense bun at the base of her neck. She glares through severe glasses with eyebrows as crumpled and disapproving as she can manage. With the lights turned on and an usher standing at the end of the row, the man finally becomes intimidated enough to drop the phone into his pocket. He makes eye contact with no one, not even the woman he accompanies. The voice is still very indignant, the dignity of her proper and perfect presentation now disturbed. She shouts, "I think it's a disgrace! Turn. It. Off!"

Lights are switched off and immediately the voice is restored once more as she continues, "This most beautiful nebula here..."

A few minutes later she interrupts herself once more. "Keep your child quiet," she snips to the woman at the end of our row with her son. The little boy had cooed and then spoken out loudly, "Wow! Look at that! Look at that over there. Whoa! What is that?" while jumping out of his seat and pointing wildly at the twinkling presentation above him. Later, while explaining the milky way in detail, she stops again and asks about the mow-bile phone. This time, abusing a patron across the room. She abandons her proper English and begins to shout forcefully in Hindi. She finally resorts once more to turning the house lights on, erasing the stars, planets, and milky way, causing the little boy to groan in disappointment. After a good verbal thrashing, the voice switches back to English and its presenter's tone, continuing on about the marvels of the milky way splashed once more across the hemisphere above us. 

It was impossible to enjoy the show, we were both so nervous about the boy who wouldn't be quiet and the apparent idiocy of the mow-bile toting patrons. And I wonder about that woman, her staunch pride in her work of explicating the mysteries that move above us in the dark. I don't think I'll ever be able to look at a constellation without hearing her voice screaming at me to turn off my mow-bile. 

Excerpt

from The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

She looks up. "Henry, who's your favorite Beatle?"

"John. Of course." 

"Why 'of course'?"

"Well, Ringo is okay but kind of a sad sack, you know? And George is a little too New Age for my taste."

"What's 'New Age'?"

"Oddball religions. Sappy boring music. Pathetic attempts to convince oneself of the superiority of anything connected with Indians. Non-Western medicine."

"But you don't like regular medicine."

"That's because doctors are always trying to tell me I'm crazy. If I had a broken arm I would be a big fan of Western medicine."

"What about Paul?"

"Paul is for girls."

Clare smiles, shyly. "I like Paul best."

"Well, you're a girl." 

"Why is Paul for girls?"

Tread carefully, I tell myself. "Uh, gee. Paul is, like, the Nice Beatle, you know?"

"Is that bad?"

"No, not at all. But guys are more interested in being cool, and John is the Cool Beatle."

"Oh. But he's dead."

I laugh. "You can still be cool when you're dead. In fact, it's much easier, because you aren't getting old and fat and losing your hair."