Path of the Blazing Sarong

Getting "Callisto" ready to head to Miami

2012-01-28T12:19:00.000-08:00

2012-01-19T14:06:00.000-08:00

“Ethylene is a gaseous plant hormone that quickens the senescence (aging and death) of fresh flowers. Various sources of ethylene include pollution, cigarette smoke, exhaust, ripening fruits and vegetables, and old, wilting, and physically injured flowers and foliage.”

Down the coast of Florida, the Space Coast, the hangar of the Space Shuttle still and shuttered on a promontory overlooking the Atlantic, the launch jutting upwards like the smokestack of a dead factory—an embodied memory. The proud seal of NASA is visible in the distance, relic of our collective dreams, barely understood. There’s a bridge named after Christa McAuliffe. I remember that day in high school the whole thing exploded—over and over again, over and over, and we sat in rows in our classroom, not really understanding, not getting death, feeling, more than anything, that we didn’t have to do any more work that day. Florida is sucking the life out of me. It wants to be left alone, and it has been overrun. In Vero Beach I think, I am a white person. White. White. White. It seems as if everything is white. White people, blinking and sunburned, filing off boats and heading for the showers.

I have not seen a cruising guide that talks about what it is really like to go into the unknown—that parses that moment at which you become a stranger. We probably would have stopped sailing years ago, gone back to something more ostensibly comfortable, if we’d been able to afford it. Instead we’ve pushed onward, envisioning a new life that does not turn its back on the exigencies of change. Our family is a unit of survival, the only known thing across an ever-changing landscape.

2012-01-04T13:17:00.001-08:00

This time last year we were sailing from Culebra to St. Thomas. It seems we have spent lifetimes in the islands, and in the other places we’ve been since—Louisiana, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida. Each with its own rhythms and logic. I can’t tell how much time has passed, or how little.

I couldn’t sleep. I was reading. Adam was up, reading. Tallulah was asleep. Why can’t we sleep? I said. Too much coffee? Adam said, I don’t know. I didn’t have that much. Me neither, Tallulah said, in her sleep.

It’s occurred to me how lucky we are. I used to tell myself that, knowing I should believe it. Now somehow I believe it. The future still streams out before us, disappearing into darkness. Who knows? I’m hanging onto the now, the freedom we have. This is a time for shedding old assumptions, so deeply held I couldn’t see them—for learning how to see differently. I’ll spend another lifetime pondering this.

A gray-headed woman strides into the Starbucks on Roosevelt Boulevard wearing fire-engine red four-inch stilettos. There’s a girl with opaque stockings on under super-short cut offs, white athletic socks pulled up to her knees, and basketball shoes. I started recording these forms of self-expression, thinking they would help me to understand the culture of this part of Florida. I sat in Starbucks every day for a month writing fiction, feeling like Dr. Frankenstein, the creature rising from the table. Creating a world (however frayed it might still be at the edges) that hadn’t existed before—it seemed too marvelous and difficult to be possible. And above all, addictive.

This place seems ad hoc, unsustainable, its human strivings dizzying. We had looked at a couple of boats in Fort Lauderdale—one of them a big wooden boat in a canal with holes in the deck. The owner was a cheerful, hunched gray-haired former marine allergic to mangoes. He’d already sold the boat once, he said, to a man from California. The guy had paid him some money, taken the interior out, then given up and left without further notice. The man shook his head at the shame of it—the boat had been his life’s work, his home. Now he’d settled by the canal to take care of his blind mother. I never married, he told us. Got no kids. But I’ve got my mom, he said, beaming. He said he was a champion high diver, self-taught. He tossed papaya seeds onto the lawn and a tree grew, bearing fruit. He sent us off with an armful of giant mangoes. People tell me they’re the best mangoes they’ve ever tasted, he said. I don’t know. I break out in hives if I touch ‘em. The mangoes were delicious, like apricots and coconut cream.

Here in Jacksonville we’ve been befriended by the owner of a nearby marine supply store. The store is on the verge of bankruptcy. It sells anchors, compasses, backscratchers and ceramic ducks. The owner is nearly crippled with a leg ailment. Her house is falling down around her, the bedrooms filled with relics of her dead mother, piles of unidentifiable things. We were sitting in her living room, eating peanut butter sandwiches. A loud knocking sounded on the wall. In the window a grizzled, wild-haired man appeared, waving an envelope. It turned out that he was her tenant. He was on his way to an interview with the Liberty Tax Service for the position of a Statue of Liberty impersonator, with a foam crown and a big sign. He would shave himself a goatee for the role.

The temperature’s dropping in north Florida, and I’ve got work to do—copyediting the first edition of The Art of Floral Design, all 728 pages of it. Next stop: the grave of Haitian revolutionary Biassou, buried with military honors in St. Augustine.

2011 retrospective

2012-01-04T13:16:00.000-08:00

Brewer's Bay, St Thomas

St. John

St. Croix

Sea Wolf, in Moorea--goodbye

Goodbye to our house in New Orleans

St. Petersburg, FL

A new boat in North Carolina

Hurricane Irene

Charleston

Sullivan's Island

Intracoastal Waterway

Haulout in Jacksonville

Visiting Tucson

Christmas in Greenwood, SC

With a thousand thanks and much love to all our family and friends who hosted us over the past year! It has been a privilege to spend time with you.

Happy holidays!

2012-01-02T16:10:00.000-08:00

I have been writing like crazy--but obviously not blog entries! I just realized I haven't updated the Path in over a month. More to come ASAP.

Tallulah at 4

2011-11-30T13:06:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Nancy Sullivan Mason and Kirk Chamberlain, new friends here in Jacksonville, for these photos!

2011-11-26T08:34:00.000-08:00

Sailing is the last great way for poor people with a bit of luck to travel. Not the only way—there are buses, I have heard that people still jump trains—but the one with the most dignity. I think about this as I row along the Ortega River, looking up at the elegant lines of the rigging in the boats of every description that crowd the marinas. I have long resisted learning how to sail. I've picked things up passively. My approach to knots fluctuates between utter disinterest and brief ambitions to execute the most difficult, inevitably resulting in failure. I hate the feel of the sun on my face. Unquestionably, I have a bad attitude. And yet—perhaps the wheels of change will find me deserving. There are layers upon layers of the psyche to excavate. I occasionally realize that there is something about life aboard that is deeply strange to me—without precedent. The seas never captivated me as a child. I remember fearing deep water. But at last I'm putting a story together in my head—the seas, the refuge of artists. Those who live rough, seeking experience. Those who crave, above all, time.

Tallulah's projects

2011-11-17T10:24:00.000-08:00

"Email"

"Barbie in jail"

Sculpture with objects found on the side of the road

Seeds

Sullivan's Island to Jacksonville

2011-11-17T10:20:00.000-08:00

Princess dresses worn daily, Sullivan's Island

Latest foraged food--bay leaves, Sullivan's Island

Adam with hard drive, Intracoastal Waterway

The crew, Beaufort, SC

Sunset somewhere in Georgia

Jekyll Island

New dinghy, Jacksonville

2011-11-16T06:29:00.001-08:00

The British Colonel fighting at Breach Inlet in the late 1700s wrote of alligators, spiders “as big as my coat buttons,” rattlesnakes, “nothing to drink but brackish water”—we read it on the commemorative plaque before running back across the road to the boat to head out, leaving Sullivan’s Island, sailing across the harbor, past the curve of Charleston’s battery.

Rough palmettos and changing leaves, expanses of yellow marsh, no movement except that of the sea birds, a vulture circling on an updraft. This is the verge of the New World.

At Brickyard Creek, there’s a loop of houses, small outpost of development—half are empty or for sale. There’s an old cemetery across the road. We walk up to a grave—Bolden, the name is. “I want to see a dead person,” Tallulah says.

I think of Buddy Bolden and his loud, loud cornet bursting from the bandstand at Lincoln Park, echoing all the way down to Canal Street. Years later, holding an instrument donated to the asylum, he played breaking notes that sounded like mown grass, like sweat and cheap perfume, like barbershop bravado, which recalled boys with dented brass that had come up the river from Asomante and Santiago, shouting for pure joy.

I tell her there’s nothing but bones down there, the woman’s been buried since 1926. “I want to see it,” she insists. Spanish moss hangs from the low limbs of the oak trees. The graves are scattered haphazardly, overgrown with weeds—one still a mound of earth, though the man died a year ago. I wonder why the gray dirt hasn’t melted into the grass. I don’t want to go near the little lambs on the headstones.

Walking back, Tallulah gathers fine sand at the road’s edge—stops and spreads her arms wide, chanting an incantation to some god she’s created, letting the sand fall from her fingers and smiling up at the moonlit sky.

2011-11-07T16:06:00.000-08:00

I dreamed that Barack Obama was having an affair with Mae West. She lived in a big townhouse in the French Quarter, filled with old furniture and hardback books, the kind of place that would be in a novel about octoroon balls. Mae West had a daughter, maybe seven or eight, and our kids played. I opened a book—something by Flannery O’Connor. (I love my dreams, and read avidly, making whole worlds of private space.)

We left Charleston and made it as far as a dock near the Stono River. A mechanic named Ray ate Halloween candy we gave him and tried to figure out what was wrong with the engine. Tallulah and I took a walk on a road raised between the river and the tidal flats where long-legged white birds landed, poking in the grass, and tiny crabs with huge claws ran like ants across the sandy dirt.

In the end we headed back to Sullivan’s Island. Adam fixed the engine today. I’m dyeing the gray in my hair for the first time. We’ll head out again tomorrow.

*Thanks, Vicki Stone, for the great photo.

2011-10-30T08:53:00.000-07:00

Quick sister/cousin visit before we head south to Jacksonville.

2011-10-13T10:39:00.001-07:00

I’m driving Adam’s grandmother’s gold Acura V6 coupe. The steering wheel is smooth, covered with stuff they might call glove leather. I turn on the radio. The antenna extends, creaking. I remember when radio antennae that extended and retracted were cool. My sister and I used to turn the radio in our new car on and off and watch through the back window. I notice buttons to the right of the steering wheel that let me control the radio without looking down.

It’s my father-in-law’s old company car, the one he drove to work in the late eighties, driving fast but not too fast, wearing ties zig-zagging with color and a beard, California-executive style. I imagine him crossing the hills, the sky bright blue and the hills brown with drought, toggling the radio switch with his right hand, tuning in Jefferson Airplane. Adam told me he used to listen to Jim Jones broadcasting from San Francisco—engineer’s mind turning over mad utopian mind.

When he got a new car he gave this one to his wife at the time. My eighteen-year-old self observed the curve of her face from the back seat, her coppery skin and stiff hair. She was driving us into Fairfield, dropping us off at the movies. That summer afternoon in Fairfield will probably always flash somewhere in my brain. The sky spread out, the dry flat land, walking across the highway overpass to buy red apples at the Safeway.

The strip of sand between Fort Moultrie and Fort Sumter is dark gray and smooth. The wind off the ocean is stilled here. Fort Sumter’s flagpoles like masts ahead of the setting sun, the fort an island, where Citadel cadets aimed their guns, firing the first shots in defense of Southern secession. Charleston harbor’s a small jagged horizon. A skeletal freighter lies at anchor beside the shipping channel. African slaves first set foot on this nondescript stretch of sand. Loaded on rowboats, looking across to the shore, and maybe for a few minutes thinking anything was better than being aboard ship—than that ceaseless motion and the reek and the dampness. Not wanting to think about what would come next. Or planning, already planning to run.

By the time Edgar Allan Poe arrived there were no longer cargoes of slaves being rowed ashore to quarantine. But I think they must have left something for him to find. Poe served at Fort Moultrie—low slice of brick half-embedded in the beach with flocks of white birds flying across the wild marsh behind it, gulls floating amid the grasses at high tide. If Poe had been here two hundred years later he would have hung out at the abandoned bunkers facing the Atlantic, relics of the Second World War, their dark doorways beckoning and repelling. Neighborhood kids go in there, leaving their bikes tossed on the grass. Giddy white boys, jittery, the smell of bodies, slick, sweating, ready to fire.

Life in Charleston

2011-10-12T09:56:00.001-07:00

From Beaufort, North Carolina to Sullivan's Island

2011-09-16T12:53:00.001-07:00

I have always believed in magic more than logic. Things will move of their own accord, appear and disappear. Statistics don’t persuade me. I haven't yet mastered the art of conjuring.

Out to sea, at the edge of the Gulf Stream. How do we know land is there, in the distance? Only because of others who have come here, who have changed and been changed by it.

Late into the second night, closer to shore. Awake at odd hours, the world continues—distant lights of container ships heavy in the wild current.

Columns of light flash in the loom. I am still thinking of the others who have sailed this way. Pirates and soldiers. Ships crossing the Atlantic from Africa, ready to dislodge their cargo—starving, wracked by the collision of wind and the Gulf Stream—into this new world.

Hurricane Irene

2011-08-31T09:38:00.000-07:00

Thank you Carl, Rhonda, and McKenzie for being such wonderful, generous hosts!

Preparing for Hurricane Irene

2011-08-25T19:18:00.000-07:00

Coffee is the mother of invention

2011-08-23T08:25:00.000-07:00

In Aurora, North Carolina

2011-08-16T17:46:00.000-07:00

"I can't stop!!"
Finding ancient sharks' teeth in gravel dug up in the phosphate mine and dumped across the street from the Fossil Museum in Aurora, where you can dig and dig all afternoon. The museum has a case full of trilobite fossils that stand up on the rocks, the last rocks they ever perched on, antennae curving.

August in Eastern North Carolina

2011-08-15T20:58:00.001-07:00

Pick a card, any card.

1. Hospice Thrift Store. A cheerful gray-haired woman announces all the clothing and bags are a dollar each. We smile brightly at each other. I’m smiling brightly because I’m alone and somewhat disoriented, out in the marina’s “courtesy van” for a trip to do errands all on my own, without anyone else to be responsible for. The afternoon is full of thoughts tumbling over each other--and fears, like that the ambulance going the other way is responding to an emergency featuring someone I love. I try to write it off as the product of too much coffee. I find a couple of bags, too good to pass up for only a dollar. I feel like spending money. I feel the money in my old bag (about to be replaced) getting up and getting out all on its own.

The woman at the checkout says, Have you been here before? Someone like you came in and bought all these old-timey clothes. She was just going crazy because there were all those old-timey clothes. Unfortunately that wasn’t me. We all smile at each other and I say with great sincerity that I’ll be back soon. I think about the woman, someone like me, who bought the vintage clothes, trying to imagine what they might have been. Feeling a little jealous. I think about who might have unloaded them in this little corner of a strip mall in Alliance, North Carolina. I remember a yard sale I went to my first summer in New Orleans--someone was selling all her vintage wool suits. I had never seen so many perfect wool suits, all being cast off cheap. I looked at those perfect little suits and shuddered. Who in their right mind would buy them? Who could possibly touch wool? I imagined the fibers of it sticking to my hand. It was not possible that cold existed. I learned so much at yard sales in the summer. Cast off things are as good as mystery novels any day.

2. We sit in the audience at the Old Theater in Oriental. Our new friends Richard and Penny had suggested a night of Shakespeare--a “concert reading,” where the performers read from scripts and don’t wear costumes. A blend of performance and rehearsal. I’m watching the performers in their street clothes grappling with the archaic diction and vocabulary of Henry IV, Part 1. I can see the women’s pale thighs in their shorts, the men struggling with their reading glasses, and feel how terribly remote is this whole notion of monarchy and succession. The audience chews over Shakespeare’s words, and I can’t be the only one who longs to join in--to try my hand and take a place in the long echoing line of performers speaking these same lines over centuries.

I wonder if it is harder now to let go. To let the self you have worked so hard to craft float away. I wonder if the Lord Chamberlain’s Men could let slip their identities like leaves in the current. I can see the gears of selfhood turning on the stage of the Old Theater and the parts Shakespeare has written struggling for purchase in these new bodies. To possess them.

I’ve recently discovered that writing is like that--no matter how much I want characters to speak through me, my self won’t flake away, and I (meaning what?) must hustle it off into the shadows.

3. Everyone goes to Paul’s Produce--local produce and the best deal in town. Women run Paul’s--friendly mother-women I want to tell secrets to, even in full earshot of other customers. They offer comfort. The other day they had big trays of scuppernongs and muscadines, deep purple ones and dusky green ones and I fell upon them and filled up a big bag and when I got out to the car I started eating purple ones as if they held the secret of life. I sat in the driver’s seat of the courtesy van biting into a huge purple grape and it was so dense and sweet, so perfectly sweet that I bit the seeds too, what harm could it do--and the seeds were bitter and the sweetness was shot through with it and I sat there tasting bitter and sweet I could see that it was true--bitterness is the most perfect part of sweetness. And that’s the real reason we’re here in Oriental, North Carolina, a place none of us had ever heard of six weeks ago--because this life we’ve chosen is the kind of thing that breaks your head open. Eating a grape will just break your head wide open.

2011-07-31T10:36:00.001-07:00

The size of it. This time last year we were in Culebra—and I still think of walks there, and the people I talked to in the town, and the fish in the reef off Luis Pena--and the ferry, and the sound of bachata that is so sweet and filled with longing and blind confidence. And how nothing seemed to be going right. And trying to plan. And in a year a lot has changed. Here we are—now—launched to this place in North Carolina, and the people I talk to, who I would never meet if I lived a life I controlled (like the man with the lopsided body in the swimming pool who tells me about his autistic daughter), and I think how much I learn this way, how much better it is that I have made the choice to let go of things, which, once you start, is a process that is hard to stop. Here in the 100 degree heat, and as usual there’s a job to do. The pieces of a household, things we take for granted on land, like toilets and refrigerators and water. We work around these things, like some kind of nouveax pioneers. Letting go of things, making something new.

Life aboard Callisto

2011-07-30T17:57:00.000-07:00

My new "office"

2011-07-27T15:02:00.000-07:00

The trick to getting anything done is to tell people you're doing it. So I tell people I'm working on a novel. The other trick is finding a place to work.

2011-07-27T14:56:00.001-07:00

I vividly remember sitting on a picnic table somewhere on the coast of northern California. I was talking on the phone, and I was saying something to the effect of, I’ve left everything behind. I don’t know who I am anymore.

I can see the sun glinting off the vast expanse of the Pacific, and the grass, and the orange-brown of the picnic table. There were people there, a family with two sons, on vacation. A quaint notion to me now. Vacation.

And I find it a testament to what’s happened between then and now that I’m sitting on another coast, the Atlantic, this time, on another boat, getting ready to take off. The future feels exactly as unknown as it did that December day in California. There’s a world of difference between then and now, but I’m still not sure who I am.

Velvet

2011-07-22T06:53:00.000-07:00

"Oh silk and fur,
How could that scratch the furniture?"

by Tallulah

My current state of mind

2011-07-19T18:58:00.000-07:00

Writing from the deck of the "clubhouse" of the Whittaker Pointe Marina in Oriental, North Carolina. It's a nice night. Life is good. All I want to do is hide out. More reflections to follow.

Litchis foraged from Crescent Lake Park

2011-07-05T17:21:00.000-07:00

Night swimming

2011-07-05T17:15:00.000-07:00

2011-07-02T12:16:00.000-07:00

Sitting at the Dairy Inn across from the Flamingo Sports Bar—with a picture of Jack Kerouac, black and white, blown up, to the left of the door. Tallulah is eating ice cream, a mountain of strawberry ice cream, her spoon digging delicate little bites of pink from a styrofoam cup, and I’m staring out across the street, beyond the handyman here on his break, across Martin Luther King Jr Avenue to the little green shack of a bar where Jack Kerouac drank (my brother-in-law tells me) whiskies and a wash—cheap and plentiful. Maybe he’s an unquiet spirit, hanging out at this busy crossroads with a message, for I can’t take my eyes from the photograph, the pale face with its wondering eyes. And I can’t stop seeing him bent over the toilet, blood streaming from his mouth, lifting his head to call out to his wife—“Stella—I can’t stop bleeding.” Maybe he came here sometimes, on his way to or from the Flamingo Bar, maybe he sat on a white picnic bench just like this one, looking out across the street. Hey—I hope you can rest in peace, Jack. I have received you.

Random thought when I should be doing something else

2011-06-15T10:40:00.001-07:00

I remember a long ago afternoon when I was allowed to stay home from school. It must have been at the end of the school year, because it was a sunny day in Portland, Oregon—I remember lots of sunny days there, no matter what they say about the rain—and my grandmother took me somewhere I’d been longing to go—that now I remember only as bright colors in a cave, a kind of strange garden, the sort of place that lives in books that were read aloud to you once, long ago, before you understood all the words. We took the bus up a hill and in my mind the city’s stretched out below us, the river like a skein of silver in the distance. We were talking, she and I, about nothing in particular—and how could either of us know that I’d keep the memory of that day, the way it felt to be beyond the reach of ordinary things, folded away so long?

ISR Swim lessons rock!

2011-06-06T12:44:00.000-07:00

http://www.infantswim.com/
This is the "baby abuse" swim course, can't recommend highly enough! T went from never having swam underwater to this video in 1 month. She was used to the water so never seemed too traumatized, other kids definitely weren't having fun--until they figured it out, then they were loving it--but it's only 10 minutes per day and soon enough they're not going to drown, big plus if you live on a boat (or have a pool).

2011-05-29T12:08:00.001-07:00

It’s been awhile since I’ve had the leisure to sit and think about what we’re doing. Something’s happening, that’s for sure. We’ve been casting things off—the house in New Orleans, Sea Wolf in Moorea—moving betwixt and between, through the liminal state where transformation happens. We’re camped out at the moment in St. Petersburg, Florida, around the corner from Adam’s brother Chris’s place. Our version of going north for the summer. White birds with curving orange beaks and wise eyes peck at the lawns. A silent man stands smoking outside the thrift store downtown, the smoke making a little world of respite around him. I can smell bacon frying. An old woman circles the park waving an umbrella, maybe someone who’s been here a long time, gotten addled by too much sun. Ratty palm trees, deco stucco, tanned brassy women driving Camaros all feel familiar, like a postcard of a place I’ve never been. It feels right to be here, waiting for a sign.

Many thanks to all those who have been hosting us and hooking us up with places to stay across the Southeast these past couple of months, as we’ve been wheeling and dealing, writing, childraising, refining our theory of the rooted vagabond.

2011-05-29T12:07:00.000-07:00

"I ate my imaginary word cupcake and now I remember my song."

2011-05-11T13:09:00.000-07:00

For Adam, far away for a few more days

Mother's Day weekend in Greenwood

2011-05-09T20:15:00.000-07:00

Faulkner would have felt right at home here--the same vibrations he must have felt in Oxford, the fictional Jefferson, Mississippi, resonate in this brick ranch house with the white columns and the magnolia tree, the cicadas droning an alarm, living their one day in mad, erratic exploration of the dandelions and the oaks before dropping, spent, into the dry leaves. Faulkner, or Tennessee Williams, who could represent so exactly the humid claustrophobia of family. I return exhausted, charged with familiar sensations, thick with bad memories, honored, in some way that is impossible to live, that is livable only as art, by where I came from.

Mother's Day weekend in Atlanta

2011-05-07T16:29:00.000-07:00

2011-05-05T16:59:00.000-07:00

On Sullivan’s Island I walked along the strip of sand toward the inlet where the tide daily rushes in and out of the marsh. The current rippled at the edges of the stream. Somewhere at sea there’d been a jellyfish bloom, and translucent bodies had washed up along the tide line—in wait for the returning tide, secret worlds visible beneath the thick membrane of their skins. Every morning it was the same. The gray strip of sand, the waiting jellyfish abandoned by the tide, the Atlantic disappearing into a haze from which ships might emerge, tall ships, their sails taut with wind, arriving from the distant shores of Africa.

One morning a flock of gulls stood about indifferently, gazing out to sea. As I got closer I could see, in the body of each jellyfish, a few rough slashes of the gulls’ beaks. They had sampled each one, one after the other, leaving the jellyfish leaking life, and now the tide would return only to sweep away the bodies.

2011-05-04T20:32:00.000-07:00

What I have been doing instead of updating the blog.

2011-04-12T20:01:00.000-07:00

Lately I wake in the night gripped suddenly by a terrible fear that the world is moving too fast. However fast it moved would be too fast.

Now I'm sitting in the library of the Good Hope School, near Frederiksted. There's a fine mist in the air and the ocean—thickened with molasses from the rum distillery and gray under the gray clouds today—pushes abstractedly against the sand. I had rowed through a squall to the taxi and Tallulah ate her breakfast en route. Walking toward the school office, she exclaimed about the height of the trees, an ordinary height, but now they were set against buildings and looked to reach up to the open gallery on the second floor. I notice that her dress is stained and her ankles are spotted with mud. Also, her hair is tangled. My clothes are damp and slightly disheveled. Clearly we are not used to this kind of thing. But no one seems to care. I already know I can only exist in a place that tolerates, encourages, strangeness. I take my computer out of its bag and stick her snack in it and then on second thought shove in a large water bottle that makes it too heavy for her to carry. For some reason I have to do this.

We arrive at the classroom for her four-hour Pre-K “assessment.” A gregarious kid named Otis comes up and asks how old she is. Kids seem to care a lot about some things and not at all about others. Otis shows her a bunch of neon tetras in a tank. Engaged in some kind of conversation, she heads for the group of kids on the rug without bothering to say goodbye to me. I think that's OK. Maybe I've agreed to be caught up in the great centrifuge that seems to be gathering momentum around me. But somehow, this seems to be working.

2011-04-10T11:58:00.000-07:00

2011-03-27T12:33:00.000-07:00

The light at dusk is spare and gentle. This is a new landscape, an old landscape. Crossing a hill obscured by tall, dry grasses, crossed with beaten paths, birds calling in the low, leafless trees, I find myself on a gray sand beach. There's a heavy swell from the north. Next to the sign that said Columbus landed here the usual trash is scattered, unnatural jetsam. A plastic water jug, discarded clothes, a deflated green inner tube, paper bags from the drive-through. A couple of teenagers sit on the hood of a car, listening to a melodic Caribbean rhythm with just enough of a beat to make it cool. The Arawak village is long gone. Columbus didn't stay—the Arawak had arrows tipped with manchineel. Will this place welcome us?
Adam was joking yesterday that we should write a cookbook called Cooking without a Choice. I had just steamed bok choy in the oven and it turned out great. Really not bad. We only have one pot at the moment and he was using that to cook a chicken with za'atar, which is a mix of toasted thyme, sumac, and sesame seed that currently intrigues the palate of every member of the crew.
I don't mind things the way I used to. There's something about constant change, about living with the elements, that has made me stop fetishizing the familiar. But we've been thinking maybe this is the place to stop awhile. Make some real money. We've weighed the options and aimed our collective will at this island, eighty square miles of ancient lava. We're pressing on the rock for the secret door that will yield. But I don't hold onto things so hard anymore. If it's not here, it must be somewhere else.

2011-03-27T11:24:00.000-07:00

Salt River, St. Croix.

Where Columbus made landfall in 1493 and was attacked by Arawaks.

And Tallulah learned to twist off a low-hanging coconut all by herself. A long drill bit and this is our drinking water.

2011-03-13T17:30:00.000-07:00

Sitting in a hotel room with the TV on—I realize suddenly that I don’t understand. I don’t understand what’s going on. Is the purpose of these ceaseless reams of stimuli to dislodge the whole idea of meaning? None of those old coherent (weren’t they?) narratives, the simple stories I used to follow, hunkered down over a Stouffer’s French bread pizza after school.

But dislocated signifiers are nothing new. We took the boat over to St. John recently, and picked up a mooring in Hawsknest Bay—forest green, azure, pale yellow—the perfect image of the Caribbean, gentle—now—hospitable. Shards of pottery, here and there, the only sign of slavery—smashed to bits long ago. The slave revolt of 1733 ended in flames and dismemberment. And the cane kept growing. I watched some people on the beach. Women carrying wooden frames. A small group of people clumped together, some in beach chairs. The women setting up a frame that looked like monkey bars from a school playground, hanging a towel on it, walking away. People, vaguely visible, coming and going at the far end of the beach—never appearing, their shadows passing through a building, maybe a house, maybe not. My mind idly felt around for meaning, came up with nothing, and, because of the sound of the breaking waves, the hypnotic curve of the surf rolling over the reef, let it go.

Tallulah and I swam to shore, lifted by the swelling water. And there, right in front of us, was an old plantation house made of stone from the hillside. Stone urns from which flowering vines sprung, and women’s clothes hanging on a line to dry. Papaya and coconut, shorthand for abundance. Here was order—perfect in its proportions. A blind, insistent order, as if stone and perfect symmetry could force harmony out of a world that had never yet made sense.

2011-02-17T05:26:00.000-08:00

Tallulah wants to watch the fishermen. There’s a local man who’s often on the university dock. This morning he was shooting the breeze with a guy from physical plant. They fell to talking about Afghanistan; the fisherman had been there--he described a conversation with an Afghani who had two wives. How do you keep ’em both happy?

The talk had turned to food prices on the island, the kind of thing that seems like it would foment revolution around here, and from there we arrived at the Taliban, women strung up by the neck on trees outside Kandahar. Can you believe the breadth and depth of five minutes?

The food here is expensive, no doubt about that. I’ve been to every grocery store on the island now except Jungle Foods, next to the projects. I wheel Tallulah in the cart at a leisurely pace up and down the aisles, checking prices, imagining what might become of the Indian condiments and the Middle Eastern cheese spread if I got them home. Probably nothing much. I haven’t been into cooking lately.

On the way to Plaza Extra, Tallulah fell asleep on the bus, the kind of profound sleep you might have in an ocean breeze, the suspension bobbing over a few obstacles in the road, sun on your scraped knees. I just kept riding, we’d circle back when the sea came into view, the peaks of St. John across the channel.

We hiked across the asphalt. We walked through the aisles of Plaza Extra covered with stains. Juice speckled the length of Tallulah’s clothes like the fading sparks of a firecracker. I have on a shirt I like, though someone once asked me, Was that eaten by ants? I’ve been wearing the same shoes for a year. But there are some things I’ve cast off, still visible in the distance, and this must be some kind of chrysalis stage, from which I will emerge clean and adorned.

Happy birthday to the cap'n!

2011-02-06T16:24:00.000-08:00

2011-01-30T05:10:00.000-08:00

At the Crown Bay Marina, people with different eastern European accents speaking in English to each other, two young men without shirts walking past, speaking of “the time we were in Mexico,” the boats in the slips bobbing in the wake of ferries to Water Island and the chop raised by the wind. Gertrude Stein wrote of Oakland, “There is no there there.” Which made perfect sense to me in Oakland, I hate to confess. There must be some there, somewhere. Here, there is only there—somewhere else. Here is a tableau, a few salient details that make up a reason to move on, a reason to return. All is in readiness.

The university library is renovating, removing from their collection titles like the Tzotzil Dictionary, Raising Beef Cattle, and Sheet-Metal Pattern Drafting and Shop Problems, Revised, with its architectural font and unusual shape. I find Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers and El Reino de Este Mundo, Alejo Carpentier’s 1967 poetic retelling of the story of the Haitian Revolution. (“What is the story of the Americas if not a chronicle of the magical real?” he asks, in the Prólogo.)

We recently got a post office box here in St. Thomas. I went to the Emancipation Gardens Station downtown, in which I found murals from the early forties depicting St. Thomas as it was then—or, as the artist imagined—the green hills uncluttered by cement houses, and, atop the curve of pale sand that the cruise ship docks replaced, a pyramid of cannon balls and a cannon, aimed, perhaps incidentally, at a Cunard Line steamer in the distance. It is beautiful. There were no post office boxes available there, and the clerk informed me that I would have to establish residency (at least six months) in order to get one. She was wrong, but thoroughly convincing; I had already noticed that this was a rarefied place, not for those who simply wander in off the street, entranced by the image of Emancipation Gardens. When I finally succeeded in getting an address—in the Crown Bay Marina, site of transience—Tallulah and I boarded the Safari and headed straight downtown again to the local library to claim borrowing privileges. In the children’s section I found more discarded books with titles like Careers in a Supermarket, Careers in a Restaurant and Careers in Construction, published in the mid-seventies, which hadn’t been checked out in years. The schools in Careers in Education look just like the schools I attended back in Portland, Oregon. I surreptitiously stuffed them into my bag, though the librarian had said we were “entitled to at least two.” I treasure their sans serif font and deadpan illustrations. We read them to Tallulah, adding plenty of subtext.

"Handyman"

"Interior Designer"

"Architect"

"Busperson"

Wednesday at Smith Bay

2011-01-30T04:58:00.000-08:00

Thanks for introducing us to the homeschool playgroup, Susan!

2011-01-21T09:01:00.000-08:00

This post is a sort of tribute to my dad, who just left after a week and a half visit, which was also an immersion course in our particular lifestyle. He is a world traveler from a young age, supremely adaptable, and one of Tallulah's best friends. We call him Frizz.

I'm writing this in the UVI library while Tallulah puts stickers in my hair, which, by the way, I can't recall washing, and that explains why there are no pictures of me in this series. I have other things in my hair, souvenirs of places I've been over the past couple of weeks. I can't remember how to spell, either, a terrible thing that has not happened since I got performance anxiety during a spelling competition finals in 6th grade and the word was "subtle." I've just given her my purse to play with, so I expect a child decorated with lip and eyeliner shortly. Not that I use those things myself, I just carry them around for some reason.

After he arrived we went on a grocery mission. Our first stop, The Priority Shop, ostensibly owned by a Dominican who flies down to bring up produce in his private plane, contained nothing more than moldy taro and an incomprehensible cashier. We decided it was a front for other imports.

Decorated.

Foraging for fruit in the University test gardens. Crops to look forward to: passionfruit and zapotes.

Rowing to shore. Sometimes a barracuda follows along.

Local pomegranates are powder pink.

Eating fried turnovers (pate) on the beach.


Barbeque for three generations of left-handed sailors. A good marinade for pork ribs, by Adam: fermented sugar, molasses, mustard, and vinegar.

I found a big stalk of sugarcane on the street in downtown Charlotte Amalie.

Local men in suits smile indulgently at three tourists sucking on cane on the front steps of their office.

Diabetes be damned!

At the Bordeaux Agricultural Fair, drums and vegan soup.

Playing dress-up.

Tallulah comments, "This curry is like inflated balloons chasing each other around the bowl!"

Waiting for the safari bus.

Saying goodbye.

View from bathroom window, Brewer's Bay

2011-01-07T16:56:00.000-08:00

I've been taking occasional photos from bathroom windows since visiting France in the late eighties or early nineties (who knows anymore?), appreciating their uniquely serene aspect.

2011-01-03T04:11:00.001-08:00

Parenting with both parents around much of the time is harder than you’d think. I would say it’s harder than I thought it would be, but what did I know, in those blissfully ignorant days before I had a child? Lots of theory was flying around back then. Some of it has been borne out in a way that makes me feel disturbingly self-satisfied. For example, I could never have done this thing surrounded by the exigencies of US culture. The objects, the expectations, the advice. Being in a foreign country where I could barely speak the language and had little idea of what was next, not having a car, not having the view remain consistent have, in fact, suited me. And I was committed to the idea that Adam and I would be in it together—he would be on site, an equal, a colleague. Which meant in practice that neither of us would have a job for awhile. And we worked it out, with help from our incredibly supportive families. The funny thing is, though, in some ways it’s actually much easier when it’s just me. (Or him.) Tallulah and I get in sync, we cooperate. With Adam and I present together, it’s essential that we be in utter harmony. Tallulah sees and seizes upon the most minor fissures in our relationship, in our mundane interactions, things we might be barely aware of, or believe that we’d successfully suppressed. She plays one off the other in a benign or malignant fashion, defending or, lately, peacekeeping, acting out, performing. Those average moments, teasing or cloaking some real grievance in joking terms—all duly noted. And they become the stuff of shame. And reason for punishment. Adam and I live now in such a way that we need to trust the other with our lives. This is the literal truth. But how insidious those small persistent failures become—the deep currents of the psyche, formed by my own parents/early experiences, now played again. It’s this complex, stratified space that I notice myself navigating—again, this is literal—on a daily basis when we’re both together. There’s no other room, no room to go to and shut the door. The space is fluid—I really have no need of metaphors—and the scudding clouds of the others’ moods are close enough to feel the vapor. By now we’ve gotten nearly as good at this as acrobats, but not yet perfect, and perfection is, in fact, required of us.

how we roast

2010-12-30T12:22:00.000-08:00

Not sure how this got started but we buy green coffee beans and roast them ourselves, really good coffee is quite a bit cheaper as green bean, oh yeah, we tried buying coffee here in Culebra (I'm tempted to expand on this theme but perhaps that's not a good idea) and it was all really bad. This became our DIY solution.

these photos were taken about 4 minutes apart: start off on high flame and start to reduce heat as smoke begins, ending on low flame, stirring the whole time. Expect smoke, flying husks and snapping/ crackling over the 20 or so minutes of roasting.

call it quits when they look dark enough for your taste (lighter brings out citrus, darker brings out chocolate, too light tastes sour, too dark tastes burnt)

this move helps cool things down and gets rid of the papery husks

the flavor of freshly roasted beans seems to improve for a few days then levels off, a bur grinder (as opposed to those blade choppers) grinds more evenly and makes it easier to duplicate a good pot of coffee. Enjoy!

Tallulah's projects

2010-12-29T15:28:00.000-08:00

2010-12-17T12:26:00.001-08:00

I think I understand the reality of living on a boat, but I am still trying to grasp the mystique, the myth of it, the thing that makes all the bits and pieces cohere and make something that lights your mind on fire. I have made peace with the idea that this myth will not come to me whole, that I may be left with pieces.

This morning when I jumped into the dinghy a school of tiny silvered fish leapt, startled, landing on the bottom of the boat—they were in our shoes, and the bailer, and the lifejackets, and everywhere, with the large unclosing eyes of prey, and we reached for their tiny silvered bodies and tossed them, delicately writhing, soft sparks, back into the water.

Something I have noticed at sea—how things get left behind. It is a place where the old, landed grudges and regrets can dissolve into nothing, which is their natural state. On a clear day, running with the wind, ordinary, bound life disappears, and we may be made new by our imaginings.

2010-12-12T08:40:00.000-08:00

cousins

Thanksgiving

foam angel
Stomach flu and a hard-hitting virus have taken a toll on quality blogging lately, but I'll be back soon.

2010-11-28T19:27:00.000-08:00

Grandpa Dan has been documenting Tallulah's new experiences on vacation in New Hampshire.

More from St. Thomas

2010-11-19T16:22:00.000-08:00

Latest foraged fruit, from the University of the West Indies experimental gardens.

I'm competing in a new Virgin Islands sport, which involves riding a life jacket while towing a small child and a plastic bag. Here we are coming in for the finish.

"There's a kind of fruit that grows in the cold areas, where there is snow on every branch. And it tastes like a pig being launched into a car."

2010-11-12T15:20:00.000-08:00

In the University of the West Indies library, I overhear an exchange between what must be a teacher and student in the psychiatry stacks. The student says, “I wish I wasn't struggling so much with it”--something like that, I haven't tuned into the conversation yet; the teacher responds, “Through struggle you learn, so struggle is a good thing.” Kind of rapid fire, as if this is part of his professor patter, but at the same time he really means it. And then they say something else while I'm fussing with my computer cord and by that point they've moved a yard away and I hear the teacher say, “Manhood isn't something you're born with or given. You earn it. And this is how you earn it.” And the student says, “Thank you. I'll do my best tomorrow.” And he walks away standing a little bit taller, I could swear it, and I think I can see his shoulders square. I'm pretty sure they're talking about a test that the student has to take tomorrow, but they've ended up affirming what seems like a beautiful principle. I realize I've never actually heard anyone talk like this. And it makes me want to ask them, What is manhood? And is there any way that I could earn some, too?

In St. Thomas

2010-11-10T14:32:00.000-08:00

2010-11-10T09:27:00.000-08:00

Of late I’m impatient with children’s books. Though, thinking back, I remember I read Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish translation to Tallulah as she nursed, two or three months old, soliloquies in Hamlet as lullabies, and Sandra Cisneros’s La Casa en Mango Street before she was two, and she was happy. Lately she revealed an interest in The Odyssey, and sobbed uncontrollably when Beowulf died, and requested repeated chapters of The Sun Also Rises, intrigued by the fishing and the bullfighting and the drinking. (She knows from drunk mans.) She began to invent games featuring Lady Brett Ashley. Hemingway wrote some nice, simple, prose—like a kids’ book, kind of, yet so much more satisfying. (“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”) The Odyssey and Beowulf, though—they were meant to be spoken. The emotions and motivations emerge stark and spare, like hillsides of granite.

I took a walk to the ferry dock at an unaccustomed hour. It had gone dark. I passed the usual detritus, the plastic bags and go cups and empty Medallas shining under the streetlights. The wind was coming from the sea on the other side of the hill as I listened to the sound of the coquís, and one of the men playing dominoes outside the bar lifted his plastic cup of liquor and called out Hi, loudly in English.
Is it tristes tropiques, whatever those are, exactly? (I look up Levi-Strauss on the internet.) Are tristes tropiques like cruisebummers—that haunted sense of something missing, a void to be filled in paradise? I passed the house of a woman we’d known. She had died of cancer two days ago. She’d gone up to her old home in Vermont to die and because I never saw her leave I couldn’t shake the feeling that she hadn’t. I walked past the empty restaurant where a young chef we’d met had started working, when the tourists didn’t come to her restaurant up the hill.
Then I understood that melancholy was something I was looking out of, into the night--displacing it to this other world presumptuously from the world in my own head. The feeling that I don’t belong here, and I can tell, somehow, that I never will. And the places I’ve loved—are they closed to me, indefinitely? That’s the thing about wandering, for me, the intensified awareness that things are always changing and temporary, the craving for difference alternating with the need for certainty, some place that is safe and unchanging. Some place that I now know, and always will, does not exist and yet—like those beautiful archetypes—it is, it must be.

Día de los Muertos

2010-10-30T19:25:00.000-07:00

At the edge of Strom Thurmond Lake on the border of South Carolina we pulled over for a picnic. Restless, I went walking on the verge of the access road, into nothingness, the sun shining. I found a cardboard box with the bottom rotted out—the spine and hipbone of an animal resting on lichen and dead leaves, discolored by the elements—a small dog, perhaps. Empty beer cans and a candle tipped in the underbrush, the tall glass cylinder filled with white wax. I used to see them on the low shelves of grocery stores in New Orleans, used for offerings. We tossed food into a stand of pine and drove on. In Edgefield the signs will tell you that a beautiful woman’s head was once split open at the foot of the courthouse steps.

Strom Thurmond and my grandfather were cousins, born in the same house. A wide white house, nothing special, save for the whispers of my grandmother and grandfather, newly wed, living on the second floor. She’d wanted to be a lingerie buyer for White’s department store in Augusta and fly down the road behind the wheel of Model T and drink beer across the river. She came here to teach school and lived in a boarding house. Her father-in-law asked her to drive him. She was beautiful behind the wheel. Strom Thurmond’s grave is marked by a giant slab of local granite, the carved words sonorous--survived by his black daughter, the child of a family servant he must have cornered in an upstairs bedroom when he was just a teenager.

Liberty Hill Road stretched past anonymous miles of pine. At a clearing in the woods my mother pulled the car over. Once she’d come out to her ancestors’ plantation and found a pile of chicken parts. The house was gone now, faded on back into loam. She walked over to a mound of broken granite. "They’ve plowed up the gravestones," she said. "They plowed the gravestones up." It must have been mere broken rock, not gravestones at all. For the coffins, those would have rotted, too--but what had happened to the bones?

What we've been doing lately

2010-10-25T14:32:00.000-07:00

2010-10-10T19:09:00.000-07:00

I’m in Georgia with Tallulah—on shore leave while Adam works on the boat and eats pressed meat sandwiches and bachelor biscotti. I’ve been working on and off on a project about the Confederadoes, Southerners who left the south after the Civil War for points farther south—Mexico, Cuba, Brazil. These were some of the most committed separatists, perhaps among those who envisioned themselves becoming white Yankee slaves. South Carolina, where my mother’s family has lived for generations, was the first state to secede, so it’s no surprise that the Edgefield (SC) Colonization Society was prominent in discussions of expatriation. And, as it happens, one of my ancestors, a man named Harrison Strom, was a member of the Society. I sat trying to imagine Harrison Strom. I imagined him sitting in an upright chair in a dim parlor, reading Ballard S. Dunn’s Brazil: A Home for Southerners. People, even prominent people, would have been poor, I figured, after the war, and maybe he didn’t have much money for lamp oil. Harrison Strom was thinking. He was thinking about what to do. As he lives in my mind he is filled with bitterness. His thoughts are angry thoughts, and he dreams of leaving this mess behind even as his blood feels tied to the land. Perhaps he populates the unknown country of Brazil with docile slaves and makes the fields grow rich crops, the Portuguese names of which he has heard, but which slip from his brain like water.

Harrison Strom never went to Brazil. He lived and died in Edgefield County, and I have no idea what happened to him. Perhaps he died in bitterness. As for the real Confederadoes—some of them went and came back, some of them formed Southern colonies, and their descendants speak fluent Portuguese, and many of them have dark skin.

On Friday we drove over to Greenwood to visit my grandmother, who is 96 now. Her voice drops a note and grows confident when she talks about the past. I remember her haunting small-town archives and libraries, researching genealogy. She found things that shocked her—like the ancestor taken away by Cherokees, who turned his back on the world he’d left. This seemed deeply embarrassing to her, yet she confessed it as if she wanted us to know. Perhaps she has secrets. Her daughters tell each other stories about her. She was illegitimate, they say. Her father was a mulatto. There is nothing but stories upon stories, blurring the edges of each other, wearing upon each other like water does on paper and I’m left with vague impressions as powerful as vivid dreams.

My mother was telling me the other day about her grandfather—he was superintendent of schools in Edgefield, then signed up soldiers for World War II. And out of the story—not a story, really, but a kind of meandering river that doubles over on itself, leaving ox-bow lakes—in a instant I felt this man, whose name I still don’t know. I felt him very near, even, I would say, in my blood. I knew then that he had lived with the intention of creating me. So that I—he could not have known it was me—so that I (not only I) could live. And now I present some part of him to the world. This rural Southerner, with a patch of cotton and a job downtown and who knows what thoughts in his head. This unknown man suddenly seemed almost as real to me as my own child. Almost. Just for a single, vertiginous moment.

I opened a book about Edgefield, a work of scholarship that, according to the inscription, my sister and mother and I presented as a gift to our grandmother in 1985. None of us have any memory of that. There was a blue piece of paper inside, carefully folded, with a little dot of something in the center. I touched it idly, like you would an old receipt or tag-end of paper that might be good for writing a grocery list. After awhile—I was doing something else at the same time--I took the paper out again and unfolded it. It was a letter that had been written and posted in Edgefield. It said something about a debt. An ordinary thing committed to paper. The fine sepia ink was dipped by A. Simkins as he wrote to R. M. Fuller about some piece of business that concerned them both. It startled me, I admit it. The paper didn’t seem to have aged at all in a hundred and fifty years.

It's what's for dinner

2010-10-10T13:01:00.000-07:00

A big batch of bachelor biscotti!

Adapted from A Treasury of New Zealand Baking

2C 3Tbsp flour
3/4C sugar
1 tsp b powder
2 large eggs and 1 yolk
2/3C hazelnuts (blanched, whole)
3oz dark chocolate chunk
optional--citrus zest

another option--forgo nuts and chocolate, add liquor--and don't put that bottle away, keep it close, that's your friend

Preheat--350F

Combine flour, sugar, b powder in large bowl. In separate bowl, beat until just combined eggs and yolk--add to the dry ingredients and mix. Add the hazelnuts and chocolate, using your hands to combine all ingredients thoroughly until mixture forms a ball.

Transfer to clean surface and knead the mixture about 2 minutes. Divide the mixture in 2 and shape each part to a flattened log shape, about 12 inches long. Place on baking tray.

Bake for 20-25 minutes, until lightly golden and firm to touch. Remove from oven. Use a heavy, sharp knife to slice each log on the diagonal into pieces 1/2 inch thick.

Lay biscuits flat on the tray and return to the oven for further 10-14 minutes, until golden.

Cool before serving. Store in airtight container up to 1 month.

Building a better mousetrap

2010-10-03T17:55:00.000-07:00

The main question I have is how did it get here. How? I was reading Tallulah a bedtime story. She was lying there, looking up, when suddenly she exclaimed, “Look! A little mouse!” She says many outrageous things that turn out to be true. I looked. There was nothing. A second later, a mouse appeared in the porthole. It seemed surprised when I squeaked with delighted dismay. Later, in the night, I was awakened by a loud crunching sound. There was the mouse again, silhouetted in the moonlight. When it saw me it threw up its little hands and ran away. We read on the internet about how to make a no-kill mousetrap using a 2-liter Coke bottle, but the mouse went in there and ate the food, leaving only a little je m’en foûtre behind. The ante has been upped.

2010-09-28T19:50:00.000-07:00

Since turning forty, some things have become clear to me. For example, that bachata music is beautifully overwrought, like the kind of poetry you can write in Spanish—like this one, for example, from a book of poetry for Puerto Rican schoolchildren :

Madre mía, hoy es tu día
y yo te doy mi alegría,
que es lo que te puedo dar.
Madre mía, yo quisiera,
que tu pena fuese mía.
Qué más puedo desear?

“My dear mother, this is your day, and I give you my happiness—for that's what I have to give. Oh my mother, I wish your sadness were mine. What more could I desire?”

Or this, from “Itinerario para náufragos”—náufragos meaning “the shipwrecked”:

Vivir el movimiento que habita las palabras,
conocer la apariencia, amar la soledad
de los frutos caídos y que, ahora,
con la luz de la tarde
desvelan el pasado en las ruinas del tiempo.

A sorry translation: “To live in the movement that inhabits words, to understand the meaning of surfaces, to embrace the solitude of fruit that has fallen—and now, with the afternoon light, they keep the past from sleeping among the ruins of time.”

This translation is lame partly because I’m not sure how the infinitives in the first two lines fit with the third person plural in the last. But who cares! What is this about? I have no idea. I just find it strangely stupendous. I’m moved by poetry in Spanish more than any poetry in English except maybe Walt Whitman, because he, too, gives voice to the most vague, exalted sentiments in unrestrained, unapologetic flights that sometimes choose not to return, leaving you high.

On the other hand, I’ve been clued in to the value of balance. Such an ordinary thought--banal even. I was wondering the other day why I intermittently fantasize about a totally different life in which I’m one of those people who search out props and necessary items for movies, or scientific operations. In a book I read I learned that this job has a name. It isn’t “procuring.” Anyway, it boils down to hunting for interesting things in a new place and then buying them with someone else’s money. Perfect for me. In my other life, I participate in a floating household that tries to maintain a high degree of self-sufficiency, give voice to its creative longings, earn money, and raise a small child far from most of our friends and family. And things break. Like, relatively important things. Or someone gets sick. Someone gets in a snit. What is wrong? I used to blame it on the boat, lack of money, bad food, isolation, whatever. Now I realize those are just excuses. Deepak Chopra spoke to me in a dream. He said, This moment is perfect. And I said, I like that better than This Moment Bites. And I said, When we feel crazy, let’s shout—silently, if necessary—OM! And he said, Do whatever you need to do. And I said, Deepak, it actually works!

2010-09-28T14:07:00.000-07:00

Gratuitous child photo.

Tutu in the tidepool

2010-09-25T17:35:00.000-07:00

Birthday weekend

2010-09-19T14:15:00.000-07:00

Turning 40 can be kind of scary, so I needed a Chihuahua on hand. And a 7-Up. (Thanks, Raquel!)

The other day Tallulah said, “Daddy, I’ll always be your baby. But you know why people need to grow up? It’s because they need to see better.” Yeah. It's cool how all those things that were just above your head—like what’s on the stove, and what really matters—suddenly get a lot clearer.

Daphne and Raquel at Flamenco Beach.

Top secret information.

Party at Lori and Fred's!

Talking about Malta, Thibodeaux, and titty twisters.

I think of this as trashy lush but I don't want anyone to take that the wrong way.

Tallulah's present was a couplet: "It's good when you hear/A please in your ear!"

The best cake decoration ever: palm trees with little coconuts on them.

Author photo for my next book. Still working on the book part.

2010-09-15T20:12:00.000-07:00

Plus ça change, they say in French, plus c’est la même chose. That line makes sense to me on and off. Sometimes it sounds like something that’s supposed to be clever. Last week it seemed like the unvarnished truth. We set off from Culebra, reached St. Croix—did things there now vague to memory—and prepared to journey on. We were careful, of course, because as any sailor knows, particularly one as half-assed as myself, you do not mess around with the weather. So we had our weather relay and we had our diesel and food that probably would not induce seasickness and our wits about us, as much as you can hope for at any given point in time. The only problem was that a few things went wrong. One of them was: While lying low, keeping my nausea tuned to a manageable level, riding it out, I looked up and saw smoke eagerly billowing from the closed door of the engine room. Look! I shouted. Smoke!

Leaping up from where he was nursing his own juice-induced nausea (it’s an art as well as a science, figuring out what to eat underway, and in each new port it seems I’m tempted by something that soon proves deadly), Adam dove into the smoke. Long and short, there wasn’t an actual fire, but the engine had gone dead.

Sailing engineless is nothing new for us, of course. We hadn’t even been using the engine. Later, though, the port side sailtrack ripped out of the deck. Adam jerry rigged something or other—I have no idea what it was because I was trying not to be sick while reading some kids’ book aloud down below or getting food for Tallulah, who seems to recover from her own little flares of seasickness with stunning speed. But no engine and a compromised rig in someone else’s boat in unfamiliar waters during hurricane season adds up to Not OK. You have to be able to get away from the storm. I used to be kind of blasé, but after evacuating New Orleans at dusk with the electric bite in the air of pressure dropping, along the empty highways—then, weeks later, driving with a will back into the ruined city to touch things that the storm had left behind, dripping with prisms of mold—I find my cells shudder at the notion.

But at some point after we decided that the safest thing to do was return to Culebra, a thunderhead like a mushroom cloud possessed the horizon. It staged a bloodless coup. It was so big it didn’t need to make a sound and it looked marshmallow soft. Long jagged clouds the color of pewter balanced across it as the sun shot that soft whiteness through with pink gold. When it reached us, it was sheeting warm rain and blowing 45-knot gusts in the darkness while the boat plowed the waves like some Greek’s mythical horse.

We knew this—this Invest 92, this tropical disturbance we’d been watching for days and now, with our change of plan, it was tickling the edge of our westward trajectory with its long white plume. And we prayed, for the first time in years, because sometimes in the dark ocean you hope there really is some kind of benevolent higher power, even if that idea seems unfathomable in the clear light of day. Because sometimes if you’re not calling out to the heavens for mercy you’re singing all chirpy in your head, “The Minnow would be lost, the Minnow would be lost…”

It’s a fact of life when sailing that plans are not that relevant. A fact not always pleasant or easy to deal with, sometimes one of the most frustrating axioms for me of life aboard. Because I’m pretty good with uncertainty but not that good and that’s probably why I live on a sailboat, because I have to learn my lesson. Maybe. I’m not really sure. Anyway, we went sailing. And now we’re back.

Happy Birthday, Tallulah!

2010-09-05T18:42:00.000-07:00

Guadalajara, Tucson, Apataki, the Virgin Islands, Tallulah travels thousands of miles between birthdays. We had ice cream with Lori and Fred in Culebra, and cake in St. Croix.

2010-08-22T08:43:00.000-07:00

I've noticed that there aren't many pictures of me in the blog lately. It's because I often look like this.

At least when there's a camera around. And especially lately, since I've been proofreading this humanities textbook, the take-home of which seems to be that the world is ending. That sucks! I've begun to wake up in the small hours worrying about overpopulation. And the only thing I can do about it is to not have any more kids. Which won't even make a difference anyway. It didn't help that yesterday I was proofreading an article about the meat industry while Adam and Tallulah were eating a steak. What is the right way? I wondered. It's just an inchoate, no-doubt ego-driven longing I have, to fix everything, and short of that, to understand.
    As I was taking a walk I got waylaid by an old Culebrense lady who lives in a ramshackle cement-block house overlooking the airport. I've noticed her house before because it's on a corner, and you can appreciate from every angle how absolutely overgrown it is, how unfinished, the goats grazing in the weeds, the rebar sticking out of the roof, building materials and broken appliances stored in the open basement, soap suds from the washing machine running down the hill. She asked me if I spoke Spanish and when I said, Un poco, she explained that her knees and ankles were killing her. We chatted for awhile about the healing properties of basil and blackberries, and living on boats, and the Virgin Mary, and the paved roads. Dios te bendiga, she said as I left. Do you know what that means? Yes, I said. And you answer, Amen. Amen, I said. I told her I'd come back after hurricane season and teach her English. Afterwards I felt better, but then I woke up again this morning imagining relentless hordes of humans overtaking every last square inch of the earth.
    My stepmother Wendy sent me an article recently about a new book entitled Le conflit: la femme et la mère, by Elisabeth Badinter, one of those particularly French intellectuals. Badinter argues that mothering has become more oppressive thanks in part to renewed concepts of “ecology.” That is, childbirth without drugs, breastfeeding and cloth diapers have all become tools of the patriarchy. “The baby has now become 'the best ally of masculine domination.'” That's not a new argument. And I'm not really sure how anybody thinks they're going to have a baby and then go back to what they used to think of as normal life. Return to work, sanity, all that crap, in the same way as before. It just simply doesn't work--I mean, in my experience. I had all sorts of notions about how awful the whole thing would be. How resentful I would feel of the new demands on my time. And in order to create a context in which I would not go stark raving mad, because I've always known I had it in me, I thought to myself, I have to quit my job and go far away. And Adam has to quit his job, too.
     I realize this solution isn't possible, even desirable, for everyone. And truth be told, I love working as much as the next career woman. (What I wouldn't give for an office!) But herein lies the main problem I have with what I understand of Badinter's theory—not only that motherhood, properly done, should make you more wasteful and less conscious, but that motherhood is strictly a woman's issue. In my view, two things are necessary: to accept the basic essentialism of sex, and to respond to it creatively. And I guess Adam and I have traveled around the world trying to work that out.

Captain Mom

Next stop, probably (because while cruising you always have to hedge your bets): Carriacou. Moving on--sometimes, it's actually not a bad way to solve your problems.

2010-08-17T14:42:00.000-07:00

I have been earning some money this week, mostly fixing other people's writing, all the little matter out of place, which makes me want to write imprecisely, scattering commas. It's a textbook, and I think about the readings, arguing with them, inserting comments in the margins, which someone will read, eventually, and perhaps become irritated. I proofread an article about the origins of religion. Ages ago, it said, everyone knew religious myths were metaphors.
    I remembered something that happened during the months I spent at a Buddhist retreat center in Junction City, California, the summer before I started graduate school. A series of special teachings was taking place. As part of this, a Tibetan monk came--to give a talk, exist. He was a short man with eyes as dark as a snow man's. He was called a Terton, which means someone who reveals--knowledge--maybe buried in a rock somewhere. Maybe in a dream. He spent a couple of days at the gonpa and on the day he left, everyone lined up on either side of the long drive leading out to Route 299, and Redding, Yuba City, Sacramento. Some held flowers ready to toss in his path. I stood there with a pink cosmos. As the Terton passed, in the back of a red Jeep Cherokee with the windows rolled down, I reached out to give him the flower. I think our hands met, but I'm not sure. We looked each other in the eye. It was as if I'd touched an electric fence. The world went white. I lost a few minutes of ordinary time.
    Later somebody said to me, He zapped you, huh? I saw you afterward, kind of standing there. Um, yeah, I said. And wandered away. Names are coming back to me now—it might have been somebody named Chris. Chris and Sonja, who were so in love they decided that they needed to give each other up. Tall, blond Chris, who worked on the roof, tiny, dark-haired Sonja, keeping to herself. I ate Oreos and watched her surreptitiously across the room in the basement dorm we shared. It was a mistake to think I had forgotten details. Is who I am now somehow a result of being charged, overloaded, by that single passing glance?
    I was taking to Diane in the heath food store the other day. She had just watched someone die. An old man, a jíbaro, from a long line of Culebrenses who talked in the old way, who remembered, or claimed to remember, the way things used to be. The man was bedridden, surrounded by family who did not want to see that he was dying—she said—for whom dying, it seemed, meant giving in, being subject to. Quieres sembrar cocos? they demanded. No? OK, then eat your food.
    What does it mean that to die is to go plant coconuts? That death holds pastoral boredom? Or unending labor? Is this a tropical heaven? Or a vision of hell?

Life in blue and green

2010-08-08T18:30:00.000-07:00


It is really amazing what remoras will eat. We probably shouldn't say what their favorite food is.

Some people say this is the second most beautiful beach in the world.

Getting down.

Telling it like it is.

Going places.


Shy and Diane run the health food store/hospice care. They also provide reality checks and general mental health support.

2010-08-01T14:31:00.000-07:00

I was watching a short film made by The Jam Handy Organization for Chevrolet in 1941. It was intended to help management improve the sales technique of its workers. I learned some interesting things. I learned that car salesmen used to go door to door. They'd even show up at construction sites to try to sell the foreman a new truck. I learned that the salesman is supposed to drive the car first, before he lets the potential customer get behind the wheel. I got a clearer sense of what people meant when they said, “It's a man's world.”
    In one scene, an unsuccessful salesman is saying to a co-worker, “I just don't seem to get the hang of this business.” And I could hear that standard expression when it was still fresh and slangy, but not too much so. How the hang of it felt to say, how it described a new way of seeing. The way something hangs. The salesman tests it out in his tongue. It describes his confusion, his inexplicable inability to get why his marks just won't buy. “How is this engine different from the Plymouth?” one potential customer asks. “Well,” the salesman chuckles, caught, “I don't know how it's different. I just know that the Chevrolet is better.”
    It's hard to remember that the people in the film are actors. In one scene, the dealership manager sits with his father on the old man's porch. It must be summer. The old man is wearing a white handkerchief draped on his head, dispensing sage, hard-earned advice about how to responsibly train your employees. The men are so earnest, so clear in their emotions, each one telegraphed precisely to the viewer's reptilian brain.
    Since I started Fear Grin Editing, No Job Too Big or Too Small, I have, thanks to a friend on the inside, been able to penetrate to deeper levels of the publishing business that I ever could have made it to, much less known about, before. Maybe I'll get some work out of this. If nothing else I've had occasion to reflect on corporate America. From here it seems a strange world filled with mirrored doors. Leaded gas. Carbon emissions. Global warming. And in the face of all this there is the beauty and order of human culture. In this case its beauty is unsustainable, it sets itself up in opposition to the natural world, and it is no less compelling for that. Some part of me adores the generous curves of the Chevrolets, the high-heeled shoes the wives wear, the stilted voices of the salesmen. I look at the strange world of people and I think, surely one will figure out a way to save us. And if not, what can we learn by dying?
    I remember reading an interview with a Buddhist priest—I can't remember his name now, something long. It wasn't his original name. He was an American. And this guy had it. Yeah, I'd call him enlightened. The things he said didn't make you feel comfortable, but at the same time, they were oddly reassuring. When the interviewer asked, “What do you think happens to the individual consciousness after death?” He responded, “That presumes there is an individual consciousness.” And so I feel hopeful. I feel hopeful about the order of things. There is some rightness to all of this, some inexplicable rightness. And if I have some spare time to get depressed, I look up at Tallulah's portrait of herself in my arms.

Typical Culebra

2010-07-27T08:10:00.000-07:00


"I'm begging to go to the beach. So, what can we do about that?"

Lori the librarian is seriously one of the nicest people on earth. Seriously.

Top of the world.

2010-07-25T14:42:00.000-07:00

Since arriving in Culebra, Tallulah has fallen victim to a variety of fevers, colds, coughs, and fungal and staph infections. She has drunk bleach and eaten bread containing BHT. Now add to that list: Playing with the fruit of the most toxic plant on earth. That's right, good family fun was had today tossing manchineel fruit hither and yon in the gentle surf of Electric Beach. The fruits are like little green apples that float. Perfect for water games. Mom was intrigued by said fruits and peeled back the skin to sniff at the flesh. Hmm, I thought. Sweet. Tantalizingly so. I showed Tallulah the interesting large white seed within. (One of our hobbies, across the world, has been dissecting the local flora. And on occasion, fauna.) I saw more, scattered along the sand, and wandered around collecting them, intending to look them up in the field guide at “home.”
    Then a little voice in my head started to whisper. It's a little intuitive voice I have, and it's been there for a long time, probably thanks to the fact that when I was a little girl, my own mom used to take me out into the fields and woods and teach me the names of plants. And it was getting more urgent. It was saying, manchineel. Manchineel. This was after I'd lifted one of those sweet little fruits and brushed it ever so delicately against my lips, savoring its siren sweetness.
    Several minutes later I felt an uncomfortable sensation in my mouth, a certain numbness, a certain tightness, and I thought I could feel the right side of my body go slack and then my heart jolted, possibly with adrenaline, or just wrongness. I sat down.
    When we came back to the boat and looked it up, we found out that the Caribs used to poison their arrows with this stuff.
    Why am I quickly being disqualified as a parent? Well, partly because it's the full moon. Is there some Scorpio in this one, or some Aries? Astrologers, help me out here. I've been tense and edgy. I'm full of delusions of grandeur on the one hand, fear of failure on the other. I've been wearing myself out with thinking about how to make some money without sacrificing family life, because lately our finances have been like buffalo meat (you know, very healthy).
    So I'm in the process of finishing the next airport bestseller, but in the meantime I'll be launching my new business: Fear Grin Productions. Copyediting and Proofreading Services. No Job Too Large or Too Small. I'm a Virgo, ergo a perfectionist, and when you're talking about comma splices or “which” versus “that,” perfectionism is a good thing. (That comma before “because” in the previous paragraph? Technically, it shouldn't be there.) I'm considering this as a tagline: If there's one thing I can get right, it's your writing.
    (Curtain.)

2010-07-22T13:25:00.000-07:00

Forty years ago, when the Marines were here, the economy of Culebra was heavily dependent on laboratory rats. The US government had set up a rat factory--this was their way of keeping the locals happy. Then they decided they wanted them unhappy. People were getting in the way of artillery shells, and bombs, and secret posts for listening to the ghostly whistling, the squawks and bleats of our friends and enemies flying, invisible, across the airwaves.
    The factory is by far the largest building in el pueblo. I can only imagine what is inside. That dim decay of abandoned offices, the laboratories where the rats were bred, the sterility necessary to places where life is experimented with.
    We went over. A couple of horses graze on the grounds. Tallulah had spotted them when we went foraging for mangoes one afternoon beside the fire station. The horses were eating green mangoes right off the tree. Their long, rubbery lips reached up, grappling with the crunch. They were also open to eating grass shoved through the chainlink fence. The next day, she insisted we return. She ran happily to the fence looking for horses, but they were nowhere in sight. When I explained, the local firemen said, They're back there. But is it safe? I asked. They looked at each other, shrugged and nodded. One of them pulled open the gate.
    So we wandered into the rat factory. We found the horses. We petted and discussed them. Then we left, because I couldn't get the flattened face of a woman I knew in New Orleans out of my head. She was kicked by a horse and the doctors never could fix her bones. It struck me that I may be unfit for modern life. I can find things to worry over even in the most innocuous, bucolic places. Then again, maybe this time it's to do with the posted warning signs, the industrial shower that accompanies a place where toxic substances collect, the odd metal cages. Maybe something's clinging to this odd intersection of manipulation and things bred to die that the simple practice of ordinary life has yet to overcome.

2010-07-18T12:28:00.000-07:00

I have been foraging. There is something in me that loves a found object. Fortunately it is mango season and the trees are dripping with great green teardrops. I found a carambola tree accessible through a family's gate, when they weren't home and had left the gate open. But then I realized the neighbor across the street was always watching through those slatted windows they have here to keep out the light.
    It has become my goal to eat only fruit I have picked. I step hesitantly at first and then brazenly into those margins I'm able to trespass, as someone who owns no land and is here temporarily, without claim. This is partly because the mangoes in the local colmado cost two dollars. I think they come from the Dominican Republic. I think only the tourists buy them now. They are piled high, they have been ripening slowly, and now they are turning an unusual shade of peach.

    In every place I have traveled, without trying, I have come across solitary shoes. I have seen many ordinary shoes and some beautiful shoes. These, too, I want to pick up and carry home. I am planning a photo essay entitled “One Shoe.” But I haven't started it yet because I keep thinking, What would be the point? And then I think, one shoe is one of the most useless objects imaginable. I love shoes, like my mother and grandmother before me. I really want to find the other shoe. I search for it among the plastic bottles and seaweed, farther down the road, back among the trees.
      I recently read about people who run barefoot. I had no idea that running shoes can actually hurt your feet. It made me think about the other day when I rowed to shore to take a walk and forgot my shoes. I decided to walk without them. I started up the hill and for the first half hour I kept thinking about how radical it seemed. When I returned to the dock, my feet felt perfectly fine, but my mind was still reeling a little. The sensation of unraveling received knowledge—and, not to be so grand about it, habit—seemed to be a feeling of nakedness. What else don't we need? My mom used to say—maybe she still does—that I was “cavalier.” I knew exactly what she meant. A sort of overly casual attitude, a tendency to want to take shortcuts. Now, with some extra maturity, we could move over one romance language and say I'm going for sprezzatura—careless ease. Trying very, very hard to make something look easy. And then, gradually, it is. Oh, the delicious lightness of a free ripe mango.

2010-07-11T12:21:00.000-07:00

Sunday at the beach with sunscreen. An elaboration on my head.

2010-07-11T06:50:00.000-07:00

Rhythm is, indeed, everything. I failed music theory back when I was eight or nine and played the violin indifferently. I never could figure out what they were talking about when they talked about 5/6 time (?), or 4/4 time. The house and the car were filled with music, mostly baroque, mixed with the solemn, annoying voices of NPR reporters. I attended the opera. Why couldn't I get it? I sit listening to the soaring arc of George Lewis's clarinet in “Over the Waves” and I think, surely it's the fact that I was mysteriously unprepared to make an intuitive leap. To feel. Or, perhaps, to feel with intellect. Rhythm is a sort of sign or metaphor. If I had to guess I'd say our lives are lived these days at something like a 2/4 beat, overwhelmed sometimes in the faster, higher rhythms of a new place, some gaping—opportunity, that is, some problem waiting to be transformed into the most astounding future we could never have imagined. Isn't that what's waiting?

Recently, Tallulah drank bleach. Jesus! It was diluted so thoroughly it didn't even have a smell. We have no idea how it got onto a measuring cup on the counter. She threw up all over the floor and then said she felt better. I wasn't at all satisfied. But Adam had gone to Fajardo and taken the dinghy; a storm was passing over, interfering with the internet connection; oh yeah, and Adam had the cellphone. We triangulated by shouting into our respective instruments, “Can you hear me?” and bleating the relevant words like morse code. It was kind of like being in a war a hundred years ago. It turned out Adam was calling Lawrence, who lives on a boat nearby, while I was hailing the anchorage on the radio. Then two men in dinghies were heading straight for our boat, medevac style. We all visited the doctor together. He looked down her throat and said she was fine. Then my platoon and I walked over to the health food store for a quick recon of life-giving fluids. When I thanked them, they said, “Happy to help. We don't have much money, but we have lots of time.” A little day-in-the-life for ya.

I recently read a book called Radical Homemakers. It's all about people who, the author says, “did the math.” They did the math and they decided to opt out of the traditional paradigm of working and spending. They turned their family units into “units of production” rather than “units of consumption.” Make, forage, barter, do with less. Drop out. Relearn. Reintegrate, but with a difference. I'm wondering if the commune movement of the late sixties and seventies ran into such trouble because there was no internet. Apparently Adam and I are not alone. Rather than being consumed with anxiety over the crisis of resources, we can look upon it as a reason to live better. What's so great about massive consumption, anyway? Does it make people happy? We've got rhythm. Now, we just have to swing it.

(Thank you, Wendy, for your inspiring gift.)

photo by Tallulah

2010-07-05T13:28:00.000-07:00

postprandial

Tallulah: I want a hamster. It would be thiiiiiis big. I could carry it.
Mama: Yeah? And what would you name it?
Tallulah: I would name it.....Hamsterdam!

2010-06-27T06:25:00.001-07:00

Once you get good at something, the stakes are raised. This is what they talk about when they talk about the universe granting your desires. If you think you want something, you'll most likely get it. But as the sages probably say, you have to be ready. Because what the universe obviously wants is not for us to remain happy and comfortable the way we, in our narrow way, define those things, but for the scales to fall from our eyes and the way we we used to think of comfort and happiness to seem kind of pathetic, at best irrelevant.

Tallulah is a cheerful id. I fail to follow her lead at my psychic peril. She befriends stray cats and drunk men. One of the men pours out the dregs of his beer and climbs the tree where, he says, the best quenepas grow, tossing down bunches of this sweet, pale-peach-colored fruit that you pop open and suck on like candy.

Like an archaeologist walking a grid, she stops every yard or so to examine whatever might have fallen or grown there. She wanders into the shop of a man whose name, we learn, is Jorge. He's a drummer and his congas are lined up along the walls. She pounds on them, calling him out of the back room with a deep chord of memory that emanates from the stretched hide of the drumhead. We talk. Every culture sees time differently, he tells me.

My occasional frustration with the process of walking slowly, rapturously, around el pueblo--that must be my notion of time knocking up against a whole other way of seeing the world, which understands the valuable information contained in animal droppings, as a tracker does, which perceives possibility in every seedpod and bloom, in every discarded and broken thing.

2010-06-27T05:55:00.000-07:00

scherzo
mighty

2010-06-26T17:35:00.000-07:00

For me the most mind-bending thing about having a child is that everything I do has a witness. Nothing too small. Nothing lost.
It's taken me awhile to get used to living on a boat. In fact, though I suggested the idea in the first place, I promptly began to resist it. The basic stuff. Like how to tie knots. Adjust the sails. That sort of thing. I'm not sure why I had such a bad attitude. Actually, I am sure. It had to do with the fact that I'd walked straight out of my world, the familiar, well-loved confines of academia, into Adam's.
We have a nice rowing dinghy here in the Caribbean. And Adam's attempts to teach me how to row—I mean, properly—soon met with snarling and sulking. I never meant to act that way. But I did. And this is the result: In Tallulah's mind, I'm still trying to live down the time a couple of friendly cruisers gave us a tow back to the boat.
OK, that happened more than once.
So even though I looked down on a recent afternoon and realized that my biceps had reached an alarming size; and getting back from shore in 25 knots didn't faze me anymore; and I'd rowed the two of them plus 400 pounds of anchor chain a mile back to the boat in one-foot swells and a stiff breeze, as Tallulah and I would get in the dinghy and I'd take hold of the oars, I kept hearing, “We need somebody to tow us.” Or, “I wish daddy was here.”
After awhile it occurred to me that it was no use getting offended. Wasn't that the voice of my deepest subconscious?
“Daddy always knows what to do in the boat, doesn't he?, I said finally.
“Yeah.”
“He always seems so sure, doesn't he? And you know you're safe.”
“Yeah.”
“But mom is learning,” I said.
What I really learned is that I can't fake anything. I have to believe, to embody, to love it. For I have a witness who sees only the truth. And whatever impression I make now—well, it's going to last the rest of my life.

2010-06-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

It seemed like an ordinary, well-intentioned act. Something responsible people would do, good for
everyone. Because even two of us can't do it alone. She hasn't played with other children in months. She can learn Spanish, how many times have I heard that kids this age are like sponges? I did the research and found a preschool approved by adults. But I can see it now, sort of—the way you see a gyrating disco lit by a strobe. There are women in hairnets issuing mysterious commands. The kids are speaking in tongues. And no one to love her, not really.
I finally understand why theater director Richard Schechner defined performance as “twice-behaved behavior.” Tallulah watches and then she acts. And acts out. She plays again on her little stage the dramas she has witnessed and been subject to. No, don't do that, she says to the kitten. Sientate. Eat. You can't go outside. And, later, I know it's hard. But you can do it.
I keep trying to write about the things that work beautifully about the way we live now—the unhurried ride to school in the dinghy, flowers and fruit and lizards, the symphony of language. Rainwater to wash dishes, a refrigerator running on sun. But the best part is that I can say I won't leave my child screaming in the arms of a stranger again, and mean it.

Going Places

2010-06-02T07:58:00.000-07:00

any information

visitors

I read recently that travel can cause people to lose the core of themselves, to become disoriented and unsure, depressed. And I remember strange hotel rooms in my past--as a college student, for example, spending a few weeks in Mexico, not knowing the language, soon to be struck by monumental gastric illness but for now clutching a paperback, lying on a hard, flat bed covered by a thin wool blanket. Trying to think of something to do. And it occurred to me that over the past few years I have become what might be called seasoned. I have some technique for getting into things. A walk around, attuned to the sensuality of a new place. Its smells, the food, the heat or cool of it, the look of people, their expressions as we smile, knowing we are strangers. We are at a sort of loss here, but not a disadvantage. We look, wonderingly, to find the local culture. Knowing that we must begin with its most obvious and perhaps deceptive forms. A lacuna has opened in us and nature abhors a vacuum. Information pours in. Who knows what details will appear as the blur resolves into focus? And who knows how we will have changed after a month in this place? Four weeks--that seems to be the period which must elapse before a place will begin to reveal itself. During this time you will become a character in the play into which you have wandered, in medias res. You appear in a particular guise for its purposes: white, in our case, with apparently unplaceable North American accents, tanned and dressed in faded clothes. Arrived by boat. Carrying a small child. And you smile, with feeling, and offer money.

Culebra

2010-05-13T10:52:00.000-07:00

Until the mid-seventies the marines were here, speaking their clipped language, that imperialist stutter, firing rounds into the azure of the sea, dropping bombs on the scented hillsides. We are here, rocking gently in the bay, the myopia of everyday life making ordinary things blur into each other and loom large. I came upon a little book in the bilge about the Virgin Islands, "in full color." The colors are the colors of remembered vacations, dreams, cookbooks with faded yet somehow vivid photographs of ham and cakes with soft billows of icing. A confection of experience, old sugar mills framed in bleeding heart vine, tourists beside a chlorine-blue hilltop resort pool, palm fronds pendent across the bright sails of beached dinghies in two-dimensional perfection. It is not only the lack of three dimensions but the silence that, against all odds, perfects. This is what I found out the other day when I dove into the reef. Suspended above the swaying coral--pale purple, yellow, olive--watching the fish move in their separate society, live rounds of ammunition crusted with life, I saw the clear blue underside of a wave. It bowed up like the mystifying sine curve from high school math, and I thought how obvious some things become if you examine them in their natural setting.

in paradise

2010-05-08T09:41:00.000-07:00

Flying Circus in paradise
"coffee" in paradise
first day of preschool in paradise
non-native species in paradise
blue eyes in paradise
toe nails in paradise

chocolate cake

2010-04-24T10:25:00.000-07:00

2010-04-21T07:58:00.001-07:00

One side of the hill browned and blackened, charred locusts at the edge of the burn, a high patch of cacti and tamarind still green, the road red dirt. A flock of young peacocks pecking in the dry, rocky ground rush across the charred landscape in their way, heads jerking. The road curves again, toward a house built in the West Indian style, like the houses planters built with European minds, their bodies moored in the New World–long, wide galleries and the lower floor set nearly into the dirt. In the distance the house looks empty, shuttered, the only movement a windvane turning in the lazy breeze. Everything brown and pale yellow, a sepia photograph, the gray pile of gravel meant for the new road standing out brightly against the stretch of burn and the shadowed house that seems to murmur to itself, saying things the earth tells it.

2010-04-02T08:06:00.000-07:00

2010-04-02T07:44:00.000-07:00

portrait w/ sunflowers

mmmm, salty

burdened vessel

jeeves, would you bring the car around?

T and Aunty Robin

2010-03-27T07:35:00.001-07:00

Path of the Blazing Sarong stutters to life again, born, as usual, of frustration and wonderment. Without that feeling, it seems I have nothing to say. Since last November, I've devoted myself to the project of learning to write fiction, which is something I suck at. So, I haven't been writing much of anything else because that is so impossibly hard and takes all my willpower and time stolen from the rest of my life. This amorphous thing, motherhood, seems in fact to have unlocked any fragile/occasional talent (today is a day for pessimism, tristes tropiques), which is something I should write down. Anyway, my attempts to develop a plot recently devolved into a multiple choice game, one like How to Survive a Disaster, which I found in the children's section of the local library.
Why did the man disappear?
a) He was murdered.
b) He was having an affair.
c) No real reason--he was always unreliable.
I should have a firm grasp of whatever logic is at the heart of this story, and everything should be turning inevitably on that fulcrum, as solid as industrial steel, be taking shape as ineluctably as sea water turning into rain. The other world has to be real. Oh well.
Now we have passed through Tortola and Virgin Gorda, the bliss of coral sand and aquamarine the Caribbean sells. On an isolated beach across the sound from Richard Branson's private island, I rushed into the surf, which constantly renewed its clarity. Tallulah and I roamed the beach, finding shampoo bottles and shoes obscured by vegetation at the high tide mark.
Sea Wolf is back in Moorea, still for sale, and we've had the good luck to become custodians of a Bahamian ketch, a former charter boat 45 feet long and 14 feet wide. Headroom.
At the moment, and likely for months to come, we are anchored in a bay in Culebra next to the island's only town, called simply el pueblo, rather than the name Dewey which, unpleasant in English, was forced on this settlement by the US Marines. We've been here for two or three weeks and my knowledge is superficial. I walk past the small houses of families who might have lived on the island for a hundred years, their doors open to catch the night air, gathering words here and there, windows, or your sister, or a package of galletas, the everyday things that people say to each other and I feel the familiar longing to share in their understanding of what things mean, to be initiated so that the way the s's tumble off the ends of the words might perfectly express my own relation to the world. Tallulah used to go and stand next to people we'd encounter and look at them, waiting, as if to say, Tell me what you know. Give me your culture. I look on with the desperate irritation of unrequited love. And yet I find I have come to accept myself as bourgeois, occasionally amusing, and awkward. It fits as comfortably as anything else, one of my disguises.

Tongariro crossing

2010-01-16T23:54:00.000-08:00

Billed as one of the greatest day hikes on the planet--how could I resist?

We most definitely did!
For the eye of Sauron lay heavy on our hearts.

Follow the black cinder trail.Hobbit sign.

Whenever the Path takes us to foreign lands, we always try to go a little native. In New Zealand, this has meant visiting sheep-shearing exhibits and thermal pools, etc. But when given the opportunity to hunt a real hobbit, I, of course, jumped at it. The Tongariro area is one of the last places where hobbits can still be found in the wild. And, even though it means a significant hike and uncertain success, this was definitely on.
Finally spotted one:
He didn't get away.
Near the summit my native guide, Dan, winged one with his first shot. By the third arrow, this hobbit was down and out.
We grilled him back at camp, and as the guest, I was given the dubious honor of eating the "tenderloin." It was quite juicy, surprisingly filling and delicious! Now I feel like a real New Zealander.
Oh, and the hike wasn't bad either.

lifeonland

2009-12-12T02:35:00.000-08:00

glass 3/4 full
visualize
firepower or lookout jojo
grampadan & T
grammadonna & T
singalong interuptus
first jet flight out of Rotorua: we were there
T is stunned, needs to be dragged home

Rotorua, New Zealand

2009-11-29T01:12:00.000-08:00

Walking in the woods finding fascinating fungi.

A couple of days ago Tallulah said, "Thank you for making our dinner, mom." She's talking like crazy! But she was NOT talking about this particular dinner, Thanksgiving dinner #1. The fish and chips place was closed and I ended up steaming a pile of incompatible frozen vegetables, because that was all there was, and putting raw garlic on it out of sheer spite. Even with the dateline, I just knew something was wrong. Pushing aside our half-eaten food we figured it out.

At Mt. Manganui.

(I will be writing more about our adventures once I finally finish this fiction project aka novel about New Orleans that's been dogging me for at least two years. Personal deadline is January 1.)

2009-11-16T01:20:00.000-08:00

Saying good-bye to Cook's Bay, and Sea Wolf.

Captain Lon is our new role model. This man personifies the phrase "positive attitude." A huge thank you to the crew of Askari for their instant warmth and friendship. Lon, Rosie, Emma, and Adrian--we hope you guys know just how great you are.

A seven-minute flight to Papeete passes over Sea Wolf's new home in Marina Vaiare (the best deal in French Polynesia!).

2009-11-08T19:57:00.000-08:00

We' ve been attending the weekly "Tahitian dance show" at the Club Bali Hai here in Baie de Cook. Every Wednesday the plastic chairs under the palm trees fill with honeymooners and timesharers, their faces eager, expectant. I think of Captain Cook's sailors leaping into their rowboats and making for these same verdant shores, brownskinned women beckoning from the beaches. The beat of the drums accelerates and the dancers appear, their sexuality unembarrassed, sly, hilarious. Young girls are adorned with fragrant couronnes de fleurs, holding bouquets of ferns like castanets. The dancers smile at each other, singing, playing to the audience but mostly caught up in a world of their own making from which we are joyously excluded. During the audience participation segment near the end of the performance, awkward and untrained westerners become the stiff colonial mirrors of the dancers' vivid jerks and fluid rotations. Tourists who want to unbend, who, prodded by the dancers (“You get up here, now!” the MC barks one evening at a reluctant young man in the back. “And you too!”) sway, a little drunk, goggling at the energetic bursts of their native partners, unable to, even uninterested in controlling their self-conscious expressions. Is the point of this to shame or to liberate? To liberate through shame? And those eighteenth-century perfumed Tahitians, what were they thinking as they welcomed Cook's hungry, unwashed crew? Tallulah leaps from her chair, rushing to an open space in which she spins. As the dancers exit she runs across the grassy expanse of the performance space, lit by a crescent moon under the black cliffs, gathering the waxen frangipani blossoms that tumbled from the dancers' sinous bodies. (The frangipani has no economy, is profligate with its scent, lies broken on the roadsides after heavy wind.) Nelly is on duty at the reception desk tonight. She often wanders, chainsmoking, shouting into her cellphone. I try to pay her but she waves my money away. “Bof!” she says, as if we are old friends.

2009-11-08T19:43:00.001-08:00

Walking alongside the market in Papeete, its high-ceilinged acres, I glimpsed tiers of mangoes, unattended, on tables in the dim warmth of late afternoon. I went toward them, stopped, stood waiting for someone to appear. “Tiare!” a voice called from the shadows, and in a moment a vision burst forth, one arm upraised, fingers snapping as if the aisle between the clusters of mangoes were the runway of a Harlem drag ball. “Oui?” she inquired with a moue, a raised eyebrow, having caught all the laughter in the world, just barely. So radiant that I stumbled over my words, trying to explain that I wanted some mangoes, not too green. She chose three for me, palpating them gently, putting them into a plastic bag. As she disappeared again the way she had come, she called to me over her shoulder. “If you want them to ripen quickly,” she said, “keep them in the shadows. Les fruits mûrissent le soir." Fruit ripens at night.

2009-10-10T22:52:00.000-07:00

Eating out of the serving bowl means fewer dishes to wash

In the Tuamotus I tried to write something about being hungry. I didn’t finish it. I was hungry. I considered how indifferent the natural world was to us, how coldly spectacular. The people we met were killing their own food, planting a few tomatoes in the inhospitable coral soil, baking bread to eat at a table they had constructed under the coconut palms. We prized the rare oranges from Australia that sometimes came on packet boats from Papeete, and from there an hour by fishing boat. I was visualizing a disorganized montage of rugged pioneers staggering across the plains, boxes of Florida citrus arriving in the middle of some northern winter, Captain Cook’s men ravenous and ill-tempered after their meals of grog and ship’s biscuits.

We live now in a mythical land of black peaks and pineapple fields, papaya, pomme étoile, custard apple, avocado, mango growing wild on hillsides that are scattered with sacred places. I pause at a spring amid a grove of mape trees, their roots like ribbon candy, and I can feel spirits gazing at me, murmuring in an unintelligible tongue. These are not my ancestors. These gods notice me, but they are not moved.

Having lunch in a nearby meadow, we can hear the Evangelicals singing “Sound of Silence” in Tahitian.

The truth is, I am still hungry. I am still seeking. I grow distracted by inconvenience. I chafe at the contours of a life I chose. The lack of space. The lack of money. No bathroom or refrigerator. How privileged I am to have such trivial, first-world complaints, but that doesn’t matter when I feel like ripping my skin off and leaping away, into another life. How stupid is that? We have everything here, we have much to learn. It appears to me suddenly with perfect clarity: this is what I need to learn. With the beauty of the landscape as a hedge against madness, I can see that the things right in front of me are my own limitations. I have the chance to overcome them. There’s nothing else. What I see are perfect metaphors: everything literal and yet deeply symbolic. Is this making sense? Can I remember it? I need to stop talking and take it in slowly, with great deliberation. This is what it means to be alive.