Products we can't live without

The first in a series?

This blog is brought to you in part by Columbus Crackers. Taíno yucca bread, unchanged since the fifteenth century. Probably way before that, actually. Columbus himself wrote down the recipe! Great power food, for pennies.

iPad--bloody but unbowed. You can't fully appreciate these things until you really put them to the test.

Cheap beer. Available everywhere. It's awesome! What took us so long to figure that out?!

Wild grapes that taste like sage and manzanas de oro  (thanks to Adolfo)

Each generation recounts its marvels to the next one. This is how the world assimilates change. An ongoing narrative of the wonders that existed—that are now stories, that are now fables. 

At least, that was what I was thinking as I walked home down the main road from my friend Bally’s house, trading holas and saludos with the people gathered along the side of the road, watching the world go by. Inexplicably, a young woman separates from her posse, holding a red hibiscus out to me as I pass. “For me?” I say. “Yes—one rose for another,” she responds. “Gracias, amor,” I say—the classic endearment, thrown around freely but always somehow sounding sincere. The first time I’ve used it. 

I felt surrounded by goodwill—begin with a smile, says my world-traveling, culturally literate dad. I’ve fine-tuned the smile so it doesn’t register provocative. 

I’ve grown more and more addicted to the challenge of living outside my familiar, the constant challenges that come from incomplete understanding, a lack of routine. The world bending and shaping me in its image.

My Spanish teacher Bienvenido is my confessor. For over a year now, we’ve sat together, an hour or two in some restaurant or one of our houses—the lesson a safe space, almost clinical, in which to trade cultural stereotypes. To tell each other what we really think. To get answers.

I sleep deeply now, like I remember doing as a teenager. Deep in a dream, I hear someone saying, “Mom, mom.” I half open my eyes. It’s Tallulah. “Why are you calling me mom?” I ask. Feeling bewildered, even a little bit cornered. “Because you are.” “Oh,” I respond, deciding not to argue the point. As if I were someone’s mom. What a crazy notion.

  I have the sense that I might wake up in my dream world, or be dreaming in my waking life. Too much Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, read aloud at bedtime?

Tallulah's projects

"Family"

"Ballet class"

"The bird on deck"

King Kamehameha was here

Honolulu and Oahu beaches

Arriving in Honolulu

On the beach with Auntie Chloe

We love the Pacific side

Cool siblings and in-laws

Thanks to Grandpa Dan and Tallulah for these photos. Hawaii is awesome!

Thoughts on work*

Parents, by Tallulah

* In which I attempt to hash out a problem without being overly poetic

Before we left the Bay Area in 2006 we watched every season of Starsky and Hutch and Miami Vice. We were glutting ourselves on pop culture, all those shows we’d missed out on as kids because we didn’t get that channel. Losing ourselves in those long delayed denied pleasures. 

(Growing up, I was thinking, we were tossed by basically inexplicable forces with pretty much no control over what happened. It’s only now, in retrospect—as adults harried by exigencies, unsuspected challenges, feelings that are accretions of a lifetime of experiences—that childhood can look so simple and blissful. And we can finally completely enjoy it.)

(I think the only thing simple about childhood is that your emotions are still new. Listening to Tallulah’s cry before she could talk—it was the purest expression of sadness, anger, confusion. Her laugh, her smile, were the distillation of uncomplicated happiness. Have I screwed that up somehow? Have I betrayed that sacred charge? I hope not.) 

Over the past year I’ve started earning money again, not a lot—but enough so I don’t have minor anxiety attacks in the checkout line, and we sent Tallulah to one of the best schools in Puerto Plata (!), with people who picked up their kids in new BMWs. 

And: we’ve launched ourselves into routines that resemble to some extent the routines we left behind when we sailed out under the Golden Gate. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about work. I work a lot. Work takes me away from parenting and relationships of every kind. In the few moments in which my mind is unoccupied I space out. When I’m not spacing out, or rushing from thing to thing, I try to orient myself to work—productively. In a measured, what I imagine to be a “healthy,” way.

I often fail. I act almost exactly like my mom (sorry, mom)—frantically and single-mindedly pursuing work, always attempting to elude interruption. “I’ve got so much on me!” I exclaim, glancing over my shoulder at the interruption (i.e., child) and then back at whatever I’m doing. (Joan Williams has cool things to say about this child vs. work problem; http://www.uchastings.edu/academics/faculty/facultybios/williams/index.php. I know about Joan Williams thanks to my latest, uh, work.)

I knew my dad growing up—after I became conscious of such things as serious work—mostly in the summers, when he usually wasn’t teaching much. But maybe he, too, is something like me—focused, driven, rather obsessive, with difficulty shifting from work to relaxation (without a glass of wine in hand and even then). 

I’ve pondered, in my spare moments, what makes people successful. What is the secret of achieving—and more importantly, doing it happily? Not chewing up everyone around you in your great maw of ambition—trying to become somebody—even just trying to earn enough to survive?

My new program, which I may turn into a self-help book, has this motto. Be more you. If I could figure out how to get out of my own way by being more me—I think that would work. If I can embrace myself, I realized, I can set me aside. “I” become an object—abstracted. Amusing, perhaps interesting, perhaps useful. But ultimately irrelevant. 

So I’m working on that. I’m going to sit here copyediting and work on that.

I’m also—(maybe for the first time)—ready to go sailing.

Reaching for the stars through the blades of a ceiling fan

This is one of your stupider, more pointless injuries. Maybe many injuries are pointless. This one just seems especially so. On a philosophical note, I've found that pain is the eternal present. Maybe that's the point of this injury--I'm one step closer to enlightenment. I have been fully in the now for almost a week. And I'll never forget Luperón!

My adversary in hand-to-fan combat. Note the bent blade. Spin that, sucker!