Ru Freeman

I’ve just recently returned from visiting The Enlightened Land, i.e. Canada, specifically, Quebec City, and perhaps that has colored my American view; a view long-accustomed to isolating a few injustices to rant about rather than looking at the vast canvas of injustice against which we fling our careless paint. In Canada, unlike in the United States, it seems that the default setting is an interest in the welfare of an entire community. It is an interest that leads to strong and continuous investment in the public good, including well-maintained parks, recreational walk-ways that take in - rather than block - the view, beautification of public buildings and a sweet pride in a collective history that gives equal place to those Native people that were disenfranchised. While the city is predominantly white - as are most of her tourists - there is very little attempt made to white wash the past.

Sure, not everybody is able to pay $416 and up to stay at the Chateau Frontenac, but the rentable flat around the corner from the Frontenac affords an equally splendid view. And the music that floats from the mouths of street musicians assaults or delights every ear in equal measure no matter the thread count on the sheets upon which he or she may lay at night. The Cirque du Soleil performs free of charge for people of every stripe and the acts, spread as they are around the outdoor viewing area, ensures that the view remains the same for everybody.

Which brings me to America and, specifically, to The Hamptons where I was on holiday with good friends. The Hamptons was a place I had heard referred to in architecture magazines lying around the waiting rooms of doctors and dentists. I knew that it was a place that the New York City rich “fled” to during the summer months. But being a foreigner who still calls Maine home simply because Box 523 Bates College, Lewiston, ME 04901 was listed as my permanent mailing address for over a decade, and whose Maine experiences as an adult involve long stretches of coast line undamaged by human vanity, The Hamptons in the flesh served to displease. Apparently, there is a way to “do the Hamptons right” and it involves being a publishing heiress, a three-home owning Polo star (Argentina, Palm Beach and the Hamptons), a cook with her own TV show etc. etc. Those grains of sand, those drops of water, those blades of grass? They don’t feel quite the same to the rest of us.

As a way of assuaging a little of the outrage I feel, and taking a leaf from what appears to be a Hamptons tradition, I have come up with a list of what’s hot and what’s not here in the Hamptons.

Hot: Homes that can be maintained by the home-owner.
Not Hot: Homes manicured by armies of underpaid migrant workers who bend their heads and step off into the hedges when people walk by.

Hot: Not caring what Hamptonians think is hot when mixing and matching swimwear for the beach
Not Hot: Following anybody else’s idea of fashion other than your own (and, just for the record, I think all these supposedly “hot” bachelors look like asinine clones!)

Hot: Greeting everybody when using running paths and biking trails.
Not Hot: Glaring at customers and assessing their net worth before deciding not to serve them.

Hot: Eschewing identical and towering hedges and tree hydrengeas in favor of gardening with original flair that happens to include vegetables.
Not Hot: Sprinkler systems that have no rain-sensors

Hot: Disguising pool fences with greenery.
Not Hot: Two tennis courts per mansion for every mansion in a ten-mansion block.

Hot: Letting a vacation house accumulate its furnishings through generations of occupancy.
Not Hot: Designing multi-million dollar four season homes which remain empty seven months of the year.

Hot: Lying on the beach when exhausted by being pummeled by the surf.
Not Hot: Lying on the beach to acquire a tan while reading trashy paperbacks.

Hot: Teenaged guards in white polo shirts who look away and do not ask for “beach access ID tags.” Also, deer who don’t give a doe’s behind for signs put up by human beings.
Not Hot: Narrow access-ways to the beach blocked by Private/No Trespassing/Keep Out signs.

Hot: Journal editors who, finding themselves in enclaves of exclusivity, treat it as an anthropological exercise with the potential for comic relief.
Not Hot: Magazines that celebrate exclusivity as though it were a serious virtue.

Okay, so that’s the heart of it, really, that exclusivity. It grates. And I believe the reason for its existence is a staggering lack of shame on the part of many Americans. To live comfortably in a country ruled by laws that champion the individual at the cost of the community must, surely, necessitate an absence of conscience. It is what makes it possible for a town in the Hamptons to put up an access-way, post sentries at cost, and charge those who do not own a home here, $7 per person to frolic in the waves. The waves themselves remain unowned, and the beach below the high water mark is ostensibly public. But if you prevent people from reaching that no-man’s land, then what is in effect is a violation of the right of access to public land.

As I sat on the beach - the only brown person for miles around - a little boy drew a line in the sand around me and muttered something to the effect that I could stay there and that’s it. I am here in the Hamptons with parents whose kids would never consider quarantining strangers in their own pre-marked zone of exclusion. They would find that both puzzling and shame-worthy. I wonder when the balance is going to shift toward that second model of parenting. I doubt the movement is going to start here in the Hamptons.

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Guest Post #3 is from Gail, whose blog-home Ticket to Anywhere I am visiting today. Here is a peek we rarely get - as writers - into what motivates the bloggers who review us. She decided to share twenty questions she had answered for Book Blogger Appreciation Week and I am posting a few of them here.

How’d you come up with the name for your blog?

I’ve always loved travelling (I caught my Nana’s bug at an early age) but it isn’t always easy to hop on a plane and go somewhere. So I started to visit those places I’ve always wanted to see through books. I’ve let the characters I’ve met show me what it is like to walk the Great Wall or even to travel through time and experience some of history’s greatest moments. Books are my way to travel…its corny but they are my Ticket to Anywhere.

How did you get into book blogging? How long have you been doing it?

I was just started to read some book blogs myself – having stumbled upon one through a search. I really like the idea of recording my thoughts on a book. Up until I started my blog I’d just been recording my rating and a brief description in Excel. So in June 2007 I took the plung and started my blog. Initially it was just a way for me to record my thoughts and I really didn’t start getting involved in the blogging community until about a year ago.

What has been the most challenging thing about blogging for you? What has been the most exciting?

The most challenging thing has been keeping up on my book reviews! I am so far behind its not funny….but the books and real life events have distracted me. For example, a good portion of this weekend was spent with Cassie Clare’s Mortal Instruments series books 2 and 3 – they are like crack I couldn’t put them down let alone try to focus on writing reviews!

The most exciting thing has been getting to know other bloggers. One of the best things I did last year was go to Book Expo America where I got to meet Alea (from Pop Culture Junkie) and my friend Tiffany S (from Letters, Words, Thoughts, Ideas, Stories…) Along with so many other great bloggers and author…did I even mention all the authors I stalked there?!? Total drool worthy event!

Where do you get most of your books?

I get most of my books from Barnes & Noble, Borders, and the Strand. My friend Beth (who blogs over at My Hobbies) and I are also constantly swapping books back and forth. Sometimes I am amazed that we can even remember what books belong to who. I also do get sent books from various publishers, publicists and authors…just one of the unexpected things that has been a result of blogging about books.

Are there any books have you been a book bully for? (ie one you’ve liked so much that you practically beat people over the head just to get them to read it)

So many! Of late I’ve been the bully for Hate List (OMG so amazing everyone must read it!!), The Book Thief, Jeanine Frost’s Night Huntress Series, Hunger Games, Catching Fire. I am now also berrating people to read Cassie Clare’s Mortal Instruments series. There really should be a support group for book bullies like me…I just don’t know when to stop.

Book you most want to read again for the first time?

Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery. Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings and Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen.

If you could visit with any characters….who would you chose?

I would love to go to school with Anne Shirley or walk the streets of Chicago with Harry Dresden. Go or to balls with Alex Stafford from The Season…etc etc etc…This is another one that I can go on and on and on about.

If you could give up the real world and move into a book, which one would it be and why?

All of them!! I just fall in love with all the words that I come across in books. I want to be like Thursday Next and be able to walk through the stories…so maybe that is the world….the one created by Jasper Fforde in his Eyre Affair, et al. The exception being Twilight because vampires shouldn’t sparkle!

What books have evoked strong feelings in you? Ones that really touched your heart, made you laugh out loud or made you cry?

God-Shaped Hole by Tiffanie DeBartolo, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, Hart List by Jennifer Brown – they have all made me cry. Janet Evanovich and Stephanie Plum books always make me laugh out loud. As did Jaye Well’s Red-Headed Stepchild and Jeaniene Frost’s Night Huntress series. Twilight made me want to slit my wrists…but that isn’t exactly a good reaction from a book. lol

Can you be found anywhere else on the net? (LibraryThing, Goodreads, Twitter, etc?)

Yes to all 3 and more. My usual interwebs idenity is Irisheyz77….its not one that I’ve ever had trouble getting as a log in so 98% of the time if you see it anywhere its me. =)

What are 5 books that are on your wish list right now?

The Unladylike Adventures of Kat Stephenson, Book One: A Most Improper Magick by Stephanie Burgis
The Line by Terri Hall
Hex Hall by Rachel Hawkins
The Snowball Effect by Holly Nicole Hoxter and
The Orion Tattoo by Caragh O’Brien

And many many more!

Finally, what are some of your favorite blogs to visit?

I’ll give 3 because that’s my favorite number and they are:
From My Bookshelf
Bibliolatry (This is one of the very first blogs I started to read that made me think, hey I can do this)
The Narrative Causality

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It is a little shameful that I have not written a word here since that last brief bleep from the mountain in the wee hours of the morning of the 14th of August. But only just a little.

Last year, the summer before Bread Loaf, I suffered a head injury as I charged around a house-to-be-sold in Maine trying to vacuum in the dark. I cursed and shrieked and woke up my sleeping neighbors and ended up in the ER demanding stitches. Odd how a year changes things. I suffered two physical injuries while I was at Bread Loaf this year. First, another bang on my forehead which resulted in a similar quantity of blood trickling melodramatically down my face. Forget the ER. I stuffed ice under a hat tilted rakishly over one eye and went about my business. Next I scorched myself by leaning - with relief, no less! - on a stove. This was managed by securing a pack of ice to my arm with the shawl that I happened to have draped around my neck that day. I sat thus through my entire workshop with the inimitable and wickedly funny Ann Hood, and thus avoided an unsightly blister and, indeed, ended up with a dark slash that looked more like a particularly edgy tattoo than a burn.

I recount these incidents because, besides being humorous anecdotes (and leaving the scars which I wear with some pride in retrospect), they had no impact on my frame of mind. Minor burns and head wounds are now within the realm of the controllable in my life. Indeed, during my time at Bread Loaf - to which I had fled literally from the radiation room - I had only one moment when the searing pain of those self-repairing nerve endings made me stop what I was doing and remember that I was not entirely whole or mended. And despite the fact that fatigue had dogged my footsteps every night on which I couldn’t get a sufficient amount of sleep all through treatment, while at the conference I could keep going on only two or three hours of sleep a night, night after blessed night.

There is something about Bread Loaf. I’m sure everybody who hasn’t been there is pretty tired of hearing that by now, but it is true, there is. Nothing that troubles me “on earth” - in my personal life, in my family history, in the world of wars, elections won or lost, not one of the things that move me to opine or rant - touches me while I am there. It isn’t conscious, it isn’t by design, it is just how the days unfold.

So it was a strange adjustment for me this time, knowing that the the first thing I had to do when I came back was see not one but three physicians. The first act, to take the first of the doses of Tamoxifen that I will be ingesting every day, twice a day for the next five years of my life, and have the surgeons and oncologists and pathologists look at me and declare me in one state of repair or another. 3,650 pills in all. A few days back, as I stepped up on to the scale to be weighed, a nurse exclaimed “You aren’t going to take off your shoes? And you’re wearing heels? Wow that’s brave!” And I smiled.

I realize that there are only two ways to talk about Bread Loaf. In silence, or with words that verge on the lushness that Charles Baxter nudged us to consider during one of his lectures; the kind of language that we have learned to shun because it is routinely ridiculed by critics. I am taking up Charlie’s challenge. Down the line, you will be able to access this years Bread Loaf lectures via iTunes and listen to what he says and agree that sometimes lushness is called for. Here are a few people I hold close, and what they had to say about being at the conference. Here is Alexander Chee whose post is titled, “Consider Writing an 86 Proof Sentence” (a quote from Charlie), and Eugene Cross, whose post for the Hayden’s Ferry Review Blog is titled, “What I learned from Charlie.” Hmm. Curious. Here is Christian Anton Gerard, poet and fellow staffer:

It’s occurred to me this week that perhaps one of the reasons we do what we do is because of the lack of time we feel in the world. We run to the top of a mountain to make time…We will tell our friends and family about that time in an effort to show how wonderful and perfect the world of writing can sometimes be, but like (a friend) said, “the beauty in our moments on the mountain is in the fact that we never know if we’ll be here again… Which makes every moment here a completely tangible, but slippery thing we will cling to for the rest of our lives, but never be able to fully explain to anyone else.”

It is indeed a gift for all of us to have been there, and perhaps even more so for us to have been there together, but the fact that we can always be there together because we’re all clinging to the same slippery time-rocks, which we share only among each other is a gift and something newly spectacular in and of itself, I think. If you need me. Any of you. I will be across a hayed field in the middle of a beautiful creek at the bottom of a wooded hill. I will be picking up rocks and loving them even as they slip away. I will be running after them, sitting atop them. I will be sated when you wade in with me.

So, did I care how much weight was added to the scales with my high heels? Is there a way to measure the weightlessness of finding ones soul-sisters and brothers, of knowing how to love and be loved in return by beautiful, brilliant strangers who become friends over the turn of a single phrase? What is the weight of the light that fills up my body and my heart when I am where I am always among friends, always among people who share the same dream, who are gifted not only in the art of creating worlds with words, but in committing everything they have to holding each other up? We’re all familiar with the way people look and behave when they have experienced grave danger, some disaster, or even some period of time which has been consumed by worry about their own fate or that of someone they care deeply about. They tip, tearful with relief into the arms of their beloveds. What happens at Bread Loaf is not unlike that. You get there and you realize that you have left worlds and lives bereft, most of the time, of people who know what it is like to nurse a craving for words, a sort of eternal itch that tangles the fingers and brain so that not to write and read and talk freely about reading and writing and muses and wordly habits is an acutely felt torture. You get there and you tip, delirious with relief, into the arms

and minds

and words

and silences

of your tribe.

And you hold on

until you have to let go.

It is, indeed, a precious thing to recognize exactly what it is - what person or collection of people, what peculiar combination of forces or energies, what place, exactly - brings one the keen joy that renders a human being both full of oxygen and just as breathless. The body can endure all manner of slights from the universe so long as the heart can sing, and at Bread Loaf I always find that song, the voice with which to sing it and a heavenly orchestra to provide the music.

Here, in the one recording I have of the staff reading, are some of those musicians: Nina McConigley, Gerald Maa, Greg Wrenn, Zachary Watterson, Avery Slater, Ted Thomspon, Christian Anton Gerard and, at the very end, myself.

track01

As I think about the year to come, and all the success it will bring to the people who were beside me this year, I am moved to close this post with the fabulous Eugene Cross, in living color, reading a section from his short story, ‘Hunters.’ The full story can be read here at Hobart.

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The words, “The End” apparently only exist for the purposes of lulling very small and, presumably, unimaginative children, into believing that stories should only be entertained so long as an author has control over the words. There is no other place that I have found which can lay claim to those words.

We may die, but, as pointed out so eloquently by James Ellroy in an article that appears in this week’s issue of Newsweek about the death of a girl, Lily Burk, he barely knew, we live in our words, our work, and the thoughts and memories and commitments and photographs and circumstances of the people who have known us. There is, in death, often more life than the dead could have dreamed possible.

We may come to the end of a story and know, as writers, that the unknown sometimes leads us to pause at that particular moment, allowing the characters to carry on and leave us voyeurs behind. Readers reach the last page and look away, taking fragments and associations with them, using them as advice or warning, handing bits and pieces away in reference, praise or blame.

I have been preoccupied with endings afresh, or the lack of them, as I came to the end of my treatment. I realized that this new “free” time was defined, for me, not by the ceasing of treatments, but rather the loss of a series of rituals I had come to enjoy:

My morning bike rides where I have to decide whether to take the low or the high road, the way I braced for - and twice misjudged - the approaching pavement, the preparation for the last stretches of uphill paved roads in both directions as well a the anticipation of the downhill runs, the way I had to think up some new way to announce my arrival to people who shared the sidewalk with me (to whistle? to talk over their iPods? to yell? to creep along near their ankles? to hope for psychic awareness on their part?), the exhilaration of making it each day and the inward thank god when I come across the bar blocking the escape of cars in the parking garage which was perpetually untended in those early morning hours.

The way I glanced at the clock by the empty reception desk to see how I had done in terms of speed and the daily contemplation and religious avoidance of the stack of new cookies in the waiting room (yes, they are out by 6.15 am!) and the way I experienced network news on TV, something I have never done at home.

Most of all, my curiosity about the nurse who looked after me as well as tended to the application of treatments. She works two jobs, coming in to this one early, by 6 am, and leaving by 3 to sometimes do a shift at the second. She has a home she just bought, a family of parents and siblings that gather together on occasion, a father to help her with installing a window in her garage, a dog who can no longer see her working in the garden over the raised fence she had installed, a couple of weeks back, to keep him in. She has flown in a plane just once, to go to a beach with friends after school. She doesn’t quite like NYC, but she likes the Jersey Shore. She is good at what she does, but she is terrified of my physician, Dr. Weiss, and of not having me set up to her perfect specifications before she comes in to check on me. She clips up her blond hair in a sort of casual up-do, and walks with a slight side to side step, like a skater might do out of habit, which makes her seem tentative and child-like. She bought a bike for $20 at a garage sale and they told her she only had to get the tires some air, but she hasn’t done it yet though she hopes to. She “has someone” but she never said more than that.

I wonder what her relationships are like, what she does when she goes home, whether she feels the same antipathy I did toward the resident who came in to help during the last ten days of my treatment. She seemed genuinely sorry to see me go when she said she would miss seeing me early morning. She always had a question for me, and she never sounded like it was just standard OP. She moved my hair away like it belonged to a person she knew, she averted her eyes when I drew back the covers, she smiled and in ways I cannot quite describe, made it something we were experiencing together. I miss her.

Which is how and why, I suppose, the end is not quite here. A specific time period during which I had to undergo a certain form of death, of a part of me if not my whole, came and went. And yet I remain, she remains, and we go on in each others’ lives. That period came and went and because of it I am a little less quick to own the road as it were. A little quicker to remember what blessings still exist. And even more than before, interested in ordinary stories, the ones that tell of people going about ordinary days, where nationality and culture and personal history simply illuminate interactions and imbue them with a truth that points to the ultimate insignificance of those broad-brushed colors in the scheme of human life and death whose own hues are both feather light and brilliant.

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It’s been a couple of weeks since I got back from Chicago, but the conversation which I wanted to write about then is still on my mind and will be for a while. There was a bottle of wine and a group of writers discussing the matter of America, what could be better or less controversial? So I was a little bemused when one of our group uttered that infamous holler of ignorance, love it or leave it. Who, the writer demanded to know, has the right to come here and expect that “we” (Americans, albeit foreign born or recent descendants of the foreign born), know all about them? Be sensitive to them? What gives them the right to tell “us” what “our” country should look like, be and do? They should be grateful, the writer continued – it was a little difficult to thunder given the volume of other Friday evening conversations at an open air venue – and not come here and just “expect things.”

Which made me muse aloud – okay, I admit, it was a sharper than musing – about the right people feel to dictate who among us gets to define America. Earlier in the day I had listened to Deepak Unnikrishnan (there’s a bio here and a review of his book, Coffee Stains in a Camel’s Teacuphere) speak persuasively about the obligation he feels to his classified-as-Indian parents, to write and speak of their work and the work of multitudes of non-nationals to build and sustain Abu Dhabi. Two years ago, NYU created NYU Abu Dhabi amidst a clamor of support and dissent, the latter for all the wrong reasons. There was nothing new about yet another part of Abu Dhabi society (in this case education) being fortified by foreigners, that was, after all, the way the society is set up. What is wrong is what has always been wrong: the way in which Abu Dhabians perceive, and therefore devalue, those foreign nationals no matter their status. Whether one lectures on Aristotle or swills the toilets, a foreigner is simply a hired hand with no say in the ephemeral yet intensely meaningful civic life of the city they call home.

Thirty five years into their tenure, Deepak’s parents are not considered natives, nor will their life’s work give them the right to stay should they lose their jobs. Appalling, isn’t it? And yet, how different is an America where its citizens express those same biases? Is it no more than an Abu Dhabi, then, on a grander scale, with greater freedom? Or isn’t it the case that every immigrant here, no matter their legal status or newness, their degrees or lack thereof, their 401(k) plans or their intimacy with the soil in which they grow the strawberries for our tables while they are sprayed with pesticides from above, whose labor and starry eyes and acquisitions and tastes create the texture of this country, has an equal right to define it?

Recently I came across this clip of the spoken-word artist, YaliniDream, who performed at my friend, Charles Rice Gonzalez’ space, the Bronx Academy for Art & Dance (BAAD). This is Marian Yalini Thambynayagam, who is a second-generation Sri Lankan American. “I am not entertained by your confusion” she says in this particular piece, responding to the people who, like my young friend mentioned at the beginning of this post, don’t know where she is from, don’t care and don’t think they should.

Momma’s Hip Hop Kitchen Vol. II: YaliniDream from Jennifer Hobdy on Vimeo.

Listening to her was certainly difficult for me, a natural-born Sri Lankan with a strong sense of my country of birth, and a different perspective and sensitivity to the work she is performing. While there is deep yearning articulated by her speaking of the one tear that a Sri Lankan immigrant tries to catch in his or her hand just so she or he can taste the salt-soaked oceans of their past, knowing the terrifying complexities that abound for those still on that small island and being familiar with the self-indulgent fantasies of those of us within the diaspora, place a barrier between us that I find it difficult to cross. But there is great rage and anguish in her performance and she is a very gifted. Moreover, the entire piece articulates what might actually run through the mind of your average immigrant/from-somewhere-else/multiply-affiliated/tourist in response to a poorly placed question. And aren’t those hidden thunderbolts precisely what drive us newcomers to say this is my country too? I will write my story, sing my song, speak my language, vote my politics, articulate my rage until I am no longer foreign to you?

I pick up books for no good reason; reason follows inevitably from the reading. And so, while re-reading the book, Half & Half: Writers on Growing up Biracial+Bicultural, I came across the following observation by Bharati Mukherjee:

In cities like San Francisco, where immigrants from Central America and South America jostle elbows with refugees from Cambodia and Vietnam, I’ve eavesdropped on thickly accented, enthusiastically conducted conversation “drive-through diagnostics” and “bun management” between people wearing fast-food-company logos on their shirt pockets. I want to think that in our multicultural United States, immigrants like them will play the stabilizing role that pride and history deny the major players.

The point is not to adopt the mainstream American’s easy ironies nor the expatriate’s self-protective contempt for the “vulgarity” of immigration. The point is to stay resilient and compassionate in the face of change.

Ah, at last, a happy balance where there is neither disgust at the people who “don’t understand” nor anger at those who long to be understood. Perhaps among the new, younger, truly multinational, Americans - like the President himself - there will be a recognition that patriotism is as patriotism does, and the same goes for citizenship. The country, any country, belongs to those who live in it, work within its borders, and help keep its many wheels turning.

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Okay, so this was supposed to be about conversations in Chicago about politics, but there’s time for that. I wanted to share this link that a friend posted on FB about the ‘Ten Benefits of Rising Early & How To Do It.’ which is written by author, Leo Babauto. Here’s #1:

Greet the day. I love being able to get up, and greet a wonderful new day. I suggest creating a morning ritual that includes saying thanks for your blessings. I’m inspired by the Dalai Lama, who said, ” Everyday, think as you wake up, ‘today I am fortunate to have woken up, I am alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others, to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings, I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry or think badly about others, I am going to benefit others as much as I can.’

Okay, so just for the record I’m not turning into (horrors!) a wishy-washing, touchy-feely, new-agey…..anything else?…..bore. Which is not to say that Leo is one. Leo has accomplished incredible things by simplifying life. I am far from that place yet, though I think some changes are afoot inside my head. But this post spoke to me because I wake up sometime after 5.30 now in order to get to therapy by 6.45 am. I wake up early because I decided to bike it there instead of driving. I chose the time of day and mode of transport because (a) I didn’t want to “wait for radiation” all day long as if it were the most important appointment of my day, and (b) because I wanted to do something healthy and right for myself and the world to counter the fact that I was going in to treat something that was “wrong” with me.

I am a night owl who now loves waking early. It is peaceful and lovely all along my drive which is only two or so blocks from Philly most of the way. I am moving slow enough to hear the birds, feel the air, admire the flowers planted around the many-roomed homes along the way - instead of cursing at their stop signs like I used to do. I make eye contact with other early risers, joggers, cyclists, dog-walkers. I sing as I go because those down hills make the songs burst forth. I’m not listening to recorded music in the car, it is just whatever comes to mind. At first I would sit back down on the bike when I saw other people, thinking they’d be concerned by a full grown woman standing up on the pedals, but now I don’t care what they think, I feel the world is big enough for their inhibitions, if such there be, and my lack of them.

There are moments when I wonder if this is “right” for me as I huff and puff my bottom up hills and/or am drenched by insensitive motorists on the main road, or worse, seek refuge like a child on pavements barely wide enough for cats let alone a bike and me atop). But what could have been a ritual that reminded me only of the impossible fragility of life and the way its end walks a heartbeat away from the conduct of our days, I am happy for the morning that has broken, and for the ability to bear witness to its coming.

Leaving a warm bed for that? Sure, it’s worth it.

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It’s been a week since I’ve been back from Chicago where I experienced a range of emotions. I got to be intensely frustrated, for instance, by having to look for a table as though we were trying to birth Jesus in a manger, and then having to wait an hour for no more than a pizza. I go to be bemused by my own interest in photographing my fellow-diners and myself as we were reflected in Anish Kapoor’s “bean” - more reverently named ‘Cloud Gate,’ - the giant polished steel-plated sculpture in Millennium Park that is like solid liquid mercury if such a thing is possible. I got to experience the happy oddness of being on a panel on politics which consisted of no less than four Sri Lankan (born in/affiliated) authors. More on that in another post, perhaps.

I got to watch one of my favorite things: a writer (in this case, Romesh Gunasekara), go from his ordinary life as an unassuming, gracious and quiet human being to embodying his art and electrifying his audience. It was too bad that I had to duck out after his first short story, set on a street in London where two men meet and are transported to the serendipity that might await them in an new life on Sri Lanka’s Northern shores. It was a marvelous picture-in-words of the possibilities people hold on to, whose very non-materialization is as important a part of their hold on us as is the prospect of making dreams come true. Romesh’s latest book is The Match.

I also had the good fortune of having deeply personal conversations with my host, Mridu Sekhar, who had opened her doors to me without ever having met me before; access to her food and room with a spectacular view and her lushly sweet and naughty grandchildren were add-ons. Mridu and I listened to Buddhist chants late into the night, and talked until 2 a.m. about the damage that can be done by kindness, the lasting hold that parents have on their children - she speaking of her father’s death, I of my habit of scolding my own for calling me every day, and about the way strangers meet and lift each other up.

I have always been drawn to people who are several decades older than I am, particularly women - the more decades, the better! They ease my mind with their words and deeds, making me feel that I am not carrying some monumental burden on my own, that the world is being held up by someone with greater wisdom than I possess. Perhaps that is why my favorite festival moments were with Bapsi Sidhwa, who combines charm and wit and sagacity in a wonderful bouquet. I look forward to re-reading Cracking India now that I have heard it in her voice.

Meeting and listening to Amitava Kumar was also a sheer delight. He is one of those people who can be entertaining without being obnoxious, self-effacing without being condescending, and…there’s a third thing here since all things must come in threes, but I can’t find it. Suffice to say that his reading of The Immortals by Amit Chaudhuri accomplished the difficult task of admiring a fellow-writer with the kind of clarity that serves as a guidepost to other readers, as well as an insight into his, Amitava’s, world view. I also enjoyed, for obvious reasons, his decision to read his essay on parenting his daughter, Ila. Having said all this, I was also acutely aware that he is not the sort of person to be a boor to an aspiring author, or anybody, really, but that he would not mince his words if he hated what you wrote. Which can be very funny, if it is not your own - bad - work he’s contemplating. Lord, may this not be my lot in life!! Before I go, and on that note, here is a clip of Bapsi speaking about forgiveness in her novels (this is the first youtube video I’ve uploaded!), and although it isn’t complete, it gives you a flavor of what she is like in person:

Overall it was great to meet all the South Asian writers, to share our experiences and grind our various axes. But it is always the conversations that stay on my mind. I’ll post on that soon.

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I have been away from the blog for a few days now - more on all that, I’m sure, at some later date when I have figured out how to talk about the latest discoveries of my life!

Meanwhile, I wanted to share this aerial view of Sri Lanka. I had never seen it before this and it is truly spectacular. It is true that, from a distance, everything in the natural world looks amazingly beautiful, and from an every greater distance, no one part of the earth looks better or worse than any other. So while I post the video, I also want to post the well-known reflection by Carl Sagan, excerpted from a commencement address he delivered on May 11th, in 1996. These thoughts are expanded upon in his book, Pale Blue Dot. View, read, tell me what you think. Alas, I seem to be unable to embed this media try as I might. I’m giving up and just posting the link here.

“(Look) at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

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A few years ago I found myself in a packed theater in a small town in Maine. The Waterville Opera House is one of those gems that we want to keep close; complete with scrolled sides and ornately framed, curving proscenium, an orchestra pit, and sloped seating. Not to mention people with the arts in their veins. On that particular evening, the Opera House was playing host to Ailey II, the brainchild of Alvin Ailey who began the ensemble in 1974 by gathering together the most promising scholarship students from the Ailey School to study, perform and teach.

There is something hungry about the Ailey II dancers. Most of them are, by the very nature of the program, brand new and eager. They can do what most dancers in major companies can do, but they are still “en route.” That makes all the difference. Their potential sparks off their bodies, their dreams of success, within their grasp but just beyond, ignite the air. Their movements are, therefore, full of the quality that makes dance joyful. It pours off the stage and picks up the audience and makes us all, even the hardiest hardy-Mainer leap to his feet. During that particular performance, mistakes were made, entrances botched. At least one dancer’s legs trembled as his partner flew through the air to brief safety in his arms. But being able to see the human, his frailty, his vulnerabilities, underneath the awe-inspiring virility of the dancer, is what makes that kind of performance memorable, and other, more perfect, ones, utterly forgettable. Their grand finale, a completely exhilarating, defiant and sexy interpretation - complete with some pursed mouths and neck action - of the spiritual, ‘Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham,’ was the perfect ending.

Last night I was reminded of that performance when I went to see Philadanco at the Perelman Theater here in Philly. The program, New Faces, showcased the work of four young choreographers working with the talented ensemble. Again, the most striking of the performances were not the ones that were most technically perfect. The somber, controlled and well executed Red Envelope (Zane Booker, World Premiere) had less to offer than the story-told vibe of Be Ye Not (Hope Boykin, World Premiere) which was both moving in its depiction of the desperation of staying out/fitting in, as it was exuberant in the way it dramatized that tension with one just-short-of-perfect dancer and the shoal like symmetry of the rest of the troupe. And while Rapture (Tony Powell, Company Premiere)was beautiful to watch and uplifting, with its theme of the ebb and flow of emotional and spiritual being, its very fluidity lulled the mind. On the other hand, Those Who See Light (Camille A. Brown, World Premiere) which consisted of all the dancers moving now together, now apart in a sort of crazy-making, syncopated urgency which brought to mind mysterious worker bees striving at some unending task in a different corner of the planet, had the edgy, street-creds of using every part of the dancer including and most specially, their stomach muscles heaving rhythmically with the music, to draw us in. Having made those distinctions, however, I also have to say that they are negligible on the strength of the work of the choreographers themselves who have created something well outside the scope of the ordinary.

Both these things, the youth and future-focus of the Waterville performance and the creative spirit of the Philly show seem to have been captured in the latest experiment in happy ingenuity set to sweep the nation or, in this case, the world. Watch, listen, enjoy. The fact that the “starter version” of the track was done by the now deceased Roger Ridley just adds to what is left behind. Click for an unforgettable rendition of ‘Stand By Me.’

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I am rushing off to catch various modes of transport to head to Washington, DC, but I wanted to share this beautiful song that I heard this morning. It is a song called ‘It Wont Be Like This For a Long Time.‘

I guess these are the thoughts that come to mind when leaving home.

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