Change In Plans

Greetings from New York!

This afternoon I was desperate to get a haircut.  The last time I got a trim was in Cape Town in January.  The last proper hair cut was from the traditional Turkish barber, outdoors on a ledge at the Cave Hotel, high above the rock formations of Cappadoccia.  That must have been September.

I went to a place across the street from the McKinsey office, where I have gone probably 25 times before.  It has faded from its former near glamour, and is now a little sad and run down.  They even took out the televisions that used to run continuous loops of fashion-show videos. много спермы

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The woman who cut my hair was Eastern European.  She grimaced and pursed her lips as she did a slow examination of my head. 

She ran her fingers through my hair and said, “So you want  more highlights?  Highlights again?”

I explained, “Actually, I don’t have highlights.  My hair got a little blond on top because I was outside in the sun a lot for the last year.”

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She didn’t say anything, but in any language, her expression said, “Yeah, right!  ‘Fess up, bottle boy!”

Regardless, she cut off most of the blond.  I felt a little nostalgic as I watched the hair fall to the floor.  I thought of sunny days in Australia, and in South Africa, and in Namibia.  I thought about skiing hatless in Switzerland, and surfing in New Zealand.  Blondes really do have more fun, I guess.

There will be more sunny days, more surfing, more skiing hatless.  In the meantime, back to brown, and back to work.

Greetings from New York!

India and I are experiencing a semblance of what our lives would be like if we had not chosen to have children.

Both kids are in Nashville, having a wonderful time with Gramae and Pop. The parade of chocolate cake, Bionicles, Cartoon Network, and cousin love continues.

India and I have been living in New York, sort of as if we were childless. We have been going out to dinner, seeing friends, living the high life. We saw the Black-Eyed Peas in concert last night.

This morning I left before 5 to go to Washington for the day (another shock to the system). India said she woke up completely alone for the first time in over a year. She went off for a 15-mile run with her friend, Sarah.

We miss Zola and Tallulah, but I’m not 100% sure they miss us yet. Soon enough, we will be together again.

Greetings from Nashville, and happy Mother’s Day!

We have had a fun, normal weekend as a family, together in Nashville. India and the kids had already been here for 10 days without me, before I arrived on Friday morning.

Friday was packed with activity.

As I walked up the concourse in the Nashville airport (while postponing a call scheduled to begin the moment I landed), I was very happy to see little Tallulah sprinting down toward me. Her blond hair was flying as she ran, and she leaped into my arms.

Zola followed a moment later, and nearly knocked me over. He has bulked up to 89 pounds during his time in Nashville, eating lots of cake and fried food.

India was slightly more restrained in greeting me, but we were all very happy to be embracing there in the corridor. Our team reunited.

We spent a couple of hours with our friend, Kim, who continues to recover from a kidney-pancreas transplant. She has been going through intensive daily treatment with a gamma-globulin derivative and corticosteroids. It appear to be working: her fevers have broken, and her pancreas is producing insulin again. She looks great, and seems to feel OK (ish).

It’s hard to imagine the medical odyssey that Kim has been on, while we have been on our geographic odyssey out in the world. It’s also hard to imagine that Zola, our baby boy, probably outweighs Kim by a little.

After lunch, we raced across Nashville, dropped the kids with Gramae and Pop, and went up to our local Department of Motor Vehicles. Somehow India and I had both let our driver’s licenses expire while we were traveling. This creates lots of problems.

Fortunately, it only took about 45 minutes to get new licenses on a Friday afternoon. As they say on the south island of New Zealand: “Bob’s your uncle.”

The next 36 hours was a blur of ice skating, Benihana-like Japanese dinner (the kids loved it), a torrential thunderstorm with hail, a long run, a kids’ scavenger hunt, a big roadside fun fair, a barbeque, another long run, church, a Mother’s Day picnic in a flooded park, and skateboard lessons for Zola.

I also spent several hours at the Verizon Wireless store, swapping out another dead BlackBerry. No tearful eulogy for that “hardly knew ye” one.

We have had fun, but mostly it has just been very normal and natural to be with India and with the kids.

Tonight, Zola cried for a while before he fell asleep. This is the first time he has cried in my presence in many months. He is sad because India and I are leaving early in the morning. She is coming up to New York for four days, as we try to make plans. He is bone tired too.

More broadly, though, I think Zola is feeling rootless, and slightly aimless, and definitely unstable. This seems reasonable, given our situation.

It made India and me sad to see him so upset. To a certain extent, we are accounting for the ragged reentry as part of the (psychic) cost of our adventure. It puts the onus on us to create a stable situation as soon as we can, which involves all four of us living together.

Being in Nashville, our home town now, after our travels, I was struck by the simplicity of two big questions that seem to get a lot of press coverage and punditry.

1- Why is GM losing so much share that it will file for bankrutcy? Because GM cars are almost all terrible: ugly, unreliable, and jammed with unwanted and annoying features. The pickups and SUVs are better, but the cars are just terrible.

2- Why are American health outcomes so terrible when we spend so much money on healthcare. The high cost comes from poorly aligned incentives: basically no one makes money keeping Americans healthy. The poor health comes from eating bad food, smoking, and not exercising.

It is good to be back with my family, and to have a shred of normalcy for a short while. Tomorrow morning we start with the abnormal again. /p>

Greetings from Soho, in New York City.

Last week, my BlackBerry cell phone basically stopped working all together. First, after many months of not rolling upward, the trackball in the center refused to roll downward as well. Then the device froze entirely, and apart from the sad side-to-side motion of the trackball, none of the keys or controls worked.

Like the owner of an incontinent pet, I knew it was time to say goodbye.

With heavy heart, I walked up to the Verizon store on West 57th Street. Raoul, in the service department, told me that the BlackBerry was still under warranty, and that he would replace it immediately, free of charge. This BlackBerry had come into my life on the day that we departed for Madrid; the beginning of the second leg of our world-round trip.

That day seemed like decades ago. How could a warranty last so long?

Raoul got a shiny new BlackBerry from a box, and hooked it to the right side of a desk-top terminal. He hooked my old, beaten BlackBerry to the left side of the terminal, and hit a switch. Raoul explained that the terminal would transfer all of my data from the old device to the new one, and that it would only take a few minutes.

As I watched my friend have its brains sucked out, I thought of everything we had been through together:

• Getting wet on the dinghy of the gulet boat in Turkey
• Being damp, frozen, crushed, and thoroughly sweat upon during the Haute Route ski trip (when half of the buttons stopped working, and then miraculously healed themselves)
• Listening to Zola speak to his friend Matthew, who was all the way back in New Jersey, as I swatted mosquitoes in a dusty tent in Rajasthan
Cleaning South African sand from the keys after it fell from a beach bag in Cape Town (and Namibian sand after dropping it in the dunes near Swakopmund)
• Cracking the screen by dropping it on the tile floor of the Hotel Agave in Positano

I thought of the countless mornings when I read the New York Times on-line, and the terrible days in October and November that I watched the financial world implode through the little screen.   I thought of the dozens of blog posts that I had tapped out with my hypertrophic thumbs in Morocco, and in Turkey, and in India, and in Australia.

I thought of the night in Namibia, 300 kilometers west of the South African border, where I walked up a huge hill in the moonlight, because I suspected (correctly) that I would get reception from the top.

This all seems a little pathetic. But while we traveled, I was clinging tenuously to my feelings of relevance, and connectedness, and of my very existence outside the small bubble of my untethered family. When I was in Switzerland, away from my India and the kids for the first time in months, I clung to them through garbled phone calls at the edges of frozen cliffs, standing on tiptoe in the cold wind to get a signal.

I clung to all of those important things through my cracked, worn out, barely functional, constant-companion BlackBerry.

As I took the new device, and thanked Raoul, he packed the old one away. Maybe it will be sent to a lab, where the RIM engineers will try to figure out why it stopped working after only 10 months. If they only knew.

Goodbye, old friend.

It is nice, though, to have a trackball that rolls upward again.

This short post is about my first week living alone in New York.  Please pardon the terrible pun in the title.

India and the kids spent Monday running around in the city. Tallulah’s friend, Clara, came in from New Jersey with her mom, and the little girls had a joyful reunion amidst princess dresses and crayons.   Zola remained aloof, reading a book and working on math.

On Monday afternoon, we all met in the East Village to visit a pre-school for Tallulah called “Blue Man Creativity Center.”   While we were traveling, we had read about the school, founded by members of Blue Man Group for their own children. Like everything in New York, admission has become very competitive, with artsy parents sending their kids from all over the city. Even though it is a school, the “Creativity Center” tag is symbolic of how they teach.

Somehow India crashed the admissions process, and got Tallulah an interview on the last day before admissions decisions were made. At BMCC we found ourselves in a kids’ paradise of paints, and electronics, and lights, and experiments. Tallulah and Zola both jumped into activities, while India and I met the director and staff, and tried our best to present ourselves well.

I’m not very cool under the best of circumstances. At the BMCC I felt conspicuously square and conventional. Fortunately, the people were all very welcoming and gracious, and pretended not to notice how unhip I am. More important, Tallulah and Zola were in top form, happy and sweet and playing well together.

On Monday evening, Zola and I went for a walk. He let me put my arm around him while we walked, even when we passed a group of girls his age. I think he was sad that we would be spending time apart.

Early on Tuesday morning, India and the kids were up early, and gone to Nashville. The “living alone” part of living alone had started. It was difficult to say goodbye.

The rest of the week passed quickly and strangely. I got a glimpse of what my life would be like without India and without kids. I would not like it.

I had fun seeing friends, and going out for dinner. But I missed the noise and the activity and the closeness of having all three of them near me. I can barely recall the many, many weeknights I spent away from them in the months and years prior to our trip.

On Friday night I drove up to the Catskills alone, and spent the night in our cabin in the Beaverkill.  This is the only place which is truly ours. All day Saturday I did normal Beaverkill family activities: riding bikes, clearing fallen trees, swimming, getting ice cream. The strange part was … no family.

On Saturday night I drove back down to the city and went to a friend’s engagement party. Aside from phone calls with my family, I had more conversation in 10 minutes at the party than I had had in the previous 24 hours. The solitary life would not exactly suit me.

This time will pass, in fragments and chunks. I will go to Nashville, and India will come back with me. We will all be together for the long Memorial Day weekend, and then they will be with me for some time after that. Still, this is not what we are used to, and not fun for any of us.

A final note: on Friday afternoon the Blue Man Creativity Center e-mailed us, accepting Tallulah to the half-day program for four year olds, starting in August.  We are delighted and excited.