Change In Plans

Greetings from the Catskills!

We have been in the U.S. for just over one action-packed week: Nashville, New York City, New Hampshire for my Mom’s birthday.  Now we are spending some time at our riverside shack in the Beaverkill Valley.  This place, and these people, are very important to us.  The only constant in Zola’s and Tallulah’s lives has been late June and early July in the Beaverkill.

My last post was about Zola.  I nearly dislocated my shoulder patting myself on the back so vigorously because I “knew my son so well” and “had such a close relationship.”  Smugness goeth before a surprise.

A few days before we left for the U.S., in the middle of his mid-year exams, Zola announced that he was getting baptised while we were in Nashville.  This came as a complete surprise.  He offered three pretty good reasons: (1) he has been taking Bible classes at school, and based on what he has learned, he wants to be a Christian; (2) all of his Tennessee relatives have been baptised, and he wants to feel like more a part of his family; (3) he isn’t sure if there is heaven and hell, but if there is a hell, and he can avoid it by being baptised, wouldn’t it be stupid not to take that precaution?  Reason #3 seems pretty compelling.

India, Zola and I had a few longish talks, and we offered our complete support.  I am still amazed that he initiated this whole process, contacted his uncle to perform the baptism, and went through with the whole thing in front of 2,000 Sunday parishioners.  Good for him, God bless him.  We applaud the independence of thought and action.

Zola also surprised us by doing better than expected on his mid-year exams, even in Afrikaans.  He is getting the hang of the South African school system.  It still seems slightly crazy to march them around like miniature university students, and expect them to teach themselves a lot of material, and write big exams starting at age 9.  Now that he’s 11, maybe it makes more sense.  Nevertheless, this is what we signed up for.  I am glad he is finding his stride.

Our trip to the U.S. has been good.  Because a full year has passed since we were in the Beaverkill (or in New York City or in New Hampshire), India and I keep marvelling at how quickly time has passed.  Not a huge amount seems to have changed in any of these places, but this may reflect investigative laziness on my part, rather than actual constancy/stasis.  We haven’t had enough time to catch up properly with anyone -friends, parents, kids, cousins- to get past the first-order facts of what is different in their lives.  Maybe during our time at the camp and with our Catskills friends. 

This is Zola’s 9th year in the day camp here: he started when he was 3.  It has been deeply reassuring to him to jump back in with the same kids and counsellors.  It is Tallulah’s 5th year.  Her baby friends have grown into young ladies.

Last night we had about 20 people over for an impromptu cookout by our pond.  I offered a simple blessing before the meal; actually, more of an appreciation than a blessing.  A cookout by a pond, with old friends in the summer twilight is not a grand or historic event.  It is not life-changing, but maybe it is life.  The appreciation was for how many things have to “go right” in order for this occasion to take place: our health, co-operation from the weather, having a beautiful place and the community of friends, a grocery store near enough and open, ability to travel from far and near.  All everyday miracles that I hope to not take for granted.  The recent invention of giant marshmallows, about the size of a baby’s head, is just a bonus.  

It is good to be home.

This is our last night in the U.S. before we move to South Africa. We flew up to New York from Nashville very early this morning, and spent the day making final preparations. After years of discussion, months of half-hearted preparation, and weeks of denial, (plus a few days of real packing) the move is upon us.

In the weeks of denial, I said things like:

“It’s the third time we’ve moved to South Africa. It really isn’t a big deal.”

“We’ll be back and forth so frequently that it won’t really be like we left.”

“With Skype and e-mail and cell phones and FaceBook and the NY Times on-line, and satellite radio, living overseas is nothing like it was when we left the first time.”

All of this is factually correct, but doesn’t change the fact that Cape Town is a long, long way from here. Best case, it’s a 24-hour trip, door to door. Long way to go for a weekend.

This evening, Zola actually cried a little, asking why we had to move. This wasn’t entirely surprising. What is surprising is that until today, both he and Lu have been so unambiguously supportive of the move. I think the 4:30 am departure from Gramae & Pop’s house, combined with the dislocation of being back in the West Village townhouse that has been home for the last four months, brought out an emotional reaction. We are all feeling some of that.

Last night, I lay awake in Nashville. Fretting. I’m excited about being back in South Africa, and about getting back into real work (details TBD). I’m slightly nervous about something terrible happening, but more realistically apprehensive about floundering professionally, or taking risks that do not pan out. I’m also pre-stalgic for the happiness and stability we have had over the last few months.

Tomorrow will be a long day: driving to Washington in our rented van, flying overnight to Johannesburg, and finally arriving in Cape Town at 11pm local time on Tuesday. We have a colossal amount of luggage, and are dreading long security lines and limits on cabin baggage.

Under any circumstances, we will be in South Africa soon enough. And it will be wonderful.

On December 20, 1999, India and I got up just before 5am. We drove to the base of Lion’s Head Mountain, in Cape Town, and hiked up for about 30 minutes. The weather was surprisingly cool and cloudy for early summer in Cape Town. We didn’t make it quite to the top, but it was an impressive effort for a 41-week pregnant woman. We took a picture of India’s exposed belly, with the Atlantic Ocean as a backdrop, and headed back down to the car.

By 7am, we were at the hospital, inducing labor. Our Ob/Gyn, Sheana, was a strapping, utterly confident, six foot two Scottish woman. She told India’s and my mother, “Don’t worry about a thing, ladies. Before nightfall, there will be a baby.”

India was in labor for about 10 hours. At mid-day we went for a walk in the sunshine. A security guard started walking with us. I asked him, in Afrikaans, whether he was afraid that we were going to steal something. He said, “No. I’m afraid the lady will step on a snake and hurt the baby.”

Despite the labor and the hot tub and lots of encouragement, it became clear that the baby was not coming on his own. At 7pm, Sheana said, “We’re doing a C-section. I’ve gotten my team together.” She told me to change and wash my hands.

If I had spent a few minutes more in the washroom, I would have missed the birth. Zola was pulled out by his armpits at 7:19 pm. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.

Ten years has passed. Zola is so much a part of our daily lives and consciousness, it is difficult to remember what life was like before him. He is a sweet, intelligent, funny, and curious little boy. We have shared great adventures and many happy times. We feel anormously blessed to have him in our lives.

Ten years!

Greetings from Bernardsville, New Jersey.

It is a rainy and cold Sunday. We made the long trek out to New Jersey from the city, visiting our old neighborhood and our storage space for the first time in a year.

It seems strange that we lived out here for nearly four years. As we drove, I recognized sights, and they resonated intellectually. Emotionally, though, they did not raise much of a response, except, “Did we really live here?” It seems like a long time ago.

Everywhere else we have lived, even for a short while, made a lasting impression, and evokes emotion around specific sounds, sights, smells. Not sure yet why this place does not.

Seeing all of our stuff - three storage units full of furniture, clothes, toys - evoked more emotion.

I was glad to find a pair of boots that I was looking for. It saved me from buying a new pair.

I laughed as India pulled another ten pairs of her shoes from boxes. She doesn’t like when I refer to her as Mrs. Marcos.

She was happy to find a photo exhibit she had been holding for a South African friend. Apparently, the exhibit is being displayed in Washington on November 1st, so if we hadn’t been able to find it, India’s life would have gotten a little complicated.

Mostly, though, I re-experienced the great feeling of liberation we had when we started our travels. Shedding all of our possessions, even temporarily, for the (relatively) unencumbered life on the open road was just great. I remember how excited and eager we were to get going. We locked the units, drove to the airport, and forgot about 95% of our possessions.

Now we are in rented-house limbo, so we don’t really need our furniture or most of our other stuff. When we move back to Cape Town in December, we will have to figure out what to ship, what to continue storing, and what to give away. My emotional response is “give it all away.”

At some point, though, we will own another house, and need things. In the meantime, I’m happy to know they are safe, dry, and there if we want them.

I hve been reading Bruce Chatwin’s book, “The Songlines”.  In part it is a travelogue of his time in the Australian Outback, trying to understand the role of Aboriginal culture in Australian society.  A big part of the book, though, is Chatwin’s debate with himself on the role of travel in human civilization.  From his own experiences, plus excerpts from anthropology, philosophy, and paleontology, he concludes (basically) on balance that mobility is the source of humanity’s ennobling characteristics.  When societies settle, they become warlike to their neighbors and repressive to their weaker elements.

The trip to the storage space goes directly to the root of the tension that Chatwin describes.  The act of putting our possessions in storage represents freedom and mobility.  The existence, and importance to us, of these things represents stability.  “Mobility vs. Stability” is the perpetual and unresolved conflict in India’s and my life together.  It is no wonder that we have been arguing nastily from the moment we arrived here. 

We have to hurry back to see They Might Be Giants in a family concert at NYU. The drummer’s daughter is in Lu’s class at the Blue School. I think we have swapped experiences for possessions for the last 16 months. Not a bad trade, but also possibly not sustainable.  More to come.

Greetings from New York!

Zola and Tallulah both started school last week.  Zola is in fourth grade at P.S. 3, the John Melser Charrette school in the West Village.  Tallulah is in “4s” at the Blue Man School on Houston and Avenue B.

For Zola, it was a shock being dropped into a big public school after three years of small-class coddling at the Willow School out in New Jersey and 15 months of no school at all.  India had to work pretty hard to get him accepted to P.S. 3.  In the late summer, she started trekking over to the school every day, usually taking Zola and Tallulah, to plead her case to the administrators.

I had not seen the school, but had heard Zola’s wide-eyed commentary from his summer visits: “It is a huge place.”  ”It has cages over the windows, “There is no grass or sand in the playground.” “It smells like barf.”  The last comment was probably just from the fresh paint.

Through India’s sheer relentlessness, Zola was finally accepted into Beth B.’s fourth-grade class. We all went to school together on his first day.  Zola walked slowly, and with his eyes wide, like man condemned.  The closer we got to the school building, the more slowly he walked.

All of Zola’s late-summer impressions were overwhelmed by the sheer number of kids that poured into the gymnasium to wait with us before school opened on the first day.  Hundreds and hundreds of kids: tall, short, black, white, Asian, Latino, long-haired, funny-haired, short-haired, bespectacled, loud, quiet.  On the morning of the first day, packed into the gymnasium, they were mostly loud.  He clung to me physically as we climbed four flights of stairs to his classroom.

There is definitely a lot more diversity at P.S. 3 than we had at Willow.  I feel woefully uncool surrounded by tattooed parents, talking about film production and lesbian activism. I became aware (again) of how the last year has been a bubble.  Our kids have had no fixed schedules, no real demands put on them, and loads of 1:1 adult attention.  Public school is not exactly like that.

After the first day, Zola said, “Do you want to hear about the worst school in the whole world?  Well, you came to the right place, Dad!”  From that point, it seems to have gotten better with each passing day.  

Zola is making friends, getting used to being out the door by 8:05 every morning, and doing homework.  He was disappointed that “no one seems very interested in my trip around the world,” but that is OK.  If nothing else, he (and we) appreciate how special our time together has been.  He us enrolled in after-school activities ranging from ping-pong (with the world’s former #11-ranked player) to fencing to “stunts and skills.”  He nurtures a dream of becoming a break dancer.

The school is about a 10-minute walk from our rented house.  I am enjoying the morning walk with Zola each day.  We have had a few tough mornings, when we couldn’t get him out of the house, and we were worried about being late.  Mostly, though, we have nice conversations about video games, movies, and the weapons and planes used in World War II.  At least it is not Pokemon.

Our long re-entry to the U.S. after our trip feels somewhat less ragged now.

Lyme, New Hampshire

Greetings from New York!

The days and weeks are flying by.  India and the kids returned from Nashville just before Memorial Day, and we have been sort of jammed into this small one-bedroom in SoHo together.  

On Memorial Day weekend we were up in the Catskills, which was great.  The kids spent hours catching (and releasing) frogs at our pond, and at the little pond by the Inn.  They had camp on Saturday and Sunday, and Zola had a sleepover with his friends Wyatt and Charlie.  We saw lots of our summer friends, and regaled them with stories from our trip around the world.  The average enquirer probably got a lot more detail than he or she wanted.  Summer will be fun.

Last Thursday, India and the kids drove up to my Mom’s and stepfather’s house in New Hampshire.  I flew and drove up on Friday evening, and we had a very nice weekend together.  Mom and Steve organized a family reunion on Saturday evening.  We had had a similar gathering in New Hampshire just before we left, so the events seemed sort of like bookends on the trip.  India and I had a chance to talk to Mom and Steve for a long time on Sunday, and they asked a lot of second-order and third-order questions about the trip that we had never really thought about before.  The trip was a rich experience, and it was fun for us to think about it and discuss it.

While they are in New York, India is trying hard to organize one major event each day.  If she didn’t do this, I think all of them would really feel aimless and out of sorts.

On Monday, they went to the war museum on the aircraft carrier Intrepid.  None of us had been since the boat/museum was totally renovated a few years ago.  Zola came back with stories of kamikaze attacks, flight simulators, and radar invisibility.  He continues to be enthralled by war and all of its trappings.  He and Tallulah bought a small collection of metal fighter planes, which have been underfoot constantly since they brought them home.

On Tuesday they all went to the Statue of Liberty.  Tallulah thought this was just fantastic.  Tuesday night she told me in  detail about the statue’s flip-flops, about the boat ride, and about the museum.  She insisted on calling the statue “Lady Liberty.”  Zola was mostly interested in the amount of security they had on the island, including a bomb sniffing machine.

This evening we went to see the play Mary Poppins on Broadway.  As you would expect, the singing and dancing and the sets were spectacular.  It is a thoroughly professional production, and fun for all of us.  India and I appreciated intellectually how difficult it is to sing and dance so well.  For Zola and Tallulah (particularly), it was all just magic.  At the very end, when Mary Poppins flies out over the audience and into the balcony, I thought Lu might jump out of my lap and try to catch the actress’s skirt as she went by.  Lu was bursting with joy and wonder.

I had forgotten that the core plot line is the story of a repressed, workaholic father, who rediscovers his inner child through the interventions of Mary Poppins.  Sounds also like the plot of Pretty Woman

, actually.  At one point, as the father was acting gruff and telling the children he was too busy to say goodnight to them, Zola leaned over and said, “That was like you before we went on the trip, Dad.”  

We have talked a lot about this theme of how I used to be, and how I changed during our year away.  It was interesting to see Zola make that connection and tell me about it.  I’m not sure whether I am slipping back into that way of being.  The fact that I made it to dinner and a play with the family at 7pm on a Wednesday night is a positive leading indicator.

Mostly what we need at the moment is clarity and stability.  This is a difficult time, frankly, but we are doing our best to work through it.

Happy Birthday, Mom!

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.

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.”

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 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.