An expatriate in my own land
The Scottish Widows ads baffled us. It was 1995, which in the UK of yore was still like the ’80s, pre-New Labor, with post-war vestiges and the occasional luxury of a deep bath. And there was a lot we didn’t understand. Scotland, north of us, would be colder and more damp. Being a widow there might be more sad, especially if you could not afford to heat your castle.
Continue reading “Welcome to the Widowhood”
Originally published in 2012.
The best laid plans can go astray in the run-up to Christmas and you may find yourself having to buy a last-minute gift, as I did yesterday.
In the weeks leading up to holiday I have felt that I have been engaged in a kind of stress challenge, a triathlon for moms that measures thoughtfulness, organization and endurance.
Radio 4’s “Woman’s Hour” recently had guests Allison Pearson, author of I Don’t Know How She Does It, and journalist Deborah Orr on to debate the extent to which an Asda supermarket commercial was celebrating reality or perpetuating gender stereotypes and whether or not Christmas is a mother’s realm, her undoing, or her finest hour.
It hits a nerve, right?
In an anthropological aside, an American ad would never end with giving the mom a glass of wine. Instead mom gets external validation, male approval or female envy, a sticky kiss from her son or Santa winking from the rooftop or the husband’s arm around her shoulders.
So, here, in an effort to help you in this final push before the big day, or as on online note to self as I train for next year, are some last-minute gift ideas: Continue reading “Keep calm and win Christmas: 10 last-minute gift ideas”
It is Thursday morning, Day 6 of the capsule wardrobe, Project 333 experiment. My friends and I are recording the month. Some notes.
Monday evening: Cosmetics are not part of the project, but I go through my box of make-up and am delighted to find an iridescent, electric blue eye shadow that I had totally forgotten about. I will wear this tomorrow.
Tuesday morning: I look for my Cholly earrings and can’t find them. Charles made these for me in high school out of a sheet of metal from his dad’s sequin factory. He experimented with different shapes and sold them at a Soho boutique. Most were round and dramatic with connecting parts, but mine are long and skinny, almost like feathers. Remember feather earrings? Remember buttons? I wore these earrings almost every day in 10th grade. I kept track of them through all of those high school sleepovers, sleepovers after parties, sleepovers after my friend’s play, after Trader Vic’s. Taxicabs, Magic Tree, rain, coffee shops, the quiet key in the door. I picture the glass-topped hotel side tables I might have laid them on in January. I am pretty sure I wore them in Atlanta last month. They are a blackish blue, not shiny, but not dull. They would easily be lost on a reflective surface. The edges are worn, distressed metal from summers of corrosive beach air, 30-plus years of being handled. They are a very physical souvenir of all of these years—of a friend who is still making things, of being a kid in New York in the 80s—and completely irreplaceable, so if I left them in the hotel they are gone. I look in the bags I took. Not there. I say goodbye to them.
Tuesday evening: But I am really good about not losing jewelry. In a hotel, I slip things into my purse rather than leave them on the side table. They are very thin and maybe they are actually in the jewelry box, but I just didn’t see them, but I tell myself this is a vain hope. I take the box into good light and there they are, tucked up against the side. What else is in here?
Technically, for Project 333, you are supposed to include your accessories, even sunglasses, in the 33 items you wear but I’m not doing this. Anyway, I thought, in terms of making more space in your life, the jewelry box is going to occupy the same space whether it’s full or only has six items in it.
The box has an upper tray, where I keep earrings. This is where I find Charlie’s earrings. Right where they should have been. A reversal of loss. The tray lifts out and underneath is are bracelets and a small green velvet box. But as with so many other things, clothes, recipes, ideas, we keep skimming the same things off the top. We get used to what is there and we stop seeing. This is why supermarkets rearrange the shelves so often. It’s not more efficient all of a sudden for them to put the napkins in the far back corner, it’s that when you walk your route and lob the napkins into your cart without thinking you are not considering other purchases you could be making. You are not looking for the napkins. Once you devise a pattern, they rework the maze.
I never look under the tray. When I get dressed, I reach for the earrings on top. I forget about the necklace I had bought in the Bermondsey Market one dark and early morning. My new, now old, friend had taken me there, back in the days of her introducing me to London. We had eaten breakfast in a caff, English bacon, then new to me and not what I thought of as real bacon, but would come to love, mugs of strong tea, a place filled with mates and geezers, and always a few tourists on a recommendation from their Lonely Planet guide, “off the beaten path,” or from an expatriate women’s club newsletter (see previous post) or word of mouth among expatriate women, or the sheet of recommendations they typed up for visitors, or a blurb in Time Out.
I knew better to think I would be buying antique silver candlesticks for a song. I do not know enough about English china, nor had then logged enough hours of Roadshow to think I would in any way be able to get a bargain. This was the “thieves market,” where anything sold here, under cover of darkness, was fair game.
But I wanted to buy something, at least a souvenir of having come. Had we brought a flashlight? That was part of knowing what to do. I remember driving out we asked someone for directions and as a point of reference, a man actually said, “Do you know the muffin man?”
Inside the green velvet box are a pair of earrings I bought the first fall we had moved to Alabama. We were downtown and A. was visiting. Before we knew she would be coming, I had signed up for a 5K run for cancer research, something I had never tried before, but I was trying to fit in and be part of the community. After the race we went to an antiques store and I bought them. I don’t think they are even particularly old, but they were pretty and different to anything that I had. Not long after, a stone came loose and they joined the endless list of tasks that, when you are new, take longer because you don’t know where to go or who to ask for a recommendation. It was easier to leave them in the box.
I open the box. The stone is fitted back in and I can’t tell where the repair is needed. One back is missing. The post is bent. The box rattles. I shake out a lone earring, whose twin is in the tray, and another pair of earrings that I had forgotten about to such an extent that for a moment I thought they might have come in the box from the antique store. But then I remember them. Why are they in the green box? Had they needed a repair too? Had the earrings mended themselves, left alone in the dark for three years?
There is a lesson here, in this box within a box. Damaged treasures. The friends and places that seem to envelop them, why getting rid of certain clothes or things can be so hard because it’s not the thing itself but all the memories it conjures up.
Wednesday night: Having fewer things forces you to take better care of the things you do have.
Thursday morning: The older daughter is now taking a business and career class, a freshman requirement. One thing they can do for 10% of their grade is wear business clothing one day a week. I lend her a skirt and survey the rest of the clothes I have placed on the other side of the closet and consider what constitutes a business wardrobe for a freshman who has yet to decide upon a career. Will this require the creation of a capsule wardrobe based on anticipating the sartorial standards of a teacher I haven’t met for a career, the idea of which we hope to nurture, but which is hypothetical. For the boys, of course, this will be achieved with khakis and a blazer, whereas for the girls, do I tell her this?, it is much more complicated.
Photo, screenshot of photo of clipping (New York Magazine?) from Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York.
Juxtaposition
In the arrivals hall, men hold digital slates and cards with names. Look for your name. Oh, the garage is small. We enter London’s morning from the west. A Lucozade sign fizzes with neon effervescence. In a field by a roundabout a pony grazes under CCTV.
Each scene is puzzling and tightly packed, like a clue in a cryptic crossword. In the field, under surveillance, at home, headless, backwards, endless, initially, oddly. We carve and slice the words to revise our understanding of what is being said. The clue is always at the end or the beginning.
Remember this road? The grey barleycorn brick houses that would look so nice on a brochure if you crop out the eight lanes of traffic in the front yard. The Hogarth Roundabout, the Hanger Lane gyratory, traffic words from morning radio reports. Exhaust, exhausted. Many B&Bs along this way, thick blackout drapes, one hopes, double-glazing.
The air is thick with pollution. A compact car is driven by an older man in a maroon sweater. Two passengers sleep with heads on pillows pressing against the windows. Long car journeys with boiled eggs and Thermoses of tea or coffee. Everything pushed together.
On the Edgware Road, a man in a leather coat withdraws money from an ATM while two minders literally watch his back. Children ride ponies in Kensington Gardens. Look at the trees, mature plantings, so much texture, so many shades of green, so many shapes of leaves.
Remember that flat we looked at to buy that might have been a bordello? The windowless rooms, something sinister about it. We are in the street where the guidebook said the magical museum of childhood would be. I remember pushing the stroller, looking at the number on the page and the enticing description of the carousel that was no longer there. The museum had closed. I’d never heard of such a thing. More cheap rooms to let, bed and breakfast, fake School of English, visa scams.
On Baker Street a beefy Russian-looking guy in his late 50s with longish hair, linen blazer: “Darling,” he says into his mobile, “I want you to give me some good news.” Who would hang out on Baker Street with all the buses and traffic rushing by?
Reversals
The Older Daughter has an English accent. “Did you adopt her in London?” a child asked me recently.
To solve the clues in a cryptic crossword, you have to read them the right way. It helps if you speak cricket and know the names of rivers. Once the answer reveals itself it’s hard to believe you hadn’t seen it all along. A clue gives the appearance of being a cohesive thought. The answer is defined by a word or words at the end or beginning. You have to work out which part is the definition, which the clue, and what type of clue it is. It is important to read each word independently of the others. The sentence is trying to push your thinking one way, but you have to resist and remember, it’s not really a sentence. You don’t understand what you’re reading yet, like being in a foreign country, where you don’t actually know exactly what you’re seeing.
Containers
There are more puzzles to solve on the tube: A man with a script for the Retiring Prime Wardens Succession Dinner. I read over his shoulder. It spells out the events to come, to take place in a hall, enacting centuries of protocol. He wears a cheap suit and gets off at London Bridge. The Guild of What? Prison wardens? Fishmongers? Cabbies?
A group of Italian girls enter the carriage, excited chatter, tourists, youth hostel. One girl with a flattened nose wears a tight tee-shirt that reads, “Bad decisions make good stories.” A souvenir to commemorate one already taken or part of her travel agenda? How good is her English?
Another mystery: those green sheds. They’re cafes for cabbies. One near us let us in once for tea.
“Oh,” our driver says, “don’t tell anyone. There’ll be an uprising. They don’t know what to moan about next. Oh, the price of diesel. Oh, the last passenger I had put his feet on the seats.”
Moaning disguised as small talk in lift in Russell Square tube station:
“It’s slightly warm in here.”
“Just a bit.”
Homophones
I buy a book of cryptic crosswords for the train to France. In France, it’s all a bit cryptic. If your grasp of your own language is tested by the crossword puzzle, you are now reduced to scrabbling for scraps of meaning. A friend who now lives in Paris says, “Five years on, I’m still Tarzan.”
A sign for Abyss Piscines and the piscine, standing up on its end, looks from a distance like the niche for a saint or a virgin, abbess, station of the cross.
The Older Daughter invents words, like “ettigency,” but is also very literal. She struggles with idioms and hidden meanings, but she is unafraid to try French. She learns to ask kids at the pool to jump in with her, to sauter avec moi. Hide and seek in French, we learn, is cache-cache. But the girls are courageous about the cold water. Not brave. In French, brave means tough.
“When I grow up,” says the Older Daughter, “I want to hang out on a farm with animals, like Shirley Temple.”
Designer of abattoirs granted MP line crookedly (6, 7). That’s a bad one, but you get the idea.
Pieds sensible are not sensible shoes, but delicate feet. I understand this is about chiropody (podiatry) but choose to find the humor in the mistranslation and the belief that others will jump to the same initial mistake. Also, the shoes are sensible and the lady looking in the window has on sensible shoes, which makes it funny, in case that needed to be explained.
A river of language, navigation, deviation. Interdit! Attention! To what? Of what? Beware of the something.
Ah, I say, tapping my pen on the puzzle, not refuse, like won’t, but refuse, like trash.
The Younger Daughter dreams you need a language license and in her dream one of the children we are with trades his language for another. He gets a bad exchange rate and ends up with only half a vocabulary.
Some things transcend language: A woman at the train station comes out of the bathroom with the back of her skirt tucked into her large white underpants.
Foreign
Dinner at the farmhouse in the vineyard. At the end of one long table is an English party of parents, grown children and their friends and partners, at the other the multilingual Dutch group staying on the caravan site. We are in the middle, with a couple from New Zealand—Liz and Jean. Jim? JEEN—and another couple from England, who create a very awkward break in the introductions when they arrive so that the slightly sunburned and apologetic girlfriend of one of the English sons is cut off just as she is about to introduce herself. English people can be mortified by introducing themselves. That end of the table are making an effort. She tries once more to go through with this humiliation, as one must in a foreign country, but the late-arriving English woman, missing the cues, is now being convivial and unwittingly casts them adrift, freeing them from the responsibility to speak to the rest of the table.
The Older Daughter talks to the Dutch party and uses some odd phrases of her own devising. I start to explain, but the man she is talking to looks over and says to me, “I understand.”
“I don’t think anyone ought to stand up anywhere in politics and say there is a group that are so wealthy that they should be given a free ride and should be excluded from having to carry the kind of burdens that other people have, particularly in a time of austerity like this. If we’re going to be a coherent society, and that is absolutely fundamental to our success and our prosperity, everyone has to carry a share of it.” So said Susan Kramer on the Today program/me, (BBC Radio 4).
The phrase “coherent society” struck me.
I was half-asleep in the middle of the night when this show was on. In an accent cloaked in good woolens this was how articulate someone could be while being provoked by news presenter Justin Webb, who jumped on the Lib-Dem Treasury Spokeswoman for being disingenuous: Did Nick Clegg not even tell her about his policy? But she held her ground, pushed on and then she came out with the above. Maybe she read it from her notes, but she spoke uninterrupted.
The idea that the people at the top of the socioeconomic scale have any duty to those at the other end and that this connects to our success as a society, or that coherence is of value, does not seem to come into play here in America. I don’t think we are especially interested in being a coherent society.
In these pre-election days of political rhetoric, people are wanting to restore the promise of America or turn it around or get it back to work. America has oratorical coherence, in the moment. Words are spoken with emphasis and precision, (except when someone uses the “wrong words.”) It all sounds like it’s supposed to make sense. It makes sense when you agree.
Definitions of America are partisan. It’s about freedom. No, it’s about freedom. America is symbolic of being about potential, sacrifice, freedom, success, road trips, individuals, immigrants and baseball, but what you have is a celebration of the individual and sports tribalism. America is not about sharing or collective responsibility. We make promises to America about getting them a job so they can afford their own health insurance and be free. In my family’s lore, the 10 newly arrived immigrant brothers drank a pint together at a pub in Philadelphia before setting off independently to seek their fortunes.
From the other room, I can hear the convention. During Romney’s acceptance speech, people break into chanting “USA, USA.” It was weird. It sounds both forced and completely fanatical. He was pushing their crazy patriot buttons.
I have been thinking about America in the dystopic atmosphere of The Orphan Master’s Son, a novel about modern-day North Korea, a book that I was surprised to find myself reading let alone liking for the humor and for the way the idea of identity and story are considered and played out. Adam Johnson’s portrayal of America through the eyes of his North Korean characters is distorted and funny with shards of truth sticking out.
In the word’s of Johnson’s fictionalized Dear Leader to a Texan Senator:
“Yet in America’s capital, five thousand black men languish in prison due to violence. Mind you, Senator, your prison system is the envy of the world—state-of-the-art confinement, total surveillance, three million inmates strong! Yet you use it for no social good. The imprisoned citizen in no way motivates the free.”
There was much in the novel that was awful to read, hear about, think about. It is a book I would recommend to you, but with a bunch of disclaimers about heartbreaking, toe-curling brutality, but then it is also a provoking interpretation of how society shapes our story.
“‘But, in America, people’s stories change all the time. In America, it is the man who matters,'” says Dr. Song, one of the government officials in the novel who travels to Texas with the protagonist.
Much of the rhetoric of British political debate is towards a fair and just society. There is less I and more we. In America, we champion the rights of the individual; the we is less about all of us, but rather for the people in our ideological camp, our demographic bubble, maybe, if pushed, our state. The restraining hand that keeps the flailing arms of the opposing parties from pummeling each other is the law. If there is too much we it ceases to be about us and becomes the I of whatever government or dictator defines us. Then it becomes them.
As the novel’s North Koreans release their American kidnap victim, the loudspeakers report:
“Still, her departure was a sad one, as she was returning to America and a life of illiteracy, canines, and multicolored condoms. … And we must admit: she belonged with her people, even in a land where nothing is free—not seaweed, not suntanning, not even a basic blood transfusion.”
Image: Tower of Babel, c.1563, Pieter Brueghel the Elder
My husband spent last week in London and returned home with treats for everyone. It’s funny how reductive our tastes can be: tea, biscuits, Smarties and the Queen.
There were also requests for Rescue Remedy, a particular facial toner my daughter uses and tea tree oil, all of which I’m sure we could find at the healthy supermarket if we could be bothered to drive for 25 minutes. These were emotional touchpoint requests not deep desires in and of themselves. We miss our old life enough to want some visual reminders.
When we had just moved back, I bought Twinkies. The girls had never had one. It would be educational and I wanted to see if they were still as delicious as I thought they were in my teens. They weren’t. No one liked them.
This story on food Americans miss when abroad includes things which, except for Mexican food and hamburgers, aren’t very good, but they signify home.
Not all bagels in NYC are good. Most aren’t. Favorite place? Brick Lane Beigel Bake, London, their bagels, small and chewy, still warm and filled with cream cheese and lox. And Carmelli’s, a place up in Golders Green, North London, did decent bagels, too. It just takes a while to find what you think you want or need.
That we bring back teabags (and of strong builders’ tea at that) instead of loose tea may indicate a lapse or lack of standards. There is, it turns out, a place downtown that sells freshly roasted coffee beans and a selection of loose tea. That is where we should be shopping. We have known about it the whole time we have lived here but have thought, oh, it won’t be that good, it’s inconvenient, the hours are stupid. (They don’t open until 9 AM on weekdays!) And maybe so, but if and when we ever move or it closes this will be the kind of place we pine for.
While he was there, I pictured the shops along the street where his hotel was. The things I would have asked for couldn’t have been brought home: the thrill of discovering an obscure book in the Oxfam used book shop, a sausage roll from The Ginger Pig, smelling soaps in Ortigia, the beautiful packaging of Rococo chocolates (I will ask for a tea towel next time), browsing for ribbon for my work ID badge in V. V. Rouleaux, getting picnic provisions at Waitrose and passing from a summer street into the coolness of a park in an ancient city.
The older daughter asked for Smarties, but what she really wanted him to do was ride the new Metropolitan Line, which she has seen on YouTube, and tell her about it. Even for me, the irritants of tube travel, the repetition, the black snot formed by breathing particles of burnt rubber train wheels, the Metro and its sensationalist headlines, the arrival at your stop, the series of escalator journeys up towards Big Ben that was a stage in my commute, become the stuff of dreams.
We leave France in the morning and touch down in Washington, DC, that evening. In between is a long coach journey through Hemel Hempstead, a 60s shopping center to your left, a bucolic canal walk to your right, two old ladies in sensible walking shoes, ignoring the great rush of traffic being inflicted upon their woods, their Ladybird land. There goes a dog, a bloke, some girls with sculpted, partially shaved hair and stripy tights, a mum with a pushchair.
On a sign is my favorite town name, known to me only from seeing it emblazoned on a blue commuter bus that went along the Finchley Road, the street by my work, up and down which I rode the 46 bus for several years: Leighton Buzzard.
Hemel Hempstead is one of the New Towns, settled around 8 AD and rebuilt after World War II to provide that Ladybird-like utopia of order and rightness. It has a Magic Roundabout, a Catherine Wheel of mini-roundabouts in a circle, with a logic that is beyond my comprehension. The canal runs through it. The ladies maybe came to it when it was better than what they’d got, a bombed out street. You’d be happy, too.
At Heathrow, I call my mother to say happy birthday and discuss literature. Zola (he’s really good) from me, May Sarton from her, now merged in my visual memory with the criss-cross of silver poles and swathes of glass and tarmac-y landscape of Terminal 5.
We are camped on the fake granite floor waiting for our gate to open, eating our French provisions, the last packets of salami and bag of olives from the olive man. One last wild romp through Boots: Nurofen Plus, Olbas oil, flapjacks, expend loyalty card points on purple nail polish. A last fling with the newspapers, the cryptic crossword. The British man I sit next to bemoans the loss of his wife to duty free shopping.
In the bag drop queue we meet a Scottish man working for a French company in Qatar. We chat. If we had met in different circumstances, we probably would have become friends. The state of expatriatism, which actually is much like normal life, now that we don’t live and die, most of us, in the same place, and if you do, many others don’t, so you are always having to replace people, rebond, say goodbye.
And then we are filing onto the plane, away, away.
Washington: a place for which my mother actually made me buy a beige outfit circa 1980. We were going to a luncheon at the State Department. Knife pleat skirt, knitted top. The shoes from B. Altman’s, that I would wear again if I still had them.
DC is like a reprogramming center for American citizens returning from abroad.
We are held here for a couple of days, to be reminded that this, this, this is where we live. It is all about America and straightforward democracy, and not flashy. Cure yourself of pretentiousness, appreciate your history. The reference point is indigenous decency. Stop looking to Europe. Stop laughing at the cars marked secret police. They know they’re not being secretive. They are your protecting your president.
At the Smithsonian Museum of American History we see everything and go downstairs for lunch. One of the women clearing trays decides we might be worthy of a good view and leads us to a table on the other side of the room where we sit with a view of a victory garden with the Washington Monument rising up behind it. Pure symbolism.
I grew up with a set of Ladybird books and they make me happy. The children in them liked Shopping with Mother, Helping at Home, Going to a Party. They modeled things with plasticine, milked cows, learned history. It was Richard Scarry with realism. My children liked them, too. For a while, I trawled charity shops for them and amassed a collection. I even found one on this trip. They imposed an order, like that of the diagram above, which is not always possible but to which one may aspire.
I write this on the heels of what has been the week of disorder in Britain. Children the ages of my children, the children from the mother and baby groups, the holiday playschemes, the government initiatives, those savings bonds that we were ineligible for, running riot and everyone trying to account for it. Is raiding a mobile phone shop a faster path to the material goods you want or an expression of dissatisfaction with an increasingly materialistic society? Stealing the phones is acceptance. Burning down the Sony distribution factory is discontent.
We are held in a state of waiting to go home. I walk through galleries and galleries of American art and artifacts. America: The ideas are good. The food sucks. By the time our plane touches down for the last time, we are happy to be home.
Our plane touched down in Heathrow on a Sunday morning. We were met by a car and spun through the mini-roundabouts, past the art deco tube stations, my older daughter calling out the names. O, the little terraced, stuccoed cottages, the buses and the traffic all passing 20 feet from the curtained front parlor. It has all been going on without us.
We stayed in a friend’s flat in the building where Benedict Arnold lived. Interesting that he is identified as an American patriot; a kind of backward compliment? A reminder that whatever you were is what you continue to be, regardless of what happens later?
The plaque is surrounded by scaffolding. The landlord has been ordered to tidy up the facade for the Olympics. London is under scrubby-uppy orders. So Catherine the Great, with all the scaffolding and cranes. Hopefully they will not hide away the uncute children.
We recovered from travel at the Porchester Baths. Happiness is a liter of water in the hot room and three rounds of plunge pool. Our friends had come from the American Ambassador’s Fourth party where among the guests were an English politician and a Scottish actor.
We dropped into London the way you might alight from a Routemaster bus between stops, jumping off in the direction the bus was traveling and being submerged in the indifferent crowd.
We spent the evening of the actual Fourth of July in a pub with our friends and assorted children. It is how we always celebrated the Fourth, “which was never,” said the younger daughter happily, or, more accurate, randomly. We are back in the irresponsible land of expatriatism, where you are free to interpret the customs; yours, theirs; and choose what and how you will celebrate, being neither here nor there.
I had forgotten how nice bitter is. American beer is too fizzy. Happiness is a pint and pub banter. The ease of meeting in a pub, sitting outside, the only downside being cheese & onion crisps (I never liked them.)
Later in the week, I take the girls shopping. We start at Topshop. If we lived here, we would be starting to come here together, for them more than me. They find things in petites. This was where I had bought a long, stretchy dress that I wore throughout my first pregnancy. Back then, you couldn’t buy maternity clothes from regular shops, just horrible polyester things from Dorothy Perkins, cheap tailored suits designed to conceal your bump, that had hidden zippers.
Checking out, the cashier says to the younger daughter, “I love your accent.” We chat, confirm our Americanness, that we are visiting.
“The Fourth of July, what’s that about, then?” she asks.
“It’s the day we declared independence from the UK.”
“You what?”
“We were a colony… part of the Commonwealth…”
“Really!” she exclaims. “Are you serious? We had you?”
“Oh,” my English friend and I say in unison when I tell her about it, “bless!”
“Oh, poor love,” my friend laughs. We imagine she will tell others about this interesting fact she learned from the American tourists, the American patriots who carry a treacherous love for the old country.
Things are not so good in Alabama right now. The day of storms went from overcast to brilliant sunshine. I am on the phone with someone who is in Florida watching the storm map. It’s going to be really bad, he says. Outside is beautiful. The first storm is about 20 minutes away.
I collect the younger daughter, where she is sitting in the girls bathroom with her classmates and the adults, who are watching the rainbow of weather sweep over us on radar maps. I join them until we get an all-clear. Then we drive to the older daughter’s school. There are about 20 minutes until the next storm hits. This is our window.
Outside is gray and blustery. My car windows are all fogged up. We pass a car that is totaled, as if it were dropped on its front corner: wind, panic, other car, random bad luck? A few blocks later, an enormous tree has been uprooted, its branches snagging the power lines; the traffic lights are out.
Mommy, this is so exciting, says the younger daughter. I can understand, she continues, that for the adults, you might be a bit worried. You’re thinking: Can I get everyone home safely? But, for us kids, it’s really fun.
The rain has picked up when we reach the older daughter’s school. The children sit against the walls. The teachers have walkie-talkies. Then we all need to take a brace position. The crossing guard comes in. The principal walks the halls and tells everyone what great job they’re doing. The rain lets up and we dash across the parking lot and back into the car.
I’ve counted six police cars! the younger daughter exclaims.
The rest of the day is spent with the TV on, the sirens wailing, the grating caw of the emergency broadcast system. Seek shelter, go to your safe place, hail the size of mothballs, golf balls. A sighting, a wall cloud, a hook, a super cell. In the UK, weather talk has some good words, like parky and diabolical, but essentially you are describing a range of cool and damp. Wednesday was a meteorology-fest.
We sit in the bathroom, the one interior, windowless space in our house with the dog, sometimes the cats, sometimes flashlights, sometimes pillows, and listen to the radio. If this goes on all night, will we have to take turns sleeping in the bathtub? It is a very small bathroom.
Then we lost power.
That night was thundery and dark but the storms had passed so no one had to sleep in the tub. We lay in bed listening to the aftermath take shape. After the rains come the floods, the displaced snakes, the tainted water supply. Don’t jump into standing water because the fire ants will leap upon you as their means of escape. Insulin can last without refrigeration for up to 28 days. Put a frozen roast in the refrigerator to help maintain temperature.
We listen as the fatalities double by the hour. Water is still fine to drink but the mayor suggests people set some aside. A local radio station is running on a generator. Local TV stations are broadcasting on the radio.
If you know where there is a business open or a place to donate food or diapers, call the station. The news people keep up a steady stream of information. Check on your neighbor. Don’t call 911 and ask where you can buy gas. Don’t sightsee. Don’t drive. No power means no gas. Keep it in perspective.
While the storm is raging you are looking at the map of the county not the country but when you pan back you see how large a storm it is and it is the worst weather happening in the US. We are on the map. State of emergency, federal reserve troops are called up, friends from Europe email. Obama comes to Tuscaloosa.
We evacuate to a family house in small town until they give us back modern life as we know it and where, conversely, there is wifi. No power? An older man we know just chuckles. We didn’t have power in the country for a long time, he says. Not til the 50s. He means electrification. We cooked over wood. I went to school over there. We had a uniform. The girls wore a white collar over a navy dress. You got some cedar branches to clean it. Boiled flour to make starch. Iron in the fire. And they looked good. He chuckled like that last time we saw him, when he saw we’d fixed our dog.
Because people would ask me, Huh, London to Alabama? That must have been a big change. I would match that with, Yeah, totally. And I was driving myself crazy. Now, I can say, Yes, indeed. Big change, but it’s not exactly what you might think, whatever it was that you were thinking. Read my blog.
Because ever since I started writing things down I have had a fear of losing my diary. And when I don’t write things down—oh, my life is boring and I know all about it—then it will change or the children are born, or older, and I have lost any hope of being able to have a factual, and by that I mean an authentically impressionistic, account of what it was.
Because I wrote very little about leaving New York, our time of arrival in London, and not so much about our last days there either. I thought, well I had better write about our re-entry to America. And so I did. I emailed a portion of it to friends in London at some point. And people said it was good, send more. And I said, yes, of course I will. But the process of sifting through one’s diary and making a narrative was daunting and I was busy. So I didn’t.
Because almost a year later we were in Mexico City and I was keeping a journal on the same laptop and when we got home it would not boot up. And I hadn’t backed up any of what I had been writing all that year or any of the photos, except the Mexico ones on my camera. And that sucked.
Because now I write as I go. You have the option to read. You are not obliged to reply, as you might be if I emailed you. It’s an anti-procrastination strategy.
Because life, wherever you live, is interesting. The picture above is one I took at the Island of the Dolls in Xochimilco, which has a network of waterways for streets, which is what Mexico City was like before they filled in the canals and it became the megalopolis it is today. We took the ecological tour and this is the turn-around spot.
Because there is always a story to tell. A heartbroken man who had lost his family, or a loner, there are different versions of the story, repaired to the island. One day he rescued a woman, or she was a young girl, from drowning but she subsequently died and he was afraid she was haunting him or he wanted to make her happy. He hung up a doll to ward off her spirit or to keep her company. Then he started collecting thrown-away dolls from the trash. Then people would come and trade him dolls for the vegetables he grew. Then he drowned. The island is now featured on lists of the World’s Creepiest Tourist Destinations and has an amiable groundskeeper.
But this would have been a better story had I written it when we were there. Or told about the whole day, with the mariachi bands on the canal boats for the family outings and how we rode all sorts of public transport to get there and what an amazing and complex city it is, like Istanbul, New York City’s Canal Street, a modern city center in Europe and a tropical island all jumbled together, with archeological excavations, ancient civilizations with human sacrifice, Art Nouveau cafes, Edwardian era hotels with elaborate birdcages, Zara, street food vendors, Mercedes taxis with lousy suspension, three-foot deep potholes. At least I have some photographs. But sometimes they are only worth 200 words.
Because life is filled with missed opportunities.
The question I am not yet ready to answer is, When does it end?
The Other Side 