Photos You Can Hear

Mt. Horeb Holy Church Choir, Kigali, Rwanda. These should cheer you up a bit after the previous post. Photos by the gifted and adventurous Christina Syndikus.




The woman in purple was totally, I mean totally. I wanted to either marry her or steal her life force, assuming those are two different things. The woman in glasses next to her is her sister, and also a rocker.







I sometimes think that if you knew you'd be singing this music at the end of the week, you could stand almost anything during the six days prior. Plus there are rehearsals.








A singer in the choir, she just walked to the front and did that once in a while. Wait, what do I mean walked to the front?







It was a privilege to be there.












Okay, here are some more. I took these.






waiting for church






Christina outside church (Paige in foreground)






choir strutting






in purple





Yes!!!

Murambi Genocide Memorial Center; Church of Ste. Famille

At Murambi, about 40 km from the Congo border, there was a vocational school with many small classroom buildings. In 1994, Hutu militia herded thousands of Tutsis into the buildings and killed them with machetes or spiked clubs. The breakage pattern produced by each kind of weapon is easy to distinguish on the skull.

The classroom buildings are now a memorial -- room after room of skeletons. The perpetrators doused the bodies with lime immediately after killing, to hasten disintegration, but the skeletons remain and some of them have patches of black hair on their heads, and even shreds of clothing.

The memorial rooms stink of death, still. On the pelvis of each skeleton there are two or three camphor balls to ameliorate the smell.

I'm including as few details as I can. I feel it is important to give you a glimpse.

Below, a mother holding her child. The red ribbon was placed there by a visiting relative.




The man below lives at the Murambi site and serves as an unofficial guide. He is standing outside the building where we saw the skeletons of his wife and five children. He does not leave the site. On the left side of his bald head you can see a round indentation where a bullet struck him but did not penetrate.



French soldiers used bulldozers to cover the mass graves at Murambi, then built volleyball courts on top. The French had commercial interests with the Hutu leaders at the time.



It's a pretty country.



Below, the church of Ste. Famille, the Holy Family, in downtown Kigali, the national capital. Many Catholic churches were genocide sites. Authorities, in more than a few cases priests, deliberately deceived the victims into thinking they would find sanctuary in a church. Thousands at a time were crammed into the small spaces: 20,000 in this one, which sounds impossible, but the perpetrators were experts at making use of space. Typically the victims were kept inside without food or water for up to two weeks, then shot or slashed. According to Costa, who stands in the foreground of the photo, the churchyard was filled with dead bodies when he arrived with the Tutsi militia on their revenge mission.




Recommended reading.

I promise, the rest of the Rwanda posts will be cheerful ones.

The Masked Neocolonialist

The mask is a public-health measure designed to protect the population, and ourselves, from flu. When we arrived, there had been one confirmed case of H1N1 in the entire country, and a few days later, there were three more, all of them in our little compound. While we were in Muhanga, an hour from the capital, a couple of us felt sick and went to the central hospital in Kigali for tests, which came out positive. A third tested positive shortly afterward, and the public health officials told us to wear masks (we informed them that masks had been shown to be of zero value, but they weren't listening). I kept my mask on for about two minutes, not long enough to learn to put it on properly.

I never developed any symptoms, owing in part to the fact that I belong to the least susceptible age group of Americans, in part to having drunk about a gallon of black elder berry extract over the past weeks, and in part to not giving a shit. I've made friends with my inner germ, and if it wants me it knows where to find me. Otherwise it can go bother someone else.

Most of my colleagues remained under house arrest while Pamela (the other uninfected mzungu) and I traveled north to see some mountain gorillas. In Muhanga, a sound truck cruised the streets announcing that Americans had brought disease, and to keep away from us. When we walked through the streets, children covered their noses and mouths and turned away. The Rwandan newspaper New Times had an article about us.

It was Columbus and the Indians all over again. We came to serve, and wound up bringing a new disease. Except that in this case, we apparently managed to keep the bug away from the natives: Costa was flu-free, and our houseman Gigy, a hip young guy about whom more needs to be said at some point, tested negative despite wandering around in an enervated red-eyed funk, mask securely fastened.

Gorillas in the Mist, H1N1 in the Guest House, Heaven in the Church, Mud Against the Wall

Help, I have a lot more to say! Here's a very quick recap:

1. I previously opined that the church service was disappointing, but the following Sunday we all went to another one, at the same church, that knocked our socks off. We'd come too late for the choir the first time, but on Sunday we were fully present and armed with the spirit. They sang beautiful African gospel harmonies, dancing to the music, passing the microphone from one section of the choir to the other; and two or three of the women, including a pair of knockout fortyish sisters (alas, I did not get their phone numbers), were possessed with the greatest joy, hopping up and down, pointing ecstatically to the congregation, and had voices to match. The visiting preacher was a visiting bishop from Kenya who oversees 500 churches, and not only the power, but the benignity, of his preaching was beautiful.

2. We went to work on finishing two traditional houses made of mud brick, funded by Groundwork Opportunities, a nonprofit that helps fund our host Costa's work. No time to link now - I'll do it in future posts so you can donate! What we did was pick up handfuls of coarse wet mud that were poured onto the ground in heaps, and sling them hard against the handmade bricks of the wall. The mud gets smoothed down with a long horizontal stick, and after drying, is stuccoed. The owners of the two neighboring houses are families that were on opposite sides of the genocide and are now close friends. They are delighted with their new homes, into which they invited us with the greatest kindness. Among them was a six-month-old girl, Giselle, who loved to chew my index finger and thumb.

3. A member of our group and I rode four buses and a moto (motorcycle taxi) through rain and mist and bad roads from Kigali in the center of the country to Volcanoes National Park in the north to visit the world's last remaining mountain gorillas. The population is a bit over 700 and gradually rising. It costs $500 a person for admission (mostly applied to conservation and community projects), up to $50 for a guest house room, and $80 for a short jeep ride to the park, and it's worth every penny. We hiked up through the rain forest for about an hour, then reached the area where the trackers said the gorillas were. (There are several gorilla troops, and small groups of up to 8 tourists are assigned to each.) Our first contact was when the silverback rose up before us at a distance of about four feet to check us out. Our lead guide went into a crouch of submission, lowering his head and covering it with his hands, showing the boss that we meant no harm. We spent an hour with our gorilla friends, who included five females and five children as well as Mr. Big. Hundreds of photos were taken; locations were carefully shifted with those of the gorilla troop; the scientifically recommended distance of 7m was maintained. It was one of the highs of a lifetime.

4. We returned to a guest house increasingly full of sick muzungus wearing useless but bureaucratically required surgical masks. Step by step the situation became a farce. A doctor with his driver drove an hour from Kigali to swab-test the First World visitors; shortly afterward, an ambulance with another doctor drove up to the community center where we were doing The Work of Byron Katie with a group of HIV-infected women. The second doctor didn't believe in the existence of the first doctor, but they were put into telephone contact after much crosstalk among many interested parties. Upshot: we do have two confirmed cases of H1N1, but no severe symptoms, and some of us may have other viruses instead. Costa, Pamela, Brenda, and I have no symptoms, and quickly tossed away the surgical masks that were presented to us as solemn necessities when we returned to our home guest house. The crucial goal now is to be declared uninfected so that one can be put back on the plane on Tuesday instead of having to spend seven days in quarantine. We'll see!

Love,
Richard

Muhanga Days

We're in the very nice small town of Muhanga -- "we" meaning our little group of seven muzungus and muzungettes -- treated with the greatest hospitality by our host Costa's brother Leopold, who bought us a restaurant meal and invited us to his home to dinner, and the mayor, who's paving our way with the prison administration, and a couple of Canadian guys we don't even know who are paying our bill at a guest house for five nights.

We're finally getting down to some serious work here, which may make me feel less like I'm sponging off people. We were supposed to do the Work of Byron Katie at the prison yesterday but the warden was away and couldn't arrange security for us. Then we were supposed to assist in mud-brick house construction in the afternoon, but we had a downpour so we sat at a protected outdoor terrace for a long time having good conversation, assorted brochettes, and the by-now-expectable great, homemade fries. In the afternoon, as a group, we did The Work with five HIV-positive Rwandan women of various ages, perhaps helping open their minds to new, less painful ways of seeing their lives, and it was moving experience -- clearly difficult for the women to think about their pain, and they expressed gratitude afterward.

Today we're booked to work with prisoners again and do the house construction. It feels as if my experience is shifting from travel exploration into community service, and that feels exciting and a little scary.

I haven't had many opportunities to sit quietly in places where there's been Internet access, and at times I've been borrowing other people's paid online minutes, so I don't think I'll be able to post more frequently than I have been, but I wanted to say hello and tell you that everything's fine. Did I mention that there's wonderful camaraderie among the seven of us? I've taken lots of photos and written lots of journal notes, so when I get back to the States I'll winnow through them and post them and give you a much more detailed and thought-out picture of this experience, which I consider to be one of the privileges of my lifetime.

National Work Day

Today's a national work day in Rwanda. They have it on the last day of every month. For a couple of hours in the morning, everyone does community work, cleaning the streets and so forth. This helps explain why the streets are so clean!

Meanwhile, I, the muzungu (white person), am sitting in the living room drinking excellent Rwandan mountain tea and eating chappatis and typing. Eveywhere I go, children call out, "Muzungu!" and say things like "Hello" or "How are you?" and shake my hand. The other day we walked past a long line of prisoners in orange jumpsuits -- these are men who have admited their role in the genocide and are being rehabilitated -- and a couple called out "muzungu" and I gave them the peace sign and they cheered. Have had experiences similar in the big open-air market and on the streets.

Last night I attended a charismatic church service at my hosts' chuch. I'd seen them often on TV but never in person, and I found that in person they're just like on TV! A portly, sweaty guest preacher bounced from one end of the stage to another proclaiming that nothing had given him satisfaction like God, telling us that in order to reach Canaan land you have to go through pain (the Bible text was a passage from Joshua about how God commanded the children of Israel to be circumcized again before they could enter the Promised Land). Mic'd, it was as loud as a rock concert in the 300-person room. There was singing and dancing afterward to a drum and organ accompaniment, and I was shocked to find that the Africans clapped on one and three instead of two and four! Neither was the dancing marked by any particularly magical looseness of limb, imaginative improvisation, or the like.

Yesterday was spent pleasantly sitting in a bare undecorated restaurant in the town of Muhunga, where I ate cooked cassava root and brochettes of goat meat and goat liver and, not least, some very good french fries. (There's a good beer here, BTW, called Primus, light and tangy with a slight sweetness, made from sorghum. There's also banana-based beer, which I hope to try later.)It rained briefly and hard and we went inside from the cafe terrace to watch, with a couple of new friends with whom we practiced three different languages. One was a geography teacher in secondary school, who teaches in English, a language of which he could trade only a very few phrases with me. I drew him a map of the US -- assuring hiim beforehand in French that I was the world's greatest artist -- and it was all new to him.

The schoolkids have just gotten thrugh a national exam that lasts, I think, two days. They all dress in clean outfits and wait tensely for the results. Acccording to Costa, private schools in Rwanda are good but expensive and the free public schools are overcrowded and not good. Oddly, Protestant schools here have a good reputation but Catholic schools do not.

There's much more ethnology around, much more than can fit here. Just wanted to tell you that everything's going well. Next week should be more serious for us -- doing The Work of Byron Katie with prisoners and other traumatized people. We've done a little of that so far, and it honestly seemed to have led some shut-off genocide survivors to open up. I've seen people smile who, according to my host, have not done so in years, and cry at confronting things that they had hid from for even longer.

Fourth Morning in Rwanda

I'm getting used to a pleasant routine. Five-year-old Gentil is counting teabags in English before he gets ready for school; Costa is bouncing baby Queen on his lap and humming to her while his wife Bernadette takes a well-deserved break; Grace the servant (who was rescued by Costa from post-genocide abuses a couple of years ago) hands him Queen's bottle. Queen returned from the hospital yesterday afternoon, a couple of days after we'd expected. It turned out she had an intestinal infection, possibly caused by eating something off the floor while crawling. She took antibiotics IV for a couple of days, then they released her with an oral form of the medicine, and now she's looking perfectly content, although she looks at me with a puzzled expression at times.

The floors have been mopped and the front and back patios dusted, as on every morning. Yesterday my clothes were not only wash by hand but ironed, an experience most of them had never had before. Breakfast will be fresh, thick, soft Senegalese-style chappatis, sweet rolls, and Rwandan coffee or tea. Today Costa, our German friend Christina, and I will be taking a bus to the southern region of the country, about an hour away, to meet Costa's mom, who wants to give Costa her expert instructions on how to take care of Queen's convalescence.

Over the past couple of days we've been to two different genocide memorials, one, on the outskirts of town, a very suitably gruesome setup in a church where 5,000 Tutsis were rounded up and killed in one day. On a platform, hundreds of skulls are displayed; on the platform below it, countless leg bones; across the room, a collection of rusted machetes and clubs.

The other memorial, in town, was erected by the Belgian government in honor of ten Belgian soldiers who were killed trying to protect the opposition party leader on the day the genocide began. Ten simple memorial columns in the yard; educational posters in the now-empty rooms where the soldiers took their stand; grenade fragments and bloodstains on the interior walls; fist-size bullet holes all over the exterior walls.

It's hard to imagine a nation that is more constructively aware of its problems or facing them more honestly and progressively. And not just the genocide: a nationwide anti-litter campaign has been very successful, HIV awareness is all over the media (there's one TV station, government-owned, and seven radio stations, some of them foreign), and Rwanda, with the highest population density in sub-Saharan Africa, has the second lowest malaria rate, largely due to educational programs such as the Bill and Melinda Gates' foundation's work in promulgating mosquito netting. In addition, Rwanda's parliament is 55% female, the electorate having recoiled from the violent governments that produced periodic genocides and massacres from 1959 to 1995. Rwanda has received a fair amount of international aid in the past fifteen years and has used it well. To me it appears that if the average American were as aware of our nation's problems, and as committed to solving them, as the average Rwandan is for Rwanda, in a decade and a half our inner-city schools would be graduating masses of literate, ambitious, responsible adolescents, the problems of gang violence and drugs would disappear, our health care system would care for all Americans equally, and our government would mobilize a nationwide environmental cleanup and infrastructural upgrade. In other words, we would be the nation we ought to be. A much, much poorer nation than ours is accomplishing equivalent goals. We could even do it without the need for genocide memorials.

Where Am I?

Using a German keyboard in an unpaved neighborhood outside the center of Kigali. Just gettting the machine ready with a Sim card transferred from a cell phone was a triumph, and I don't know how many minutes' credit I have. I recently awoke from 45 straight hours of travel, Austin-Minneapolis-Amsterdam-Nairobi-Kigali, which included an afternoon walking around Amsterdam. There's so much to report already that I don't know where to start, but the people are lovely, the setting is one of Third World low-rise urbanization familiar to those who know Morocco, Greece, Costa Rica, etc.

I've even now heard stories which are too chilling, sobering, to tell here in a rush. They require books.

Two more weeks -- how will I be different at the end? This afternoon I'm going to church, an English-language service, with Costa. I thnk I'm also scheduled to accompany him to talk to a woman who has HIV as a result of the genocide.If I can't describe such things fully yet, I hope that time will allow me to.

Costa's year-old daughter went to the hospital last night, a problem with digesting breast milk. She's okay now.

Amid all this, things like not shaving and showering,and wake-sleep shedules, and brushing teeth from a half-glass of boiled water, seem of minimal import.

The completely ordinary, and the worldwide problems of economics, coexist here with the unimaginable. Will I be able imagine it after I've heard it? If so, there's the danger of it becoming ordinary: "Oh yes, you told me that story before." A defense mechanism to keep it at safe distance.

Meanwhile, there's fun! Meeting delightful individuals, immediate friends; talking a mix of English and French, and building affection through the effort; drinking East African coffee and tea, among the world's best. Watching TV, which is just like all TV but in a different language. Saw a good Congolese movie last night, though, a somwhat realistic romance-melodrama featuring famous regional musicians and actors.

Fifteen more nights under a moquito net, in a shared hot room where no mosquitoes are seen. Playing with 5-year-old Gentil, who can count to 1,000 in English and taught me how to fold a paper boat and blow bubbles.

See you later! Forgive me if I don't answer comments while I'm here. Later there will be photos and more time to write at length.

Ready to Go

I'm starting off toward Africa today and I'll return on Nov. 12.

Today it's the Minneapolis airport for five hours, which may be the most boring part of the trip. I chose a long layover rather than a 45-minute one, thinking that the latter was too risky for an international flight. Overnight to Amsterdam where my layover is long enough so that I hope to get out into the city for a walk and lunch. Then on to Kigali, Rwanda, via the Nairobi airport, which I've read is neither as bad nor as good as it could be.

I'm not bringing my computer, but there are internet cafes in Kigali so I hope to drop a few posts in here during my stay. I might save the photos for after I return -- there's a learning curve involved, I just bought a camera last night.

Stop by once in a while and see what's happening!

It feels utterly cool...

...to go into Radio Shack and ask for a foreign travel electrical adapter, and when he asks what country I'm going to, say, "Rwanda."

Six more days.

Obviosophobia

"No one in our family can ever say anything obvious."
--John Althouse Cohen, age 8, c. 1989

Is it obvious to lay off blogging for a little while? It hasn't been planned, it's just way the days have unfolded for the past couple of weeks.

I can assure you, though, that beginning about October 22 I'll have some interesting experiences to report. On that day I fly to Rwanda for a two-week mission of peace and reconciliation.They have internet cafes there, so I hope to do some posting.

In the meantime, something every once in a while.

UPDATE: A writer friend once told me I have "a genius for the obvious." I don't know how it was intended, but I took it as a compliment.

coming attraction

...and yet stay tuned for when, in late October, I travel to mysterious faraway locales to bring peace and reconciliation to a strife-torn world.

All I'm saying about it now is that taking malaria pills is cool if you don't have the actual malaria.

African plans, macrobiotics, white bread

1. I look into flights and immunizations for my autumn trip to Africa.

2. After a long workout I take myself to dinner at the all-you-can-eat macrobiotic restaurant, Casa de Luz. Sweet potato soup, aduki beans and brown rice, steamed zucchini with walnut kombu miso sauce, blanched greens, daikon, beet-and-carrot cornmeal pie, urns of twig tea. You can eat an infinite amount of that stuff and not gain weight.

It’s in a little Central American-looking complex of meditation rooms and yoga rooms and a preschool. Tropical trees shield a narrow red-cobbled walk and an assortment of sitting nooks. A pomegranate tree; banana leaves; notice boards; a black stone statuette of an elephant god; an oak draped with tiny antiqued lampshades. A blond-haired little brother and sister –- her name, inevitably, is Zoe –- argue in the most reasonable polite tones about how to break a stalk from the carefully groomed stand of bamboo.

The dining room is like an audition hall for roles requiring tall, lean, healthy, pink people. A few tall gray stoop-shouldered ones lurk around hoping against hope for callbacks. Multigeneration families discuss meaningful issues; strangers venture conversation at communal tables; regulars rush to hug hello. The tall pink waiter with the unchanging minimal smile makes sure not to be accusable of impatience when I ask him to explain the food-ordering system. He has embraced silence but sometimes acknowledges a spiritual duty to interrupt it for a customer.

By the window sit a group of unrelated adults, a class in some meritorious subject. Two of them, a white-haired man and a sexy fortyish brunette, stand and bow repeatedly to the setting sun through the window, clap three times, and thank each other very much. Later everyone in the group sits with their right arm extended in midair.

The studenty foursome at my table wonder aloud about the arm-raisers, and reminisce about a convenience store in Lafayette, Louisiana that serves immense magnificent delicious po’boy sandwiches piled with oysters and dripping with mayonnaise. I could use one myself. The most memorable of the four, short and wiry, Appalachian-looking, visually out of place here, wearing a half-grown beard and a green gimme cap, talks about his travels with a landscape crew digging gardens for the wealthy. The inexplicable competitive lust to outdo one’s neighbor’s plants. He and his friends fantasize about a plot of land they’ve seen for sale, almost seven acres with an unlivable 1920s farmhouse, just outside the city, for $110,000, but who can get that kind of money?

I’m practicing taking surreptitious notes. I’ve got a science fiction novel open and am apparently recording my insights about it. I stare off at the ceiling with intense detachment while hanging onto the voices here beside me. I open and close my notebook at unpredictable intervals as if inspired by shuddering fancies all my own.

The fools! Little do they know I have captured their dreams.

3. Home, I allow myself to eat packaged white bread, which I keep only for my children. The sky doesn’t fall.

Travel Notes: Comfort, Texas

Down the road a few miles from Welfare, another of those little Hill Country towns named by the German immigrants who stopped and settled instead of continuing further west, having recognized a paradise when they saw it. Comfort was founded by freethinkers and abolitionists and, like many towns in this part of the state, voted against secession in the Civil War. In fact a battle broke out here between local Union sympathizers and Confederate soldiers, and a monument flies the flag permanently at half-staff.

It’s about 110 miles from Austin, through the broken plateau with its toothed hills and seasonally flooding creek beds. Once, we stayed at an inn here, crossing a bridge over a waterless rocky gulley, and after an overnight storm the creek bed overflowed into the pasture and almost to the house. That’s what the wildflowers count on. By this time they’re darker than in the spring, dusty purple and orange like dirt-smudged fruit, with lots of bare stalks, and they appeal to me as much as in their youth. I’d like to stay with them, to sit with them and talk about what we’ve seen and what we remember. The Hill Country storms also make Richard’s Rainwater possible: the nation’s first bottled rainwater company, its tall collecting tanks rising in faded crayon colors above a green meadow. When you get past the For Sale signs on the ranchland on Highway 290, there’s a wildflower seed farm: a big square field of purple next to a big square field of orange next to a big square field of yellow; a lavender farms. And peach orchards and blackberry bushes, and roadside stands one after another offering homemade jams, ice creams, cobblers, and pies. A claque of adoring purple flowers applauds rapturously at the feet of graceful young fruit trees.

With a population of about 2,400, Comfort strikes me as a smaller and more easeful Boerne, which in turn, at 10,000, is a smaller and infinitely more bearable Fredericksburg. Fredericksburg, the area’s foremost cutesey-boutiquey retro-Teutonic daytrip destination, has become absolutely choked with chain hotels and fast-food franchises and weekend crowds, while Boerne offers the same features – the town square, the streets signs in German, the big stone library, the old houses with nineteenth-century trellises and columns, the cowboy-style storefronts – and still makes them a pleasure. In Boerne’s outskirts, I drove past a spanking new biotech company and right afterwards 2 Fat Guys Complete Automotive.

Comfort was where I stopped and walked, though. High Street is lined with antique shops and cafes and the storefront public library, a 1916 native limestone building incorporating elements of an earlier building. The Closet, a dress shop, is also a full-sized old-fashioned soda fountain with big vinyl booths. In Bud Kracher’s antique shop, amid beautiful tables and armoire, I saw an authentic Sinclair gasoline pump with the dinosaur logo, $2,250. A sign points to Comfort Cellars Winery, as small a winery as you could possibly hope for –- I couldn’t find it, and concluded it must be someone’s backyard. Across the street, the window of the Meet Market, a club-in-progress, bears a handwritten “Opening Soon” sign, with each of its optimistic dates crossed off and replaced by a later one—“Spring!”—“Summer!”—and finally someone’s scrawled response, “Really?”

High Street is marred by the gutted shell of a big old limestone building protected by a chain fence, but it’s no long-term eyesore. It’s the Ingenhuett Store, a landmark built in 1887 and burned in the middle of a March night in 2006. There are ribbons on the fence, and signs saying how much the store is missed and promising to rebuild it. Down the street, two of the Ingenhuetts’ ancestral homes have been preserved; the newer one, from about 1900, is a reasonable size, but the original is tiny; yet here lived the town’s first family, who owned the hotel, the saloon, and many of the stores, and who filled the lucrative sinecure of postmaster.

Comfort. Just enough city escapees have moved here to keep it alive. No evidence of construction anywhere downtown. In an antique mall I was sorely tempted by an Arkansas toothpick in a beaded leather sheath, but it was a multi-owner place and the cashiers weren’t authorized to bargain. Well, I was just as glad to see it and leave it alone. I strolled and smiled, I greeted shopkeepers and appreciatively left without buying, and drove home carrying plenty to write about.

I'm Ready for My Closeup

Or to put it another way, I'm headed for Los Angeles. I'll be there ten days starting tomorrow --- I'll be back Monday April 23 (Shakespeare's birthday and deathday).

"What will you be doing in LA, Richard?" Well, not making a movie, I'll tell you that. I'm going to attend Byron Katie's School for the Work, a nine-day intensive program that's a kind of psychological Outward Bound, from what I've heard. Nine days of concentrated emotional and interpersonal exercises developed by Katie as stimuli for transformative change, based on what she has learned through her own transformation out of despair into permanent joy.

I first wrote about Katie in this post last year, and whatever impact the post may have had on my readers, it had an overwhelming, astounding effect on me. You see, Katie learned about me through our mutual friend Dilys at Good & Happy, one of my favorite blogs of yore. Unbeknowndst to me, Dilys showed Katie my post and Katie was so moved that a few months afterward, her husband, the great translator Stephen Mitchell, emailed me to invite me to the School as their guest. Something I had dreamed of saving up for had landed in my lap for free, out of the blue! It is the most wonderful act of generosity I have ever received. And it's typical of this enlightened person from whose magisterially simple self-questioning technique I continue to learn so much.

I hope to tell you lots about the School, but not during the nine days themselves. I'm going as a full participant, not an observer or commentator. To do otherwise would be to sabotage the experience by setting myself at a distance from it. I'm not taking my computer. Katie urges us to have as little contact with the outside world as possible during the School. I'll take my cell phone to call my kids, and that's it. (She also urges us to eliminate alcohol, caffeine, and sugar from our diet two weeks before the School, which isn't a problem for me.) Ten days without a computer -- I wonder what that will be like. And nine days with a random roommate -- a diabolically instructive part of the School experience.

So this will be my last post until April 24, and during that time I won't be able to read your blogs either, or comment on them, a loss that grieves me more than a break from blogging for myself. In the meantime, blog well!

Ithaca: Reality and Dream

Don't wait around for any gritty, hard-hitting dramatic series about the Ithaca police department any time soon. This cute little yellow Beetle, with its rear windshield slogan "Cops, Kids, and Toys," is on special duty at the downtown Commons to persuade kids to stay off drugs -- although the lingering influence of 1960s psychedelia is not undiscernible on the car itself. The department also has normal cruisers, you'll be relieved to know; there was one parked in the Beetle's place later that night, with wet flurries speckling it.

Ithaca turns out to be a cute, old college town about the size of downtown Madison, with grand stone churches and brown-red brick homes. It's surprisingly hilly, but unlike San Francisco which has hill after hill after hill, here there's one immense main climb, with Cornell University at the top and the downtown area at the bottom, so if you're a student who lives downwtown you get great exercise walking to and from campus every day. Most students live at the collegiate top of the hill, though, and rarely go downtown because then they'd have to walk back uphill drunk at three every Saturday morning, punctually punching the ol' bar-crawl clock as they do. In both areas there are a lot of rundown student apartments -- one can only imagine how much profit the landlords, who have owned those houses forever, are making, considering the minimal amount of repair they seem to do.

Ithaca is the only city in my experience in which, if you're waiting to cross a street at a trafic light and you press the Walk button, you can see an immediate, direct, causal relationship between pushing the button and the light changing to green. Because of this, Ithacans go around happily pressing the Walk light button at every opportunity and waiting a split second for the light to change, even if there's no traffic in sight. Not only that, but at major intersections a woman's voice comes on, floatging thrugh the air to tell you things like, "Begin crossing Oak Avenue..." and five seconds later, "Do not begin to cross Oak Avenue if you are not already in the crosswalk." Then a little birdie cheeps twice.

The restaurant/cafe scene is rather thin; if a student brings his visiting parents to dinner, there are only a handful of choices, as in Madison circa 1980, and so at every place we stopped last night we ran into my son John's fellow law students. The places we did find were good, though. The coffeehouses, Stella's and Gimme! Coffee, both had dark reddish walls with little artworks and mirrors, creating an old-fashioned atmosphere (more so at Stella's because of its solid, dark wood booths) where you could linger and imagine yourself drinking absinthe and writing French poetry. For dinner we went to Za Za's, a family-style Italian restaurant in a big, 1950s-swank room with white tablecloths and chairs, an arched, padded ceiling, and a wonderful, completely unused Art Deco bar with a big hourglass-shaped lamp and a sky ceiling, dark blue with pinprick stars. If I lived in Ithaca I would hang out there and sip gibsons and make it a hip discovery amng my (imaginary) in-crowd. (But what kind of restaurant wwebsite requires Macromedia Flash? If you're searching for a restaurant online, you have to have that software on your computer in order to figure out whether to eat there.)

After Za Za's we walked through wet snowfall (a sign of the unusually warm winter in upstate New York this year) to Felicia's Atomic Lounge, a likably grungy hangout with an unobtrusively sapphic vibe, tin squares on the bar wall, and a Leo Kottke-imitating singer-guitarist who was impressive and enjoyable when he fingerpicked his acoustic, and obnoxious when he plugged in and sang his magnum opus denouncing the sexual promiscuity of Paris Hilton, recruiting three young women from the audience as backups to sing a chorus of the crudest, most misogynistic insults.

Well, what do you expect in one of our leading university communities?

Earlier, Ann had been with us as we stalked the downtown area in search of things to quip about. Ann's got a good post about that part of the day, culminating in a YouTube video in which she, John, and I riff off each other about the window display in a used record store. Unfortunately, most of my witty remarks are scarcely audible, the microphone having been at a distance. Listening, I remember the riff extending over seventeen years (including my relative inaudibility), covering every passing phenomenon that intruded into our fields of vision, and ranging in tone from full symbiosis to raging hostility.

As I reach a certain point in life, it seems in retrospect impossible to tell reality from illusion. What did one really feel, what was one convincing oneself to feel, what was one convinced by others to feel, why doesn't one feel it anymore, what happened to change it, was the change positive or negative? I'm not just referring to a specific marriage but to any kind of love, any attraction or repulsion, including my current satisfaction with solitary life. Yet more than any time in the past twenty years or so, I want to touch once again my memories of long-gone people and places, to try to reclaim who I was and what resemblance remains to who I am now. To reclaim all of myself, past present future. Otherwise it's like breathing thin air. Deep companionship is bleached to casual acquaintanceship overnight; I visit someone I've spent the past almost two decades with and think, "What a beautiful woman, I'd like to meet her." (Notice I'm conflating two marriages here. That's part of the illusion-building process. Sometimes I don't know which I'm remembering.)

Maybe the mystery of changing identity explains the dream I had early this morning: I was visiting Ithaca New York, but it looked like a Greek island, with rocky cliffs to which I sailed on a little ferry. The natives were old-style New Yorkers, cordially rude Italians and Jews, and they worked and shopped in big underground caves that looked like subway stations, and I was baffled and worried but as I stayed and found my way I began to understand.

Snow flurries again this morning. This afternoon I fly to Austin via Detroit. The scenery keeps shifting.

Take a Load Off

It was so windy in Ithaca last night, even hardened Wisconsites were squealing, "It's too cold!" So we slipped into restaurants and lounges and drank brandy and port and laughed about things we'd done, until people at the next table wanted to hear the story too and I told them, "It's too embarrassing!"

This morning I wake to this view:




Unlike those who might wake up to this view.

So after a trip to the complimentary continental breakfast bar and a dash outside to sample the air, I retreat to my room and take a look at something pretty:



Later, a country drive, assorted cafes, and a night of music from talented students.

h/t: Amba the Revelator

Strait is the Gate

Which way am I supposed to go, I wonder?

I expect I'll see a similar sign at the entrance to the Pearly Gates.

Meanwhile, though, I'm sitting in a major airport hub, waiting for my traveling companion. I expect she's blogging away somewhere in the concourse, maybe even at the gate, but a glance at her site shows she has not yet posted about her travels. It's 15 minutes till boarding, and I wasn't sure I was going to figure out how to get the photo from my borrowed camera into my computer and onto blogger in time -- but I have, I have! That makes it worth the $8/day internet service at DTW.

The first airplane flight I ever took landed at this airport, in 1969 when it was called Detroit Metro Airport. Looking out the big windows, I recognize the flat land, the thin snow, the bright blue, still, winter sky. The airport itself is much expanded and improved, but this time I'm not paying $24 dollars for student standby ($48 full fare), and this time we had to wait standing in the air of the tiny plane so that the short-handed airline could track down an employee, somewhere, anywhere, any employee, to connect the jet bridge to the plane. Moddin times, mon.

That first flight could be a post in itself: a waiting area full of New York college kids on their way to Michigan, getting to know each other on the fly, asking what dorms we were in, orming spontaneous groups to hunt down refreshments... I was waiting with my father, who'd driver me from the Bronx to LaGuardia, and when someone invited me to join a group prowling the airport, I first said, "No, I have to stay here with my father," but when I looked to check with Dad, he told me it was my choice; and I chose to go with the peer group, and that was the beginning of leaving home.

To the North Country Fair

Tomorrow morning I’ll be flying to snow country to see one of my grown offspring at an academic occasion. I’ll be taking my computer and hoping to get in a couple of posts here and there, spurred on by the presence of a fellow blogger, who I know always brings her blogging paraphernalia.

I envision us sitting opposite each other at a café table, hunched behind our barricades -– I mean our computers – peeking out suspiciously while simulblogging each other’s quirks.

By sheer chance, we’ll be on the same plane from the hub airport to the destination, and on the way back. We won’t be at the same hotel though, because she always stays at the best place in whatever city she’s in, while I tend to choose…a different point on the spectrum.

I’m hoping it’ll be a lot of fun, and I’d like to take some photos if my hands don’t freeze off while pressing the shutter. I’m not used to that kind of thing anymore.