Stories

My Grandmother is going to die.

This fact has always been indisputable. She is human, just like I am, just like Mother Theresa was and also that guy who fought alligators. It’s inevitable. No matter who we are, where we live, or how much money we made (or didn’t make), we all die.

But what’s different about the inevitable death of my Grandmother is that my Grandmother is now going to die soon.


It’s not like I haven’t had time to get ready. She began slipping away, you see, a decade ago.

First it was little things. She had a bad car accident (not her fault) but then started getting lost driving to the grocery store in her little 1997 white Grand Am. When grapes rotted for the first time on the counter of her spotless kitchen, or when she didn’t ask one of us to take her trash bins down to the curb on a Tuesday night. Standing in her kitchen I asked her what went into the pumpkin cookies next and she sat and stared at me, unsure, at her little table under the 1980s chandelier.  

I stayed at her house, most of one summer. Tidying up here and there and poking around my grandmother's mind. Do you remember Pearl Harbor? Which brother was it on the USS Arizona, was it Guy? Tell me the story about how you met Grandpa again? Was he handsome? Were you gorgeous? Stories that had once poured out of her with the tiniest bit of prompting. Now she sometimes shrugged. “I dunno.” She would say that it was a long time ago. She’d snap. Her patience, previously as endless as the sea, abruptly ran into a wall.

It’s not like I haven’t known. It started when she was 80 and 80 is an old age to be. And she was younger than that, even, when she moved from her house to our house. My mother bought a tall twin bed with a sleigh frame and a firm mattress. It wasn’t the kind of mattress that lets you sink in and envelopes you, but was instead the sturdy sort. The sort that propels you up in the morning. One that it would be easy to get her in and out of. Maria, a home nurse, came in every morning for an hour or two to help us get her showered and dressed. Every morning, when we’d get her up and get her breakfast, she’d sit on the porch, or the couch, listening to Rush and occasionally patting the dog that followed her around like he was hers.

My grandmother was always immaculate. Her hair as exact as her penciled-on eyebrows. The smell of the Pantene spray pervading her iron-pleated slacks and turtleneck sweaters even more than the odor of her cigarettes, the ones she would secretly smoke outside. Or the Avon perfume she once sold to her neighbors, and wore to mask the cigarette smoke, spritzing it on only as she slipped in the door.

Maria helped her become perfect, immaculate, every day. After Grandma burned her hair with a curling iron, because she just sat there, holding it in her hair, Maria would curl it carefully each morning for her. She’d remind my grandmother not to touch the metal rod, that she’d burn herself and then wonder why. But that first time, that time that she burnt her hair, that was a sign. A sign that her mind was wandering away somewhere as she began to leave us, piece by tiny piece.  

She adored Bailey, the dog, and used to sit on the couch and watch Fox News, or ask questions about my day when I wandered in from work. Sometimes we went to the park. But now it was me, not her, driving that 1997 Grand Am. The cushion she had used to scoot her tiny self far enough forward in the seat to reach the pedals was now relegated to the passenger side.

It’s not a surprise, that my Grandmother is going to die. She’s 90, almost. She turned 88 on September the 9th. Many people do not live to turn 88. Or 87. Or even 70. By any measure, my Grandmother held more than her fair share of years in her delicate but hardworking hands. She has had more years than anyone in her family was ever given--except for maybe her grandmother. Maybe, because we don’t know exactly how old she was when she died. She might have been 87, or maybe 89.  But my Grandmother has lived through 88 falls and 88 summers and 88 winters and springs.

No one is left anymore who knew my Grandmother as a young woman. Her brothers died young, but not as young as her father. My great Aunt Fontella, her dearest friend, was the last…and she slipped away just earlier this year, fading into the soft summer nights she loved so well after a series of strokes left her half present and half gone.

There’s a photo, hanging on her wall, of my Grandma at twelve with her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother. She’s sullen in the photo. Angry about a beautiful new haircut she thought her mother ruined, just because it wasn’t formal enough for the photograph. Grandma’s mom had combed the curls out with water so that she’d look respectable. There were four generations, sitting in the same room, so clearly just holding it together after a fight, all because the camera was there. It was a special occasion, in 1940.

My Grandmother was born the same year as Shirley Temple. But she never had natural blonde curls. Her hair is still almost black, incredibly fine and softer to the touch than silk. Wrinkles line her face, but they’re not the wrinkles of someone who is 88. If it weren’t for her dentures, which she got at 22 after losing her teeth to gum disease, she wouldn't look particularly old. Not as old as she really is, the age of someone who slips away quietly one night in their sleep, glancing back only to remind themselves that all will be okay. The world will turn anyway.

It isn’t a surprise that my Grandmother is going to die. Because it is never a surprise that anyone is going to die.

And I have had more years to prepare than most. To remember how safe her arms were when I was a little girl. The way that nothing in the world could ever be wrong if I was sitting in my Grandmother’s lap. How much I admired her giant glasses and perfect makeup. How Grandma never wore pajamas or sweatpants or jeans. She was the prettiest, classiest, most beautiful and strongest person I have ever known.

And I have had more years than most to choose what to forget. The times she snapped at me. It stung more than I could bear, because it was Grandma. The cigarette smoke and the semi-constant evaluation of my weight. Those moments happened, but they never defined who we were to each other. They needn’t take over now.

Dementia is a slow, slow death. One that creeps up on you, that leaves you wondering and waiting, holding your breath, and holding their hands.

So I went in, every day I was home. I went in and I sat, or I call, winding up hours and hours on the phone.  I sat and I waited, and while I waited I’d tell my Grandma all the stories that she used to tell me. I’d sit in the chair I dragged in from the hall and propped next to her bed and I’d squint a little bit up at the ceiling, trying to remember the details she knew so well, that used to come to her so easily.

After that I would call from far away, winding up hours and hours on the phone. I’d search frantically for the battery charger and for one last international calling card, with another twenty minutes on it. Punching in the numbers while on the speakerphone, hoping I hit them all before we’d disconnect. “Disculpe, no tiene mas credito.”

She, a firebrand of a woman with a temper as hot as ice to match, now lies in the bed, drifting in and out of awareness, while I talk and talk and talk.

I tell her about how she used to sneak into her mother’s bedroom when her mother and stepfather were sleeping, to take money from her mother’s purse. And how when she’d squirrelled enough away, she’d buy a bus ticket a few towns over to where her Grandmother lived in Twin Falls. How she’d stay there, working on and off in the “hotel” and “restaurant” her Grandmother owned throughout prohibition and beyond. How she’d sometimes tend bar, and how much she loved her Scotch Whiskeys.

I tell her how she ran away at 17 and married a man 25 years her senior. Just to get out. To be on her own. I talk and I talk and I talk about a young Air Force vet, just back from England and the World War. He was from Sugar City, Idaho and mistook her for a date that had stood him up. He chewed her out right there, in the bar where she worked--only realizing she was an employee, and not his date, afterwards.

Then I ask if she remembers when he came back a few days later, carrying flowers, because he’d been out of line. She fell in love. How his apology bled into a first date. Then a second. Then a third. How he stood next to her in front of a courthouse and swore he’d hold her as long as he lived, which he did, even though for him it was only until 50-something. How their honeymoon lasted only a few days and was only a few towns over, but their romance lasted her whole life, so strong it stayed alive long after he was gone.

I ask if she remembers Fontella. How they grew up together and married brothers. How they were best friends before Reid hauled Grandma Shirley off to Island Park, and Vance set out for Washington with Fontella. I trace an 8 inch scar running up her arm, and wonder aloud for the thousandth time how much fun it must have been, attached to a toboggan behind a pickup truck, flying at full tilt across the snow. What, I wonder aloud, did she think of the snow plane her husband built out of old parts? How much was it, in total, that they sold their Candy Apple Red Convertible for? After they’d finally given up on kids, bought that car and moved to California, only to get pregnant with my mom weeks later?

Was she in love at first sight? With that beautiful baby of hers?

I sit and I tell her the stories of her life. The golden succor of my childhood. Reminding her, I hope, of the formidable, intelligent, beautiful woman she has been. Of a life lived in full. Of love freely given over and over and over. Of my Grandmother. Shirley Dene Casperson Haws. Brave, bold, daring and everything I ever wanted to be.

I’m reminding myself why it hurts so much to have lost her so slowly. And why it will hurt so much when the last glimpse of her will be gone.

Reminding myself how lucky I have been, to call her Grandma. And how lucky I have felt every time she has looked at me, with so little else left in her mind, and said “I love you, too.”

Home.  

I’ve never forgotten the way that the Provo City valley stretched out in front of our verandah.  The way that the lightning creased the sky in an instant flashing down from above while we sat huddled in blankets just watching, and waiting for the rain.  I can still hear the sounds of the aspen trees brushing up against the house in the wind, their leaves chiming as they rustle together.  And that smell.  Overpowering as the ground soaks up water for the first time in months.  Steam dribbling upward lazily from the cracks in the pavement.  

Home.

For the most part Ceiba’s only grow at sea level. Their defining roots grasping into the ground around the trunk.  The cool smooth bark stretching and stretching and stretching an impossible distance into the canopy.  The legend says that the Ceiba in Chamelco was planted by Aj Poop Batz’, chieftain among chieftains, king among kings.  Planted to guard a bell he carried underground, guided by the spirits of the homeland as he brought back this strange gift from Spain.  Bell or no, the Ceiba towers over the central park, in front of the old white church front.  The broken jagged outline of the mountains reaching out into the distance behind.

Home.

It’s freezing. One of those perfect mornings where we come tumbling out of the fifteen passenger van to discover that the fog we were driving through in the valley below hasn’t touched the lake. Deep blue, before the sunrise, the stars are reflected as perfectly below as they are above--once you push past the ice crusting the edge of the water.  We’ve beaten even the fisherman and the park ranger. Coach cuts the engine on his skiff, mostly so we can hear him yell a little better, and for a brief second the only sound is the glide of the hull in the water and the echo of the coxswains last call.

Home.

Tony, who used to work here until last year, would repeatedly declare in his thick Yorkshire accent, that these were the best gardens in the south of England. And for all I know, he may have been right.  Perfectly trimmed lawn, literally acres of daffodils and meandering red gravel paths perfectly contained by Queen Anne style red brick.  There is a sense of timelessness here. The students sitting on the lawn, studying and laughing in the sun, will be gone in a few years time, but there will always be students.  Sitting in the sun. Tony is gone. But there are still gardeners trimming the edges of the pathways, and minding the daffodil fields.

Home.

Where the huckleberries are, and the mountain looms. Where we fight and laugh and cry and pray. Where the smell of the ocean drifts in on the wind, and the rain washes all the dust away. The Big Pink Building still soars behind the mistake they are building on Burnside, and Californians are driving up the cost of our coffee our gas and our apartments.  Where an old man still makes pottery on a wagon wheel, and we still smile a sad smile when we cross the Hawthorne, just remembering Working Kirk Reeves. Where my bicycle tire got caught in the tracks, and where I didn’t have time this summer to buy one Hermiston Melon.  Walla Walla season isn’t on yet, and dammit the Thorns lost this weekend.

Home.

Because I’ll always forget to do one last thing before I leave. And to say one last goodbye.

Languages

They say that the more bilingual you are, the more the languages mix and blend and move and shift.  Setting out paths across the neural networks of your brain and remapping it's layout as they travel.  That the more you live and speak and breathe in one language the further back the other settles, waiting it's turn to surge forward as your tongue slips and stumbles when someone addresses you using it's suddenly new and yet ever familiar sounds. Languages, like children, can wander, following the easiest path forward and through, focusing on mundane details or fixating on that which is not yet understood.  Like water, they can slip away unseen, bleeding through cracks and wearing holes in our memory as they wind their way out, ignored, unused, forgotten.  The footprints of their existence leaving cluttered marks in the form of an ability to make an odd vowel sound, or better hear and repeat a new and unfamiliar name.  Those of us who were bilingual as children whose second language simply vanished before we knew it was gone are left with scattered memories of words and feelings and meaning uttered in no definable identifiable language.  A gut feeling about the sense of a word, or it's emotional timbre when we a character utter it in a film or on TV.  We cannot define the value of what we have lost, because we do not know it was, or that it has gone.

Learning a new second language chases out the last remnants of that first second language from your mind. Grammatical structures you did not know you still remembered blend into those you cannot fathom as you stumble through how to ask for the ketchup. Or to find the bathroom and the bus. Understanding shifts as fluency starts to settle in, the way you feel about what you think is every so slightly different in your first language than in your second. Direct translations begin to lose their meaning as you seek out sentences that hold the same meaning when you mull over them in the part of your brain that deals with colours and song and the openness of the sky.  You wonder how you might have phrased it in the lost language as a child, and you choose your words more carefully in your mother tongue, unintentionally more aware of the power language has to define not only what others hear, but how you frame what you think; how you engage with your life. Who you are and why you are that who.  

And every once in a great while, at the edge of sleep in a half remembered dream, when you sing under your breath or catch yourself staring off into the distance, you get a glimpse of a tatter of an understanding you once had that has gone. And for that half second, you remember who you might have been, and how you might have known the world.  And then it's gone, the new language you are learning surging forward to battle with your mother tongue.  The old language, that was once new, skittering into a forgotten pocket, somewhere in the back of your mind, waiting for another reminder and another moment in the sun.

Chicken Soup

Dear Neighbors,

As we haven't seen each other in a few days, and I just very recently thought of you, I figured I'd put together a nice note and drop it by. I may not have mentioned this yet, but you have a lovely house and garden. The cute little group of hens out in the garden really give it a homey pleasant touch.  I thought I ought to share with you that you have a big beautiful rooster in your possession.  Yes, I know.  Rather forward. I'm American. It's a cultural thing. Yes, we talk a lot. I am aware. No I don't dye my hair.  No, Trump doesn't either because his is not real.  I agree. Strange. And yes, he is a terrible racist. Awfully vocal too. The worst kind of woman chaser.  A little like your rooster.

I have to say that having a bedroom that borders on your garden is, for the most part, a lovely experience.  My room is never quite as warm as the rest of the house can get, and in a summer that's already particularly hot and dry, it's an added relief that I can get a little bit of wind to cool things down at night if I crack open the window. Early in the morning--and in fact late in the afternoon, and often in the middle of the night--I find it relaxing to be able to listen to the sounds of the local birds.

Have I mentioned how big, beautiful and vocal your rooster is?

I haven't yet had time to thank you for the lovely traditional chicken stew you served on Thursday at Nicholas' 33rd birthday party. It was delish. I've gotta admit, that although I've developed a taste for fried chicken feet, this was the first time anyone offered me a chicken head, beak and all.  My heart did skip a beat--when I first took a gander at the plate. Staring back at me was (I was sure) was that virile and cacophonous rooster of yours.  Moments later, however, I was relieved to discover that his ample windpipes continued to very effectively ferry air in and out.  He really is something special.

It was lovely to chat the other day while we were all outside with our buckets waiting for the fire department to bring us not-quite-enough-water-for-three-days-that-has-to-last-all-week on Tuesday.  I don’t think I mentioned how much I like your new haircut.  Super feminine.  I may have also failed to mention your vociferous rooster.  So much bigger than the one the neighbour behind us has.  He is quite the specimen. That large, boisterous rooster of yours. I’ve noticed that he is an early riser.  A late sleeper too.  Strepitus in his pursuit of the hens that are so often happily eating away in your garden, laying their eggs and living their quiet lives.  I almost don’t even know they are there--in fact, if it weren’t for blusturous rooster, I probably wouldn’t. He does such an excellent job of making sure we all know nothing has gotten into the garden to bother the chickens.

Anyway, to wrap things up, I’ll be here about another month.  But was thinking about throwing a little get together to say goodbye.  I thought I’d ask---if it wouldn’t be too much of a bother--if you could bring some of that delicious chicken soup of yours?

The gringa next door.

Tomorrow there should be water.

“Tomorrow there should be water”.   The Alcalde’s promise rings out in a hollow sort of a way. Since February we’ve been waiting.  San Juan Chamelco isn’t a big town. It’s 10,000 people clustered right at the edge of the mountains.  It’s the heart of the Q’eqchi’ region in Guatemala and has been dubbed “Garden of the Verapaces” because of the thick cloud forest filled with orchids that seemed to stretch on forever.

It’s really only been four days since the water just stopped completely.  But over the last three months we’ve stayed up later and later and later every night.  Waiting first for a flow, until that turned into a trickle, to start so that we could fill up buckets to cook and bathe and clean during the following day. The Chipi-Chipi rain--a constant drizzle that is the hallmark of the Alta Verapaz--hasn’t come this year.  Or last year.  Or the year before.  The sweaters, thick blankets and heavy rubber mud boots that define life in this chunk of Guatemala are gone. Replaced by flip flops, sunburns and t-shirts bought for 5 quetzales from a paca.

The heavy thunderstorms that signalled the end of the short dry season (March/April) haven’t come this year.  But neither did the rain last year. The orchids aren’t blooming and the corn ears are small, hard and dry.  Without the rain in May the baby corn plants, popping their heads up after an April planting are wilting and struggling. Riding the bus into Coban is to sit on a bus full of women and girls with their brightly coloured plastic water tinakas.  With toddlers in tow they are off to visit friends, relatives, acquaintances.  Anyone they know in Coban who has water. Walking down the streets, with containers balanced on their heads or hips, it’s like the town has somehow skipped back in time a decade or three.

“We’ll send a truck.” Says the alcalde.  A water truck, that will drive up and down the streets and fill a few buckets for each house. A reason to stay home from work and give up a day's wage--just to have water. My host family assures me that while the truck was helpful last year, it’s still not the same as having water. Or being able to wash our clothes or clean our hair. Their oldest daughter and an aunt haven’t had water all week.  The frustration is palpable when people talk about last May. It got so bad that they risked protesting. Something that the community elders still remember being dangerous, as protestors they knew in the 1970s and 1980s disappeared.  There was a petition and they marched to the municipality office. They waited in the park to talk to the alcalde. They were met with police, the military, paid counter protesters.

There was no water.  Not that week. Or the next.

And May is just beginning.

Large swaths of Guatemala have been fighting through one of the worst droughts in recent history over the last three years.  The European Commision on Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection estimates 1.3 million people are being severely impacted and over half a million are facing direct food insecurity because the rain just won’t come.  Oxfam is handing out cash to over 2,000 severely affected families and assessing what can be done to alleviate the heavy impact that drought has on health conditions. Families without water lose what little access to good sanitation they once had. Parasites that cause diarrhea, nausea and vomiting hit families facing food insecurity particularly hard, impounding malnutrition and leaving them more vulnerable than ever to diseases such as zika, malaria and dengue fever.

Bouncing out past Chamelco in the back of a pickup towards the aldea of Chamil, the effects of climate devastation surround us; from the thick haze as massive corporate farmers burn sugarcane to harvest it (easier and cheaper than other methods) filling the air across the highlands with a smog that lasts for months, to the newly barren hillsides as deforestation runs rampant throughout the Alta Verapaz. Landslides, both small and frighteningly large, creep onto roads from Chicaman to Cahabon.  Dry loose soil, no longer protected by a canopy of root and forest, sliding off the hillsides.  Particularly when it rains. Dust coats leaves and flowers. Plastic bags and bottles float down streams, catching on twigs and branches.  Bobbing in the eternally brown water that is slowly washing away the topsoil.

Why I Can't Write A Blog

“Oooohhh!” was a fairly common refrain I got when I mentioned I was leaving for fieldwork to Guatemala.

“Keep a blog.”  Common advice that we can’t get or give enough of in the western world when someone is going to to travel off somewhere.  

“Put up pictures!  We want to know what you are up too.”  So I dutifully plug a few snaps into facebook every few days.  Afterall, I have essentially placed my social life on hold for the better part of a year.  The least I can do is give those I am lucky enough to call friends, a glimpse into why I am (yet again) dropping everything and everyone to move.

And now, for almost three months, I’ve been trying to sit down and write a post. To say something about tortillas, or mangos, or eating beans three times a day.  To somehow convey the shape of the mountains rolling off into the distances in the Alta Verapaz; the way they are anchored deeply within the earth, a landscape so powerful it feels alive.  To adequately describe the sounds of the birds complaining for rain and the smell of the smoke drifting on the air as the undergrowth burns in preparation for the planting of the corn.  I’ve been sitting down and trying to write a blog about the dichotomy of living in a country whose history my government has littered with atrocities, while I am blessed enough to feel completely at home with a family I have loved as much as I love my own for almost a decade.  I have been sitting down, trying to write a blog, and I come up short even when thinking about the trundling mini buses I sit in every day, crawling across mountainsides to towns and houses perched on the edge of believability.

I stumble when it comes to wondering whether the stories shared with me are ones I am allowed to pass on. The strength of community health workers who, at times, are left only able to help people die with dignity at home.  A $500 test is too expensive, let alone the treatment that might follow.  The universality of the words a woman says about her husband who hits her “only when he’s drinking.” I can almost mouth along “He doesn’t really mean it”, I’ve heard that phrase so many times back home. The inevitable reminders as I work through basic Q’eqchi’ language classes that colonialism is alive and well here, its ongoing impact rooted in the very structure of the language.  A language shaped by the conquest of its land, even as its people and culture somehow hung onto their identity through over a half a millennium of assault. I struggle when thinking about whether or not to write about the hummingbird that hung out on the patio, or the frustrations of struggling through a bureaucracy I do not understand. Would anyone care that “la tortuga” (that is its name) circled the patio 12 times one Friday, or that I counted and took photos of the epic journey?  How does one write about commitment to family, and community squabbles when that family and those communities are not, and never will be, one’s one?

How am I proposing finishing a PhD, 80,000 words, on a subject that I can’t even manage to stumble through 650 words on, day after day?  

It’s something that I am still trying to sort out. Whether I like to blog, whether I can blog.  What exactly it means to blog. In the meantime I meander through the internet, looking for examples of blogs or websites or facebook posts that navigate the roles of researcher/tourist/outsider/friend/storyteller with the sorts of grace and awareness I can’t quite seem to muster, and I write blogs about politics back home. A subject I feel I can fully claim as my own.

In the meantime. Here’s a picture of the turtle.

Put a Berd on it...or why I voted for Bernie

I go to juice bars. Willingly.

I feel like I need to throw that out there before I can really dive in.  Just so you understand exactly how much of a yuppie I have become.  I am white, aspiring to middle class and wildly educated beyond what is even vaguely beginning to be good for me--and certainly beyond my wildest dreams. I read The New Yorker and feel like I have a legit reason for enjoying Malbecs more than Sauvignons. I have a strategy for the Friday Crossword in the NYT.  I have a career, not a family, and believe in effective politics.

But despite the juice bars. I voted for Bernie.

So here’s the thing. I don’t have to be against Hillary to vote for Bernie.  In fact, I like Hillary, I (in some cases) adore Hillary. My respect for Hillary Rodham Clinton is as deep-seated and unmovable as the bedrock underneath New York City. If Hillary is the Democratic Candidate for President you can bet your bottom dollar that I will be phone banking like you would not believe for her.

But I still rocked up to my primary (in this case Democrats Abroad) and threw my hat in for Bernie. Because guess what?  I do not have to dislike Hillary to vote for Bernie. I’m not voting for Bernie because my other option is a bad option, or because I hate women. Or the poor. Or my mother.

Nope. My preferred political party (of the WHOPPING *two* choices I have) happens to have fielded two excellent candidates.  Mine is the one with a bird on the podium.  

I voted Bernie because I, like so many Americans who have lived before me, really really do believe in an American dream, not an American nightmare or the continuation of a deeply flawed American reality.  And it’s a damn good dream too..  A dream about equality and opportunity and liberty and freedom.  A dream about a nation that seeks to be the best it can be. A dream about an America that has yet to be realized, but a dream that Americans have not forgotten and are willing to fight for every day. An America defined not by what is, but by what can be. Not by poverty and inequality, and degradation of human rights—our past as a species—but a nation that seeks to imagine a future better than the past.

And yes. We have fallen flat in seeking out that dream. We have succumbed to warmongers and the purse strings of billionaires.  We have caved to economic interests and sacrificed human rights (and lives) on the altars of racism, sexism and inequality.  We have trampled our own citizens and those of other nations underfoot in the pursuit of economic and military dominance. We have torn that dream to shreds time and time again, only to pick the tatters up from the blood-stained ground where they paved the way forward for sociopaths and narcissists who made us forget the best in ourselves, and we have pieced them back together. We have failed. But we have not given up.

And I am voting for Bernie not because I distrust Hillary or believe that she has some secret plan to destroy liberal values. Quite the opposite in fact. Hillary has a career behind her of pushing for a better world. No. I am voting for Bernie not because I have abandoned my feminist principles, and not because Hillary has a bigger Super PAC.  I am voting for Bernie not because Hillary isn’t a good candidate—in the current system she is perhaps the best candidate.  But I am voting for Bernie because I believe America is at the cusp of a crossroads. We are facing the spectre of fascism and the utter destruction of what our shining Statue of Liberty stands for. I am voting for Bernie because placating the conservatives in our political system over the last twenty years has gutted the middle class, threatened women’s rights and allowed racism to flourish.  We are at a juncture where a presidential candidate is capable of essentially endorsing the KKK and then still comes out on top in the Republican Super Tuesday Primary. Where his supporters pepper spray women for defending themselves from sexual assaults in his rallies.  Where anyone who is not white is forcibly removed.  America is choosing between the worst it has ever been, and a better future than we have ever known. Hillary represents a continuation of today, rather than a regression to the past.  But Bernie represents a future that hopes to fulfill what we as a nation have always stood for. Equality, liberty, freedom and opportunity---for ALL.

I respect Hillary deeply. And my heart aches at the misogyny that has been spewed at her as a candidate.  And I think she’d actually make a damn good president. I just know that today wealth and privilege of all stripes are destroying the American I dream of, and I am ready to fight to get that America back. HiIlary has not promised me a fight.  She promises that things will get a little bit better, and she has promised an effective government.  Those are promises I am confident she can deliver.  

And Bernie?  Bernie has promised me that fight. Maybe he can't win. Maybe it’s a risk. But it’s one I am ready to take.

Internet Cafe Excitement

On my last day in Antigua, someone left me a present.  A computer, in an internet cafe, left wide open with quite a few pages open, includnig an email account.  I, of course, could not help myself.  Yes, I logged out of his account.  But not before taking note of a few things, and sending this email:

Dear William,

I logged into a computer at Conexion Internet Cafe in Antigua to send a quick note home, and as I opened gmail, it loaded to your account.  While you do seem to have quite a few unread emails, you are clearly not adequately using the 'tabs' function in Gmail to help sort and manage those unread emails.  I am in a bit of a rush today, so I was able to refrain from adding those tabs, sorting your inbox, muting group conversations or setting up a bookmark system which would enable you to more easily sort and store emails per your preference.  As I decided that prying might be a poor choice, I was unwilling to find and use your mobile number to set up remote log-out, something I'd highly recommend.  Particularly if you share computer access with any roommates or family members.

I did however log out, wipe the browser history and would recommend that you do the same in the future.

Fellow traveler, Internet Cafe User and Useless Spanish Speaker

C.

Yes.  I was sunburnt and bored. And yes, I really really really hope I get a response email from William. And that he changes ALL of his passwords into a totally unsolvable jumble.

Cheryl & Jules

Today, Cheryl and Jules, an American couple I met traveling in 2010 have finally been unseated from their long-held spot at the top of my not-so-short list of ‘travelers’, ‘backpackers’ and ‘gap year peeps’ whom, I deeply loathe and who ensure that the stereotypes about western travelers remain truer than true year to year.

Cheryl and Jules, well into their sixties bled America. Even without being cut. They also seemed to bleed money, but without the added effect or benefit of appreciating the output of their expenditures. I was staying (for one night) in a mid-range hotel in Antigua. The project I was working on had a budget the like of which I had never before experienced (it would be considered ‘modest’ in the business world, but for little NGO focused me at the ripe old age of 23, it was amazing. I’d had my own bathroom the whole trip and we ate three meals a day).  We were just wrapping up, and preparing to leave the highlands for California. This last night was a chance to do goodbyes, risk amoebas by buying one last bag of mango slices, nab a handful of bracelets from the market for my sister, etc. The hotel, situated near the centre of Antigua, like so many of the old colonial style houses, was a brightly painted adobe/stone affair with a series of rooms around a large central courtyard, filled with flowers.  There was, of course, a fountain and it was home to a pair of very vocal little Lovebirds—whose names, Juan and Juanita were posted on a sign next to the cage, along with the note that “they bite”.  And it was through the little Lovebirds that I met Cheryl.

I’d settled myself outside my very very very very lovely room at a small table near the garden (also very lovely) to do some writing, get a postcard or two off before my flight and to enjoy the Antigueno sun, when I heard her.

“OOOOHHHHHHHH” not quite a squeal, not quite a scream. “AREN’T YOU JUST LOVELY!” Her accent had a hint of New York and before looking over in annoyance I could have told you that every item of clothing she was wearing was both brand name and brand new.  Sure enough, from her blue tinted, slightly permed hair down to her Gucci bag and Pedro Garcia stiletto heels, Cheryl looked like money. Obnoxious, horrible, money. She wore an off-white silk button-up blouse underneath what can best be described as a ‘Steve Irwin’ style vest over light tan trousers. “ARE YOU PARROTS?”  She asked, poking her finger into the cage where the two, now significantly less vocal lovebirds were potentially considering taking action (biting).  

“ARE THEY PARROTS?” Cheryl turned, shouting at one of the Guatemalan employees who had been moving from room to room cleaning out the recently vacated spaces for the next round of obnoxiously moneyed guests.  The woman smiled rather politely at Cheryl and kept moving on.

“I ASKED YOU A QUESTION DEAR. ARE THEY PARROTS?”  The cleaner kept cleaning. I can only wonder at how many Cheryl and Juleses she’s encountered working in the tourist sector over the years.  

“I SAID ARE THEY PARROTS????”  At this point Cheryl had completely abandoned the Lovebirds and was staring directly at the hotel staff member, 15 or so feet away from her and *clearly* busy with her work.

“AAAAARRREEE THEEEEEEEY PAAAAAUUURROUUUUTS.?”

“IN THE CAAAAGEEEEEE?”

“THE BUURRRDSS?”  

At this point Cheryl had doubled her volume and taken to drawing out each of the vowels, adding diphthongs where there were none and pausing between questions to stare back and forth expectantly from the employee to the Lovebirds.

The cleaner was only saved from whatever level of volume Cheryl would have been able to produce next in her quest to understand the nature of exactly what the Lovebirds were as Cheryl’s husband, Jules, appeared in the door of a room just a few down from the cage.  

“Dear.” At this juncture I had I some hope that Cheryl was simply very very animated and interested in parrots. That would not last long. “Dear.” continued Jules in a his own not quite New York accent—head to toe decked out in safari gear. Including a hat. “They aren’t educated here. She may not know what a parrot is, or be able to differentiate it from another type of tropical bird.”

It should be noted here that Antigua is not located in a jungle. Of any kind. Nor is there anything resembling a jungle in the immediate vicinity of Antigua, or the immediate vicinities of the immediate vicinity of Antigua.  Sitting at just under 6,000 feet above sea level, Antigua is in no danger of ever becoming a jungle. Of any kind. Jules (whose name I did not know at this juncture) seemed utterly unaware of that as he took a seat and pulled a giant orange bottle of Deet from one of his plethora of safari pockets and started spraying it liberally over his clothing and person.

“DO YOU THINK?”  Cheryl turned away from the cleaner towards her bug-spray obsessed husband, her stiletto heels tapping loudly on the tiled floor of the hotel as she crossed. “WHY DON’T THEY HIRE SOMEONE KNOWLEDGEABLE ABOUT THE LOCAL WILDLIFE?”

“Now dear, you know we aren’t in the developed world.” Jules started every sentence to his wife with the word ‘dear’, and while that in and of itself was sweet and potentially endearing (pun intended) his clear dismissal of the ‘non-developed world just got more and more charming the more he talked.

“You just can’t hold them to our standards. You know that.”

This was the juncture that I began packing things into the canvas over the shoulder bag that served (and continues to serve) as a purse. With no idea how much longer Cheryl would ask about he parrots, and Jules would dismiss any non-Americans as idiots, I had decided that, no matter how lovely, this particular courtyard was perhaps, not for me.

“OH HELLO!”

You know when a deer freezes in a pair of headlights? When it has basically two choices, one of which ends happily, and the other which ends with it smeared across the front of a semi going 88 down the Interstate 84?

“ARE YOU AMERICAN?”

Had I been a deer, I’d have ended up lodged in a grill.

“HELLO?”

“Yes. Hi. I am….I was just heading out to meet a friend.” Lying through my teeth isn’t something that I do often, but if there were a time to have some immediate reason to not be in the vicinity of the hotel, this seemed to be it.

“IT’S SO NICE TO FINALLY MEET ANOTHER AMERICAN. WE’VE BEEN HERE TWO WEEKS AND YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE HOW FEW AMERICANS COME TO GUATEMALA.”

I sank back into my chair slightly, still pushing the last of my writing supplies and postcards into the bag.

“Huh.” I responded.

“Oh yes.” Jules had tottered up to join Cheryl, the smell of Deet wafting off of his person and filling the patio with it’s rather specific perfume.  “And just to think, it’s like Mexico’s back garden!”

“Oh.” I wasn’t sure a) how to handle the scent of Deet, b) how exactly one responded to an entire country being titled ‘Mexico’s back garden, or c) how to extract myself as quickly as possible.

“MY NAME IS CHERYL, AND THIS IS MY HUSBAND JULES.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“HAVE YOU BEEN TO THE LAKE? THEY HAVE MONKEYS.”

“Oh dear, I’m not sure everyone is as interested in the outdoors or trekking as we are.” He turned to me, “however, if you are, there is a lovely wildlife refuge near the Hilton in Atitlan.”

I should clarify. There are exactly three monkeys at a ‘refuge’ (read private park) near Panajachel at Lake Atitlan.  At least there were in 2010.  One is blind and one throws it’s food at things. They live in a contained space.  A big contained space, but a contained space. The ‘trek’ to see the monkeys is just over ¼ mile. On a circular, flat, paved trail.

“Not much of a ‘trekker’” I answered. The smell of Jule’s Deet was starting to get to me in a fairly impactful way and I forcefully shoved the last of my things into my purse in hopes that Jules or Cherly might get the hint.

IT WAS JUST WONDERFUL. Chimed Cheryl in her unforgettable, unmistakable trill of a voice. THEY ARE NATIVE YOU KNOW, HOWLER MONKEYS.

Oh. I let my reply slide.  No one, least of all Cheryl and Jules would give a flying rat's ass to know that despite being ‘native’ very very few wild Howler Monkeys still live in Guatemala.

I ran into Jules and Cheryl three more times before I took a shuttle into Guatemala City for my San Francisco flight and learned that:

• SOME BIRDS HERE ARE GREEN
• You can’t put toilet paper in the toilet because people ‘refuse to insist on better infrastructure’ and Jules intended to contribute to Guatemala’s development by clogging up the toilets.
• Tipping non-English speakers is pointless because you must ‘earn’ a tip, and how can you ‘earn’ a tip if you aren’t speaking English?
• THERE WAS A COCKROACH IN THE HOTEL IN MONTERRICO AND THEY REFUSED TO REFUND US OUR MONEY EVEN WHEN JULES KILLED IT FOR ME AND WE BROUGHT IT TO THE FRONT DESK.

Suffice it to say, on Sunday morning when I was boarding a tourist shuttle from Copan Honduras back to Guatemala City, while I might have had some trepidation about my company, I’d never in a thousand years have dreamt up ‘Jason’ from “Strayly.”  Despite having spent 11 months traveling from Argentina on up could speak no Spanish, managed four racists sentences out of his first six in the vehicle.  When two full seats to himself wasn’t enough--talk about man-spreading--he made a nest for himself out of everyone’s backpacks (besides mine, which I rescued) in the back of the van. The driver tried to insist he sit in a seat and wear a seatbelt, but that discussion ended along the lines of the phrase “well, I won’t have to clean it up if a truck hits us.” He spent a good chunk of the trip, in that nest, where he loudly watched ‘Family Guy’ on a giant touchscreen tablet until it ran out of battery and he got bored.  But that’s a story for another day.

My Mountain.

I went up to my mountain to look at my stars.

Each blazing sun a tiny pinprick of light.

Every one sitting, just where it belongs.

Grains of shining sand, suspended in the velvet empty.

Closing my eyes, my fingers trace the lines.

Constellation to constallation. Virgo, Leo, Pisces.

Midnight to Dawn.  Autumn to Summer.

A mobil suspended just beyond reach.

A map of where I stand on our shining sapphire sphere.

So I went out on the heath.

I walked to the edge of the forest canopy.

Then I wandered the shores of an unfamiliar lake.

And I went up another mountain, to look for my stars.

Orion, four inches from where he belongs

Counting by finger lengths from the horizon.

At the edge of sunset. An hour before dawn

He rides high in a sky that is not my own.

But I remember. More familiar than words

Knit closer to my soul than the smell of the pine air on my mountain

My mountain where I go up to look at my stars.

On nights when the air is colder and clearer than ice.

Each blazing sun. Each tiny pinprick, right where it ought to be.

But here, with the desert air dry as a bone.

The tiny pinpricks, line tracing to line of Taurus' flickering face,

It is mobil map of how far I am from home