Greece Journal: 2003 part 1

I lived in Athens, Greece from 1965-1976. I speak Greek quite fluently. Between 1976 and 2003, I lived in the U.S., raised children, worked, worked, and worked, but in 2003 I returned. That is a gap of more than 25 years.

I was traveling alone, and thus felt much more comfortable having a purpose to my trip. I would do linguistics research on the situation of the Macedonian community in northern Greece. ( The research has since been presented at an academic conference at Ohio State, and gained me an A as I finished my M.A., so in the end my mission was accomplished.)

Greece was preparing for the Olympics, and construction construction was everywhere in Athens. There was a new airport.

I hopped on a bus to go to the Royal Olympic Hotel, owned by Saki Papadimitriou, whom I had last seen some time before 1976. A friend had been his girlfriend, and we saw him quite often. I wrote to tell him I was coming, and he wrote me back saying that it would be nice to see me, and my stay would be complementary. I was gratified at his warmth and generosity. After all, we hadn't seen each other in 25 years.

The bus driver asked where the bus passengers were staying, and seemed open to suggestion as to where he should stop. Giggling, excited American tourists were asking him to take them to their hotels, and he flourished many an "okay." When I asked him in Greek to take me to the Royal Olympic. He lifted his chin toward the ceiling -- the "no" gesture. "We don't go there."

"But you're stopping at many other hotels. Couldn't you stop at this one?"

"Oxi -- no." Abrupt.

I sullenly took my seat on the bus, prepared to either haul around my suitcases or get a cab when we got to Athens. One by one the tourists were dropped at their hotels, leaving me the lone passenger.

"Hey!" He called back in Greek. "Where do you want to go?"

I went up to stand next to him "The Royal Olympic."

"I know where that is. Are you Greek?" He began to chat with me, taking one hand off the wheel for frequent hand flourishes.

Though he had irritated me, he had me where he wanted me, and I didn't want to piss him off. He might change his mind.

"No. I'm American."

"How come you speak Greek?"

"I used to live here."

He laughed. "You speak Greek well."

"I haven't been here for 25 years."

He gave me a rundown on what had happened in the last 25 years. He said I should be sure to see the new Acropolis area, and declared Athens "beautiful now."

"I've read that the air is very polluted. Is that true?"

He wrinkled his brow upward and raised an open hand from the steering wheel. "What can we do? That's progress."

He not only took me to the hotel, but he helped me with my bags, chatting and laughing.

I realized I was back in the Greece I knew and didn't like so much. They toy with you. Their reactions to you have nothing to do with anything more than whim. First they insult you brazenly, then embrace you as if you were family.

I had an unpleasant feeling in my stomach as I entered the hotel and asked for Saki. I was looking forward to hearing about his last 25 years. He's an interesting man.

"He is in the bar," the woman at the front desk said, and I left my bags there and walked up the marble stairs into the bar.

How is it that two men sitting at a table having a coffee can look like conspirators in an international plot? That is how Saki looked in the corner of the bar. Greek men love to look "spudeos -- important," and nothing is as spudeos as having a secret, so they often speak as if they had one. It always looked silly to me.

I was delighted to see Saki, and it showed in my smile as I reached my arms out as I walked across the marble floor toward him. I was shocked to see how old and frail he looked as he rose from his seat. His skin was sallow, his body strained.

From the way he greeted me, I realized that he did NOT want me joining his conspiracy in the corner. It flitted across my mind that since I was a 60 year old woman, not a 30 year old beauty, I would be of no use at his conspirators' table. If I had been a 30 year old prize to show off, no conspiracy could have kept him from flaunting me..

He said he was busy now, and made no offer to see me any other time. I wrote him a note on the hotel stationery, saying I'd love to see him, but never heard back. Despite his generous offer of a gratis shotel room, I got a bill and, of course, did not protest. Saki owed me nothing. His offer had been an empty flourish. It did annoy me because his hotel is not cheap, and I had not factored in the hundreds of dollars it would cost me.

So I was greeted with the same kinds of brazen rudeness and self-interested crassness that I had always experienced in Greece. I had spent many years observing and experiencing Greek ways, and needed no more than a few hours to realize that despite the shiny Olympic veneer, it was the same old place. The only difference was that now I was better able to protect myself, and had a nuanced perception of the motives behind their ways.

The Royal Olympic is very close to where I and my husband used to live, and the first thing I did was to see what had happened to that house. We lived in the large first floor of a house owned by Mrs. Bambouki, an elderly woman whose son had a gambling habit bad enough to cause her to ultimately lose the house. There was a courtyard and garden out the back, and a large terrace along the street.

The location of this apartment had been ideal. It was an easy walk from Syntagma and Kolonaki Squares, right next to the stadium, across from the Royal Gardens and, most importantly of all, was on a hill seaward of the city, so the sea breezes cooled and refreshed the apartment through its high windows. I often did my laundry and strung it on the roof, where sheets would have flapped dry by the time I had hung up the rest of the laundry. It was a matter of stringing up the laundry, then bringing it right down.

I was quite sure that this taste of old Athens had been torn down and replaced by a square, generic apartment building, but was surprised to find it still there. The whole area had been gentrified, with a cobblestone street with plantings along it. The area under the terrace was now a garage. There were expensive, lovely curtains blowing in the wind through the open terrace doors. It had cost us 3000 drachmas a month (about a hundred dollars in those days). What could it possibly cost now?

When I was there we often strolled to either Syntagma or Kolonaki and sat at cafe tables, watching life go by. There were cafes on sidewalks all around both squares. As we sat there, we were always sure to see one of our friends or acquaintances passing by. It was an easygoing, enjoyable cafe life. People didn't usually meet in homes. They ran into each other at cafes. There were hardly any cafes left now. Syntagma's busiest cafe had been replaced by a MacDonald's, and the only one left in Kolonaki was the one where I had loved to eat loukoumades, deep fried puffs, which were always made fresh as you ordered them, and covered in honey sauce. They no longer made loukoumades. Too time consuming.

I went to a Linguistics conference which happened to be happening on the very days I was there, and walked around the equally gentrified Acropolis. There was little for me to do there though. My friends were all gone. The apartment of one of my closest friends there, Muriel, was now an embassy.

I couldn't wait to pick up my car and head north to Florina.

Hawaii Journal: 2007 part 6

We flew back to Honolulu for our one night of pampering at the Moana Surfrider before returning to Newark. Our room was on a high floor, giving us a perfect view of the hundreds of surfers in the water outside the hotel.

When we arrived at the Surfrider, two young women in muu muus greeted us. One gave us a cup of real guava juice, not guava punch, which tastes like .. well, never mind, and the other placed a lei around my neck (Terry’s was of black beads). I was stunned by the heady fragrance of the pungent yellow plumeria. I got the point of leis. They feel like the smoothest velvet and smell like paradise, lying with a pleasant, evenly distributed weight around the neck. I’m going to pack mine and dry the flowers when I get home to see if I can preserve this fragrance, which climbs into your hair, your skin, your mouth, your nose.

“Partly cloudy, chance of showers” is the weather forecast every day. It is 6:45 am., the sun is shining, and the surfers are out. The trade winds are not blowing, so the surf is up on the south side of the island. The surfers lie in wait far offshore (at least it’s far if you are swimming), a few popping up to catch the waves of their choice. Some of them ride the waves laterally as they break almost into shore, others wipe out as soon as they mount their boards. There is a separate world out there, fun, dangerous at times, pleasant, congenial, physically demanding. They probably have their own means of eating and drinking on their boards, they spend so much time there. The aquatic version of a golf cart gave a ride back to shore to one of them. They take water safety seriously in Hawaii, as 20 or so people drown here every year.

I plan to go for a morning swim as soon as I finish writing this. I swam a long time yesterday, and never have had so much fun in the water. One can swim in Hawaii’s sea, and I lapped the beach 6 or 7 times. The water is powerful, playing with you, lifting you up, twisting you a little, crashing here and there. There was a sense of play stronger than any other place I have swum and I was exhilarated. We have asked for late checkout as our flight isn’t until 9:00 tonight, and I plan to swim as many times as I can.

I experimented by swimming once before and once after a mai tai. The swims proved nothing, as they were pretty much the same, but it was fun noting sensations with and without alcohol. I indulged once in a tropical drink, seated in a beach chair watching the sea. Terry had a margarita with some exotic red stuff around the rim—it had cayenne and sugar in it, I think, and some other tasty, but Hawaiian additions.

The Surfrider is filled with Japanese. A large Japanese group ate next to us last night, laughing a lot, the women mainly silent. I felt I had a glimpse into Japanese family life. There was the nerdy one, the misfit 21 year old with his spikey hairdo, sitting glum and disapproving at the far end of the table, the hip middle-aged man, with a white mesh shirt over a t shirt of another color, a baseball cap on sideways, the talkative storytelling woman, whose words always brought laughter, the woman sitting prim and silent most of the meal, smiling at the jokes – like a family anywhere, I suppose. Though I couldn’t understand the language, I had the impression that no serious subjects were touched upon – no common remembrances, or plan making, or heaven forbid, politics.

My opinion of Hawaiian music has changed somewhat – not that I would buy any CD’s of it to take home, but sitting outside on a terrace having a lovely dinner, watching the light catch the breaking waves, it sounds lovely in the background, especially with a singer like the one featured in the group at The Surfrider, a pure, high soprano, melting one note into the next as sweetly as you could possibly sing.

As we left the hotel a Japanese bride and groom arrived in a stretch limousine. She was petite, with creamy white skin and a pretty face. She looked like exploding cotton candy. The groom stood by in his silver tails looking concerned and awestruck, afraid to interfere, as two women bustled around the poof of a bride, gathering up great billows of fluff in their arms.

We’re in for a nine hour plane ride, but they always turn out to be not quite as bad as one thinks. It’s time to get home and get on with reality. It intrigues me to see how, with masses of people sometimes crushed together, as in an airport, or simply coexisting, as in a hotel, they get along. Driving along the roads in the north of Kaua’i, with their one-lane bridges, calls for a high degree of cooperation, yet drivers instinctively fall into the protocols, even if they have never been here before. At the airport there is tolerance for the other guy. The surfers are working in with each other, as they crowd behind the waves. The animal instincts which preserve us are calculating and projecting beneath our consciousness, making it possible for great numbers of people to slide frictionless past each other to their destinations, without spoken rules, and without a common language. Occasionally there is an asshole, but it seems to me that everyone else forms a block of solidarity when that happens, oddly making the bonds among those willing to cooperate even stronger. Traveling is a pain in the neck, but has gone as smoothly as one could ever expect for us.

Thoughts are turning to home. What do I have to do tomorrow? There is a six-hour time difference, so I will be a little peculiar for a while.

Hawaii Journal: 2007 part 5

I went swimming this morning, about five minutes by car from our B&B. Terry walked in the water for a while, then retreated to a spot under a wide-spreading tree to read. We passed several beaches which were either down a steep wooded hillside, or had warning signs about tides and waves and currents, until we reached a protected, accessible beach. The warning signs are mainly for other seasons. In May the sea around Hawaii is, we are told, as benign as it ever is. I don't even swim in a pool without someone watching. All you need is one little problem in the water. It's not like land.

Since I was wearing goggles, I could study the sea bed. There were deep canyons in the ocean bed. I was swimming over them, but if I had been walking I would have suddenly stepped into crevices which would have swallowed me to my shoulders. Fish too numerous to count hugged the canyons.

In the afternoon we tried again to see the vaunted Hawaii sunset, but it was once again was a bust. A bust for Hawaii, that is. The sky was still infinite, with patches of clouds coming from Japan, and rosy, but not the display that this place is famous for.

We played GO on the seashore at the Hanalei public beach. There was a surfing school, sailboats, a jetty with a gazebo at the end, and picnic tables. Dozens of people were watching the sunset with us. It is cloying to imagine that if one lived here, one could stroll out to such a place virtually every night of the year. I suppose that, like the many Greeks I knew who hadn't ever visited the Acropolis, familiarity breeds contempt.

At the nature preserve at the Wailua Lighthouse there were Frigate Birds, Albatross, Red- and White-Tailed Boobies, Shearwaters. Birdwatching was easy as taking candy from a baby -- there hundreds of birds. They are serious about preservation here.

We always search for fine dining, and were well satisfied at the Bar Acuda. Tapas – goat cheese cheesecake (not sweet), Guinness Stout Chocolate Cake. The delightful maitresse d’ was a former New York lawyer who moved out here in January, and lives with the non-necessarily-logical confidence (let's call it "faith") that her student loans will get paid off. She has just joined an outrigger canoe team and cannot imagine ever leaving.

Hawaii journal: 2007 part 4

The Farmer’s Market in Hanalei specializes in tropical fruits – pineapple, mangos, some unpronounceable things, something that looks like grapefruit, lychee, tomatoes, some cucumbers, salad greens, mustard greens, bok choy, onions, odd looking sweet potatoes, and arts and crafts of various kinds, the most interesting of which were the bowls made of moli (meli?) and kau woods. The bowls are sculpted, very thin, with fascinating grain running through them. The loveliest one, which would be used as a salad bowl, I guess, cost $500.

Speaking off expensive things, a fisherman we talked to for a while says that Hawaii is getting so expensive that many people are retiring to Las Vegas. Interesting how we are supporting our children’s education, and our old people through the questionable proceeds of gambling. I have heard that Las Vegas has its charms, but it would be quite a letdown from Hawaii.

I asked in the fish store if the fish was fresh, and got an ambivalent answer about when they were cutting the fish. The man who had just delivered his catch engaged us in a long conversation. He fishes near Nihau, the island off the western coast of Kauai which is owned by the Robinson family. There are 250 Hawaiians living more or less as they have always lived on Nihau, supported in part by the Robinson family, and tourists are not allowed. Nobody but the residents and the Robinsons are allowed, in fact. Rumor has it that if courtesy doesn’t do the trick, some very large Hawaiians make their appearance to make sure nobody trespasses.

This fisherman fishes around, not on, the island. He says that ocean fish should be hung for three days before cutting them up. Eating them straight out of the sea results in a rubbery texture. The secret is that the fish must be put on ice the minute they are caught, and then “hung”(how you can hang something on ice I don’t know) for the three days, after which the meat has somehow matured and become more tasty. His favorite fish is sea bass, but very few are caught near Hawaii. They have mostly tuna of various kinds, shark, snappers, and some fish whose names were in Hawaiian and I have no idea what they were. We bought ahpoh and something I should have written down, but is something like musti ghaou. We’re hoping for the best. We can cook at the B&B. The other night we had a nice dinner of leftover restaurant bouillabaisse and grilled vegetables and fruits. It was delicious. Tonight it’s eggplant, cucumbers and tomatoes, a salad, and the mystery fish.

He says the dark meat tuna is good only for sushi. Cooked, it tastes like Chicken of the Sea. I agree. In his opinion albacore tuna isn’t good for anything at all. I might agree with that, too.

The plan now is to drive to Princeville (the 7^th most expensive vacation home community in the country) and watch the rich people while we have a drink on the terrace well known for sunset-watching. No eating there is planned.

I was tired of living in everybody else’s world and took a nap and lazed around this morning. We then watched the end of the Yankees-Mets game and just missed the Preakness, but saw a rerun. It felt good to do something we would ordinarily do at home. This might be a good night for a laze in the hot tub too.

Hawaii journal: 2007 part 3

Last night we walked to Waihina’s little shop, the Hanalei version of the 7/11. The leisure of walking drew us closer into the community along the road. Many of the houses are modernized and interesting architecturally. About a third of them are occupied by families who have been here a long time, with old tools rusting in the front yard, overgrown back yards, falling down front porches. Without changes of season, there are never any deadlines for cleaning things up. As with everything else in Hawaii, much is obscured by the huge fronds and spraying flowers. One old Hawaiian woman wearing a brightly patterned pareo was sitting in the front yard of her house, almost camouflaged in the heavy foliage around her. She was wearing a lei around her neck, and smiled warmly as I greeted her, white teeth in dark skin.

The hostess at the B&B, Kirby, taught me how to tie my pareo, and I wear it around the B&B. Kirby and her friends wear pareos when they go out, but I will not. I would feel fake. Kirby goes to hula class twice a week. The hula unites the women in her class into a very special kind of friendship, which has lasted for years.

We walked over the two-lane bridge on the way to Waihina’s. Efforts to widen the bridges on this part of the island were resisted by the locals, who wanted to limit construction in this part of the island. Since cement trucks and other heavy trucks can’t traverse the one-lane bridges, building is restricted without bothering with zoning.

As we walked over the bridge bullfrogs honked loudly in the water below. There were rings spreading outward in the water where the frogs were moving around. On the road were two paper-thin roadkill bullfrogs. Even after losing a couple of their number to automobiles, there were still enough to make a hell of a racket.

We played GO last night seated at the kitchen bar, with the host, Toby, kibbitzing. He arrived in Hawaii 29 years ago with a bicycle and $450, on his way to China from Wyoming, and never left. He makes his living with the B&B and doing odd jobs. His next job was painting somebody’s truck. He didn’t like his given name, Milton, and so named himself after his dog, Toby. The hostess is named after her uncle, Kirby. Toby thinks the World Trade Center was an inside job. Bush and Silverstein. One can pretty much think whatever one wants at such a remove from Ground Zero. I think the reverberations from Pearl Harbor have passed, and Hawaii, especially Kauai, doesn't feel like any kind of target now.

As we were leaving for Waimea Canyon this morning I said, “Okey dokey,” to Kirby.

“You’re really catching onto the language,” Terry teased. The language is all vowels and lilt.

We drove to the 40 miles to the other side of the island to see Waimea Canyon. Legend has it that Mark Twain dubbed it the “Grand Canyon of the Pacific,” but legend is wrong, because Mark Twain never visited Kauai. Its moniker is not, however, wrong. It was too vast to capture in photographs -- layers of geological eternity, with the Hawaiian touch of green.

Around the canyon were masses of white egrets. About 30 of them were spread over a soccer field, reminding me of the plague of geese in N.J. They looked like so many white flags on a golf course.

At the top of the canyon someone was asking if anyone had lost a dog. During a short hike down one of the side trails we found a transparent corn chips bag with a note inside it lying on a bright green towel. The note asked anyone who found a dog to call the number on the note. We asked around at the top, then drove down to the lodge, where the woman at the counter knew the couple with the dog (everyone knows everyone around here), and said it would be either at the lost dog pound halfway down the mountain, or the people who found the dog would take it home with them and call the people who had lost it. The whole of Kauai is like a small town.

Passion fruit, called “lolikoi,” is a tasteless experience in New Jersey, but in Hawaii it is fresh, and ubiquitous. The salad dressing at lunch at the Moke’e Park Lodge was Honey Mustard, with lolikoi wasabe. We had a Passion Fruit Chiffon Pie at Gaylord’s, the top end restaurant on the island, a former plantation house. We had excellent wine, good food, and delightful service. The dining tables sit under a horseshoe shaped covered patio, with flowers in the grassy middle, craggy mountains in the distance. Beauty is simply taken for granted everywhere you go here, though much of it reminds me of elsewhere, from Tuscany to Greece to New England. The difference in Hawaii is that you don’t have to drive to see the beauty, it surrounds you almost everywhere.

The religious wars started by American missionaries so long ago continue on Hawaii, as evidenced by the variety and persistent presence of churches of all sorts – far more churches than would fit the population. I counted the churches on the way back from Waimea Canyon today, driving the 40 miles back to the B&B. Here is a list, incomplete, of course, because I wasn’t paying attention everywhere:

Seventh Day Adventist (2) Kaliki Adventist Park and School Baptist

Latter Day Saints First Hawaiian Church

Holy Cross Catholic Kapa’a Missionary Church

Methodist All Saints Episcopal

Zen Temple Kapa’a First Hawaiian Church

United Church of Christ Church of the Pacific (United Church

Hanapepe Mission Church of Christ)

Kalaheo Missionary Church Mormon Center

Kalako Bible Church

The landmarks in Hawaii are mileposts and elementary schools. The schools are on the map as a church might be in a New England town. Hawaiian royalty left the proceeds from selling most of Waikiki and Honolulu’s land to a foundation for the education of Hawaiian children. There has been disgraceful fraud involving those funds, but they are getting it under control, and the money will once again be used to educate Hawaiian children, not to buy golf courses outside of Washington DC where the members of the foundation’s board can entertain Washington policymakers for their own purposes.

We stopped at the Kauai Coffee Company to poke around. They are the largest producer of coffee in the U.S., with 3,100 acres. (No sooner do the acres and acres of coffee plants end than the acres and acres of sugar cane begin.) Terry noted that all they needed now was a dairy farm and they’d have coffee with milk and sugar. There was, in fact, a dairy farm a little farther on. Or maybe they were beef cattle.

The Kona coffee came in different shapes and sizes, and was expensive. They had a tasting room with tiny cups for sipping each variety of coffee. I didn’t find it that much better, if better all, than some kinds of coffee I get at home. The peaberry was $16 a pound, and the decaf $19 a pound. It wasn’t worth the extra money to us.

Back at the B&B after an adventurous and tiring day, we played some GO (split the games, with me playing at a handicap) and thudded into our round yellow bed in the Pineapple Room worn out and in need of some rejuvenating sleep before another day on Kauai.

Hawaii journal: 2007 part 2

In a blog called Don’t Tell Me No, there is very little to say about Hawaii, which generally says “yes.” It is a non-confrontational place.

At Waimea Beach, for example, I had a chat with an “American Adventurer” who hauls his home, a converted VW beatle painted with red, white and blue stripes, around behind his motorcycle. He comes from Alaska and has been to all 50 states but found Hawaii the most hospitable. He says nobody bothers him here. His choice was aided by the weather I am sure, which allows him to sleep in his VW trailer without freezing to death. He lives on donations and odd jobs. I was wearing only my bathing suit so was carrying no money, and I felt badly taking pictures of him and his gear without making a donation, but he was happy to tell tales. He was married once, but the experiences he had as a child in a broken family hindered his embracing commitment, and the marriage ended. His former wife is now a lawyer, and he took off on his motorcycle. There are free spirits, or maybe lost souls, like this peppered around Hawaii. They seem to cause less trouble here than they would in, say, New York City, though I don’t know Hawaii well enough to say.

The birds, plants, and trees provide a textured background to every move in Hawaii. One small soft grey dove sat placidly as if on an egg in the middle of the road at the Waimea Audubon Center yesterday. We had to stop the car for it, the way drivers have to stop for a herd of goats in Spain, or a crossing deer in Pennsylvania.

I love the cardinals in my New Jersey back yard, but the cardinals here were more flamboyantly red. Like the American Adventurer, this bird is not afraid of making a display. We also saw peacocks, which are not native to Hawaii, but were walking around as if they owned the place. A flock of tiny birds barely bigger than hummingbirds flocked together, pecking seeds out of the ground. I thought at first they were leaves, but they swarmed upward and flitted to another seed mine. Studying the Audubon materials didn’t completely satisfy my desire to name these tiny creatures, but they looked like the plover in a photograph which was twice the size of the bird itself.

The Waimea Valley was a wonder. We saw our first Banyan Tree, and enormous, arching, tentacled, reaching trees of several sorts. People swam in the pool beneath a waterfall. The snack bar had great smoothies. There was peace and hushing all over. The Hawaiians lived there until floods and drought drove them out in 1895 and they never came back. Don’t know why. Can’t imagine why not. There were replicas of their huts, the huts being optional, used only in bad weather.

The whole windward side from Waikiki to Waimea, is lined with white beaches, most of them deserted. With so many beaches, it would take an invasion of many more tourists to fill them all. Further into our Hawaiian trip, we came to be more wary of the seas around the islands, more hesitant to simply jump in. The waters are treacherous, sometimes dangerous. These islands are isolated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by sea life, currents and winds which belong in the open sea. In the way that opposites are often contained in the same object, the stunning waters bear danger. The beautiful sea is a Circe.

Since Sunset Beach, the Banzai Pipeline, and Waimea are the world centers of surfing, there were a lot more people on those beaches, though the people were spread widely apart. Waimea River flows through the Waimea Valley and opens onto Waimea Bay, a pocket of beauty which was once reserved for royalty. Only royalty could surf there. The surf yesterday was as tame as the Jersey shore, but everywhere are posters and instructions about what to do when the surf is 30 feet high. One poster told of an unsuspecting tourist who sauntered out onto the rocks, only to run for his life when a 30 foot wave bore down on him, and then a second, and then a third, and a fourth. The waves come in sets of three or four.

I swam laps of the beach at Puukua. I felt in the water the way I sometimes felt on the land in Africa. I didn’t know what life was swimming near me, could not read the tides and waters well, and would have needed several more swims to get comfortable.

Hawaiian names sound the same to me. English flows from consonant to consonant, with vowels in between. In the Hawaiian language words flow from vowel to vowel. Kakaako, Kaimuki, Kaaawa, Kahala, Kailua, Kalihi, Kaneohe, Makakilo, Mililani, Nuuano, Wahiawa, Waianae, Waipahu, Waimanalo. They look and sound the same, though I am getting used to them and am more capable than before of remembering which street to take, Kalakaua, Kahala, or Kalanianaole.

The hostess at the B&B had given the room we originally booked to another couple. The husband of the other couple had health problems, which we heard all about at breakfast; past knee problems were all solved with a knee knee replacement (which he actually didn’t take that long to recover from, which surprised him). Now he suffers diabetic peripheral neuropathy, which bothers his feet some of the time – not all of the time, mind you – when he goes up steps. He asked his daughter for a garage door opener so that when he visits her, he can go up the stairs from the garage rather than the entry stairs. The stairs going up to the room we had originally wanted were difficult. They gave him pain in his this and pain in his that, and he is so grateful that we were willing to change rooms. Whew.

In the new room we are sleeping on an enormous bed, which was at one time the bed or Princess Ruth, a 400 pound titan of Hawaiian aristocracy. I lost Terry in it a couple of times during the night.

Breakfast was fresh fruit (half a papaya, mango, pineapple, strawberries, bananas), hard boiled egg, delicious toast with some exotic marmalade, and asparagus wrapped in cheese and ham. It was served by Sumiko, a humorous Japanese elderly lady, whose precise and tidy hand is everywhere in evidence in the house. The friendly, American-type owner is a pack rat whose overwhelmed but tasteful hand is also in evidence everywhere.

After breakfast the sun was shining, the breeze was breezing, and wandered through Waikiki.

Hawaii journal: 2008 part 1

The birds frantically greeting the day seem as happy to be in Hawaii as I am.

I am seated on a piece of furniture unique to me – a couch four feet deep. My legs are as comfortable as they would be on a chaise lounge, and I am wondering how this would go in the apartment in Hoboken. The couch is in the sitting room of of our B&B apartment in Waikiki, on a hill a ten minute walk from the beach. The ornate ceiling fan looks as if it came from Thailand.

The “& B” part of our stay is wafting across the spacious open porch called a lanai ten lush feet from me, barely visible through the foliage. It is as if nature were upholstered, so naturally does the furniture live on the lanai. Am I outdoors, or indoors? It is the meeting place for all the people who live here or are staying here. Exactly who lives here is a little inconclusive. The rooms and living quarters are splayed over a large footprint which it is difficult to comprehend, so dense is the vegetation.

Terry spotted a red-white-and-blue scavenging sort of bird unlike anything I had ever seen before alight on the road ahead of us yesterday, then fly away. I have no confidence that either the trees, flowers, or birds are anything that I am familiar with, so would never even try to figure out what it was. What was that enormous spreading tree with the gnarled embracing aboveground roots and the dry-looking tentacles hanging down from its branches, hanging down to the ground, where their tentacles spread out to make structures like the base of a table? The tree with sideway-reaching branches as long as my house is tall is a double-pod acacia. I saw no flowers on the hedge along the driveway yesterday, but last night there were large white flowers dotting it. They were fast fading flowers, with the last night’s blossoms lying limp and spent on the ground.

My brain was a gumbo when I arrived. Where was I? What time was it? I felt as I often do on New Year’s Eve – okay, now it’s time to get excited. But I wasn’t, just a little awestruck. This morning my tummy is giggling with excitement, after a fish dinner on the beach, sitting comfortably watching the sun go down over Honolulu, and ten hours of sleep.

Privacy is a mutable concept. In Europe, for example, I sometimes feel violated by peoples’ standing “too close” to me, or touching me "too often." In Zimbabwe, one had to figure in servants, who were going about their business, but often on a path that collided with mine. Giving access to my private life to a total stranger, even if that stranger was an employee, felt odd. In Hawaii, privacy is commonly secured by visual blocks – huge plant leaves, draping vegetation, screens of all sorts – that windows are wide and open. Air is so vital that even the bathroom has small rectangular open screened windows high on the wall. Terry and the hostess of this B&B were talking on the lanai while I peed three feet away in the bathroom, with two open windows. I was aware of a slight embarrassment, but aware also that sounds are dispersed here, coming from all directions, and constantly. My sounds were swallowed in the chirping of birds, the sighing of wind, the movement of leaves, the sounds of other people in the open house. It was not as if two people were having a conversation in the hallway outside my bathroom where the sound of tinkling would be the only sound they heard. There are doors in our apartment, both between its rooms and to the outside, but I can’t even figure out how to close some of them, or haven’t yet attempted to do so.

The beach in Hawaii is the center of far more varied activity than anywhere I have ever been. Last night, in the two hours we sat in the lanai restaurant in the New Otani Hotel, we saw a cruise to nowhere pass from right to left, then an hour or so later, come back left to right, smaller sailboats and yachts, five outrigger canoes, a young boy paddling on a surfboard, getting his sealegs, surfers, swimmers (and I mean swimmers – swimming parallel to the shore for long distances), paddlers and dabblers, kayakers. Nothing with a motor on it, and no fishing so far as we could see.

The fish at the restaurant was freshly caught, and tasty. It was mother’s day, and many of the women at the restaurant tables had a lei, or two, or three, around their necks.

There was also a surfeit of buff bodies, a depressing surfeit of buff bodies. We’ll get to work today, with a drive to Waiamea Beach and a swim someplace. SWIMMING in the ocean – that’s my kind of place.

Los Angeles journal: part 2

We were stopping in Los Angeles on our way to Hawaii, so wanted to rest up and take the time change slowly. So this was a lazy day, with a massage, and a pedicure and manicure given by a sweet, petite Hispanic woman named Gloria. She had been an R.N. until she injured her back holding onto a 200 pound, 5’10” woman t o keep her from falling. Now she cleans the salon and does manicures and pedicures. She thinks that’s how God wanted it and is accepting of her reduced station in life.

I refused to get in the car for another choking drive on the ever-full L.A. highways. This obstinacy was met with no resistance, since Terry was also still reacting to our drives of the previous day. We had dinner in our ornate, historic hotel, The Biltmore, at a restaurant named Sai Sai, a “fusion Asian” restaurant. Dinner was adequate to good. We chose a fondu dish for dessert featuring fruit dipped in marshmallow sauce which Terry thought tasted like chalk. I thought it was too bland for the fruit.

There was an informed conversation about the Gewurtztraminer with the German owner of the Asian restaurant with the Hispanic waiters in Los Angeles. Come to think of it, the glistening tiles at the entrance of the restaurant didn't feel Asian, more German. Perhaps the clean, clever décor also reflected his exposure to sexy hip European architecture. At the salon the owner was Iranian, the masseuse French, the hairdresser Ukranian, and the manicurist/cleaner Hispanic. The mix of folk in L.A. is different from New York. There seem to be bigger chunks of each ethnicity in L.A. But what do I know.

L.A. was chilly. The newspaper says Honolulu is in the 80’s. I was so filled up with L.A. that my mind had not yet attached to Hawaii.

As we entered the airplane the next morning, I remembered one reason why I had never yearned to go to Hawaii – I find the music trying, boring, anodyne. Pictures of Hawaii look canned. Soon I will be able to touch it, smell it. The trip will then come alive.

Los Angeles Journal: 2007 part 1

On May 10^th, 2007, I left for Los Angeles and Hawaii. I hadn’t bought the tickets or made the reservations. It was the first time in my life (since childhood) that I had not been responsible for the travel arrangements, and paid at least for my part of the trip. I know that sounds unlikely, as I have been married twice, etc. etc., but it is true.

I was no longer perilously in charge, but was lower to the ground, safer. Someone else was worrying. It’s not fair that one of the two had to worry, but Terry had offered this, and I was deeply grateful.

I sympathized with his edginess as we checked in – patting his pocket to be sure he had the boarding passes, getting the slightest bit snappy with the Los Angeles hotel clerk who said that the only room he could find for us didn’t have what we had requested. Terry huffed a bit. “We made our reservation several weeks ago.”

The clerk backed off and gave us what we had asked for.

I felt his discomfort as he realized that getting a PT Cruiser wasn’t the best idea. It had looked spiffy and modern on the Web, but it had no power, was weak going up hills, maneuvered poorly and had hard, uncomfortable seats. I knew how he felt responsible for every little thing. The car was fine, just not perfect.

This was my second visit to Los Angeles, the previous one was in 1962. Terry had lived in this part of California for several years, so I could relax and allow myself to be led around. There wasn't anything in particular that I wanted to see, other than where my daughter was living during her six months out there.

The traffic was intensely annoying and driving was as unsatisfying as it has ever been in my life. Washington DC is also annoying, sludgy and overcrowded, but Los Angeles is much worse.

I don’t like it that the trip into New York along Route 3 is unpredictable, with traffic sometimes ruining one’s giddiness at going to a show or out to dinner, but L.A. has been crafted as Road Rage’s perfect storm. The heavy brown cloud of smog hangs in your future as you crawl along. Identifying license plates from different states as a diversion would be impossible, as the number of cars flying past is unparseable. Everywhere. All the time. Up on a mountain road. At 11:00 at night. Here. There. Everywhere. The estates are among the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, but getting in and out of them must drive the owners crazy.

We drove along Rodeo Drive, watching for movie stars but seeing only illegal aliens. At the end of Rodeo, as the millions spent on each house rose and rose and rose, we turned left on Sunset Boulevard, ready for our close-ups, past the elegant gates of Bel-Air, past the spacious, beautiful UCLA campus which Terry said he had seen only AFTER choosing another college, down the hill to the Pacific Highway and Malibu.

Gladstone’s, the fish restaurant near the intersection of the Pacific Coast Highway and Sunset Boulevard, has it too easy. Their location is so good, and their purpose so well known that they no longer have to try. The food was mediocre. The waiters were very cute. Hannah asked one of them “Do you have a ladies room?” “No, you have to hold it,” was his answer. Cute. The view of the ocean was matchless. After lunch, we moved on to the Getty Villa down the block.

On the way, we passed the first of many Malibu beachfront properties, dens of luxury and sybaritic pleasure. There is a strip about ten feet wide in front of the closed garage doors facing on the highway which owners would have to negotiate when getting in and out. How could you give a decent dinner party with parking like that? If the guests parked across the highway, they’d have to wait five or ten minutes to get across. The owners are rich enough to phone up limousines to take their guests to and fro, I suppose.

Waiting to get onto the Pacific Highway can take five minutes. If I lived here, I’d get used to it, but I think I’ll refrain from living here.

We missed the entrance to the Getty Villa and had to go around the corner. They waved us off our effort to enter at the Exit, so we went the 20 yards or so back to the intersection at Pacific Coast Highway. The entry to the villa was too close to the intersection to turn the corner and then immediately turn left, especially given the steady stream of vehicles going 60 miles an hour. We waited five minutes or so for the light to change, and then Terry turned left against the oncoming traffic (which was stopped at a red light, but you never know) along the shoulder to get into the Entrance.

The guard at the entrance, who, we found out, came from King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, noted the eccentric entry with a smile, then said we needed to have tickets, which were available printed from the Web or mailed several weeks in advance. Parking was the problem. We screwed up our faces and looked at each other .

“You from out of town?”

“Hoboken, New Jersey,” Terry said jovially.

“Okay, maybe we can make an exception to today.”

He pulled three passes from his guardhouse. “Just remember, “ he said, pointing at the passes, then at Hannah, “You’re Terry, you’re Jill, and you’re Hong.”

“Hung?” I asked. Terry might enjoy saying his name was “Hung?”

“But I’m Terry,” he corrected the guard.

“Not today you aren’t. She’s Terry today.”

Beggars can’t be choosers.

‘I think it was the cool turn into the entrance that got us in,” Hannah remarked as we drove up the hill to the museum.

We parked in the spaces reserved for the people working on the estate, took a tour which pointed out the sort of intriguing architectural details and materials which Getty money can buy, took us through the villa and the amphitheatre, pointed out the buildings housing academics who restore, study, and educate regarding ancient art and culture, mentally scarfed up the sculptures, jewels, paintings, heads, torsos, and, my favorites, signature rings from thousands of years ago. Wouldn’t you love to have a little stone in your pocket, just a little stone, which had an exquisite carving in it or a face or a bridge or a pattern, which you used to sign with? What would I have on my signature ring (though, as a woman, I guess I wouldn’t have had one)? A horse I think.

After two hours I was museumed out, ready for something else. We took the long way back.

Looking down from the top of Malibu Canyon the horizon was layered with the brown effect of the Catalina fire, the second major fire in a week. (The first was the burning of Griffith Park in L.A.) With only two inches of rain since January, it’s no wonder that the bushes and trees are sere. It is more a wonder that Topanga Canyon is still green.

We stopped the car at the entrance to the Dead Horse Trail, leading to the Tripett Ranch, partway up Topanga Canyon, and Terry and I took a walk. Hannah stayed behind seated tranquilly at a picnic table attracting warmth and light, as she does so effortlessly in all parts of her life. Her face turned like a sunflower to follow the westward moving sun.

On the sweet-smelling, easy trail we saw animal footprints that looked like the mountain lion footprints portrayed on a warning sign at the entrance to the trail. The presence of a series of houses no more than 100 yards from the trail made me feel more comfortable about the prospect of stumbling upon a mountain lion. The houses had laundry hanging out the back, and must have had children around. To confront a mountain lion would be a rare occurrence.

There were birds skittering out of the underbrush as hawks threatened from their smooth flight path above the trees. The ruckus in the undergrowth to our left was fortunately not a rattlesnake, but a small brown bunny whose transparent ears shone Hollywood pink as the sun flooded through them. There was scat of different sorts; a dog-like sort, pellets, a cat-like (lion-like?) sort, plus a scat that looked like someone had let a mixture of coffee grounds, nut shells, and cranberry skins fall from their torn garbage bag. A lot went on in these woods.

Having gotten the kinks out of our legs and brains, we set out for Dodger Stadium. As we came down into The Valley where the Valley Girls come from, it was slightly frightening to realize we were driving straight into that brown bank of smog ahead. Terry said that sometimes the buildings to our right in the near distance were barely visible due to the smog. We got off the Freeway, which was clogged, traveled along Ventura Boulevard, then got back onto the Freeway, which was by that point flowing fairly freely. The constant flow of vehicles, even high in the mountains, even in the middle of the night, is like a madman’s hallucinations – whish whish whish whish whish whish whish whish.

The signage to Dodger Stadium was almost as bad as the signage in New York and New Jersey. In both cases, you have to know how to get there and then they tell you. The signs are more in the way of confirmation than direction.

We drove up the back of Chavez Ravine, circling to the top parking lot, bought our Loge tickets, took the escalator and elevator down to the correct level, and watched the game. It was quite cold. If Hannah had not brought layers, including a cashmere sweater, we would have all been shivering. Terry was the lightest clad but also the least affected. He got up after the third inning to wander around in search of warmer seats.

We pretended to be rooting for the Dodgers. After the long day, this kind of silliness and fun was what we needed. We had our hot dogs after the fourth inning, sang Take Me Out to The Ball Game, arms around each others’ waists as we promenaded toward the elevator, wended our way up, then down, to our car, and were out of there by the time the Dodgers pitcher was taken out of the game because he had thrown too many pitches. He struck out 11, the Dodger center fielder made a great catch, a Dodger bruised the third baseman while sliding into base, and the Dodgers won 2-0.

The length of my shower was somewhere between a drought shower and a very-long-day shower. By the time we all hit our pillows, we were wrung out.

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Grandma and Grandpa in love

My church asked me to teach their sex education curriculum. It was difficult to find that fine line between telling too much and telling too little. My fellow teachers and I laughed with each other over the fiction we were creating that we knew enough about sex to tell others about it. We learned a lot too.

If I had had a class like this when I was a teenager, where I learned not only the sexual nitty gritty, but discussed the ethical and practical issues of dating, my life would have unfolded much better than it did, but that is another story.

One of the beautifully rendered illustrations showed a picture of an older couple lying in bed. The woman’s long white hair was down, her head on the man’s shoulder. The man lying on his back smiling, his arm around the woman’s shoulder.

“Yech!” said one kid.

“Why do you say ‘Yech’?” I asked.

“That’s, like, my grandmother.” His expression showed disbelief.

“And?”

“Well, that’s disgusting.”

“Why would you deny your grandparents the comfort of sex?”

The thought had never occurred to him.

“They have lost a lot by their age, and a lot of fears have been introduced into their lives; fears of death, and illness, and the death or illness of people they love. They might need the comfort of sex and affection even more than young people do.”

I wish I could perfectly describe the way the young man’s face softened into understanding. He smiled. “Yeah. That’s right.”

Our exchange not only affected the way he saw his grandparents today, but when he becomes their age, he will remember that the sweet comfort of affection and sex is available to him.

The fiction we create that older people don’t have sex has not one good reason to recommend it.

Keeping fit

Pictures of me 15 years a go show a dowdy woman carrying 40 more pounds than today. I'd always been thin, and didn't know what to do with myself when I gained all that weight. It humbled me. In a period when I wasn’t paying attention, I became lean and strong. I’ve stayed that way, and here’s how.

I have a scale in my bathroom, and weigh myself several times a week. When I get three pounds overweight, I cut out carbohydrates for a couple of days, and add an extra exercise round every day. Every day. In the ten days surrounding my cousin’s recent wedding in Colorado Springs I had the hotel’s ample breakfast, a full lunch, and a dinner with appetizers, wine, and dessert. We happened on a German restaurant with authentic everything and ate spaetzle, schnitzel and cheesecake until we were sick to our stomachs. The scale was unnecessary. I could feel it. My pants were hard to cinch closed. I could feel the padding at my sides and on my stomach as I sat down. My clothes tell me when I have gained weight. The scale forces me to face it.

On the trip, I didn’t exercise, and could eat much more without feeling full. Exercise does something to my metabolism which makes me feel full faster.

It was only five pounds, and it came off quickly.

This quick-response method had worked for ten years now and can work forever.

Craving, hatred, and delusion: the fetters of the ego

Craving, hatred, delusion form one of the neat sets of virtues and vices from the Buddhist liturgical canon. They are called “fetters of the ego.” In my own psyche they rank: 1) delusion; 2) craving; 3) hatred.

Hatred is number three. I have had three enemies in my life. For a moment I could only remember two of them. That is a good sign.

Once your antennae are trained, you detect your hatred early, and that is the moment to depart, before you waste energy, emotion and brain power. There is room for pretty much everybody on this earth, and the person I hate might fit in tidily somewhere else. Hitler, Genghis Khan, people who would kill 500,000 Rwandans, and Saddam Hussein are outside of this scope. They are the stuff of grand philosophy, Devil and Evil talk.

One of them was an extremely successful litigation partner in one of the biggest law firms in the U.S. Her disdainful, manipulating and suspicious nature were perfectly suited to her work, and when she died an early death she left millions of dollars behind, specifically cutting out her mentally ill brother, giving it mostly to the Republican Party. She probably died of hatred, though they called it something else.

Craving is my median weakness. Craving is all mixed up with impatience. If you could only wait until dinner to eat, you wouldn’t get fat. Craving the sound of a boyfriend’s voice has gotten me on the telephone long before I should have been, during times when a period of separation would be a better idea. Craving has landed me in bed with someone long before the relationship was ready for it.

The opposite of craving, waiting for perfection, is also counterproductive. You have to date quite a lot before you find out which flaws are dealbreakers, and which you can get used to.

Viewing it as a continuum, we look for the sweet spot in a relationship where you each have a few tolerable flaws to put up with for (you hope) the rest of your life but you get that feeling of sweet security, reliability, response, and I guess we call it “love” that you have craved.

My cravings have turned frogs into princes one too many times. They are frogs.

Now we come to the force which has made me fall off the edge of the earth. Delusion.

Once I was leaving a job and at my going-away party one of my fellow teachers read a poem which was very funny and appreciative, but included the lines:

Ann is smart and at her sternest

When talking about the importance of Ernest.

Ernest was my boyfriend, later my husband. I was unaware how gradually, but completely, I had made Ernest my world. I had deluded myself into thinking he was giving me a wider world, not, as it turned out, less of everything.

Other peoples’ advice and observations are a good way to check delusions and maybe I should have listened more closely to that observation. I didn’t have my internal delusion detector working properly, and possibly still don’t.

It is rare that a pointed observation is made so wittily, in rhyme. Think of the clumsy, well meaning warnings you have received which came out as insults. Think of the overstatements of risk so grossly overdrawn that you discounted the warning.

Our delusions are so deeply rooted in our expectations and our predictions. A male friend fell in love with a married woman a few years ago during a torrid, brief affair which she abruptly broke off. The mere mention of her name still strikes deeply into his heart. He is convinced that she loves him more than she loves her husband, and that she will come to him one day. Delusion. Or is that true love?

How slippery delusion is, because it somehow involves predicting the future, and nobody can do that.

Zimbabwe journal: 2005 part 9

This is a journal from my trip to Zimbabwe in 2005. I stayed with my friend Louis in Harare.

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Yesterday was a humid, hot, violent weather day. Thunder and lightning disturbed the sky, and the wind blew fiercely in the afternoon. I went outside just to feel the approaching storm. I looked up in the sky and saw what looked like long-necked, long-legged paper airplanes soaring on the wind currents, black silhouettes against the dark grey clouds. One after another of these swooping cut-outs cut across the sky above me, finally coalescing into a flock of 12 or so who hitched a ride on the violent air currents to ride to the east.

This morning I was walking back from the gym and on the grass in front of the gate was a white bird, all white, with a yellow bill, long spindly legs and a curved, long neck, and I recognized one of the paper airplanes, though now domesticated, on the lawn. It was such a beautiful sight.

In the middle of the night a storm roared in, crashing and banging, with torrential rains pouring down. There is a hole in the thatch of the roof, with a catch basin below it usually used to carry the laundry, but left there by habit to catch the rain. They have tried several times to fix the hole in the thatch, unsuccessfully, and were waiting for a more thorough review of the situation. Last night the rain was pouring through onto the living room carpet. I got another basin, but it did not begin to catch all the rain, it would splash into the basis and hop out onto the carpet.

Water also poured in under the kitchen door to pool in front of the sink. I thought maybe it had come through the wall, but there is a gap between the bottom of the kitchen door and the floor and water came in through there. Must be cold in the wintertime.

The electricity went out for a few hours, but the lightning flashes lit my way through the house.

Coming back after arranging the basins in the living room, I noticed a red light flashing on the unit with the buzzer for the security gate. I wondered if the security gate was left vulnerable when the power went out, as it operates electrically. I learned this morning what I of course suspected – a person could never afford to have the security gate not functioning, it reverts to battery power when the electricity goes out.

This morning the earthen V’s between the road and the walkway are full of water, the small streams are pouring water, there are little lakes of still water settling into the lawn, and the storm is over.

Fall is beginning to come to this part of Africa, as I read of snowstorms and freezing cold in the northern hemisphere.

The next day another torrential rainstorm created more havoc. Water overfloweed the small creek between this house and the next, pouring under the steel gate and creating a torrent of water coursing along the back fence, pooling in the open “garage” (just a roof) and on the lawn, and creeping up the concrete base of the verandah. Close inspection showed that the house was safe from flooding, though the neighboring houses, on the back side of the property where the torrent was flowing, had water pouring through them. I called Louis to tell him to drive in the other gate, since the gate he usually came in would have flooded out his truck

It went away the next day, leaving behind worms, whose lives had been deeply disturbed, squirming along the wet grass. I saw one of them disappear into the mouth of a pigeon-like bird.

Zimbabwe journal: 2005 part 8

This is a journal from my trip to Zimbabwe in 2005. I stayed with my friend Louis in Zimbabwe.

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Sunday.

Today we drove out of Harare on the main road to Malawi, the road which the big trailers hauling cars and supplies go up. It is a two-lane highway with not much traffic. Thirty yards to the left and right of the road, past a v-shaped earthen depression which catches the excess rain and keeps it off the road, is a path where the constant stream of Africans walks, well off the road so they are not in danger from the traffic. The road is patched, with fewer potholes than usual.

Last night I heard the graduate of a fine boy’s school in a town two hours away from here tell of visiting the school recently, how it had fallen to pieces, and how depressing it was.

Today we went to the botanical garden outside of Harare where they have a display of aloes. The aloes are there, many varieties of them, unlabeled except fora few, with empty rectangular beds, or beds containing one or two straggly plants between the displays of plants which I could not identify. There was a thatched roof over a table where people could sit and look at the view. There was also a picnic area. And one other car there. At the entrance there was a nice display of flowering plants, and uniformed wardens to collect our money ($50,000 (about $4.50 US)) to get in, and to ask us to sign the guest book. “Ask” is perhaps not the correct word, the guest book was presented, and it was required that we fill it in, name, address, purpose of visit, number of visitors.

It is depressing to see these beautifully conceived places falling to wrack and ruin, unvisited, unappreciated, untended. There were a few workers with scythes cutting the high grass and one tractor mowing a large area. It’s strange to me that people don’t see the beauty and the value of a place like this. I mean, even if they aren’t interested in the scientific aspect of preserving the plants, etc., at least they should see the value of attracting tourists, even Zimbabwean tourists, to these places. It’s as if all over Africa European projects were started which add value and beauty to the place, and they just never took root. As soon as the Europeans left, they tumbled into ruin.

The figure 70% is bandied about as the percentage of unemployed in Zimbabwe, but I think this number is created just for the entertainment of western economists. The people streaming along the sides of the road are not “unemployed”. They are not sitting around waiting for the government to feed them. They have a little stash of clothes or food or staples or some kind, or they have some tools to fix bikes with, or a saw to cut wood with, and they keep sadza in their bellies, clothes on their backs and a roof over their head that way. Although I know none of the people I see at the side of the road selling or providing a service, I do know some Africans, and see that they are always scrambling to make a buck here or there. That goes for the white people too – setting up a side business, buying and selling things, figuring out a way around repressive rules, etc. Some go over the border into South Africa to buy something and resell in Zim. I am told that the women sometimes carry on a sex service on the side. Even in the central market, Mbari, there are hand painted signs next to a single room saying “Barber,” for example, where they earn enough for the sadza every day. While these people would undoubtedly love to have more money, they are not “unemployed.” They are unregistered, uncounted, unproductive in our sense of the word, but they are busy every day all day.

We drove to an area which was stunning for its lavish wealth – properties of many acres, behind walls and gate and fences, with horses standing in the fields, lovely gardens, multiple cars visible in the driveways through the lattice gates. We went to see the studio of a silversmith Louis knew but had not seen in years. Coming to his home/studio there were three uniformed guards standing by a guardhouse next to the gate. They looked intently at us as we pulled up, and one of them came to the driver’s side window. Another guard buzzed us in at the high sign from the first one, and we found in about 20 yards another gate with more uniformed guards. As the first gate clanged shut, we found ourselves in an open area between two locked gates, with a few armed guards at each. It was as if there was a small army protecting this silver studio. The guard at the second gate told us that the studio was closed on Sunday “Why didn’t you tell us that before?” Louis asked. The guard laughed and chatted for a few minutes, then we turned around and drove out.

We wanted tea, so drove past a row of estates and turned right to the “River Café” which Loui had heard was very beautiful. The road was atrocious, but we finally made it up there, got past the guard standing at the gate, past the boom which was raised at that moment, but I wondered if it might swing down on us, and parked next to one other car. A boy of about 8, blond, kind of dumb looking, came to the car and said, “The café is closed.”

Louis got out of the car and looked around. A man was sitting on the porch of one of the two buildings and he shouted up at him. “The cafe’s closed?”

“Yes,” he said without getting up. “Closed about a year ago.”

“So are you constantly harassed by people wanting tea?”

“I guess we ought to take down the signs,” the man said.

A couple of nights ago we watched “Songcatcher” on tv. It’s the story of a musicologist who goes into Appalachia to collect songs, and this scene reminded me for all the world of Appalachia, without the banjo.

We drove back down the potholed road, and decided to take tea at a fancy hotel in the neighbhorhood, the ‘House of Stone’ Imba Magobo(??). We drove up to the gate which had brick pillars on either side and a steel door in the middle, with a guardhouse on each side. Two guards came down, asked us to sign the guest book, asked us our purpose for going to the hotel, wrote down our license number, and then opened the gate. We parked next to the only other car in the parking lot and walked to the restaurant.

“What may I do for you?” asked the hostess.

“We’d just like to have a drink, maybe some tea,” Louis said.

“I’m afraid we only serve lunch, not tea,” she said.

So we walked out, past the deserted glistening swimming pool, past the thatched hut which had some exercise machines inside but nobody in it, with a sign “Gym,” saw the uniformed maids laughing and talking to each other sitting on a low stone wall behind the obviously unoccupied bungalows which in times past had been filled with guests, and drove out.

“I’m kind of used to this kind of security,” I said, “coming from New York, but what are they protecting against here? In New York it’s terrorists with bombs. Here is it thieves who would rob the guests, of which there aren’t any?”

So it was back to tea and toast at home instead of supporting the Zimbabwean economy.

We drove past huge farms in the most gorgeous valley, Enterprise Valley, lined with formerly productive farms. Now some of them were producing crops, especially we saw maize seed crops which was encouraging, some soya beans, but the tobacco drying houses were empty and falling down, the greenhouses careening right and left with their coverings ripped and flapping in the breeze. The grass at the side of the road was unmowed so you couldn’t even see the fields in many places. The grass was 6 feet tall in many fallow fields. As the agricultural situation has become so dire in Zim, some of the white farmers have struck a deal with a black politician so that they can keep on working their farms, but there are not many of them.

I learned about one farm in particular. This farm was fairly recently awarded to someone as a political favor. Most of its fields are now empty of crops, the row after row of greenhouses tipping over, the large lakes for irrigation are still there, but there are only a few sprinklers irrigating crops.

This farm used to produce flowers for Europe – a container truck would pull up every day and take a load of flowers to the airport. It had a private game park, and cooperated with the World Wild Fowl Foundation (correct name?) by sheltering endangered species of birds, collecting their eggs and sending them to central breeding places where the species would be propagated. It had 80-90 houses built on the property for the farm workers, and these workers were provided with produce from the greenhouses and milk from the dairy cows (which have now been eaten). It produced vegetables, avocados, milk, soya beans, corn, wheat, flowers, and multiple other crops.

This farm was what we would call an agribusiness, exporting vast amounts of produce, and feeding Zimbabwe. We rail against agribusinesses in the U.S., and I guess it is this kind of farm we are talking about. Of course the person who owns it wields power. He is, or perhaps I should say was, a rich man who employed hundreds of people and brings, or brought, large amounts of foreign currency into the country.

What has been achieved by undoing his economy of scale, by destroying the productive ability of this beautiful land? It’s hard to see any improvement. The Africans are still walking slowly along the side of the road carrying heavy loads on their heads. The workers’ houses are empty.

“They think their freedom is worth it,” one person remarked.

“The enterprise zone of these Africans is bounded by the amount they can carry in their hands or on their heads, and by the distance they can walk or cycle in a day,” I observed.

Going back to subsistence farming does not appear to be benefitting anybody. Even the person who was awarded the beautiful big farm described above is only getting a fraction of the former earnings, because he does not know how to farm the place. He is not a farmer. He’s a judge in league with politicians.

T he banks are getting screwed because, while this particular farm did not carry long-term debt, it had financed several projects which now are not being repaid. In a strange twist, the original owner still has the title documents to the land, perhaps in an effort to make him personally responsible for repaying the debt which now is not producing any income. The bank in fact tried to enforce the personal guaranty of the owner in an effort to get its money back, but the high court in Zimbabwe ruled that the former owner (well, still the owner in that he holds the title, though he is not allowed on the property) is not required to repay the money, that the present owners have to, but how to enforce that when they don’t technically own the land?

In this chaotic atmosphere of waste and ruin, the tourism industry is totally dead, the lights are going out all over Zimbabwe as one European venture after another (farms, supermarket chains, industries, research institutes, educational initiatives, etc.) are being denuded of expertise as the people who formerly ran them leave. Anybody, black or white, who has access to foreign exchange leaves. The supermarket where I go every morning has many older Afrikaner type farmers hobbling along after their shopping carts. They can’t afford to leave Zim. They have no foreign exchange and no entree to England or South Africa or some other country.

The parents who struggled to set up one enterprise or another in Zim, only to see it taken over by others without any compensation, see their children leave to study and to live elsewhere, leaving families scattered all over the world.

There is a basic incompatibility of between the European ways of doing things and the African way of life. Africanization of everything in Zimbabwe is inevitable and the European inventions – the game parks, the botanical gardens, the schools and universities, the farms and industries, will wither and become ghost towns, with clowns dressed up in uniforms guarding the gates. Guarding nothing and noone. Protecting against what?

I’m not a defender of colonialism, and would be willing to agree that if this part of Africa had been left alone, it might have made its way in a more healthy manner into the 20^th, now the 21^st century. But you cannot change the way history has unfolded.

At a party the other night one person remarked that the government’s aim is not only to chase out the whites, but also to chase out the black middle class, because they are troublemakers. There are plenty of black people driving fancy cars, there are black men and women at the gym where I exercise every weekday. But according to that informant, they are going to be in the same sort of trouble that the white entrepreneurs were in before.

Even in South Africa, the most successful economy in sub-Saharan Africa, where so many Zimbabweans aspire to go, is separating like oil and water into two increasingly disparate layers, protected by layers of razor wire and high walls. The Europeans know that without separating themselves from the African sea around them, they will drown. And if the Africans invade the European territory, taking over what was created, running the businesses, holding the shares, living in the houses, they have incorporated so little of what these things mean into their culture that these things wither

I can only observe in the most superficial way how the African society functions, but it seems to me that far more important than making a profit is maintaining human contact. Sitting all alone at a desk would be unwelcome, no matter how much money was made. At the first moment of contact, the Africans are warm and responsive and laughing, enjoying thoroughly the human contact, no matter how light. At every entrance to a game park or botanical garden or silversmith studio, there is a bit of banter with the guards.

Even the young men in Mbari who had an exchange in Shona with Louis were soon laughing. They were not miserable and surly standing around on the corner poor and without prospects. Or perhaps I should say that even standing around on a corner poor and without prospects, they still were not surly and miserable.

I know from my conversations with random Africans on the street, which I have recounted to you, that they are all concerned about having enough to eat, about the elections and the government, but this concern is not embedded in bitterness and resentment, it is wreathed in smiles and banter. This is counter-intuitive, to me. I would be worried sick, wasting away from concern, if I didn’t know where my next sadza was coming from. I would be short-tempered and anti-social. Not these people. Of course, they have wondered since the beginning of time where their next meal was coming from, and so concern and worry embroider every aspect of their culture.

There are so few old people about. When the young men called Louis ‘Old man” I said, “You really ARE an old man here. I see so few old people.”

Seeing the waste, the destruction, the chaos is depressing and baffling. The Europeans who built such a thriving economy here feel the same, and feel helpless to change the course of events. They realize, I think, that their way of resolving the issues here is not the way that is going to work in the long run. Africans don’t think, act, or desire the way Europeans do. Driving past the fields which used to be lush with crops, Louis made remarks that I don’t think any African would make, “Any farmer would be ashamed to have a maize crop that looked like that.” Or “We used to mow the grass along the road just to make it look well kept.” Or “They used to export ____ tons of maize from this farm. Just look at it now.” Or “He has as stud farm here. Must have made a deal with somebody to keep it.” We passed farms that used to be owned by a single owner that stretched to the far hills. The owners were thrown off, now living god knows where. The heartbreak is almost palpable, though there is no crying in their beer for these white people who lost so much. They are stoic and have moved on, as far as I can see. But they can’t help noticing, driving by after years of absence, that there is nobody at the country club where hundreds of people would gather for lunch and cricket every weekend, there is nobody at the hotel where they used to go for tea, there is nobody at the botanical garden donated by Mr. And Mrs. Somebodyorother, the game park is empty, the irrigation systems non-functioning, the grass overgrown, the houses falling down, the place gone to wrack and ruin.

And the Africans stream by on the roads, carrying their loads on their heads, selling their pyramids of tomatoes or mangoes or oranges, or their rugs, or their services. This is their country and this is how they want it. It is beautiful, hypnotic, underutilized, inefficient, unproductive, poor, simple, dangerous, smiling, warm.