What is this space???

Though this is being posted today, I began writing it on November 26, 2008.  I'd like to finish it today ...

I've been sitting here in front of the computer.   Spending a great deal of time here rather than walking around a very hazy Delhi.  The air quality seriously bugs me.  But anyway, I'll get out there pretty soon.  I need to find the post office to mail some letters to the boys which I've wanted to mail for the last week.  I find myself feeling almost ashamed of that fact.  To let the letters just sit in my purse.  (And maybe that I have yet to get outside today . . . )    I attempted to get them off with the Asplund/England mail, but that goes through Mark's office and they don't need to deal with my mail.

Then there is email.  This whole internet thing where I am able to send a letter, the boys get it the next time their Daddy opens the email account and I hear right back from them.  Does it get better than that?   Yes, actually it does!  I discovered the "video chat" feature on gmail and have been using it.    I'll keep figuring this stuff out.  

Keeping in touch with people when we are in other places and spaces sometimes works, sometimes doesn't.  

What I wrote was a lifetime away, since so many things have happened since then ... if I sound mysterious, I don't mean to be.

A friend I've known for about 15 years, whom I loved, who was a good man, husband, friend, business owner and boss, father to about 4 (or 400 depending upon how you look at it) loyal dogs, brother, son, and so, so much more than any label, any word .... killed himself on December 20.  

Now that I am home from my own travels, now that the holidays have passed as they do, back to living a certain sort of routine, I am reeling a bit more than before.  No, not true.  I'm still simply reeling.

But there are certain things I need to say that I may not be able to later.

Two things:  the first is some wisdom past on to me yesterday that can always bare repeating.  Almost everything is completely out of my control.  Practically everything.  And it doesn't matter whether I am crying or dealing or angry or thrilled or empathetic or whatever, perhaps except to myself, to those who I love and who love and care about me when they are able.  Even in terms of my own actions .... sometimes even those feel out of my control.  Of course, this is me being frightened about taking whatever action I probably know, deep down, I know in my heart I need to take.   That maybe others understand, or don't.   Again, I have no control how others think or feel about my choices.   I don't seem to have much control over my own thoughts, my own feelings so much.  But I am learning how to watch them change and pass.  My own personal weather pattern.   We all have them.  

I guess, as my brother told me on the phone yesterday, right now I'm probably in the middle of a pretty enormous storm,   a hurricane in fact.   And so is everyone who loved Jon.   Another person dear to me told me that the actions I was creating around me were building to the Perfect Storm.  I think we are already in it.  And we are all just hanging on to the closest thing we can.   This can be difficult when you love the other people who are whirling around, or clutching whatever they can.

I'm grateful for the strong supports that are keeping me grounded.  If there is a perfect storm raging, I just want to say  ..... in this world there are certain physical laws and, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, right?  So the things we are hanging onto have to be strong enough to hold us in place, while we tighten our grip,

Or we can let go and just see what happens.

Watch where it all falls down.

Just like death always does.

Zachary was singing Ring Around the Rosy, I'm not kidding, out of the blue (or maybe out of the darkness), but he added his own words which I will paraphrase .... how I wish I had a tape recorder for the things he tells me, the little wise man, the seer, my see-er ....

Ring around the rosie, 

pocket full of posies

ashes, and tootsie, 

we all fart and poopsies.

Jon would appreciate Zach's version.  this does feel shitty.

Why I Am Here

"So why did you come to India?"

"Did you come just for the wedding?"

"Do you have any other plans?"

"How long is your stay?"

These are good questions.  I'm still trying to figure out the answers.  I guess I'm living them, but I'm not entirely satisfied with the way I'm doing so.  Just for any of you who thought I would, perhaps, be able to be a little kinder to myself, I assure you, I can still dish it out and criticize myself to shreds.  This becomes apparent as I travel with a woman I didn't know at all prior to this trip, or live with an exceedingly kind and generous and gracious family I had never met before arriving, or go to an Indian wedding where the families have pulled out all the stops and the women are decked to the nines in their finest gold, silks, colors, saris, bracelets and beads, or try to navigate a teeming city of somewhere around 12 million people.  I may have that number wrong.  I'm thinking you already understand this place is busy, loud, crowded, hazy, dusty, rich, poor, full of a lot of living.  

For example, a list of the animals I have seen on the street or by the side of the road to date: 

     cows

     horses

     pigs

     boars

     camels

     elephants

     black cobra

     one other snake I couldn't identify that a man had next to the car window to "pet" 

     (that one may have been another cobra without his neck all tricked out like they do to scare the bejesus out of us)

     peacocks

     monkeys, on leashes 

     monkeys, just walking around, you know, being a monkey

     goats

     dogs

     parrots

     did I mention the cobra?  I like snakes, but I'm just not sure about the cobras randomly out with your neighbor on the street.

This is lame, but the Mister Rogers song about the "people in your neighborhood, the people that you meet each day" just popped into my head.  That means a lot of hungry people.  

I think there are a lot of hungry people in the US, but we REALLY don't like to see them.  We really don't want to be reminded on a daily basis, multiple times a day, countless times a day, that there are very hungry people around us all the time.  It feels uncomfortable when we see a homeless person and are oh-so-quick to point out how they probably just want to get drunk.  Never mind the fact that a whole lot of us just want to get drunk, and if we were in their (missing) shoes, getting drunk might be just the ticket for the afternoon.  I know it isn't, (for them or me,) and I'm writing all this righteous sounding bullshit because I still am grappling with what the hell I am doing here.   Seriously, why am I here???  Why did I come here?

I said I would tell you that when I entitled this entry.  The quickest way to let myself off the hook, to be able to socially respond to the question with some semblance of sanity, and get the monkey off my back, is to say I came to attend a three day Hindu wedding.  My routine answer has been along these lines.  I've wanted to visit India since I was about 20 years old.  That when I understood Nandita's invitation to attend her brother's wedding ....  her brother that I had never met ....  was extended in earnest, I thought to myself, "how many times during this lifetime will I get asked to go to India for a three day Hindu wedding?"  

Just the other day I had a woman call me on this.  She noted the number of Indian people on the planet and said it could very well happen again.  Hmmmm, she does have a point there.

Sometimes I also mention that it feels like a transitional kind of journey for me.  In a way paralleling the trip I made to London when I was twenty.   This is another big shift.  I left for that trip to study abroad.  I knew I had to leave the University of Connecticut, but didn't know where to transfer and when I said out loud that maybe I should just go abroad instead, there were two other students nearby who had come back from France and Spain.  The two of them practically started to shake me to say, "you MUST go abroad!!!"   

It ended up changing my life.  I like to say it was the first best decision I ever made.  That still sounds pretty fair to say.  Simply stated, my world got bigger.  I realized I had so many more choices than I could have imagined.  There is no one "right" way to live.  The world is teeming with people who don't put me or my country first.  That I wasn't the only person who thought Ronald Reagan was an idiot, whole nations might think he's one, too!  That I love listening to people learn from each other.  You can meet new friends anywhere.  There is ALWAYS something interesting to look at.  I'm not so great at navigating new ways of communicating when what I know seems to work (even if what I need to learn might be better.)  But then I'll figure out how to do it, despite the frustration.  That I love Indian food!  And falafel!  And Earl Grey tea.  I love, love, love to travel.  That the way I travel is VERY different than a bunch of other people and I don't care too much about what time it is.  (I knew I didn't care about what time it is before, but when others' schedules are in the mix it can either seem incredibly flexible or incredibly difficult.)       

I might go on with this later, but these are just some of the things I learned in London.  And this trip .... I'll need to make a list about India and what I've learned during this first week, but I'm hungry.  There are a lot of things that make us hungry.  (not eating breakfast is my reason at the moment and I need to go fix that)

So I guess RIGHT NOW I'm here to get myself some breakfast. 

     

Did I Say I Was Going to Write Something?

I thought I did.  My dilemma is only where I begin when the trip has, clearly, already begun.  It seems to me, Right Now is always a good place to start.  I'm pretty exhausted.  I've just returned from the first part of the wedding celebration.  There was an engagement ceremony for the family yesterday, but most of the day today we were with Shohbit's family, the groom's side. There was a lovely Indian breakfast, and quite soon after that we had mendi done on our hands and wrists.  This is otherwise known as henna tattoos in the US.  We weren't supposed to pick it off once it dried, but of course I obsessively began to do just that.  It looks amazing, but for whatever reason has begun to smell kind of funky.  I'm not liking the smell at the moment. Perhaps it's the oil we put on it after the stuff dried up and flaked off.  I think I'll be washing my hands tonight.  I hope to get a few photos posted as soon as I can. 

I feel as though I should be expressing something profound, but I would rather call the boys and others. 

I really think I could live here if the people I love were here as well.  This is not the way Sallee feels.  Having many people ask us directly, "What do you think of India?" or "How is your trip going?"  brings a pause because she and I have different answers to this question.  Sallee says, "India is an interesting place."   I believe I'm responding with, "I love it."  Because I do.  I love being just about anywhere as long as I'm not afraid and know I can talk to someone.  Especially when I can talk to someone I love.  Isn't that possible anywhere?  It seems to me in some strange way, it is.  

Sallee said to me this evening as the dancing was wrapping up, "I have less than 48 hours left here now."  

And I asked her, "Does that make you sad?"  

She responded, "Are you kidding?  I'm counting down.  I want to be home.  I miss my family."

I miss my family, too, but I'd rather have them here experiencing this with me.  I think I might be annoying Sallee with the way I can fall asleep just about anywhere, too.  I woke up and realized my mouth was probably hanging open like a dog at the end of the evening while we waited for a driver to take us back to the home we are staying in.  Nice.  Love it when I look like that.  But I did get to sleep a bit.  

The dancing was great.  The outfits and colors and jewelry were amazing.  There is no such thing as too much jewelry at an Indian wedding.  Shailija told me this before I left Salt Lake City and then added, "You'll see."  yes, there is no such thing as too much.  I found myself wanting to be decked out as much as any of them and in a fuschia, gold and turquoise sari with a dance to amaze everyone.  (I did not look remotely like that.)  I also had to laugh at myself because I really do believe I must have lived at least a few lives over here . . . . while I watched the women doing the traditional dances for everyone I was oddly reminded of some of the weird shit I could come up with in high school when the music got me going and my girlfriends and I weren't in a circle doing the back & forth goofy bouncing thing from the 80's.  If I was sort of off on my own I think my hands were spinning up and down doing all sorts of freaky things I didn't care about.  For those of you who were there, please do let me know if I'm imagining this, or if I really did stand out oddly on the dance floor from time to time?  The women at the wedding did not look odd, or freakish, or weird.  Their expressiveness was alluring, whether it was from a seventy-something year old, or a twelve year old using a Bollywood mix of tunes to convey the story of Shohbit's "affair."  These are the words of the 12 year old, later on as we talked together during dinner . . . . .  her music told the story of Shohbit's "affair."  Of course, the words in the music were Hindu, so I didn't get the story.  But from her dance, I can tell you there was a lot of   come here . . . run away . . . come here . . . run away . . . come here . . . over here, cutie pie, over here . . .   stuff like that.     You know, just like home. 

I know this is all over the place.  But that feels like me right now, so that isn't such a bad representation.  I want to mention how wonderful it felt to be in London for the day.  At about 6:30 p.m. when I was taking the Tube back to Heathrow, and I was standing on one of those steep escalators, it felt like I could have just as easily been taking the Tube back to my flat somewhere not too far away, somewhere on the other side of the city.  I found myself saying, "Sorry" in that funny little lilt, so fast it was almost scary.  Just trying to get around the people at the reception tonight, I heard the English, "sorry" pop out of my mouth without thinking about it.  I love London despite all its gray days.  

I need this trip.  Birdsong is gorgeous everywhere.

  

Here I Go!

Heading off to Delhi, India today.  Lots of deep breaths and remembering to model some sort of calm as I say goodbye to the boys for the month.  I've been telling them how much I am going to miss them, but it will be no time at all before I am back again for some time before Christmas.  So now falling apart as though this is a year or forever is not an option.  For those of you who read this and can help Anthony with the two most amazing boys ever, I would be grateful beyond words.  I know they enjoy their friends immensely, as do I, and the time always seems to fly when you are with people you love. 

I had a dream last night that I was 'intimately engaged' with an Indian woman.  I don't believe this is a literal thing about me 'switching teams' but rather how much I will love this place.  I did have to leave her in the middle of things....   so I look forward to coming back and loving those around me right back here.  Hope to keep up with this as much as possible.  Thanks for taking the time right now to check this out!!