At the end of a long week, the weekend can almost seem like an oasis in the desert, teasingly refreshing only to dissolve into hallucination as you approach it. Saturday was a lot like this.
As mentioned, the weeks are grueling and long. Mornings begin before the sun rises, breakfast made, coffee brewed by the light of a single fluorescent bulb in the kitchen; often rain falling outside, heavy pattering on the palm fronds outside the kitchen window in the courtyard. Even after the kids are home from the hour-long bus ride, homework begins in earnest; Elise orchestrating a symphony of activities, worksheets, flash cards, and forms to sign while trying to put dinner on the table. I usually don't arrive home until six or later, and we sit down to dinner, tie on, sleeves unbuttoned and rolled, trying to unravel and decipher tales from the day.
The busy schedules holds the kids' emotions back like a dam. On Saturdays, when they have time to sit and just be, cracks in the pavement form, and water comes spitting through, of course there is always the possibility, the threat -- as happened this Saturday -- of cataclysmic failure.
The kids completely melted down no less than four separate times on Saturday alone, like the Batman villain Clayface melting into a pile of amorphous goo. By the end of the day, after reconstructing each of them, there wasn't enough gin, tonic, or limes to overcome the emotional exhaustion.
Peter, again, cried for his friend Faisal in Jordan and could only be brought back to life by a long talk about Godzilla movies, and Clementine's torso was too long.
It's day like this school does seem especially cruel. The traffic in Colombo didn't seem bad when we first arrived in mid-August, but local schools started a week later, and the city became clogged with every parent in the city dropping off or picking up their school-aged child. It feels like every denizen of Colombo has a kid in the second, third, or forth grade.
The civil war in Sri Lanka lasted 25 years. It ended only 10 years ago. Memory is long. Habits are stubborn once formed. And the country, naturally is still guarded. Trains and buses, mass transit, in general, were the targets of suicide bombers, and those with the means to avoid this mode of transportation still do. School buses as we know them do not exist in Sri Lanka. Kids are brought individually by parents to school, dropped off, and picked up the same way, by foot, by tuk-tuk, or by Audi Q7, creating endless queues of small girls with pig tails and white skirts with starch shields; they don't touch the pleats for fear of fraying the tips of their fingers.
You see the looks on the faces of the guards outside the schools -- the baby-faced young men in khaki uniforms with machine guns who were schoolchildren themselves when the war ended -- and you get the sense, perhaps, the entire country is waiting for the other shoe to drop. Especially after the Easter bombings in April.
Every generation has a societal angst it can own. The mistake is thinking we are passive and the fear - -whatever it is -- is something that happens to us. In 1979, cars lined up for blocks when Jimmy Carter embargoed oil from post-revolutionary Iran. Today, three billion birds die in 50 years in North America. In neither case, did these events just happen to us. They were caused by the avoidable actions of man. Nor will the pall hanging over Sri Lanka, invisible on most days, yet somewhere still in the eyes of the traffic police in marrow white sleeves, flicking their wrists and waving their gloved hands fearlessly at oncoming traffic, dissipate on its own.
I don't know if birds can be recreated or what it would take to make three billion birds sing again. Likely, it would be more difficult than putting our children back together after an emotional meltdown on a Saturday afternoon, but it was hairdresser and television personality Jonathan Van Ness that said, "You're never too broken to be fixed."
As mentioned, the weeks are grueling and long. Mornings begin before the sun rises, breakfast made, coffee brewed by the light of a single fluorescent bulb in the kitchen; often rain falling outside, heavy pattering on the palm fronds outside the kitchen window in the courtyard. Even after the kids are home from the hour-long bus ride, homework begins in earnest; Elise orchestrating a symphony of activities, worksheets, flash cards, and forms to sign while trying to put dinner on the table. I usually don't arrive home until six or later, and we sit down to dinner, tie on, sleeves unbuttoned and rolled, trying to unravel and decipher tales from the day.
The busy schedules holds the kids' emotions back like a dam. On Saturdays, when they have time to sit and just be, cracks in the pavement form, and water comes spitting through, of course there is always the possibility, the threat -- as happened this Saturday -- of cataclysmic failure.
The kids completely melted down no less than four separate times on Saturday alone, like the Batman villain Clayface melting into a pile of amorphous goo. By the end of the day, after reconstructing each of them, there wasn't enough gin, tonic, or limes to overcome the emotional exhaustion.
Peter, again, cried for his friend Faisal in Jordan and could only be brought back to life by a long talk about Godzilla movies, and Clementine's torso was too long.
It's day like this school does seem especially cruel. The traffic in Colombo didn't seem bad when we first arrived in mid-August, but local schools started a week later, and the city became clogged with every parent in the city dropping off or picking up their school-aged child. It feels like every denizen of Colombo has a kid in the second, third, or forth grade.
The civil war in Sri Lanka lasted 25 years. It ended only 10 years ago. Memory is long. Habits are stubborn once formed. And the country, naturally is still guarded. Trains and buses, mass transit, in general, were the targets of suicide bombers, and those with the means to avoid this mode of transportation still do. School buses as we know them do not exist in Sri Lanka. Kids are brought individually by parents to school, dropped off, and picked up the same way, by foot, by tuk-tuk, or by Audi Q7, creating endless queues of small girls with pig tails and white skirts with starch shields; they don't touch the pleats for fear of fraying the tips of their fingers.
You see the looks on the faces of the guards outside the schools -- the baby-faced young men in khaki uniforms with machine guns who were schoolchildren themselves when the war ended -- and you get the sense, perhaps, the entire country is waiting for the other shoe to drop. Especially after the Easter bombings in April.
Every generation has a societal angst it can own. The mistake is thinking we are passive and the fear - -whatever it is -- is something that happens to us. In 1979, cars lined up for blocks when Jimmy Carter embargoed oil from post-revolutionary Iran. Today, three billion birds die in 50 years in North America. In neither case, did these events just happen to us. They were caused by the avoidable actions of man. Nor will the pall hanging over Sri Lanka, invisible on most days, yet somewhere still in the eyes of the traffic police in marrow white sleeves, flicking their wrists and waving their gloved hands fearlessly at oncoming traffic, dissipate on its own.
I don't know if birds can be recreated or what it would take to make three billion birds sing again. Likely, it would be more difficult than putting our children back together after an emotional meltdown on a Saturday afternoon, but it was hairdresser and television personality Jonathan Van Ness that said, "You're never too broken to be fixed."
No comments:
Post a Comment