Left to Their Own Devices

The inevitable finally happened over the weekend. The kids' got their own devices.

I don't even fully recall the exact decision tree that got us to this point. As a kid, I remember having my own yellow Sony Walkman Sport. I used to love music. I mean, I still do, but listening to music used to be a hobby, a pasttime. I used to listen to cassette tapes starting when we lived in Houston, fifth grade, younger than Sam is now. I even remember my first cassette. Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Followed by Culture Club, Adam Ant. When we moved back to Florida, I distinctly remember lying on an inflatable mattress in the living room in our old house on Snug Harbor, one holiday when my grandparents came to visit from Texas and I was forced to give my room up to them, listening to The Clash and Queen. Later, when I would reach high school, the more eclectic and nuanced the music the better. Green on Red, Neutral Milk Hotel, Violent Femmes, and of course R.E.M., Depeche Mode, the Violent Femmes, the Cure. 

But Sam had no way of having the same relationship with music. In Jordan, one of my coworkers was cleaning out his closet and came upon an old iPod. He put it up for sale on our work's Facebook page, and I bought it in a second for Sam. He loaded it with his mom's downloaded music from iTunes and that worked for a while, but it was a temporary fix, a patch, a band-aid. 

One of the great things about music is that sense of discovery. Like Vasco de Gama or Columbus, finding new music was revealing a new landscape, uncovering a new continent or passage around the world. I remember looking through my dad's old records and before even placing the needle on the vinyl, wondering what the music would sound like. I had no idea. An entire universes of new sounds awaited me. Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead, the Who. I had heard of these bands and knew they were significant in their own right, but I didn't know why and I couldn't imagine what they would sound like until I pulled the record from the sleeve and put it on the turntable.

Though we move frequently and a large collection of anything is antithetical to spanning long distances, it's one of the reasons I carry my old LPs with us from country to country. To instill that same sense of wonder in my own kids. We are currently, however, without a record player. Peter plugged our 110v turntable into a 220v outlet. The trials and tribulations of living overseas. I will forever wonder why there have to be different voltages in different parts of the world. I'll have to buy a new one soon. And speakers. Big ones. With sub-woofers. 

One of the main reasons I bought the kids Kindle Fires was to give them something to listen to music on, so they had that same sense of exploration and freedom I had. It wouldn't have been practical or even feasible, really, to get them cassette players. That's what I really wanted to do, but cassette players are collectors' items now and I don't think anyone is making cassette tapes anymore. Even a portable CD player was out of the question. 

But in order to play music on the Kindle Fire they have to find the songs first which entails surfing the web, or if not the web exactly, the music player app. Staring at a screen. Exactly what I wanted to avoid.

Also, I am the father of three voracious readers. I, too, read a lot at their age. Mostly, sci-fi and fantasy. Sam, especially as is a huge fan of fantasy. Again, I remember going to the Waldenbooks in the Twin City Mall (long before there were Barnes & Nobles) and buying a fantasy paperback to read. 

My brothers and I, all of us, were huge comic book fans, we would beg my mom to take us to the comic book store off of Dixie Highway and 45th Street in Riviera Beach, a horrible part of town, even now, every week. The store would "pull" new releases for us and keep them in a paper bag for us to collect on the weekend. I don't remember the day new releases came out, but it was weekly, so though your favorite titles were monthly, they rotated the new releases so one of your favorites came out every week. I was a huge fan of the Chris Claremont and John Romita, Jr.'s run on The Uncanny X-Men and Marv Wolfman and George Perez's time on The New Teen Titans. I still am. 

But the kids don't seem quite as I to comics as I was and I guess that is okay, especially since we don't live near a comic book store in Colombo. When we lived in Falls Church, we would ride our bikes -- me pulling Pete and Clem in the trailer behind my mountain bike -- to the comic book store, but even then, they were more interested in Pokemon cards than comic books. 

All this to say we needed a way to keep them reading without a Waldenbooks nearby.

Though they spent most of the day Sunday on the Kindles, they didn't look at them all during the week, so I'm hoping my fears are overstated. 

I guess we'll find out.

Halloween 2019

Halloween came early this year!  My work hosted an event on Saturday night.  Since Halloween isn't really a thing in Sri Lanka, there is unlikely to be any trick-or-treating on actual Halloween later this week.

Elise says she can commit to a handmade costume once every other Halloween.  I believe this is fair, since we had very few homemade costumes growing up.  Most of our costumes were the plastic mask with a rubber band that always caught in my hair and apron that smelled like toxic off-gassing we bought at the K-Mart on Northlake Blvd.

This year, Peter and Clementine knew what they wanted to be early on.  Godzilla and a mermaid, respectively.  But Sam remained uninspired up until the day of the actual party.

Elise signed us up to host a table at the party.  Unlike traditional trick-or-treating, kids would go from table to table collecting candy, instead of door to door.  Never one to do anything half-assed, our table ended up being a hit, as it was one of the only tables to include a game.  The whole affair ended up being a little bit like a carnival midway, and we were the table that got stuck handing out pencils and bookmarks, kind of like the one house on Halloween night that is handing out toothbrushes.

Since the theme Elise came up with was eyeballs for the table (she bought a bunch of ping pong balls and spent most of the preceding week coloring them with Sharpies to look like actual eyeballs).  On Saturday, right before the party, the kids finally got inspired, throwing out one awesome idea after another on how to decorate the table, including floating the eyeballs in vats of jell-o and filling plastic test tubes with colored water.  The table started to take on a mad scientist vibe, only we didn't have a mad scientist.  Yet.  Step in Sam as the mad scientist! 

Peter's Godzilla costume came a few weeks before Halloween.  Needless to say, he spent quite a bit of time inside the costume prior to Halloween, even though we asked him not to for fear the costume would tear.  

Elise and I both feared the costume would be too hot to wear.  Our theory proved correct, and Peter shed his plastic cocoon a few minutes after we arrived at the party, sweat pouring off him.  When it was time to go trick-or-treating to the tables, we discovered the zipper to the costume was broken (the costume came with a built-in fan that blew the suit up to truly monstrous proportions, but if the zipper didn't zip up, there was no way to keep the air in the suit).  

The Bridge on the River Kwai

When I was the same age as Peter or Sam are now, my dad made us watch the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai.  Growing up, we would spend every other weekend with my dad.  He would pull up in front of our house on Snug Harbor Dr. every other Friday afternoon in his Porsche 911 and honk the horn.  Our backpacks already packed for the weekend, we jumped like Pavlovian dogs.  I stretched out in the expansive leather bucket seat in front, while my brothers squeezed under the sloped glass dome over what barely passed as a back seat.  Those weekends almost always began with a stop at the video store. These were pre-Blockbuster video store days in the mid-80s.  Our video store -- like others from the same era -- had a certain dimly-lit section in the back behind a curtain.  We would pick out movies to watch over the weekend.  My dad usually chose.  The Great Escape, Marathon Man, Papillon, and The French Connection.  I was raised on a healthy diet of Steve McQueen and Gene Hackman. My dad was the furthest from an auteur but he knew a good movie when he saw one.

I remembered loving the movie. Without really thinking about where the movie was filmed. The Bridge on the River Kwai is a 1957 war film directed by David Lean, based on the novel Le Pont de la Rivière Kwaï (1952) by Pierre Boulle, and tells the story of the construction of the Burma Railway during the Japanese occupation of World War II.  When we were recently presented with an opportunity to go white water river rafting at the same spot where the movie was filmed there was no way I could say no.

We had a very early wake-up call to meet the bus that would drive us to the interior of Sri Lanka.  The rapids are located near the town of Kitugala on the Kelani Ganga River, the second-longest river in Sri Lanka which begins at Adam's Peak, the island's tallest mountain and runs all the way down to Colombo.  The drive was long, a little over three hours, on narrow roads winding their way into the jungle, but went by quickly.  Your eyes never get tired, because there is so much to see.  The city literally dissolved around us, gobbled up by the jungle.  We passed rubber and tea plantations.  Peter and Sam asked why the rubber trees wore dresses, skirts of transparent plastic to collect the black, sticky sap. Tiers of tea plants scalloped into mountainsides rose on both sides of the winding road, then disappeared into the upper canopy, clouds, mist, or fog.

Immediately upon arriving at the hotel, we had a quick breakfast and changed, then were taken three miles upriver. 

Much deliberation was taken in determining which children were old enough or big enough to participate the rafting (which would become very ironic later on in the morning when no deliberation at all was taken in evaluating the fitness of the children for a potentially far more dangerous activity). It was decided four of the smaller children -- including Clementine -- would skip the first two rapids and meet the boat downstream.  Elise decided to stick with the kids and meet us down river, as well, which ended up being a prescient decision, because the four were too small to ride the two rapids, but evidently big enough to ride in the back of an open pick-up truck down a bouncy, unpaved jungle road without adult supervision just fine. 

Because Elise stayed with the small kids, Sam became our sixth paddler.  Peter, Sam, and I shared a raft with two high-school age girls and a guy I'd never met before with red-rimmed beady eyes.  (This was definitely the type of situation in which you size up your boat mates carefully, and -- to be honest -- the guy who looked hungover...or maybe, still drunk...wouldn't have been my first choice.) Nevertheless, I took the front left side of the boat and he took the front right side of the boat with Peter planted on a slowly-deflating pontoon in between us. 

We first learned the various commands we would have to execute, plus the proper way to hold the paddle so we didn't accidentally bludgeon one of our raft mates.  There was 'paddle forward' (relatively self-explanatory), 'paddle backwards' (same, though we never had to paddle backwards. Which is good, because I think it would have been really hard to paddle back up the rapids), 'rest' (this was my favorite command), and 'get down!' (aka "Holy Shit! We're about to go over the foaming white water of doom and we're all going to dieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!"). We practiced all the commands, too, before tackling the first set of rapids and I remained convinced 'paddle backwards' was really just an excuse for those of us in the front of the boat to 'accidentally' splash those behind us in the raft. 'Get down' would become particularly useful when a tree branch dropped down over the river and we all had to get our heads flush with the side of the inflatable raft in order to avoid being decapitated. 

We would approach the first rapid early in our downriver voyage. The rubber nose of the boat tipped forward revealing a torrent of white angry froth. Peter played the role of coxswain or captain well, but it was our Sri Lankan river guide who instilled in us a true sense of urgency with his repeated calls to 'paddle forward'.  We were going forward whether we liked it or not.  It made me wonder what fate may befall us were we not to paddle forward. I didn't want to find out. I reached deep into the water, the color of coffee with a touch too much milk in it.  Then 'get down!'. Peter squealed as me and Beady-eyes squeezed in next to him at the bottom of the raft; the river came up at us, spilling into the raft.  I only had a second to look back to make sure Sam -- who was sitting on the side of the raft, paddling -- was still there. 

He was. We emerged soaked and laughing and triumphantly. One of the high school girls asked, "Didn't they tell us we could wear our normal clothes? That we wouldn't get wet?" We all laughed, because it was impossible to imagine how one could possibly not get wet.

We went one other big rapid before coming to the bridge location.  Unfortunately, all that was left was a few blocks of concrete marking the foundation.



Shortly past the bridge location, we padded to shore just as Elise, Clementine, and the three other small rafters came stumbling out of the jungle.  As our boat was already full, Elise and Clementine climbed in one of the other rafts.  There were two or three smaller rapids left to go, but they were definitely still big enough so everyone can say they had a chance to experience white water.

After the last rapid, we had the opportunity to jump out of the raft and float down river with our life jackets. You didn't have to ask Peter or Sam twice, but even though I offered to hold on to Clementine, she preferred the safe confines of the raft.

Once we reached the hotel, we stumbled up to shore, bodies drained of endorphins.  We dutifully handed our paddles over and were summarily escorted back to the same pick-up trucks Elise and Clementine had ridden in to meet us after the first two rapids. We all piled in the back, helmets and life jackets still on, and taken up the road, my bottom a little too bony for the wooden bench in the pick-up's bed.

We had been taken slightly back up river, to a wide spot above the torrent where a bridge spanned the frothing current below. We tumbled out of the back of the truck before following the guide across the bridge.  To our left were the rapids we had just tackled.  To our right, was a wooden pedestrian bridge that spanned a wide part of the river. Each end of the bridge disappeared into dense palms.  The bridge sagged precipitously in the middle; a lone woman crossed it, holding a large basket on her head, presumably going to or coming from home to town or back again.

We passed a factory; a pack of dogs wandered by us, oblivious to our presence.  They sat in the dusty grey dirt and scratched behind their ears with hind paws. A small camp sat behind the factory where workers hung lines to dry laundry, a seemingly futile pursuit in a land as humid and wet as the mountains of Sri Lanka, and watched us from behind corrugated metal shades, dhotis around their waists. As we passed the factory, the jungle swallowed the path. We first walked through tall reeds before the path narrowed further, criss-crossed by gnarled roots.  The grey soot around the factory gave way to rich red earth. Ferns and vines reached out to us as though expecting hand-outs or loose change. The path sloped upward sharply, steps formed from the earth packed between roots.

Elise and Sam walked ahead of us.  I lost them for a few moments as the path wound through the dense jungle.

I came up to them around a turn. Sam was panicked, looking down at his feet.

"Get it off! Get it off!" he cried, his voice rising an octave in distress. 

"What is it?"

I stooped and looked down at his feet.  A leech squiggled in between his toes. 

"Get it off!"

"How do you get a leech off?" I heard Elise ask in my ear. I reached down and tried to pull it off, but couldn't get a hold. The leech was small and slimy; it slipped out from between my fingers.

When I did get a good grip, I pulled but it held fast. I, too, panicked momentarily, remembering the scene in Stand By Me where Wil Wheaton finds a leech attached to his... ehem...groin area...and passes out. I couldn't remember how to get a leech off. Salt?  I remember another movie where I think they burned it off. Did anyone have a lighter?

I tugged again....and it came off.  I wiped it from the tips of my fingers on the bark of a tree nearby.

And then everyone freaked out.

Before we reached the our destination, a waterfall deep in the island jungle, I'd have to pull three more leeches off of Sam, two or three off of Peter, and several from my own feet.  We all had on Tevas, open-toed sandals with straps over the toes, the top of the foot, and another behind the heel. The leeches would get stuck under the strap, between the sandal and the skin of the foot. The leeches were in the trees and the longer we stayed on the path, the more leeches we would get, and the more leeches we would get the slower we went and the longer we stayed on the path.

We emerged from the jungle on to a cropping of rocks overlooking a waterfall. The kids were crying or nearly so. They wanted to go back.

"Has anyone ever done canyoning?" The guide called.

I looked down river. A series of waterfalls, rapids, and rocks trailed off in the distance, descending rapidly down the mountain we had just hiked up.

"I want to go home!" Peter cried.

We have two ways back, I told them.  We can go back down the trail ("With the leeches?!") or jump over the waterfall.

Needless to say, neither of these two options particularly appealed to either of the kids.  Or, likely, Elise at this point, for that matter.  But here we were. So, we all pulled up our proverbial bootstraps and decided the fastest way to get back was to go over the waterfall.

I somehow convinced them the water moved too quickly for them to get any more leeches. I don't actually know if this was true or not, but I believed it at the time.

Canyoning -- just as the name suggests -- is an outdoor activity and mode of travelling in canyons involving scrambling over, climbing up, and scrapping knees and elbows on rocks, jumping over waterfalls, abseiling down cliffs slick with moss, and swimming.  There would be four or five jumps or slides, natural slides carved out of the rock by the movement of the water over several centuries or millennia.

The first obstacle was a jump into a natural well of sorts, scooped out of the side of the canyon by repetitive swirling waters. Everyone passed and decided to scoot on their tizus down the rock to the next obstacle. 

We proceeded like this, mostly on our bottoms or all fours on the rock, down the canyon, occasionally, jumping off cliffs or sliding down rock slides. Everyone grew braver the more obstacles we successfully completed. Clementine and I went down the rock slides together. I held her in my lap and we slid down the rock, flying off the end, falling several feet, before landing in the water below. Every time, she would wait to go last, steeling herself for the challenge ahead. I never had to force her to go. By the time it was our turn, she would take a deep breath and say to me (without taking her eyes from the water), "Okay...I'm ready."

Right before the last jump, the canyon merged with the trail we had hiked up. Elise and Clementine decided they had enough and were going to take their chances on the path. Elise put Clementine on her back and hiked back down the mountain, carrying her the entire way back to the factory where the pick-up trucks waited for us. The boys and I decided we'd stick to the river which may have been a mistake.

The last jump was high. The cliff was easily several meters high. After we jumped, I tried to swim towards the boys, but was pulled away from them by a current.  I tried to scramble up a rock where I could gain purchase and hold on to them, but as I did, Peter thought squiggly contours on the rock were leeches (who was I -- at that point -- to say they weren't?) and panicked. Through their tears, Peter and Sam pulled me off the rock, clutching at me in fear. A colleague who canyoned with us helped me find a path through the rocks with the boys. I was able to stand and I grabbed both Peter and Sam by the life vest. "Look at me," I told them firmly. They did hesitantly. "We're going to be okay, okay?" "Okay," they replied unconvinced. "I won't let anything happen to you."

We pulled ourselves from the rocks and ran down the path past the leeches. We saw Elise and Clementine sitting in the back of the pick-up. I found myself bleeding from a cut on my knee suffered on the last jump. We were all bruised and battered. My shoulders ached from carrying Pete down the mountain through the leech-infested jungle. We bumped back to the riverside hotel just in time for lunch.

The trip was thrilling, amazing, stressful, and physically and emotionally exhausting. In short, epic. Just like the movie.

Grocery Shopping on a Poya Day

Every full moon day is known as a Poya in the Sinhala language; this is when practicing Sinhalese Buddhists visit a temple for religious observances. There are 13 or 14 Poyas per year, and, generally, shops and businesses are closed on Poya days. The sale of alcohol and meat is also forbidden on a Poya Day.

Unbeknownst to us, Sunday was a Poya Day. Sunday was also the day we convinced the kids to pile into the car for a trip to the grocery store.

Recently, it has become a flight to get the kids out of the house every time Elise and I want to go somewhere. We wanted to go out for South Indian breakfast -- dosas, idly, and sambar, the kids' favorite -- Saturday morning, and you would have thought we were dragging them to the gallows pole. We could tell them we were going to Toys 'R' Us and Disney World and I think they would still protest having to leave the house. 

Now, granted, the grocery store is neither Toys 'R' Us or Disney World, and I didn't fully expect them to come willing, but it is true that everytime we leave the house there is the potential for them to see or do something amazing. Saturday afternoon, Elise and I wanted to get a coffee and check out this cafe in the neighborhood, right around the corner from our house, Black Cat Cafe. 

The kids vehemently did not want to go, but we made them come with us anyway, and they each got a cup full of pudding for their troubles. Pudding! 

This is one battle Elise and I will continue to fight. Even when they are older and able to stay home by themselves, we feel as though it is healthy they get out of the house and see things. Yes, at some point it will he much easier to sigh heavily and say, "Okay. You can stay home. Just don't kill each other." But, for now, sorry kids. That's not an option. 

We drove out to a new grocery store Elise had heard about out by the kids' school. We didn't know it was a full moon or a Poya Day...until we were stopped by the Poya Day parade. 

Elise and I looked at each other incredulously, "We were just driving to the grocery store!" we exclaimed.

And I told the kids they never would have seen the parade or the elephants or got to have an ice cream cone if they hadn't of come to the grocery store with us. 

"Just trust us," I tell them imploringly. "We won't steer you wrong." 

Endless Summer