Dark and Stormy

The first thing I did this morning was run by a cemetery. This wasn’t a modern day cemetery with neatly manicured rows or perfectly plotted paths winding through Elysian Fields. This was the cemetery of bad dreams, musty Stephen King paperbacks. Giant banyan trees stand guard over tombstones smeared with decades of biological grime, moss, soil, and dew, jutting from the soggy land at a hundred different angles. The sentinel trees reaching mangrove root fingers into the ground, seeking nutrients, the things that rot there. Winged angels, hands clasped in prayer, perch atop the once white tombstones, frozen in flight. A dull orange streetlight haze hangs over everything. 

As I run by, a breath of slightly cooler air brushes, appropriately, from the graveyard. Street sweepers in neon orange vests circle the perimeter, brooms in hand, guiding their metal wheelbarrows in circles in the street, the only other life as I streak by. They look at me over their masks, their large white eyes keeping the social distance their bodies cannot for frailty of movement. The street sweepers are all skin and bones and always seem completely exhausted. I feel guilty for having the energy to run when they seem to barely have the energy to keep their skin on or their brittle bones upright, much less sweep thousands of leaves from the gutters and street. 

Five miles later, as I was pulling into the home stretch, I spied Elise bounding from the opposite direction. We high fived as I passed her. No other word spoken. 

It was Friday. The end of a long week. Elise recently told me that as a result of the pandemic, our fight or flight response is constantly engaged as we continually assess our personal health and safety. Do I have my mask? Is this situation safe? Am I six feet away from this person? Or that person? Why is this person standing so close to me in line? Ugh, he just inched closer. Oh god, now he’s coughing!  Why is this taking so long!? And now she’s pulling out coupons!  

With our fight or flight response constantly engaged, our brain fails to register time stamps on everyday events. We are all suffering from a form of amnesia. Compounded by a warped perception of the passage of time. 

The kids continue online school. Though they mostly are succeeding, it’s not without its challenges. Peter had virtual sex ed this week.

During his classes, a series of online meetings, the kids in the class have the ability to chat with one another in a sidebar on the screen. This extracurricular conversation is usually monitored by the teacher. The feature has advantages; for example, it gives students the ability to ask questions in real-time without interrupting the teacher. But when the teacher is presenting her screen to show or describe some part of the lesson, she loses the ability to monitor the chat. The kids know this, and it quickly becomes a free-for-all.

During sex ed, while the teacher presented a diagram of female genitalia, you can probably imagine what a chat box looked like run by a bunch of fifth graders:

“Ewww”

“That is gross”

“Oh gosh”

“Ewww hair”

“Ewww indeed”

“Totally ewww”

“Omg”

“Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww”

“Oh my god”

“My mom and dad literally learned this in 8th grade”

“Just

No”

“It’s not ewww. It’s natural”

The last comment was Peter’s. 

“Well it’s ewww for us”

“Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”

“And that is why I want to adopt a child”

“Grow up” 

This is where Peter’s frustration showed. He’d complained to Elise and I before about how distracting the chat box was. Even if you minimize the chat box, a near incessant pinging rings in his ears every time one of his classmates comments. Understandably, it makes focusing on what the teacher is saying difficult. 

“Peter you are insane”

“It is still gross Peter”

The chat spiraled out of control when Peter told one of his classmates to shut up in the chat box. Of course, the kid immediately radioed that back to the teacher while the rest of the kids kept copying and reposting his comment to the point it bordered on cyber bullying. 

Peter was, not surprisingly, upset by the whole ordeal. As though learning sex ed wasn’t stressful enough. Like adults, children, too, take advantage of the cover provided by an online environment and say things they wouldn’t normally say to one another in person. We’re learning lots of different lessons this year. 

Peter were later complain he wasn’t taught how to have sex. 

“Well, you have to learn the parts of a car before you can learn to drive,” I replied.

That night, we met a small group of friends at the Station, an outdoor restaurant on the beach for sundowners (a distinctly Sri Lankan way of saying Happy Hour), as a thunderclouds darkened the sky to the east. 

The sun set into the Arabian Sea as black clouds metastasized over the water like a wizards cloak, purple like a bruise and orange, reflecting the dying ray’s of the setting sun. Tendrils of lightning tickled the waves. I forced my brain to remember to take a time stamp. Our time in Sri Lanka is not infinite, and I want to remember it. Despite, or perhaps because, this is where we rode out the pandemic.

Scenes from a Government Curfew

Sam’s beard almost matches his hair. 

Food art made with the end of a leek. We called him “Leeker”. Do you know why?

That’s why.

The artist at work.

Election Day outfit.

Yes, that is a BMX bike in the kitchen.

Reading, walking, and brushing teeth.

What Goes Up

We live in a three story townhouse. The kitchen is on the bottom floor. The TV room is on the third floor. Sometimes — usually on Friday or Saturday nights for pizza or takeout and a movie — we eat dinner in front of the TV as a family. This entails carrying our plates, napkins, silverware, and beverages up three flights of stairs to the TV room, and after dinner, carrying the empty plates, dirty silverware and napkins, down three flights of stairs back to the kitchen. 

There is an atrium that runs through the middle of the house, all the way from the ground floor to the third story. A skylight at the top allows light to reach the entire house. We’ve frequently imagine how easier this would be if we had a dumb waiter.

This past weekend, the rear car door wouldn’t latch. It was the same side of the car we were hit on a few months back, immediately following the last lockdown, but the car door closed just fine after that incident, so I concluded the two weren’t related. Simply, the latch stopped catching.

We’d have to wait until the curfew lifted to take the car to the shop and get it fixed. Until then, one of the kids had to hold the door closed as we drove around town. Something that might have been frowned upon if we were in the States. 

Our friend brought over a bag of different types of rope, string, and bungee cords. There were like 100 bungee cords in this bag, and it wasn’t long before the kids were hooking all the bungee cords together and pulling things around the house, chairs, bicycles, and toys.

Then, someone came up with the brilliant idea to construct the dumb waiter out of a length of one-foot bungee cords linked together and attached to a picnic basket. 

I don’t remember what they first hoisted up in the makeshift dumb waiter, but it seemed to work pretty well, if not move slowly. Clem monitored the basket’s progress from the ground floor as the boys hauled up the basket from the third floor, hand over hand, finally pulling it over the third floor railing when it reached the top. 

They lowered the basket back down to the ground floor slowly.

At this point, I jumped in the shower and shaved. I had shaving cream covering half my face when I heard wailing coming from downstairs. 

I rushed to the second story landing where I nearly collided with Elise.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

She guided me back into our room. “Sam’s computer,” she started. “It’s shattered.”

I must have muttered something in disbelief. I ran my fingers through my hair and walked in tight, quick circles. 

Elise and I marched downstairs. Sam day at the dining room table, head in hands, sobbing. In front him was his computer. The shattered screen refracted broken ultraviolet computer light back at him, mockingly. We have no way of knowing if anything else in the computer works for lack of a screen to see through. 

At some point in the preceding 20 minutes, our three children collectively came to the conclusion the bungee cord dumb waiter worked well enough to attempt to hoist Sam’s computer to the third floor. 

They were wrong.

I don’t exactly know what happened or where the mechanical failure occurred, somewhere around the second story, based on the spiderweb-like crack. 

All three of them took turns fighting back tears as they explained what happened, a circle story of good — if not entirely well thought out — intentions. 

Neither Elise nor I raised our voices. Though Sam’s laptop is the only thing connecting him to his education, his teacher, lessons, and peers, at the moment. Fortunately, Clem had an extra laptop from school she was able to move to, freeing up the desktop for Sam. 

We have another screen already on the way, and, of course, it could have been worse. At least they hadn’t put one of their siblings in the basket. 

Chalk it up to another twist of history, this time in our lives, a wrenching, like an Indian burn, or two tectonic plates grinding together. Nothing so acute to make you grasp your side in pain, but there nonetheless, a dull throb. It can always be worse.

The People Have Spoken

Lockdown, Vol 2 - Part Four, The Waiting Place

Clementine has taken to wearing a black cloak around the house most days, a la Harry Potter. She is currently reading the fourth or fifth book in the series. I can’t remember which because she is reading them so fast. 

Peter’s Halloween costume finally arrived in the mail. One day too late. He didn’t waste any time jumping into the spandex and web slinging. 

Time has stopped. The days are longer under quarantine. We woke Wednesday morning as the results started to filter in. Like the rest of the world, we watched the map change colors, red and blue. Like most everything in life these days, we knew to be patient. A vaccine wouldn’t come before Election Day, and election results wouldn’t come before the end of the day either. 

After the last lockdown, I bought a grill. 

A gas grill. I was super excited. I even found a gas store in an old part of the city run by a Muslim family that sold me a small gas tank to go with it. 

Sam and I put the grill together like it was a LEGO or a piece of IKEA furniture. We had planned to grill hamburgers on it that night, but it took a lot longer to put together than either of us anticipated, and we had to make other plans. 

The grill would sit outside on the small patio behind our townhouse. I even bought a grill cover on Amazon to shelter it from the elements. 

It was a good grill.  Over the following weeks, we would grill burgers, steak, shrimp kebabs, chicken fajitas in a grill basket, and bread for paella. 

One day last week, I pulled off the cover, lifted the cover, and a giant rat leapt out of it. 

I came back inside the house and leaned against the counter. 

Elise glanced at me, “What’s wrong? You look pale.”

It would take me several weeks to revisit the grill with the intent of cleaning it and moving it to the third floor balcony, hopefully out of reach of nesting rats. I lifted the lid of the grill with a broom handle, and — sure enough — the rat came scurrying out. I examined what was left behind and quickly concluded the grill was now unusable. I guess this is why there isn’t a lot of grilling in South Asia and tandoori ovens are mostly indoors. 

Because of the curfew, I’ll have to wait to get a new one. 

There isn’t much more that can be written about waiting that Dr. Seuss hasn’t already written...Everyone...Everyone...really is just waiting.

Lockdown, Vol 2 - Part Three, The Night Before

I ran three miles yesterday. Elise and I have resolved to add a mile every morning of lockdown. I ran four miles this morning. I plan to run five tomorrow morning. We run up and down our road, an approximate half mile stretch. I will soon now every step of this road, every building, house, jasmine  and mango tree, street light. 

I start at 5:00 each morning. I get to know the rhythm of that hour on our street. The same people come and go, the bread tuk-tuk arrives at the same time each morning, playing the same song, “It’s a Small World.” Doormen report to work on bicycles and scooters at the same time each morning. I’ve become familiar to the security guards in front of the newspaper office across the street from our house, at the French Embassy a few steps down the street, and the UNHCR office. 

An army of street sweepers keeps Colombo, a city under a green leafy canopy of giant trees, leaf free. They deploy from central points around the city, armed with metal wheelbarrows and brooms. Every morning is filled with the swish-swish-swish-swish of broom bristles on asphalt. You can tell a street sweeper by the rhythm of their swish, a short, quick swish contrasts with long, spaced-out swishes. 

The street sweeper on our road is one of the hardest working humans I’ve ever known in my life. He starts at one end of the our block at 5:00 a.m., goes down one entire side of the street before starting at the other side, finishing well into the afternoon. He is older, with dark, weathered skin. He occasionally wears a cap similar to a newspaper boy’s and occasionally wears a baseball cap backwards. He is ageless, but also very, very old with thick, leathery hands. I get a blister when I sweep the kitchen; I can imagine the giant callouses deforming his hands. It strikes me now I don’t know his name but see him every day.

He is always accompanied by his adult son who stands next to him and watches him sweep. The man boy is autistic or otherwise impaired. I stopped one morning to say hello to him, and he said nothing in return. When prompted by his father to respond, he shook his head vigorously, no, child-like.

I run past a man standing in the bed of small, rickety Toyota pick-up, plucking white jasmine flowers from the high tree branches. Men in plaid dhotis can often be seen picking the flowers. Fortunately, there are enough jasmine trees on our street to supply enough white flowers for them to pick their full every day. I don’t know what they do with the flowers, shaped like tiny galaxies. 

Online school provides it’s own daily challenges, if not rhythm. Yesterday, Clementine was working on her report on glaciers. She was copying passages out of a book she checked out of the library, changing a word here or there by looking up a synonym in an online thesaurus. Elise told her that still plagiarizing. 

Clementine broke down, as she is apt to do usually once a day during online school. She ran from the computer and up to her room and planted herself on her bed to sob. 

I entered the room and sat on the corner of her bed, the bottom bunk, and tried to console her. I don’t know if I ever got her to stop crying. She claimed she couldn’t write even one sentence of her own. I told her she couldn’t write anything upset. She had to have a clear mind to write. I think this just made her cry harder.

I left. A few minutes later, she followed me downstairs, sniffling back tears. At that point I told her it was just better to have a good hard cry and get it over with. Contrary to my expectations, she stopped and flared at me, arms crossed. It was only at that point she sat back down at the computer. I pulled up a chair next to her, grabbing a pad of paper and pen as I did.

“Look at me,” I ordered. “What is a glacier?”

She glanced down at her notes.

“Look at me and tell me.”

Her eyes snapped up from the paper . She reluctantly, haltingly, started to describe what a glacier was. I scribbled her words down furiously. When she was done, I ripped the page from the note pad and slapped it on her desk like a doctor prescribing medication.

“How are they formed?” I asked.

Her eyes drifted down to her notes.

“Look at me,” I repeated. “How are glaciers formed?”

Clementine described in her own words how glaciers are formed, something to do with layers of snow and slush, ice forming, layers compacting and sliding. I wrote it all down as fast as I could. When she was done, I ripped this page out of the note pad, too, and slapped it on the desk on top of the first page.

We did this for three more questions until she had her report written, in her own words, with me transcribing. All she had to do was type it out. 

Today, Elise received in real time an email from Peter’s teacher. He hasn’t finished his math homework assignment. He would need to finish up at the end of the day after class. 

The homework ended up being an interminable number of decimal addition problems. He had to get 100 problems in a row correct. Every time he missed one, he got set back 10-15 points. I was working with him. At 95, he missed a question by transposing two numbers, got the problem wrong, and burst into tears. 

He was set back to 84. I dismissed him, took over his seat, and finished his homework on the calculator.

This week, when I finish me run, I wait for a Elise to either join me or beckon me back inside. I’m just running in front of the house. She knows where to find me. If I finish my allotted distance before I see her, I walk up and down the street, in no rush to return indoors, knowing this is likely my only chance to be inside all day. I listen to the chatter of a flock of parrots fluttering overhead. The moon has been full this week (and the air quality poor) and has been fall-like obscured behind an October veil of wispy clouds. Towards the end of my walk, a pelican glides overhead. It flaps its wings once, twice, and I notice for the first time the bend in a pelican’s wing is, in its own way, so much like an elbow against the violet dawn sky. 

Today has been a lot. Tomorrow will be more. We all love our country so very much and only want the best for it. 

How can we think that is what’s best for it? both sides will think. 

Unlike last year, when we woke to news of the election results, we will be up as the results roll in, making breakfast, brushing teeth, unloading the dishwasher, taking out the garbage, and getting the kids ready for school. 

Dreams

“Thunder only happens when it's rainin'...”

“...Players only love you when they're playin'”

Pure joy.

Lockdown, Vol 2 - Part Two, All Hallow’s Eve Eve

This may seem like our least successful Halloween in 10 years, since we first moved to Ballston. Then, we attempted to make a Thomas the Tank Engine out of a cardboard box. The costume never got made. We were completely overwhelmed at the time, having just moved from Florida to Washington with two very small babies, and living high in the sky in corporate residential housing. 

We’re not quite as overwhelmed now as we were then, but the challenges are still significant. Some weeks ago, Clementine decided she wanted to be a box of Cheerios for Halloween. We saved a large Amazon box that had come in the mail and put it in the garage where it sat for several weeks. 

Peter couldn’t decide what we wanted to be until we bought him a Spider Man costume off the Internet that still hasn’t arrived in the mail, the day after Halloween. Sam wasn’t in the spirit at all and didn’t want to be anything, the promise of trick-or-treating and piles of candy dumped on the living room floor, their bounty, and the subsequent horse trading that inevitably follows, all canceled this year. What was the point? I guess they asked themselves. No trick-or-treating. No costume party. No school. No candy. 

We ordered a styrofoam hemisphere online and white stockings for Clementine’s cereal box costume. They came in the mail a few days before Halloween. The box we had set aside was still in the garage. We pulled it out and moved it to the center of the living room. Elise and I drove to the art store while the rest of the city stockpiled groceries in advance of the curfew and bought yellow acrylic paint. 

The paint and the box stayed in the living room until the day before Halloween. I was having flashbacks of that failed Halloween 10 years ago. The sad, half-constructed Thomas the Tank Engine sitting on the dining room table in our small apartment. Despite a last ditch effort to finish it, I could not. 

The day before Halloween, All Hallow’s Eve eve, Elise sprang into action. 

She finished just in time for Clementine to wear the costume to the pool and pose for a few pictures (she missed the impromptu Halloween parade by a few minutes).

Halloween night, we hosted the two small girls who lived next door for trick-or-treating since we couldn’t do any trick-or-treating ourselves. 

Elise got a hook up on a pumpkin delivery (still on despite the curfew), and we carved flat, green Sri Lankan pumpkins at the dining room table.

We had a lentil sausage soup for dinner and listened to records. All told it ended up being a much nicer Halloween than we thought it could be and somewhat helped us to reset our expectations for that this — or any — holiday can mean.