Over the Hills and Far Away

This morning, we were invited to join friends on a hike through the mountains around Ella. Unfortunately, it had been raining on and off for the last several days. Which meant the leeches had come out. 

Sam did NOT want to go on the hike. Elise and I did not present him with the option not to. Though Peter and Clementine had moved to quiet acceptance, the closer it came to the time of departure, the more upset Sam became. We took tuk-tuks to the trailhead, and as we were walking to get in the tuk-tuk he was bawling. 

Elise looked at me. "Should we let him stay?" her expression said. 

"His reaction is not equal to the threat. It is our jobs as parents to help him correct that imbalance."

With that, we piled into the tuk-tuks and were off. 

As we started up the trail, Sam was nearly hyperventilating. Neither Elise nor I could get him to calm down. I was never certain in my decision.  I didn't know what the right answer was or how this would turn out. Would he conquer his fear? Or would this be the moment that causes him to lose all trust in his father and hate him forever?

At the beginning of the hike....No. Honestly, for the first two-thirds to three-quarters of the hike, I wondered if I had made the right decision as we plowed through the wet, tall weeds flanking both sides of the trail the mucky forest floor underfoot. We stopped frequently, checking each others shoes for leeches, helping one another to flick them off with sticks we'd found along the trail and pulling their pliable, blood-engorged bodies from between the striations on tube socks. 

At one point, Sam fled up the mountainside, hands flailing in the air, screeching, "It’s in my shoe! It’s in my shoe!"

Eventually, the trail flattened out and opened up and became an undergrowth-free, deserted tea road, relatively free of leeches. 

Sam survived, our parent-son bond intact.

Leech check.

Thumbing their way back to the starting point. 

Theater of War

On the drive from Yala to Ella, we listened to the podcast "On Being" hosted by Krista Tippett, a show exploring the immensity of our lives and asking such questions as, "What does it mean to be human?" "How do we want to live?" "And who will we be to each other?" 

The episode we listened to featured Bryan Doerries, co-founder, principal translator, and artistic director of Theater of War Productions who works with leading film, theater, and television actors to present dramatic readings of seminal plays—from classical Greek tragedies to modern and contemporary works—followed by town hall-style discussions designed to confront social issues by drawing out raw and personal reactions to themes highlighted in the plays.

The interview was endlessly interesting,  but the part that struck me the deepest spoke about the pandemic. 

Bryan talking about how Ancient Greeks think about time, "...the Greeks had a very complex conception of time, but just like they had multiple words for love and multiple words for various seats of emotion and places of cognition within the body, they had multiple words for time. And two of the words were chronos, which is chronological time or the great, measurable expanse of time, and kairós. And kairós, in Greek — several definitions, but for me, it’s a moment that stands outside of time. It’s atemporal space that is timeless. And in the kairós, in the New Testament, the kairós is 'the time is nigh.'"

Krista adds, "It’s like an in-breaking. It’s like a moment of opportunity that is distinct, that transcends the kind of flow and the increments of the passage of time, chronologically."

Bryan, "And I think you’re right; the pandemic is a kairós, in the sense that it’s an opportunity. I would never fetishize the pandemic; I wish it weren’t here, but it is. And so the pandemic has made visible, to many people who were willfully blind — much like Oedipus, in one of our other projects — has made visible things that I hope we won’t be able to un-see.

"And that’s a kind of telos, the sort of end possibility of what this might accomplish."

This time in our lives, the pandemic, is more than a disease, more than the medical or clinical definition. The pandemic has stripped layers away, exposing multiple societal ills in need of addressing, opening raw, sometimes festering, wounds.  So, this period of history is more than about combating a disease, but also about combating the ugly truths the disease exposed. The pandemic is not just about the disease, but also about the life we lived through the disease. 

Like Bryan, I wish the pandemic never happened.  But it did. And to not let the pandemic change you, to not come out of this time looking at the world a little differently would be a disservice to the hundreds if thousands who lost their lives in the pandemic. 

I think its important to talk about returning to a "new normal", not just going back to the ways things were before the pandemic. When Elise and I had kids, we were eager to get to a "new normal", a way of living that was sane and manageable but that we knew would be nothing like our lives before having a tiny baby to take care of. I'm upset and a little disappointed by those who just want things to go back to normal, to the way they were before the pandemic, without recognizing all that has happened during the pandemic, and how we can use those events to share a better world, to work smarter, to be better people. 

I wish the pandemic never happened.  But it did. And something good should come out of it, should follow it.

The pandemic should signal a paradigm shift. Like the movement from the Ptolemaic system (the earth at the centre of the universe) to the Copernican system (the sun at the centre of the universe), and the movement from Newtonian physics to the theory of relatively. A movement from how we see our position in the world, from us at the center of the universe to others at the center. As President George H.W. Bush said in his 1989 inauguration speech, "America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle. We as a people have such a purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world."

Elise made a good analogy.  The pandemic has cut and broken bones. We can't put a bandage on those cuts without first cleaning the wound. If we don't reset the broken bone, it will heal crooked. We have to pick at the scars, dig the dirt out piece by piece. This is not done easily. It takes time, lots of conversations, some of which -- perhaps, many of which -- will be uncomfortable, an acceptance that we could be wrong in our thinking, an acquiescence to truth. 

The Comic Book Store

Whenever the kids ask me to buy them something or take them somewhere to buy something, I am reminded of my mom. As a kid growing up in South Florida, my brothers and I would ask my mom to take us to the comic book store. 

New titles came out every week. I don't remember what day now. Tuesdays. Or Wednesdays. Or...now that I think about it...maybe it was Thursdays. Most titles came out with a new issue on a monthly basis. But we couldn't go to the comic book store just once a month and collect all the new issues we wanted at once. We had somehow convinced my mom to take us on a weekly basis. 

She did this generously. The comic book store wasn't close. It was about a 20-30 minute drive into a not-so-great part of town before the store moved into a larger space off Northlake Blvd, closer to our house, and started also selling musty, used paperbacks.  We rarely would leave with just the new comics from that week. We often plucked a few back issues. Bagged in mylar with cardboard backings and filed alphabetically by title and numerically by issue number in long cardboard boxes, back issues sold at a premium. This was part of the essence or allure of collecting comics, I suppose, and sometimes drew us into buying comics we may not have otherwise bought because we thought they may gain value. 

Mostly,  I loved the stories. The X-Men and Teen Titans were my favorites. I couldn't exactly identify with them since I wasn't super-powered, but they were young people, too, around my same age. The storytelling seemed slower then. The characters were real, and the decisions they made fit within these characterizations.  Some may tend to forget why Superman is so popular or why is story is so engaging,  and it's not because it is the story of a nearly omnipotent alien from the planet Krypton, but because he is an inherently good -- yet humble and conflicted man -- from the middle of Iowa. 

Dick Grayson (Robin for the uninitiated) was one of my favorites. I saw a little of myself in him. He was the ward of a billionaire playboy and the sidekick to one of the world's greatest detectives and superheroes. It was impossible to escape Batman's shadow or not feel somewhat inferior.  He was talented in his own right but couldn't see it himself, couldn't see that others believed and looked up to him.  He had to leave Batman (and become Nightwing) to forge his own path. I'm no Nightwing, but I, too, had to leave Florida and the real estate business to escape my father's shadows and forge my own path. 

This comic book habit wasn't cheap, but we kept this up for several years. Even when I went off to college. My freshman year in the dorms, my mom would still go to the comic book store, pick up the new comics, and mail them to me in manilla envelopes. 

The kids don't ask me to buy them something or take them somewhere often. Certainly not once a week. So, when they do, I try to channel my mom and say 'yes' (within reason). She had a willingness to do almost anything for us. 

I realized when my mother died, that my brothers and I each mourned her passing differently.  We were each losing a different person, likely, not the same person she may have been when we were younger and perceived her similarly,  but the person she would become in each of our disparate lives. 

Recently, Sam and Peter asked me to take them to Liberty Plaza. I wrote about my last trip to Liberty Plaza in a recent post, so you likely recall why I wasn't eager to go back. It was the Friday afternoon before spring break. We were supposed to be packing to get an early start out of town Saturday morning and try to beat the traffic, but no one was packing (myself included). The traffic was going to be horrible.  But they rarely (almost never in Colombo) get to experience the raw, juvenile joy of going to the store and buying something of the shelf, so I acquiesced (Elise nudged me into doing so), but I also thought what would my mom have done in the same situation?

Sam bought a fishing rod (he already had an extra reel. He's rediscovered his passion for fishing after straying from it for a month or two after the sea took his tackle box), and Peter bought a Transformer.  I couldn't get them to stop at the small comic book kiosk in the mall.

Bundala National Park

Spring Break! We finally made it to the kids' spring break. Though Sam and Clementine have only been back to school two weeks (and Peter four), it feels like it has been a neverending stretch of five-day weeks and our last trip out of Colombo a lifetime away. 

We started spring break in the southeast corner of the island, Yale, known for the national parks and safaris. We went out on two safaris in Bundala National Park, known for the wide variety of water birds. 

Consulting the bird book.

Crocodile lurking in the muck.

Monkey crossing.

Driving on the sand dune. 

Elephant at a watering hole. 

The bat tree (a tree full of bats). 

Sparks of Joy

Only you can know what kind of environment makes you happy – this is the underlying principle of the KonMari Method. In the KonMari Method of organizing and tidying, your feelings are the standard for decision making – specifically, knowing what sparks joy. You’ve probably heard “Discard anything you haven’t used in two years,” or “Every time you buy something new, get rid of something old.” To determine this when tidying, the key is to pick up each object one at a time, and ask yourself quietly, “Does this spark joy?”  Pay attention to how your body responds.  Joy is personal, so everyone will experience it differently; Marie describes it as “…a little thrill, as if the cells in your body are slowly rising.”

In the last week, very little caused the cells in my body to rise. I didn't really know how joyless I was feeling until I saw a puddle if bright pink flower petals in a circle on the ground around a tree. I was driving home from dropping Peter off at school when I saw it, a soulsucking sludge through phlegmatic Colombo traffic, the absolute worst aspect of the world returning and fits and spurts back to normal. And when I did, I felt a small spark of...something.  My thoughts turned to spring. Specifically, I was reminded of New York City for some reason, the trees in Central Park, the day Elise and I got engaged a little later in the spring, early May, on my birthday. I was happy, content 

My life is far, far from joyless,  but this week was comparatively hard. Elise came down with dengue Friday a week ago. She was incapacitated for most of the week fighting a bone-crushing fever. It is sadly ironic, because we spent all of the entire last year locked down and quarantined to avoid catching one virus only to catch another. Not to mention, Elise is the most conscientious and fastidious of all of us when it comes to rye appliancatuon of mosquito repellent. 

The same week all three kids headed back to school, except Peter somehow caught a cold at some point over the first two weeks he was back in class and gave it to Sam. How were they not going to catch the coronavirus if they could catch a cold at school? This and other thoughts kept me up at night. 

I started the week driving them to and from school, a duty Elise and I would normally share. We quickly decided this would be unsustainable. Traffic was much worse once all the kids were back in school. With Elise out of commission,  I was doing all the grocery shopping, making three meals a day, and trying to stay on top of my work. There's just not a lot of time for joy when one is so task oriented. It's all you can do to keep your head above water. I don't know how single parents do it. 

As the week wore on, Clementine became more and more excited about Easter.  Elise and I had totally forgotten about it and probably wouldn't had celebrated at all if it wasn't for Clementine.  She was insanely excited,  assigning to Easter the same level of anticipation usually reserved for Christmas.  When did Easter become another Christmas? Wasn't one day of the year when you wake your parents before the sun rises by jumping up and down on the foot of their mattress enough? 

Knowing it was up to me to bring the magic, I did manage to get the box of holiday decorations down by Friday afternoon. I picked up a smorgasbord of leftover candy from the commissary, and Elise and I stopped at the Japanese grocery for a few items. I got them each a small toy from the electronics store in Liberty Plaza. Then, at the last minute, decided not to put the new Minecraft cartridge in their Easter basket. 

The trip to Liberty Plaza itself, a four-story mall squeezed between a parking garage and the vegetable market, was a chore. It's not a mall as one might think of a mall in the Western sense, but more like an indoor market. The stores are actually stalls, mostly very small and only large enough to accommodate one or two shoppers, and the corridor between stalls is as narrow as your shoulders are broad. Two people standing abreast of one another would find it difficult to pass. It did have escalators though (I can't remember if they ran or not) and a KFC.

As I drove up to the mall, I entered a long queue of cars waiting to pull into the parking garage. The BMW in front of me pulled out of the line and drove around. I followed him, assuming the car or lorry in front of him had stalled or stopped for some reason.  This is not out of the ordinary. Cars and tuk-tuks stop in the middle of the road for no apparent reason all the time, completely unaware or nonplussed someone could plow into them from behind at any moment. 

But as I reached the booth and guard arm to the parking garage, I was met by a uniformed security guard wagging his finger at me. I rolled my window down. "There is a line!" He yelled at me. 

He was right. There was a line. But this is Sri Lanka. No one. Ever. EVER. Stays in the line. 

I couldn't argue with him. It would have been completely pointless and there was no way I could not come out looking like an ugly foreigner. "You are wrong!" He yelled at me, taking great pleasure in having the opportunity to do so. The BMW in front of me and the lorry behind me were also not in line. 

Easter morning, the kids hunted the dozen or so Easter eggs I had haphazardly and half-heartedly hidden. 

We had string and egg hoppers, daal, chicken curry, cashew curry, and pol sambal for breakfast, then drove to the beach. It was Elise's first time out of the house except to get blood drawn in over a week. We stopped at the pool on the way home for a quick swim. Elise made a smoothie for lunch. Peter heated up a Cup O Noodles he got in his Easter basket. I took Sam fishing. 

He caught a fish. A small one. That sparked joy, too.