Fort 2 Fort

Elise and her team of four completed a 72 mile race from the Dutch Fort in Colombo to Galle Fort in the south if Sri Lanka yesterday. She did amazing! And her team name couldn't be better, "In It for the Beer"!

Eva Lanka

I rolled over the lowered delta barrier and to a stop in front of the steel portcullis. The guard swung the gate closed behind us, locking us in the cage. Shouting and chanting carried over the outer wall, the wave of sound pressing against the steel doors and cement walls with an intimidating physical force. I could hear the shouting and chanting as the crowd passed outside, somewhat of an "Argo" moment, though I was reasonably sure they were not coming after me. The guard glanced at me and my bike and jerked his head toward the wall and the crowd. "Protest," he said, stating the obvious. "Against Rajapaksa."

Gotobaya Rajapaksa is the president of Sri Lanka. The gate started to roll back.  "It's okay now," he told me. "They went that way?" I asked pointing left. He nodded. "Okay, I'll go that way," pointing right. 

Armed soldiers deployed to gas stations around Colombo and now stand guard over empty tanks. Rolling blackouts disable traffic signals and turn intersections into complete pandemonium, a battle of nerves, bravery, stupidity, or a combination of all three. Demonstrations and protests come more frequently. Usually, we receive advance warning when a crowd may form. But the crowd that trapped me in the cage for several minutes was unplanned and unannounced. The ride home was thankfully uneventful but underscored the need to get out of dodge. 

I'm deep into "The Wheel of Time", a fantasy series with Tolkienesque breadth and vision. In the series, there are magical places called steddings, pockets of countryside shielded from the frenzy and chaos of the everyday world.  The stedding is a beautiful place, and an aura of peace and well-being can be felt by anyone inside one. The steddings are curated by creatures called Ogiers, also known as the builders, the people who planted all the trees and built all the cities in the world outside the steddings. The other main characteristic of the stedding is that it blocks access to magic.  This blocking effect also extends to the power of the darkness, which abounds in both our world and the world of the "Wheel of Time". 

Eva Lanka, in the south of Sri Lanka, near Tangalle, is a stedding.  One bedroom villas perch on terraced cliffsides, one by one, down to the aquamarine sea.  Explosions of bougainvillea dot the terraces. The beach sits in a quiet cove. Rocks the kids have nicknamed Atlantis and Lemuria house dozens of species of tropical fish hiding beneath the steady, hypnotic crash of white froth. A small, thatched-roof shack squats in the middle of the beach. There, they sell ice cold beer and small fried fish and octopus pried still-squiggling straight from the surf.

We sometimes head down to the beach before the sun comes up for a morning swim. Sam dangles his line in the ocean. More often than not, pulling a small flapping jack from the brine, the sunrise flashing on its silver scales.  We have a Sri Lankan breakfast with breathtakingly strong coffee filled with grounds and a juice out of dispenser that is almost certainly Tang. We head back down to the beach after breakfast, making sure not to get too much sun. A late lunch is often followed by a third and final trip to the beach. There is nothing that penetrates the stedding that is Eva Lanka. 

In Need of Repair

Clementine turns 10 on Tuesday.  I was 10 when my parents got divorced. My mom took her three boys on vacation to visit our grandparents in Houston. And we stayed for two years. 

Peter is in 6th grade, the same age I was when we finally moved back to Florida. Sam is in the last year of middle school, navigating those turbulent waters with a loquacious bearing that is far from feckless, demonstrating a confidence and sense of self that is almost superhuman. He's the Clint Barton of our Avengers, a young man with the forbearance to stand toe to toe with gods holding nothing but a bow and arrow; that's his power.  A power neither Elise nor I had.  Where did Sam get it, then?

I don't have many happy memories of those years. My kids are now the same age I was when I felt so much hurt and loneliness. I remember 5th grade PE at Manvel Middle School (a small suburb of Houston) wearing a white Club Med t-shirt to gym. My dad took us to the all-inclusive resorts, snorkeling in the Bahamas or skiing on Copper Mountain. But we didn't spend any time with him there, either. We spent all day at the kid's club, meeting the parents for meals. It was just as well, I suppose. 

5th grade gym was also my first experience having to change and shower for PE, a sadistic rite of passage forced upon kids for no other reason than to traumatize them. The fact this is still practiced today baffles me and seems to border on abuse.  I changed into the white Club Med t-shirt for PE and stood in the middle of the gym floor, self conscious I wore black-soled sneakers. I had been made to feel terror my soles would permanently mark the floor, a sin worthy of corporal punishment. A faceless thug stalked across the gym floor, ducked under a volleyball net, flinging it aside with the sweep of an arm, charged up to me, and muttered, "Club Meat." Then, punched me in the chest, knocking the wind from me, sending me sprawling, the backs of my thighs squeaking on the gym floor. 

God created bullies in support of an egalitarian ideal, to bring down the bright and the smart and damage them, too. The fact I remember this so well means my kids will remember things that happen to them now that well. I can't keep them from getting beat up in gym class, but I can be there to pick them up when they fall. Put them back together again when they crack. 

Someone in my office now is a bully. Their exhuming feelings I haven't felt since 5th grade, and I despise myself for it. Good-natured ribbing rubs too deep. I spent a few minutes in a recent staff meeting telling my colleagues how microaffirmations can be the anecdote to microaggressions in the workplace, then had to suffer through 45 minutes of the person, in essence, making fun of me, turning tongue-in-cheek microaffirmations into microaggressions.  A colleague who confessed she was deathly afraid of whales found a giant Inflatable whale suspended from her office ceiling. 

Harmless? As harmless as a punch to the chest.

Warning Signs

The line stretched around the block. Every person with a bright yellow propane canister in hand. Trucks and lorries doze on the roadside, sleeping giants, left there overnight in a queue 30 vehicles long, thirsting for diesel. Imported goods are banned: from apples, grapes, flour, fish, meat, to TVs, kitchen appliances, and tires. Prices are rising. The rupee is falling. Bakeries are closing by the thousands. 

I took Peter and his classmate to soccer practice Wednesday night, 30 5th and 6th graders, rosy cheeks and bangs pasted to their foreheads with sweat, cackling with prepubescent glee when they're not body checking one another into the cement wall or tripping over one another onto the artificial turf.  The setting sun leaves a golden gloaming in the sky, reflected off storm clouds piling up along the eastern foothills. A stream of humanity makes its way home from work. Young men congregate on street corners, surgical masks around their chins, grinning conspiratorially. Are they reviewing the day gone by or previewing the night to come? Either way they are likely oblivious to the warning signs, plastered everywhere and dominating not only the conversations at dinner tables, but also the talk on the radio. 

Citizens are encouraged to take the stairs. Even one less person in the lift saves energy, the radio tells us. The country doesn't have enough fuel to keep the power on and can't afford to buy more. Blackouts roll from neighborhood to neighborhood like a blight. The kids tell us their teachers at school suffer through the night, sleepless without electricity or air conditioning. Everyone prays for rain though it hasn't rained in months. The reservoirs are low and there's not enough water to turn the turbine blades. The populace is instructed to turn their air conditioner off at 2:30 for several hours, making sacrifices to compensate for the avarice of others. How much are they willing to tolerate?

The problem is complicated, and I don't understand it completely. Sri Lanka -- heavily reliant on tourism, a sector that was decimated by the pandemic -- doesn't have enough foreign currency reserves to pay its debts. In fact, they have so little money they can't even import fuel or other essential goods. It reminds me of a trip to the Bahamas with my dad and having to stay several days on one island, waiting for the fuel tug to arrive. Then, blackouts were common, and when there was power you could hear the one diesel generator roaring through the night from any point on the low island. It's easy to forget Sri Lanka, too, is just one big, sleepy island.

As I was riding home from work on Thursday, dozens of bright blue-painted busses squatted stubbornly in front of Town Hall. A man yelled protest language through speakers that had been tied to a lightpost. He shouted in Sinhala, so I had no idea what he was screaming about but it was clear he was displeased.  Will protests increase?  Sri Lanka's ability to withstand adversity seems infinite. And yet, the scars from the 26-year civil war are still fresh. The government seemingly has no plan except to hope and pray.  But hope and prayers a plan do not make. 

Water and the Ocean

We went to the outside movie night Friday evening to see the Pixar movie Soul. 

I had heard Soul was good but never realized the movie is, essentially, about the meaning of life.  

Towards the end of the movie, a jazz saxophonist named Dorothea tells the protagonist, Joe Gardiner, after his big debut show, "I heard this story about a fish. He swims up to this older fish and says, 'I'm trying to find this thing they call the ocean.' 'The ocean?' says the older fish, 'that's what you're in right now.' 'This?' says the younger fish, 'This is water. What I want is the ocean.'"

The point of the story, I think, is that the difference between your dream (the ocean) and reality (water) sometimes is less different than you think. 

The following day, Elise and I were at the pool with the mom of one of Clementine's friends. The mom works in my office. She's the head of her department. She's senior and savvy and a clealry a hard worker. But she made a comment which made it seem as though she wanted more; she envied our new boss who -- at more or less the same age as she -- had seemingly accomplished so much more. 

Yet, to me, they swam in the same ocean. 

As I approach 50, it seems natural to assess where I am in my life conpared to where I thought I might be. Perhaps, not natural, per se, but unnatural not to conduct some form of self-assessment, to recognize the natural beauty I am swimming in the ocean.