Letters from Grenada

serendipity?

I hate Word with a burning, unbridled passion. Not only is it clunky and slow, it makes inane “corrections” to my spelling and grammar.

So, mostly I used TextEdit. TextEdit is my jam. TextEdit and I like-like each other. TextEdit and I are kissing in a tree.

Alas, TextEdit has a fatal flaw. No word count, and sometimes a girl just really needs word count. For ages now, I’ve been meaning to find a simple, light text editor that also has a word count function. But I never actually looked, because I figured it didn’t exist, and that if it did, I’d have to pay for it, and it wasn’t *that* important. So I kept using TextEdit, and whenever I really needed to count my words I’d copy and paste into Word, giving myself a french pedicure during the time it took the program to load.

This has been going on now for over a year. Until last night, when I decided I’d actually do a thorough search for the kind of program I need. In under ten minutes, I found it. It’s perfect. It has word count and a few other useful features, but it’s light and loads really quickly. It’s also free.

And it’s called Bean.

memorial day

My grandfather was a veteran of World War II. He’d been on the Normandy coast, though he missed the gruesomeness of D-Day proper.

In 1998, when I visited the graveyard there, I walked down to the ocean and collected some sand for him. I filled an empty film canister. (Remember those?)

It was an eerie experience. I’m sensitive to psychic disturbances, and I could almost hear the crush of souls hovering in the air over Omaha Beach. When I got back to New York, I visited my grandfather and told him what I’d felt there. He was something of a mystic himself, so he understood. He believed in stuff like that. He was an inspired carpenter, and he often said that his creations just sprang forth from the wood. His hands were tools, he said, but whose tools, exactly, he was never quite sure.

the infant mayor of westerhall bay

One night when Bean was about eight months old, we took the subway from my dad’s house in The Bronx to my friend’s apartment on the Upper East Side. He was still Snugli-bound back then, so it was an easy trip. Pleasant. Fun.

We had a good night. He found her stash of cat food and stacked, knocked down and restacked the cans with unbridled glee. They were the best blocks he’d ever seen, and to this day my friend jokes about stocking up on cat food before Bean comes over.

We left after dark, and walked from her apartment on 77th Street to the 86th Street Subway Station, where we caught a Uptown 6. It wasn’t too cold and I’m totally comfortable in New York City, so I didn’t hurry. I couldn’t see my son’s face, because he was facing out, forward, which was one of his requirements by that time, that he be allowed to see as much as possible of the world around him.

The lights and the people, the shouts and the music, the squeal of the trucks and crosstown busses and the rumble of the subway beneath our feet. These were all things Bean drank up, but his favorite thing by far was all the people, especially the ones walking their dogs. I am certain of this even though he was too young to speak, because my boy’s face has always communicated on a plane far beyond mere words.

He was used to being popular. He was born in Grenada, where everyone knew his name. Neighbors called to him when they passed our house and saw him out on the verandah. People, as far as he knew, were always friendly, bringing him a mango, or a cookie, for no other reason than they had one to share and thought of him, the infant mayor of Westerhall Bay.

That night I saw New Yorkers through his eyes. Their heads down, their eyes hooded, their pace quick; busy, busy. He tried to engage them all. He threw out the only hooks he had, hoping to catch them with his eyes, bait them with his toothless grin, reel them in with his tiny, gummy, waving hands.

Not a single person even made eye contact.

Finally, in frustration, he turned to me and asked with his eyes. Why, Mommy? Why don’t they want to play with me?

I brought my lips close to his ear and whispered, Because it’s cold and dark, and they want to get home as soon as possible. They don’t know any better, baby.

May 27th, 2010 | Tags: caribbean, expat, from the mouths of babes, Grenada, home, island life, joaquin the illustrious bean, living abroad, motherhood, navel-gazing, new york city, reverse culture shock, the infant mayor of westerhall bay, travel | Category: Grenada | Print This Post | Email This Post | Leave a comment

“break stick in your ears, or what?”

West Indian slang for ejaculate (both the noun and the verb) is “break”. I thought, at first, that this was kind of weird, but the more I thought about it, the more it made perfect sense.

Break? Break. Break! Yes. Exactly.

There’s also a saying, something that you ask people who are just not hearing what you’re telling them. If you find a person is obtuse or bull-headed or just needs to be reminded of the same damn t’ing over and over?

“Break stick in your ears, or what?”

I was so proud of myself when I sorted that one out. And I thought it was pretty hilarious. To ask someone if they had semen in their ears that was keeping them from hearing properly? That’s a real knee-slapper. I wondered if such an idea could be acceptably translated into the American lexicon. I made tentative plans to appropriate the concept, incorporate it into my personal idiom.

About a year later I realized that I’d completely misunderstood, and that the break stick question is actually asking if someone stuck a stick in your ear and broke it off, leaving the end of the stick in there, making you half-deaf. There’s some subtext there, and its juiciness is eclipsed only by its yuckiness.

I wasn’t proud of that realization, but rather relieved that I’d never explicitly stated what I had thought the slang phrase meant.

The learning curve when you live in another country actually gets steeper as you reach the top. When you first arrive in a foreign land, you’re overwhelmed by all the differences. The accents, the food, the daily words and actions that are small to you but hugely insulting to the lady in the market who sells you breadfruit or the taxi man who picks you up at the airport. After six or so months you get to a point where you think you’re on the level. You know the secret handshake. You get the joke. You stop worrying about embarrassing yourself. And it feels great, understanding and being understood. You breathe a sigh of relief, and you get comfortable.

But then a year or so later, a funny thing happens. One day you’re minding your own business when a memory is triggered, something that happened in your early days, probably something someone said to you, and suddenly you understand what they really really meant. The details aren’t important, but it’s a facepalm moment for sure. You groan, wonder what else you missed and try to convince yourself that your faux pas has been forgotten.

That moment when you first truly comprehend the steepness of the learning curve is a mixed blessing. Because from then on you know enough to know that you’re still a lifetime of layers away from truly getting the joke, and that maybe, just maybe, you always will be.

bean’s birthday

My brother has one of those video cameras with a little screen that you can flip around.

I guess so that you can use it to tape yourself? Yeah.

He brought it out on Tuesday to record Bean blowing out his birthday candles and opening his presents.

At first he kept the monitor where he could see it, but then he turned it to face Bean, who got a huge kick out of seeing himself.

He started monologuing.

My brother asked him if he knew who he was talking to. Bean just looked at him. I think he sensed it was a trick question.

My brother said,

“The future, Jack. You are talking to the future.” He paused. “Do you have a message for the future?”

Bean thought for a moment and then grinned, obviously pleased with his answer.

“Yeah! NO BITING.”

play us a song, you’re the piano bean

I find this video speaks for itself.

happy belated mother’s day

I’ve been analog for four whole days. Four. Whole. Days. Weird at first, but then I got over myself and it actually felt pretty good. And it’s going to be the norm for the next couple of months or so. Some big things are in the works. I’m taking a class, self-publishing a little book and planning a major move. These are all steps forward for me, but they’ll require a lot of my attention, so I will be scarce in the digital world for a while. But only for a while.

I had a lovely Mother’s Day, and I hope you did too. I’m all personal-essayed out at the moment, but I did want to share this photo, which is one of my very favorites from Bean’s first few months. And if you’re looking to get misty-eyed about maternal love, please read the post I wrote on my mother’s birthday.

regarding tourists & short pants

Last week I wrote a post in which I described getting ready to go to work in Grenada. I included this sentence:

I wear a white sleeveless linen blouse and jeans that reach my ankles, because only tourists wear shorts, and I am not a tourist.

In response, an American friend asked:

I’m curious why only tourists wear shorts in Grenada. It seems like being cool (and holy cow, just the thought of jeans in a hot, humid environment make me break out in heat rash) would outweigh being “cool”, if you know what I mean. What’s the dealio?

The following was my response.

Grenadian locals do wear shorts sometimes, but not to work. This, like every declaration I make about the island, is a general rule and there are exceptions. *I* never wore shorts to work because as one of the only women and THE only foreign woman employed there, I needed to get a lot of things right if I wanted to be taken seriously. Most of the Grenadians I worked with took great care with and interest in their appearance. They were extraordinarily polished, even when dressed very casually. I tried to take my cue from them.

Regarding the heat? I got used to it.

Also, I really hate shaving my legs. I’m pale like my Scottish grandmother but dark and hairy like my Puerto Rican grandfather.

Speaking of whom. The shorts thing kind of reminds me how my Puerto Rican grandfather would get upset if one of us kids just bit straight into an apple, instead of peeling it and cutting it with a knife. It took me a long time to figure that out, but I think it’s because when he was growing up, that was something he associated with being poor. Eating fruit right off the tree.

But if he had grown up having money, he probably wouldn’t have cared about how we ate our apples. You know? It just wouldn’t have been an issue. And I suspect, though I have no way of knowing for sure, that that also explains why the only (non-tourist) guy I knew who regularly wore shorts to work was the owner of the place.

my bean, he likes to clean

He loves brooms, mops, the dishwasher, all varieties of soap, buckets and sponges.

Mommy, I want to wash. Mommy, I want to sweep. Mommy, why don’t you use the dishwasher? These are some of the first sentences he ever spoke.

He was about eight months old when I went back to work. Carol, whose primary task was ostensibly to take care of my grandmother who was dying of Parkinson’s, decided that her time at our house would now be dedicated to Bean. And since her third primary task was to cook and clean, Carol and my son spent many days together mopping, sweeping and doing the laundry. Since he was fourteen months old, he has been helping us hand-wash dishes.

After Carol went home for the day and before I got home from work, Bean would spend time with his grandmother. If you’ve ever spent more than three weeks in the tropics you know that the cleaning is never done. Our house had about thirty non-consecutive feet of verandah, and windows that were always open, letting in the breeze but also the insects and the salt that rose up from the bay. Always open unless it was raining, of course. The first tippling sound of rain quickly became a trigger for just jumping up from whatever you were doing and running around the house closing all the doors and windows. My mom often did it with not-yet-walking Bean tucked under her arm.

Then, on weekends, he’d watch his father clean. Bean’s daddy is Jah’s gift to laundry. So much so that I was banned from washing his white shirts. Banned! I couldn’t get them bright enough.

The point of this random Grenada memory is that right at this very moment I’m sitting at my desk, looking through the sliding doors at him in the driveway, happier than a clam because he’s carrying one of those enormous brooms that’s like three inches by three feet. And I’m thinking that because he spent so much time when he was very little cleaning with people he loved, he’s likely going to be all about cleaning for the rest of his life.

I can’t relate. I might even be a little jealous.

a bit of bean bother

The other week I was looking for my debit card. It wasn’t where I left it. I *know* I didn’t take it anywhere, and it’s not like me to put things away in a place other than the place I always put them. (Note to young people: This is a good strategy for remembering things. Do what you’d expect yourself to do. It eliminates some guesswork.)

I looked for the card for a few hours. It was nowhere to be found. (I even looked in my sock drawer.)

So I called my bank and arranged for a new one. That was on the Tuesday. It arrived early Thursday morning, which meant that this mishap did not, after all, ruin my trip to Chicago. (I don’t use credit cards. Only debit cards. Note to young people: This a good strategy for avoiding spending money you don’t have on things you don’t need.)

You wanna guess what happened Wednesday morning? (It’s totally cool if you don’t feel like guessing. I wouldn’t feel like it either.) Wednesday morning my mom found my debit card. At the bottom of her laundry hamper. Clearly that Bean was the culprit. And so it goes.

This incident reminded me of something funny that happened a couple of months ago. I left my debit card on the kitchen table. Bean grabbed it and ran off to his playroom with it.

“Honey,” I called. “Please bring Mommy’s card back. Mommy needs it.”

His reply? “No! I am going shopping.”

“Really,” I said. “And what, if I may be so bold, are you shopping for?”

“Presents for Mommy.”

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