Letters from Grenada

happy birthday, mom

This photo of my mother was taken in 1970. She was a year out of college and teaching biology at Cathedral High School in New York City. She was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana. Living in Manhattan was an enormous challenge for her. That first winter, she tells me, she got herself a long brown coat, her secret weapon against the weirdos on the subway who’d otherwise ogle her bottom.

That summer, she made costumes for Shakespeare in the Park. In the fall she continued to teach and also started graduate school at Columbia. The following summer, she and my dad got married. Five years after that, they moved to Nyack and had me. My brother arrived two years later.

It wasn’t easy for her, of course, when my dad left. But after a while she pulled herself together and did things she might never have done had they remained married. In Montana one summer, under the wing (ha) of a Native American named Brooke Medicine Eagle, she went on a vision quest. She taught at the Audobon Camp in Maine. She lived for a time on the Clearwater, the Hudson River Sloop. She published a short story.

Whenever there were breakthroughs in science, she’d get the newest college textbooks and teach herself whatever there was to learn. Dinosaurs, global warming, mitochondria, and neurotransmitters. For example. She was an enormously popular teacher and at least once a month I pass along to her Facebook messages that I can only describe as fan mail.

In 2001 she and her boyfriend of seven years got married, retired, sold the house I grew up in, moved onto a 45’ Herschoff Mobjack and sailed to the Caribbean. The lived on their boat and sailed from island to island until 2004. They were in Grenada when my mom got word that her father had passed away. She went to Indiana for the funeral, and several weeks later, while she was still in the States, her husband was very badly injured in an accidental fall. He needed orthopedic surgery, and medical care that was simply unavailable in the Caribbean, so she flew back to Grenada so she could be with him while they medievaced him to Florida. He was at one of the best hospitals in the country, and I was so certain he’d be fine, I didn’t talk to him on the telephone before his surgery. On the operating table he suffered a massive stroke. He never woke up.

It was, simply, the scariest thing that had ever happened to me. Not only John’s death, but what it did to my mother. I was so worried about her I couldn’t breathe, or cry, or imagine how we would ever again be whole.

She stayed with me in New York for a while, but by January she was itching to get back to Grenada. It had become home. And so she went. I followed her a few months later. I was supposed to stay for six weeks, but when my time was up I didn’t want to leave. So I stayed. For four years. By the first anniversary of John’s death, we had found a house, brought my grandmother to live with us, and I had met a guy and found a job. I was also pregnant. With Bean. Who is, by the way, named after the grandfather he never got to meet.

I still think about John a lot, and I know my mother does too. I do not think that I will ever, as long as I live, stop missing him. Nor will I forget what it was like to witness my mother become a widow. To watch her face crumple up with a sorrow I could not ever hope to soothe. But I am at peace with the knowledge that we survived the hardest part. We weathered the storm. And we are stronger for it.

Today is Mom’s birthday. She’s 63. She’s just as beautiful as she was at 24. She doesn’t have any wrinkles, and her white hair doesn’t really say “old”. It says “hippie snow princess”. She still bakes and sews and has an almost supernatural touch with our garden. She loves dark chocolate-covered chili peppers. She devours the books I recommend and then wants to talk about them for hours. She is quiet and shy and soft-spoken. She is nothing like me and she is also everything like me. And she is the best Grandma a Bean could ever have.

I love you, Mom. Happy Birthday.

February 8th, 2010 | Tags: backstory, caribbean, childhood stories, early days, family, grandma kay, Grenada, grief, happy birthday, joaquin the illustrious bean, love, motherhood, PHOTOS | Category: Grenada | Print This Post | Email This Post | Leave a comment

grenville coast

I remember thinking to myself as I took this, I’m never ever going to capture the way the sky actually looks. Or how bright the sun is.

And I didn’t.

But the photo is useful in spite of its limitations, because it helps me remember.

(Click here for a much larger version of the image.)

women who run with the wolves

I'm a sucker for book memes.

Women Who Run With the Wolves (Clarissa Pinkola Estes) was published in 1992 and my mom got it right away, which means I was 15 when I first read it. Which explains a lot about me and my particular brand of weird. I’m won’t even attempt here to distill the book into something neat and pithy. “Myths and stories of the wild woman archetype”? That’s a topic better suited for a PhD thesis than a blog post.

I offer the following excerpt for your consideration:

“She comes to us through sound as well; through music which vibrates the sternum, excites the heart; it comes through the drum, the whistle, the call, and the cry. It comes through the written and the spoken word; sometimes a word, a sentence or a poem or a story, is so resonant, so right, it causes us to remember, at least for an instant, what substance we are really made from, and where is our try home.

These transient “tastes of the wild” come during the mystique of inspiration ” ah, there it is; oh, now it has gone. The longing for her comes when one happens across someone who has secured this wildish relationship. The longing comes when one realizes one has given scant time to the mystic cookfire or to the dreamtime, too little time to one”s creative life, one”s life work, or one”s true loves.

Yet it is these fleeting tastes which come both through beauty as well as loss, that cause us to become so bereft, so agitated, so longing that we eventually must pursue the wildish nature. Then we leap into the forest or into the desert or into the snow and run hard, our eyes scanning the ground, our hearing sharply tuned, searching under, searching over, searching for a clue, a remnant, a sign that she still lives, that we have not lost our chance. And when we pick up her trail, it is typical of women to ride hard to catch up, to clear off the desk, clear off the relationship, clear out one”s mind, turn to a new page, insist on a break, break the rules, stop the world, for we are not going on without her any longer.

Once women have lost her and then found her again, they will contend to keep her for good. Once they have regained her, they will fight and fight hard to keep her, for with her their creative lives blossom; their relationships gain meaning and depth and health; their cycles of sexuality, creativity, work, and play are reestablished; they are no longer marks for the predation of others; they are entitled equally under the laws of nature to grow and to thrive.

When women reassert their relationship with the wildish nature, they are gifted with a permanent and internal watcher, a knower, a visionary, an oracle, an inspiratrice, an intuitive, a maker, a creator, an inventor, and a listener who guide, suggest, and urge vibrant life in the inner and outer worlds. When women are close to this nature, the fact of that relationship glows through them. The wild teacher, wild mother, wild mentor supports their inner and outer lives, no matter what.

So the word wild here is not used in its modern pejorative sense, meaning out of control, but in its original sense, which means to live a natural life, one in which the criatura, creature, has innate integrity and healthy boundaries. These words, wild and woman, cause women to remember who they are and what they are about. They create a metaphor to describe the force which funds all females. They personify a force that women cannot live without.“

more “graffiti”

I dug up the original photo that I cropped into the Haile Selassie/Marcus Garvey header image. Looks different in context, doesn’t it? I’m not positive but I’m pretty sure that the gentleman in the lower center is Maurice Bishop.

navel ahead, avert your gaze

Bean loves the library. It’s always difficult to convince him to leave. Today was no exception. I dealt with it by whispering, Bean. Honey, come closer. Mommy wants to whisper a secret in your ear.

So he forgot about his tantrum and allowed me to pick him up. As I was helping him get his arms into the sleeves of his jacket, I spoke softly against his cheek,

Guess what Mommy’s doing tomorrow? Mommy’s going to school. (I’m taking classes so I can be an ESL teacher.)

Oh, he said, looking a little sad. He anchored his gaze to the floor.

Bean, what’s wrong?

Is your school very very far away, Mommy?

And I’m flabbergasted. The poor child is worried that I might go somewhere and leave him behind. I assured him that I won’t do that, and he seems soothed, but my heart is a little heavy tonight. He doesn’t understand why Grenada has to be thousands of miles from here, and dammit, sometimes I don’t either.

“you and your horse”

Once upon a time, I was liming at my favorite Grenadian beach bar, throwing some darts.

(“Liming” is Caribbean slang for “hanging out”.)

A friend was teasing me. I don’t remember what about, precisely, but it was probably the fact that I always had a book with me. Always. Even whilst drinking.

Generally I’m a fan of people who make fun of me in a good-natured way. Provided they can take back some of what they dish. So, with a grin on my face and a smile in my voice, I said to my friend:

“Screw you and the horse you rode in on.”

He’d never heard this expression before, and found it wildly entertaining. So much so that the following evening he greeted me with a loud and jovial,

“Hey, Maria! Fuck you and your horse!”

Bulls-eye.

“in lieu of flowers, organize”

“Howard Zinn didn’t want or need flowery eulogies. He wanted us to get out there and do the work he chronicled. In lieu of flowers, organize, document and tell the stories of that organizing so that others may, too, be inspired to do the same. That – and not a book on a coffee table – is the legacy of Howard Zinn. Like the song says, if you wanna go to heaven, you gotta raise a lotta hell.”

This quotation is an excerpt from The Field: Howard Zinn (1922-2010): In Lieu of Flowers, Organize. Click through and read the whole thing. There’s also video of Zinn being interviewed by Bill Moyers.

Howard Zinn and Bill Moyers in the same room is the kind of event that changes tides.

haile selassie

This is one of my header images. The gentleman in the middle is Emperor Haile Selassie and to his right is Marcus Garvey. “Haile Selassie” is not the name he was given at birth, but rather a name that he adopted when he assumed the throne of Ethiopia. It means “Power of the Trinity”. His complete title was “”His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, and Elect of God”. (And here I thought “Maria Alisa Santiago” had a lot of syllables.)

Haile Selassie is fascinating. So is Rastafari Movement, the religious ideology in which he’s a holy figure. Contrary to popular misconception, being a Rasta is not all about smoking ganja and listening to Bob Marley. It is also not merely a “culture”, and not exactly a religion either. It is an ideological movement. I don’t know enough about it to describe it in detail (yet), but the more I read the more I am struck by the realization that in many ways – dietary restrictions and emphasis on Messianism, for example – it resembles Orthodox Judaism.

You’ll never catch a Rasta uttering the word “Rastafarianism”. Isms are for Babylon.

(Photograph taken in Woburn, Grenada. Click here for larger image.)

iron, lion, zion

a sort of poem

Last week I mentioned that “I’ve been treating blank pages like confessors since I was seven”. I imagine that sounded hyperbolic, but, as you can see, it’s true.

Now. The cover is one thing. Actually reading it is something else entirely. I legit cringed at the thought. But my curiosity overwhelmed my trepidation and I opened it to a random page, where I discovered this:

“The man has a hat
The man has a cat
The cat sat on the mat
The cat sat on the hat
The cat is fat, and now the hat is flat
So the man doesn’t have anything to wear.”

Poetry has never been my thing.