A Small Moment

My Dad, 1927-2010

I met my Dad by accident on the main street in Sea Cliff.   To see him outside the never ending psychodrama of my mother’s house came with the realization that we both walked on streets outside in the world.  We met by the library, a gothic building with long, looming spires, leaded windows and dark brick, rococo swirls.  It was a building from a time when libraries were important.  

“Well, hello!”  he said.  

He was by then a fagile looking old man, whom I barely knew, who had kept himself from being known.   His steps were becoming tentative but daily, he took himself down the alley where once ran a trolley car, to the Italian deli where they knew his name and would tease him about all the women he could still attract.  

“He’s a cute old guy,” the deli man with the blood-stained apron would say to no one in particular.  My father would blush, this kind of banter unknown.

“Hello!”  I said in a slightly exaggerated way, schooled as I was in the great and necessary chasm between parent and child of an era begone just like the town.

It wasn't where I grew up in but it was a good choice of my parents to move there some years ago.  The main street passed the striped barbershop pole and its green awning, an antique nook that was rarely open, the deli, the post office with an impossibly friendly post mistress, one bank, the library, before continuing further on to the sloping lawns and wide verandas of big houses looking out onto the Long Island Sound with its sailboats lazily moving on nice days.  I was headed to the circular, grassy park that is the terminus of walks and bike rides and the end of the main street, where I  drink a cup of coffee in the morning or listen to the cicadas and watch the first firefly at dusk.  I met my father and we said hello - surprise, some formality in our voices.   “I am going to the park,” I said.

“I am going the other way,” he said and we smile and turn and begin to walk off and then, reason unknown, a small moment, we simultaneously turn and look at ech other.  We look for a minute, don’t smile now, and turn back to our own paths. It is the last visit I will have with my father walking, still well, still himself, still breathing on his own.

Miss Lily

She is bigger than life now as life slips away.  She imagines herself an icon, a talisman while driving a new fire-engine red Prius, saving the Earth with every mile. She has replaced the old van with the bumperstickers and reinvented herself once again, emerged anew, a siren, a goddess whose hands are thrown up in jubilation when she departs a room even if the attention has already turned elsewhere.  By day, she leads a troupe of middle school dancers to other middle school stages, insists they call her “Miss Lily” so as not to be confounded by the formality of a surname.  She herself has danced the samba in Cuba, the tango in Spain, the belly dance in Egypt.  She believes in the body’s wisdom yet speaks an inordinate number of languages.  During her summer vacations, she has traveled and lingered by the sea of fiery sunsets and white foam speckling pockmarked sand.  Way past youth, she has taken lovers in their own language, imagining them relishing her large thighs and substantial ass.   Her blonde curls flung back in a headband, she is not afraid of ageing, dances in her tights to world music.  She is Isadora Dunca, a red car, a red scarf,  white dance slippers, a coastline, a handsome stranger, a guilty pleasure.  At night, a hotel room with french doors flung open to a velvet warm night of sparkling stars and sparkling drinks.  In the morning, a balcony of yucca and cactus for Miss Lily.

San Francisco Alleyway

Journey

My Name

Secretly, my name is Happy.  Not Happy Rockefeller although I wouldn’t mind the money.  My name is candy canes and jelly beans, the riotous colors of autumn, the swirl of a psychedelic poster.  It is not subdued, brown, beige or depressed.  My name is Cuba, indulging in complimentary colors, not matching tones.  It is the pink of cotton candy and red hearts, Fiestaware and a lemony drink with an umbrella found perched on a barstool in the middle of a blue pool in Cancun.  My name is not the East Coast but the alleyways of San Francisco with brash urban art, the sound of a belly laugh, a pulsing of the air that refuses to cease and desist.  It is not serene but the braying sound of the seals in Fisherman’s Wharf.  It is not the name I was given on a dark, January morning into a world that still had Harry Truman as president.    I was deposited into a button-down, dreary, Cold-War world of steam heated apartments, frozen exteriors, dark skies, the silence of snow and a mother who went crazy.  I was named for a biblical figure, a woman of justice and majesty and it might have been enough until it  became a diminutive, the brand name of a small donut.  Little Debbie.  I was born with three short, ugly names.  A middle name that was a common tag of its time, a bowing to the convention of having one at all, innocuous and blending in with the first, not taking away its thunder, a bridge to be skipped over or forgotten.  The last name a  non-euphonious translation, a hatchet job at Ellis Island.  A name not in the language I speak.  One that had no flowing rivers, no hillocks, no resting places, no artisan occupations, no village as a reference.  An unlikey combination of consonants, a reminder that we were immigrants.   Over time, my new last name has added more vowels to round it out on the tongue, to drive it deeper down the throat, closer to the heart, away from the upper palate of Teutonic inflection, to sunny Mexico, to doors painted in blazing blues, to the colors of the rainbow.  My made-up name has migrated to lands with sunny plazas and ice cream vendors selling neon-colored flavors.  I love the Hispanic way of naming, a full succession of names denoting relations and ancestor lines, a seemingly endless parade of names, a heralding of a new person to carry on.  Secretly, my name is Happy now, happy to be old, happy to be finished with the seriousness of it all, happy to let go of everything that doesn’t please me, happy to find the world in its daily sounds, smells and images.  Happy I have survived intact.

Early Morning

Andean Joan (Juana)

In front of Inca stonework, Cusco

Pachama (Mother Earth)

Cusco is a beautiful concept.  It is a city whose time has come and gone, trampled under the hordes of tourists that have descended on it.  Its main plaza is beautiful, although somewhat barren in that all the trees have been cut down.  Everything and everyone spends everyday trying to make money off of the tourists in Cusco. Even the churches charge tourist prices to enter.  They are probably the most beautiful churches in Peru, but I wait until Sunday and attend services with the regular folk to get in for free.   I understand the need to charge foreigners money but I loathe the experience of it.  In an effort to find something else, Juana and I go to a Pachamama (Mother Earth) ceremony outside of town.  At the top of the mountain,  we meet Cindy, a woman who embodies what it would take for us at almost sixty to cross over the divide, to make us travelers and not just tourists in Peru.   At sixty three, Cindy amazes us.  Her brain is perched high onto her long, slender frame.  With her little wire-rimmed glasses perched on her nose, she looks like a suffragist.  She tells us she is on a vision quest and has climbed the mountain to find the ceremony.  She has pushed through brambles and vines, lost and found the dirt path that led to the top of the mountain where the ceremony is in its slow process unwinding.  We had nearly given up when a taxi came along and was willing to drive up a rutted road with no regard to how the cab”s suspension would be affected.  The cab driver keeps calling me “Mami” and it is a touching tribute  and a clue to how important Pachamama is to Peruvians.  I feel validated as a female in a way that I never do in the United States.   Cindy, it turns out, has walked all the way from Cusco, up past the people’s church and  the drunken festival that is taking place, past the Inca ruins.  “Once I invest a certain amount of energy,” she says, “I can’t let go until I get there.”  

The ceremony reminds me of the seventies, which is why I am there, to rethink how I was and to remind myself that it was many decades ago and although the time shines in my mind as bright, formative and special, I am now somewhat old and it hurts to sit cross legged on the cold ground.  Cindy lives with that time still much more alive in her mind and her body, it is as if she never had to leave it.  Juana  has her immediately pegged as an aristocrat of sorts. Cindy tells us she is from Kansas, throwing us off track.  Yet, I am fascinated by her.  She seems right there, a mountain goat or ethereal, a fairy dancing on a pinhead.  The contrast fascinates me.  She seems to possess vast reservoirs of intelligence and experience.  She is wearing a cap that says, “Water is Life,” and it turns out that this was the sentence that came to her during an Ayahusaca ritural.  That’s the shaman led journey where you ingest a concoction of potent drugs that make you vomit first and then trip out to a conclusion of hopeful visions, hopefully summarized in one sentence.  She says that she did the Ayahusaca ritual four times but it was never as powerful as the first.   She tells us she is planning the potential gathering of likeminded healers and professionals for Peru and how only here in the clear, untainted light do the Apu (Andes) mountains breathe.  That was another one of her visions, the mountains breathing.  I try and think of one sentence that I could emblazon on a tee shirt or a cap, one shining sentence to guide me.  “I am worried about health care”  or “Pension reform is bad” are the only things that come to mind.  I feel jaded next to Cindy.  I feel like she is good for Peru in a way that I will probably never be.  I am glad she has her life’s work and that I can follow it on her blog.

 Meanwhile, on the mountaintop, we watch as the fire pit is dug.  Everything that will benefit from immolation will then placed within to go back to Pachamama, Mother Earth.  The shaman looks cute with fluffy, dangling balls of colored wool attached to his pointed woven hat.  Shamans should look smart or cute.  The fire pit is a long time coming as men struggle with the cold, hard Earth.  A coterie of older shamans have nested down at one edge of the circle, laying down their blankets, assembling their beads, bowls, rattles, feathers.  A basket of coca leaves is passed around, each person taking four leaves that were to be arranged in one hand, the leaves splayed and overlapping.  Someone in the distance is raking the steaming Earth where potatoes are being roasted  for the ceremony.  The bounty of Peru - the carbohydrate powerhouse that has kept the multitudes alive.  Juana, meanwhile, seems to be channeling her sixties self talking to Cindy.   She seems to have come alive in a way I haven’t seen in a while.  When the brew is passed around in what looks like a gasoline can, she seems eager for her turn.  

“I’m not drinking whatever is in there,” I whisper.

Juana looks at me with contempt. 

The Medicine Man begins to shake the rattle and the ceremony begins.  There is a lot of chanting and the brew is passed around again.  Then we stand and go to the shamans with our splayed coca leaves to receive a blessing. When it is my turn, I stoop on my haunches, knees aching, before a wizened old man whose lines circumvent his face like the lattitudes and longitudes of the globe.  I offer my coca leaves, he smiles and I receive my quick blessing.  

We walk back down to Cusco with Cindy.  Her energy is boundless.  

“How do you feel?”  I ask Juana.

With her greenish eyes swirling, she says, “Very good.”  

Yet she has to sleep off the Pachamama ceremony and then some.

On the road to Cusco

 The bus out of Puno to Cusco was not nearly as nice as the Cruz del Sur line.  For reasons we did not yet know, Cruz del Sur did not take tourists from Puno to Cusco.  We meet an uptight, bespectacled man who is traveling alone.  He is wearing a cap proclaiming “Achievement First” and I ask him if he works in a charter school.  My enmity for him grows as he expounds on “school reform” and how much he has grown to dislike teacher tenure.  Given that I am almost ready to collect a pension based on teacher tenure, I am incensed by young people talking about how poorly I have done my job.  He is young but growing fat in the middle, a small, sad looking guy clearly missing his clipboard, walkie talkie and other accouterments of his charter school, administrative job. He seems an unlikely traveler to Peru, a few vacations out from the beach in Hawaii or a Princess cruise.  Then there are the gaggle of English girls, a high spirited high school group with plans of trekking every Inca trail in and out of Macchu Picchu.  There is a German man with his young son, doing some quality bonding, all decked out in expensive hiking gear, all whistles and bells, interlocking straps and velcro, mountaineering logos on expensive, breathable weft and warp outfits.  The bus is a barebones affair for all the tourists it is carrying.  It creeps up the highway to Cusco, higher and higher untl the landscape is as dry and barren as the moon and the ice covered mountains are closer and closer.  And then the bus stops like it is dangling in mid air on an exhalation of breath.  

“Huelga,” says a very thin, pretty Peruvian woman who is sitting next to the Achievement First! guy.  He has been trying to flirt with her and I at least admire his taste.  She is polite but distant in the way of all South Americans who aspire to be European.  

“Strike,” she says in English.

“Well, cheers!”  the English girls begin eating crisps and digestives, begin playing word games.

“Huelga?” I ask and glance at my water bottle which is just half full.

She is preparing for a long sleep, putting a mask over her eyes, bedding herself down for a long rest.

“Oh yes, many, many strikes in Peru, all the time,” she says with resignation in her voice.

“Indigenous demands?” I ask and she eyes me curiously.

“El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido?” (the village united will never be defeated) I say the chant of Latin America that has become the catchall leftist slogan everywhere.

“Yes,” she says as if indigenous demands were just about the worst thing to ever happen to Peru.  “Gas prices,” she adds. “They are angry about gas prices.  And it could be hours or more.” 

She vaguely waves her hands towards the outside moonscape.  I shudder and imagine the night darkening, the high altitude cold like the prison that American leftist Lori Berenson nearly died in.  The unheated bus, maybe the random light of the moon.  Was there a full moon tonight?

“They take rocks and put them in the roads, no one can get through,” the Peruvian woman says.

“Why don’t we just push on slowly over them in the bus?” an English girl asks.

The Peruvian woman looks askance at them.  Young, privileged girls going trekking on cheap, third world holiday.

“They will throw stones through the windows.  Someone will get hurt,” she says matter of factly.

Indigenous demands.  My sympathies are with them.  From the time of Pizarro, they have been exploited.  Yet, as the hours will creep by and my sense of safety diminishes, I know I will be tested on this committment.  I am sure the universal pariah, Lori Berenson,  despised by almost everyone we spoke with in Peru, would still not waver.  Yet, I already feel my ugly conservative tendencies surfacing.

“Your English is excellent,” I say to the Peruvian woman.

She smiles and tells us she leads tours of Patagonia and have we ever been there?  The implication is that this would never happen in Chile.

“No pueblo unido there?”  I ask.

And she smiles again and with it, the mysterious, vast geography of South America falls into place for me.  There are the countries aligned that are profoundly and perhaps dangerously committed to undoing past colonial designs - Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and there are hierarchial, fascist leaning countries - Chile, for one.   

We will spend many hours at high altitude on that bus.  No police ever arrive. The English girls eat all their junk food and start throwing up, my water bottle registers empties, I start to get a headache, Juana disappears for a long time to go climb some mountain so she can see the strikers better.  At nightfall, the bus, along with all the other backed up traffic, starts to slowly descend.  We don’t reach Cusco until late that night and end up staying in a posada that is so old and off-kilter it looks like Pizzarro stayed there.  

The White Stone of Arequipa

Lake Titicaca

But the trip must go on and a week later we board a comfortable Cruz del Sur, first class bus to Puno, at the shores of Lake Titicaca.    We recline on padded seats on a bus line that shows art house foreign movies and has a bus attendant dressed the same prim way that flight attendants used to dress.  “More mate tea?” she asks. Even Juana likes the bus, which stops for high altitude, big basin, cratered lakes, for vicuna and llama packs and lets us out to take pictures.  We stand perched on the side of the road, cameras pointing, and marvel at the clear, thin, cold air.  The formidable range of the Andes is the far backdrop to the sweeping, dry, deserted plains.  It is like crawling your way on the moon.

 The only movie Juana didn’t like was the last one with the sound of baby babble as an inherent and immutable part of the soundtrack.  “Why baby?” she asks plaintively.  “It is the baby Jesus cult deeply embedded in Latino culture,” I say authoritatively.  The eternal curse of mindless life repeating its cycle of poverty and low expectations, the tribal nature, the collectiveness of it, both endearing and repulsive.  It leaves us on the outside looking in, which is what I enjoy about traveling, but it poses a problem in explaining ourselves to people like the travel agent in Arequipa who sold us the bus tickets.  Who are we to a woman who looks like she is cast from an Aldomovar movie?  A woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown who considers this a Spanish upgrade in costuming, so as not to be confused with baby on the back, braids and cloth sack.   A woman with heavy mascara, deep cleavage, a bad but vivid dye job, flimsy but high heeled, gold sandals.  “No husbands?  No children?” she asks whe curiousity just gets the best of her.  Juana does not go into the history of the gay liberation movement, feminism, she seems tired instead, unlike the time she told someone we had thrown the husbands into the Bosphorus.  She smiles wanly and lets any misunderstanding be attributed to the huge linguistic gap.  We travel, in part, to be incognito or at least think we are, looking for the special status that is afforded the observer and foreign outsider. 

“Lake Titicaca!”  the bus stewardess proclaims and we stare down at a similar but bigger basin of water than the lakes we have passed.  The bus winds its way down through the shantytown, whose predominant color is baked mud.  We step off the bus in Puno, the town on the shores of the lake and I know immediately that I have gone too far.  Puno can not mask its problems, which even seep into the tourist infrastructure.  A gold-toothed woman whom we have entrusted to take us to a hotel seems coarse, heavy jowled, a variation of the travel agent in Arequipa but one who has seen harder times.  The light has an even brighter, high altitude, close to the sun quality that etches objects into the mind.  I tell the woman that I feel like I have come to the end of the world, “el fin del mundo”.  She laughs a smoker’s laugh, full of plegm.  “Not the end of the world,” she reassures.  She has been here always, her family has been here always, back, back before any tourists even thought of coming, this was a navel of the world they knew.  Before the highway was put in, when it took days, weeks, to climb down the mountains to dirt roads that led to Arequpia or Cusco, this was the world of her ancestors with their flat hats with red fringes, with their many shawls layered against the mountain cold and many skirts that flared out from the waist.  The hotel she takes us to is a sad affair, smelling of bad plumbing and baby poop, cracked concrete.  There is an interior windown in our room, covered with a curtain, facing the stairwell.  At night, when Juana gets a rare night of deep repose, I listen to a woman crying intermittently, hear her running up and down on the hard stairs, a man following her, protesting, screaming.  In the morning, when they try and charge us for something else, my Spanish becomes more fluent with anger.  “Somebody crying.  Somebody screaming. Don’t talk to me about more money.”  The woman’s face takes on the sorrow of the world, downcast, swollen, her crying.  The man has dark circles under his eyes, ducks behind the counter, his screaming.  

We leave Puno within a day or so, not even bothering to see the islands that the guidebook calls “tourist traps.”  We are frustrated with Peru on some level, in that we can’t really seem to get far in broaching the enormous gap between tourist and native.  Other countries have provided more access and it is almost as if Peru’s geographic terrain, the vast, inhospitable, arid stretches, the craggy, formidable Andes mountains represent the lengths we would have to go to really experience the culture and the people.  Everytime we think of going outside the center of town, the designated tourist center, we are warned with gasps of surprise and with palpable fear for our safety.  The one night in Arequipa that we ventured to the periphery of city’s center, where the shutters became dinghy, where the broken pavement wavered, where the houses had chunks of white stone missing, we were approached by well meaning people and told to go back.  Go back to the main plaza where lights sculpt the rococo, ornate porous stone of church facades, go back to where you can have an expensive cocktail and look upon the serenity of the plaza, go back to an indigenous market and buy something. Soon, the vast shantytowns surrounding Lima city center, the entrenched hovels carved into the hillsides of Arequpia, Puno, Cusco, grow as oppressive forces in my mind, they come to occupy the peripheries of Peru, the untold miseries, danger, poverty and chaos always there, only slightly out of view, ready to implode, to cave into our vacation plans.  By not knowing them, by fearing them, I feel like I don’t even remotely know Peru.

Altered Palms

Arequipa, Peru

When the small plane lands, we get off like the early days of air travel, down a ladder, onto the tarmac and into the small airport with its one baggage carousel.  We are flying to the sun, to a higher elevation.  “Arequpia, the White City” the sign proclaims.  I feel instantly elated in the way that only traveling does to me.  The city is surrounded by snow capped mountains in the far distance and high, arid desert before that.  The slanted light of morning, like the sweep of a beacon, greets us.   The air seems thin and I check with Juana about the altitude, an ever abiding concern we have about Peru.  “Like Tahoe,” she says and I breathe in slowly.  People are breathing all around us like it is no big deal. 

 I will come to love Arequipa for many reasons, the biggest one perhaps is that it is not overrun with tourists like Cusco and the locals seem to have enough pride or disdain to not bother us every waking minute for a sale.  We tour the Santa Catalina Convent, the touted tourist attraction.  It is billed as a city within a city and indeed it is, still a functioning convent after four hundred years although the nuns have now moved into better quarters in a new structure just next door.  I catch a glimpse of one scurrying down a ladder, fleeing from the sight of the secular world.  The  white volcanic stone has been painted; vast stretches of reddish orange walls are public spaces, while blue interiors carve out the private or sanctified realm.  I spend a lot of time at the convent photographing the light as it sculpts the walls, the arched colummns, the courtyards and the interplay between the worlds.  The convent is like a city of my dreams with its labryinth streets, leading to quiet plazas of fountains, benches and trees.  Arched colonnades define the perimeter of these plazas and these walls, ornately painted with saints and religious scenes.  We are in New Spain, set back in their colonial times, and the uneven cobblestone, the archways, the saturated color, the olive trees, the carefully placed scarlet geraniums that decorate the windows and walls, remind me of where I am most happy.  I imagine myself a sweet-faced nun, a habit outlining my face, an inconvenience for sure, but the promise of security,  privacy and uninterrupted dream time in my little cell supersedes that.  The convent was populated by daughters of the nobility, those in need of refuge.  Their aristrocratic families made sure that it was not a prison but more like a plush, richly decorated spa.  Their daughters were assured a place in the eternal cosmos.  I imagine myself such, a fixed star, twinkling in the surity of the velvet night.  Sor Juana, the title denoting “sister” as in nun,  beckons me to scamper along through the winding streets to the convent’s church and I follow.

Our posada very close to the convent and is built out of the same white sillar stone the Spanish used for all of colonial Arequipa.  Our room has an arched ceiling and a cavelike coolness.  There is a ladder nearby leading up to the sundeck.  We meet an Australian woman up there and are subjected to a long, winding tale of divorce, estrangement and frenetic travels.  Her distress unnerves me and I watch the shadows deepen and sculpt the stones of the buildings to ground myself.  We tell her we must leave to get to our “Menu of the Day” before the restaurants stop serving.  This is the mid-day, Spanish-inspired, three course meal for the equivalent of US $1.75.  These are fancy affairs - cloth napkins, changes of silverware, heavy goblets.  There is a choice of soup, a main dish, a dessert and the ubiquituous ruby colored, fruit infused drink.  We find a restaurant that is grotto-like with mustard walls. It is hard to tear ourselves away from Arequipa.

A Question of Altitude

   Socked in by a fog that never lifted, we morosely perch ourselves near the cliffs overlooking the ocean at a park with a hideous statue of two concrete lovers entwined for a kiss.  This is an “Attraction” as is the upscale shopping center that has a cineplex and North American franchised restaurants.  The sullen gray mass of the Pacific Ocean and the long stretch of deserted beach is below us.  Juana, my girlfriend, seems a little confused about the altitude although she is most intelligent on every other matter.  “Lima is at sea level?” she asks, and I attribute the question to the enduring concern about altitude that was posed every time Peru as a travel destination was broached.  “Notice that large body of water in our immediate vision?”  I ask.  “Notice that long stretch of beach below us?”  Juana still seems confused.  Maybe it’s the long plane ride we have recently endured.  “The ocean doesn’t tilt up just because we have flown to South America,”  I say brightly.

Yet, the Earth as a spinning, lurching, watery globe with the southern half rearing up is somehow planted in her mind.  At night, when the fog is replaced by blackness and we return to the cliff, I am excited to see an electrified cross lit up and stuck in a rock near the water’s edge.  It is a neon-lit, glowing statement about Peru.  “We are simply a Catholic land.”  It is a  statement that we will find to be both true and untrue.  We will find the obvious differences of very distinct geographies - the coast, the mountains and the jungle (la costa, la sierra y la selva).  There is the heritage of African slaves, Chinese coolies and natives that spawn different music, food, art, culture and in the case of the indigenous peoples, persistent, clamoring demands. But in Lima, on our first nights, with my fascination with the fortunes of Pizarro and his mandate from Spanish royalty, I gaze at the roughly equivalent spot where he stuck his wooden crucifix.  How pleased he would be to see its modern electrified equivalent, nothing else ultimately competing for the soul of Peru.  How perplexed he would be by his reversal of fortune here; a bloody conqueror, who razed the land, is now a hero, a cultural explorer, a builder of church and square.  Lima comes better at night.  People rushing around give it a cosmopolitan feeling. The ugly, substandard, concrete high rises are obscured and even the block-long, garishly lit casinos become fascinating for their cultural significance. Still, we are happy to fly south  a day later to the city of Arequipa and really begin the trip.