Dictionary of a Dream

There is a pale light leaking through the curtains—legs of the leftover sunset dripping down the walls. I am at my usual post, one foot in front of the standing fan. Thank you God for reliable electricity in this place. Tin roofs, furrowed at the edges, slide into one another gently outside. Fat-fingered palm trees exhale happily in silhouette. My bare feet hang off the foot of the bed, a foot or two above a concrete floor.

Nothing in Africa holds its breath at night. I adore the carefully fringed houses of my neighborhood in Colorado - the sound of new spring winds from the high country and cars crunching through freshly plowed snow. But there is something tight around the throat when night falls, when everyone waves and goes into their big houses and no sound seems to make it out of there. In winter, even the trees stop their blustering and all heartbeats go underground. But here…here everything has a voice, especially after dark. Doors are open without screens, cooking smells carry, lush trees and gardens squirrel with activity. If it isn’t the dogs woowoowoo-ing each other or the rooster crowing well before dawn just to get a headstart, then it’s the crashing rain on the tin roof, preceded by unseparated rolls of thunder for hours. And if you manage to sleep past dawn, then the mothers and small children of the entire continent will do you the honor - cheerfully muckity mucking to each other, singing low and lovely as they hand wash their laundry and squawking to their children about this or that in between beautiful breaths of the morning. The early evenings are the quietest when everyone sweats out a day's worth of hot sun on their backs and enjoys the breeze frothing up from the sea.

This evening is such an evening. Just like the last and most likely just like the next. The American in me sometimes gets so bored I could read a physics textbook in one night. But then again, that is the same me that runs around in high boots trying to please everyone at once and holding my breath the whole time while doing it. I like that about myself – always burning up like hot oil over this thing or that which I'm hoping will lead to something meaningful. Crunching whatever sanity I have left between my teeth just trying to be something I can be proud of. Chasing everyone else's tail in the search of what I can work to the ground until it taps and feel like I made people's lives better. Something I deem worthy of remembering. But frankly, I’m surprised I’m not downright purple after 27 years of it. And like I said. Nothing holds its breath at night in Africa.

Tonight I am thinking about writing while I’m doing it. Trying not to delete some things that look imperfect to me and just feeling it flow out of me like hot boiling water through a metal strainer. Sometimes when I finish a book I feel jealous. Isn’t that funny? Every time I read a good line, part of me gobbles it up and wants to shake the author's hand—and the other thinks, damn, it should have been mine. Reading the author's biography is the hardest part. Especially if she was some hidden gem, some accountant or librarian that suddenly produced this golden egg with a Penguin Publisher stamp on it and now the world wants to know every little thought she ever had, everything she ever wrote and every fleeting feeling that passed over the pages of her life. I'm sure it sounds silly, ironic and rather obstinate to you to hear this. Those closest to me tell me I'd have a better chance of someday writing something worthwhile if I'd just get off my fanny (or get on it, in this case) and write more often. Of course they are 100% right. No one to blame except, well, you know who. Funny how cheeky one little dream can be.

See, I've been wanting to be a writer since I was five. You think I'm kidding. But I wanted to be a writer and an illustrator. The library at my public elementary school bought a little miniature book binding machine. And I was in the library pretty much anytime I could be. It was half to hide from the little boy I'd had a one-day handhold with who thereafter stalked me like an alcoholic ex-husband just out of prison (seriously, that guy was scary, even at the age of eight) and half because I was the smallest, shyest girl in school. Sounds like the perfect introvert turned dazzling young writer story, doesn’t it? Don’t get too comfortable. As I said, this machine – you could write and illustrate your own little story on printer paper and choose the patent leather color of your book's binding. Then after a few days, the library would hand you your very own book. And your name stenciled into the fake leather on the front cover, sunk into it like this product was yours forever. Wow, this was neat. I mentioned earlier that I grew up in an affluent, middle class town. Read therein that while inner city kids were on the subway selling candy to buy a three ring binder, I was fancying around pumping out my own little bound books faster than I could write them. I'd of course been encouraged to write since the day I was born, every story and picture I produced was treated like it was the Iliad of the 1990s. Not exactly the rags to riches story that gives many writers that knuckle-biting hunger, destined to be laid bare on finger-tingling pages within the kind of masterpieces we can only salivate over. This I know. But I remember those productions with more pride than I do any of my more recent professional achievements. Receiving every last one of them hot off the press was like getting married every month of the year. Nobody but me ever read them. But all of my little heart was in ‘em. And I guess in life, that’s all that really matters. That and how many hearts you have at your disposal for throwing into things like that.

Through high school and middle school I took my writing underground, lined up in secret stacks of bad poetry in my room. I liked keeping it away from the world because it knew me well by then. Knew me just how I wanted to be known. And it made me feel bigger, stronger than myself. Kept me from disintegrating into doubt or worst yet, complete silence. It had the worst job of all - being the keeper of the ugliest of secret feelings, none of which I knew how to label yet.

In college, it didn’t take me long to put the ingredients of the old dream back together into life again. I went at it hard again, bolstered by academic encouragement and post-pubescent confidence. I majored in writing in college and even though the critique workshops were like fingernails in my eyes, doing it was the only thing I could do every single day and feel all filled up. Never got sick of it. Not sure if I got any better at it. But that’s the nature of the beast. When it came time to graduate, I applied to every prestigious writing grad school program I could. Which of course is only a handful. I handcrafted, edited and reedited the short story for the applications. It was about a wild-hearted Latina and a stiff-lipped white southerner. Id never been to Louisiana. But I described it anyway as I imagined it. I saw pieces of my self in that story like I was looking back at my life in the sideview mirror. At all these new and interesting angles. I loved the characters, I loved the setting, I wanted to KNOW them. It was my best and I hoped that was enough. Colombia and NYU, of course, didn’t think so. So when a local company in my hometown offered their writing intern/restaurant hostess a job in marketing, I traded the dirty kitchen flats for high heels and hit the office, without thinking about it too much. Given the choice between making a decent salary to write press releases and going to graduate school in my hometown, the only place that had accepted me, I guess I chose what seemed most reasonable. They always said in my writing workshops, “write what you know”. At the time, I suppose I figured I didn’t yet know enough.  And who knew, I loved business too.  I liked business the way I like really honest and frank people – sometimes their blunt, objective observations can sting a little and won’t ever make them good at politics , but at least you always know exactly what they are thinking. The dream changed then – opened bigger at its edges to be just four words. Write for a reason. Make it matter. Book, blog, or newsletter…whatever.

Five years later. I am in Africa, sitting like a human crescent moon on the bed. My face is arching toward the fan with the heat of the laptop making my belly sweat. After a big move to New York City to carve out a new life, it seemed I had changed so much that writing was the only thing I still had in common with my old self. The monologue running in my head non stop just the way I’d write it down, with unacceptably long fragment sentences and far too many adjectives. So when my brother got sick and we all played the role of crisis negotiator for the 12 months that death held him hostage, it came out like a broken sewage pipe. The writing was a way to pass that terrible time, to feel the feelings from outside myself, a reprieve but also an ode to the experience in hopes of never becoming a eulogy. I thought for a while that this would be the story it was my earthly job to tell. This would be the turn the words had been waiting to take. But when he thank heaven recovered and escaped certain death with his life - by the skin of western medicine’s teeth I might add - it became clear that it was a story that belonged only to him. Not only that, but I wasn’t sure that I could hem in the feelings satisfactorily in a controlled environment of 200 pages, or handle the subject safely from the distance of a writer’s stethoscope. Cancer had changed him and it had changed us too. It wasn’t so easy as I had hoped to turn that into something we could all sign our names to and blow off like an eyelash from a fingertip.

I left my job in the silver tower over Ground Zero and started again. Yes one more time, this time with a backpack in Africa. I came here to volunteer, learn and crack open my heart wide, but most of all I came to write. People kept telling me it would be the inspiration for that book that was coming to me. This, they said and I told myself, was surely a story I could tell safely and passionately. Bringing global paradox to light and singing in a million unheard voices. Excavating everything in need of empathy and forcing it under the nose of the unconscious world.

There are nearly two weeks left in my trip to Africa. In an effort not to bore you, I wont list the things I learned, only highlight a few of the biggest ones in passing. Life is much smaller and shorter than any of us ever thought. Nobody gets out alive and so going out laughing instead of going out crying is a more enjoyable approach. Doing something that you love alongside someone that you love is an even bigger gift than living a long life. Home is where your heart is, which is not always where you are. True friends are everywhere. Life dreams are like teenagers - they only turn out alright if you let them grow and change their clothes a million times until you hardly recognize them. But you knew all this already.

I may not have helped the human race all that much - and whose to say it needed help, let alone mine. But I sure have come to respect it more. Respect in a love/hate kind of way. Which is the true nature of respect, I guess. If you’ve never seen a little something to hate in someone that you love, then you don’t love them all that well. After all these months, I’m sad to admit, there is no book, not even a short story. I don’t want to write a book about Africa. Africa doesn’t need me to write their stories - it is a job that I am highly unqualified for, from my small seat in the global amphitheatre. I respect the people I have met enough to realize I don’t really know them, their country and their lives - not to the level that they do. And the ultimate disrespect to anything or anyone is thinking you know what you can’t possibly. But sometimes, deeply sincere respect is good enough. And what’s more - I don’t even know if a book is what I will write at all. Its not the book binding or the cover art that I’m writing for.

So I will return these months later with pen in hand and ready to walk back into the life I was born into. With all its warts and childish misconceptions, I still love my country in that love/hate kind of way. Even watching it do what it always does, swipe at the world with a big clumsy paw like the biggest kid in the sandbox. This is who we are and we are always changing. I too am changed. A little younger, a little older. A little happier despite myself to walk into the arms of my friends and family. To take a seat back in my very small section of the global audience, from which perch everything on the universal stage of life will look just a little different to me from now on. That’s enough for me. Book or no book.

And as for what to write or do next - I’ll just have to wait and see what change tomorrow has in store for me. But this time, I won’t hold my breath while waiting for it to sweep me up in its current. As if in response to these words as I write them, the massive theatre of the African sky yolks up with night clouds and starts an overture of lighting flashes. A new storm is coming - coming for me.

Circle of Life: The Untold Story

The pig hit the ground, stunned, and the red dust rose around it. The heads on the old bus swiveled in unison out the dusty back window. Stiff from arching my shoulders forward without the room to straighten them and my knees mashed into the wall of the bus, I struggled to turn enough for a clean view. It took a few moments to register as the driver rushed out into the red dirt road and crept up behind the pig, which sat dumbfounded and wide eyed on its haunches in a swirl of diesel exhaust and dust. At first I thought it had been in the road and we hit it. This curdled my throat. But then, I realized as the entire bus erupted into laughter and pigeon English, that it had been tied to the top of the bus with the luggage and the plantain bunches as cargo and had come crashing off as we sped around a turn.

Blood ran down its pink nose and it made no effort to escape as the driver approached but instead eyed us dolefully from afar. The roof was a good twenty feet high and we’d been thrashing around that dusty turn. The young pig made a good effort to casually gander off but it didn’t look to have the strength to run. The driver dove for its hind leg and carried it back to the bus, dangling its bloodied body from one leg while it squealing pitifully. It was then tossed up to the roof and lashed to it once again with a strap. The bus roared as the driver put us into gear and the sun hit on its hottest midday high note.

Its not often that those of us from the first world think about the source of things. The source of our water, our power, our food, our clothes. And all that is by design of course, because if we appreciated the source of things we use, we probably wouldn’t use or buy as much of it. I myself am a first class second-hand consumer. All I care about is what I get when I buy something that has reached the shelf but thinking any farther back into its history than that just irritates my conscience. I’ve been lucky to visit this continent because that, I can promise you, will change for me in the future. Maybe not so much the reality of my consumption habits as my thoughtfulness for what I consume and who made it. After all, sometimes it’s the thought that counts.

In Africa we have seen all kinds of interesting things that tend to stay out of sight in our own country, only one of which is the live animals grazing just nearby that end up on our dinner plates. If you want chicken or goat meat, you have to buy one from a local farm. You have to see it alive, kill it yourself, clean it and cook it over an open fire. If you want vegetables, you buy them from a local who grew it behind their house. What you eat is therefore much limited to what is growing or living nearby at the moment and so you don’t complain much for lack of variety. When it rains very little or very much, the power shuts off, most of which comes from fragile hydroelectric sources. When there is no money to build an efficient water infrastructure (or even when there is), you’ll be trekking with yellow jugs to the local spring to hand-carry everything from bath to cooking to drinking water. Kids as young as five can be seen with a jug in each hand bigger than they are on their way back from the spring each morning. And if you are unlucky like our current town, then things like cholera epidemics are a dark reminder of the source - or lack thereof - of everyday things. When there are no mystery trucks that come by like the tooth fairy in the early morning to collect your trash, you simply pile it in your yard and burn it. Sure burning plastic is a carcinogen but it will kill you a lot slower than unsanitary diseases living in rotting garbage outside your house. However inconvenient these things are when they are visible, they are also very real. The real causes and effects of human life, just like the life of anything else on earth.

In general, its difficult to see how most Africans treat animals. In fact, most of the time its downright disturbing. Barefoot children throwing rocks at their dogs for enjoyment while adults lead the way by kicking and beating their dogs until they become both skiddish and mean. I cried once at the deaf school for young children watching them mistreat their dog, who endured the kicks and punches like a silent martyr before following behind them obediently back up to the schoolhouse. I welled up and smacked the hands of the children who had hit the dog, but they looked up at me confused and hurt as to why this strange white person would be angry at them for doing what their teachers do every day. Dogs are things not people, right? And pigs are only food. The irony was sad and painful from a group of kids who are forgotten and stepped upon themselves by their own communities because they cant hear. Every day in Uganda we had the pleasure of hearing a pig get killed next door, the sound of which will haunt my every nightmare until the day I die--and here they do it much more humanely then they do it in secret at home. A dozen live chickens tied together at the neck hung upside down and carried on the back of a motorcycle on a bumpy highway. Cardboard crates of small yellow chicks stacked on top of one another on the ferry to Zanzibar with their tiny beaks bleating pathetically all at once. Goats tied to a foot of rope cowering under a banana leaf in desperation for shade from the midday African sun. These are things, and much worse, that I know for a fact happen in our own country. And it seems to me that the only way we Americans can afford to differentiate the treatment of our pets from the treatment of the animals we eat is by not having to see it before it ends up on our plate as a rack of lamb. But seeing it as a part of everyday life, seeing it as a source and a real live being, is a little harder to ignore. At least for me. And in that way maybe Africans are doing it right - earning the right to eat what they kill. At least they are consistent. The moral quagmire of it all can be hard for we westerners. And while the rest of that bus was laughing at the everyday comical nature of a pig falling off the roof, something in that pig’s eyes got right up in my throat and choked me. Because in my opinion, everything living deserves a little dignity. Even if it has to die.

I don’t see myself as an activist, a tree hugger (well, maybe), or a weirdo and Im certainly not about to throw red paint on someone coming out of Bergdorf’s. I don’t think that everyone should be a vegetarian, buy only used clothes or stop living life the way we want to, because the first thing you learn in Africa is that people gotta live and the circle of life is more than just a great Disney anthem to this great continent. But I do think that a little more respect is due from all of us here at the top of the food chain, the economic chain and the overall state-of-the-world chain. Even if its just a moment at the grocery counter, a moment over a bite of food, or a moment in the seat of our car to think about who it was that cut, cleaned, packaged and shipped it to our doorstep for us. To think about the massive global spider web hanging from the walls of our world stringing us all along together. Every small vibration is absorbed by its invisible fibers but still, on some level, it is felt by all.

Downriver

The wine is so sharp it makes me shudder. But it goes down like a lover down under neon lights. Just me and the fan. Whap whapping against the minutes as they pass. Only silence in between and even she is wary of me, just like the rest of the continent. Porcelin to be smashed, I am already a pumpkin before midnight. Footfalls in the sand, I move under a hood of shame. My citrus eyes the color of honey or hot shrapnel, you decide. I have backed out of the driveway of my country in a cloud of dust and trespassed across the continent of Africa in a search for my halo and I found my ashes instead. Ring around the rosy.

My hair is falling out in fistfulls, no doubt in protest of something. There aren’t too many mirrors here, but even when I see myself in one, I realize I havent really seen myself in a while. Have you? See, I’ve been off the map. Down a rathole and into the light like a newborn, puzzled by the smell of my own urine. Something is telling me that I’m still in there somewhere, while my license testifying to the only identity I have ever known has been suspended and there is this stringy white girl in my place. And whats worse, I think that’s actually the best thing that ever happened to me. But you’re damn right Im unhappy about it. The angry voice of the dog outside bites me in the ass through the window as I settle into a stare-down with the fan. Seems to me like every shift or growth we undergo in our lives is like a white water rapid on the Nile- one of eight or more. From a few meters away upstream, what with the spray lifting up toward the sky like the doorway curtain of some earthly diety, you feel ready, strong, yourself, thrilled and dry-mouthed with anticipation. Your friends cup your shoulder in encouragement and you may as well be goddamn Napoleon in a lifejacket that’s too big. F that rapid, you got this! But then, just as the nose of that raft hit’s the wall of water that’s sucking at your oar like a dog on a fishbone, then you don’t even have time to close your eyes before the wave has rolled your raft on its side like a roasting hot dog, one of your boat mates has landed on top of you shoving you down into the black of nature’s biggest pool drain and water has made its way past your open eyeballs into your stunned brain. Its really not you but your big-ass life jacket that finally pops your little head up into the crust of the white waves, hiccupping for your life and sucking in spray. At that moment, bobbing out of rhythm with the water, face into every oncoming wave and rocks playing your spine like a keyboard, that’s what changing is like. What progress wants, progress gets. So love it, fear it, want it, ride it however you wan to, but you still gonna be a wet string bean in the strainer on the other side. And there, the sun will dry you out eventually, good as new. Blinking and warmed by its rays with the roar of the water in your ears, the mysteries of life that you thought were so long dead inside of you start marching in all their colors and glory as the world’s greatest river runs past you. So there you are smiling. Feeling  newborn but tougher than ever. Believe it. Or don’t. But that’s what I tell myself anyhow.

Lost and Not Yet Found

I don’t write much lately. Not altogether sure why. But in times like these. When the hot breeze outside the lowlit window. Dies on the ledge before it reaches my outspread toes. When I search for meaning and pride and one unselfish desire. When there is no clock on the wall to tick down the minutes I spend idle and impotent to do anything. Anything truly useful. This is when I write for real. Not for rent or for recognition. Not for redemption or ruin. But just to right the horizon when I am awash in the world, my cabins filling with its waves and my stern making eyes with Davy Jones.

When you were a child, were you ever lost in a grocery store? Running from isle to isle of towering boxes and bottles, iron teeth of metal carts and frosty freezers full of fake food. You just slipped away from your mother to examine a box of sugar cereal and before you know it, she is gone. A bright and interesting world it is, a grocery store to a child. Canyons of treats, colors, costumes, donuts to be bitten into and boxes to be hidden in. Other children around every corner to be taken in. Misty rainstorms over the vegetable counters to be danced in. But now, now you have strayed from your mothership. The isles seem higher and even less interested in you than inanimate objects could have been before. Carts don’t see you and run over your toes. You can’t reach the best and brightest things on the shelf from your measly height. The rainstorms leave you damp and cold. The other mothers are too busy buying with their own children to want to be yours. Suddenly you feel as if the dog food healthy cereal you have at home would do just fine for the rest of your life if you could only find the one who gives it to you in the morning. The only option now is crying and waiting for someone to notice you to take you to the customer service counter and mispronounce your name over the loudspeaker. You are a big, bad, brave six year old. A million miles from land and blubbering like a baby.

It seems you are never too old for this feeling. Never too brave or brazen. Captain of your ship on the sea of your life, there are sweltering dolldrums, triton storms, smash-rock shores or days of cabin fever, that will bring you to the brink once you seek them out. A mutinous wind is blowing and sending you so far off course that you wonder what you set off looking for in the first place. The world is a jungle and maybe you just can’t handle it. Are ‘helping people’ or ‘making a difference’ relative terms? What did you really mean by them? You thought you could fix the pain of the world? Who did you think you were anyway? Maybe you should just go back to your palace in your half-blind country and chalk it up to naivete. You spent most your life getting here and maybe you’ll spending the rest of your life back at home learning to live with yourself for being born. Spread eagle on the bed, sweating all the experiences and feelings and wonderings and loneliness and paradoxes of the last few months, heck the last 26 years, out of every pore. There is no loudspeaker. Sometimes your name doesn’t sound like yours. Even when you see its every wart, your home cart, your home country, your mother, feel very far away. How long can you stay wandering among the isles before you notice how lost you are?

Reflections on Status

About status. What is it, exactly? How does it define every one of us in some way? How is it that we should spend our lives looking for it, abusing it, cursing it, observing the world through its unseeing eyes. From the beginning of time, even the first societies and clans were organized into had and had nots. And today, its not too much of a leap to say that everyone you know has one - and walks around in society according to it daily. Our statuses are like our pointy-eared dopplegangers that follow us around and either pull us along on a societal leash or trip us under our feet. Status has many forms, some of which disguise themselves as things like personality - your job, family, education, skin color, age, gender, neighborhood, speech patterns, marriage, hobbies, beliefs, you name it, can all be a status. All of which can be related or completely unrelated to who you really are, but usually status has your number because of its great influence on your daily life. Deny it you might, but it follows you everywhere without asking and it wont leave until you do. Its like plasma to your hemoglobin and it requires a painful and sometimes impossible psychological surgery to extract your true identity from your status. Usually, scraps of old status remain always, even when status changes. And learning to live honestly along with whatever you think your status is, well, that can be a bit of a Descartian process. No one can really tell you what your status is - that’s something you and society negotiate together based on your perception and those around you. But ultimately, you know you have one. And illusory and ambiguous as it might seem, ignoring it as an important piece of your path to self discovery means it can eventually have its way with you. And then you wont recognize the difference between you and it. This thing you will always have but never own. Haven’t you heard, being born is going blind. And then spending your years learning how to see again. In my experience, most of the time this means learning what you are not in order to find out what you are…underneath the tender tissues of your status.

If you think that there is a society on earth that doesn’t operate based on status, then you are most likely wrong. For some, the status might look pretty different than what your society has chosen. In Africa, having fair skin and many children is a sign of status. In the states, its being carefully tanned  from a vacation in the Bahamas and having a job that may or may not leave you time for children. In Africa, feeding and refreshing any expected or unexpected guests with beverage and a meal is a necessity and one of the most basic cultural curricula, even if you are poor and have little. The cable guy will join you for dinner after he works. In general, you are always very welcome. It does not matter what or how few clothes you have, but when you come to church they should be clean and well-ironed. Who you know matters. And in a country of vast corruption from the bottom rungs all the way up to the top, it’s sometimes the only thing that matters. We watched a well-known journalist friend of ours shout down a local policeman aiming to intimidate Scott out of his camera with one or two important names, which were enough to bring about the shame of the first testament. A very gravely mistaken judge of character on the part of the policeman and it showed on his face. But it was clear, had we not been with such a man of social stature, we would be filling out a very expensive claim for travel insurance. Who you know is just as important back home of course - but has a little less of a visibly sharp edge on a day to day basis. When traveling in Africa, being white has a meaning unto itself that I never thought about before - one that brings me right round into the face of my doppleganger, my inherited status. In most cases, our stories, opinions, financial situation or even our purpose for being here is irrelevant. Our white skin blinds like the sun on a white-hot summer day. If we don’t know someone very well, and sometimes even when we do, let them believe whatever they might about us because nothing is likely to change that perception. The children we don’t know love to come “touch the white man” (its woman, if you please), they sneak a feel of my hair or just stare blankly at us and when I reach out for their little hand, they withdraw it as if I were a ghost. And I am. I am a ghost. I am  “a white” who has wandered too far from my country and bleeding the same color blood as those around us to them seems sometimes impossible. And you of course cant blame them. They are friendly, curious, welcoming and smiling, glad to have you on their front porch sharing a drink. But it’s a hard realization that many don’t really want to get to know YOU. They just want to know a white. They want to shake hands with your doppleganger. One that is so different, so vastly far from the life they know, that they cant imagine having such a person as a real friend. And after you’ve taken a long hard look at that doppleganger, and another one in the mirror as your mind starts to pick pieces of your privileged life apart in an effort to make sense of who you are, after all that, you realize you can’t blame them one bit. Your people would probably do the very same. Because status at first sight always commands the conversation. And only later, once you really spend time with someone very different than you, taking pains to strip away the layers and stop blinking into the blinding light of status indicators, then you can really start to see the smoldering candle glow of who they really are, the one that burns so steady and warm underneath it all. Maybe you can start to see your own. Getting there is a challenge, and when you do, be cautious - status still controls the laws of motion for everyone on earth, like streetlights at an intersection. But the glimpses are more fun than every neon light in Vegas.