Make me want to sing. 

Way better than diet Coke. 

Lately I find I have a hard time staying vexed about anything. 

Beauty heals. 

Sometimes I feel like I’m the only blogger in the universe who doesn’t edit her photos. 

IDK. 

Nature is as nature does. 

Five minutes later. 

It rained a lot last week, which meant rainbows, including this one that I caught on Thursday about four minutes before sunset over Saint David’s Harbour. 

Happy Monday, internet. 

Bean went fishing for the first time yesterday.

Also, your lunch is invalid. 

Today is Carnival Friday. In preparation, I’m stepping up my hydration routine. 

[photo via grenadaphotoalbum.com]

Classic Big Tune Hits

Best of Lover & Rock Steddy [sic]

It’s not just that Cheryl *knows* the rules, it’s that she was there while I invented them. The night Bean was born, she stayed overnight with my grandmother, so my mom could sleep in the other bed in my room at the clinic. Cheryl was still at the house when we got home early the next afternoon. For the two and half years that followed, she spent eight hours a day, five days a week with my family. She knows me, and she knows Bean, even if she hasn’t seen him in a year and a half. She’s also the only person he remembers from our life here in Grenada. Other than his father. He even forgot mangoes. 

So when Cheryl called and said could she please take Bean for Saturday, and bring him in a sports festival t’ing for chirren, I said yes, of course, because she’s still his only babysitter.

This is Bean’s first ever sleepover with anyone who is not my mother. He’ll be back tomorrow. 

*

When I informed Bean’s father, he frowned. Briefly. And then he said, “You know I hear dey say Cheryl have dem wild children.”

“Wild?” Like, what does that even mean?

“Yeah, man.”

“Wild. Like the big daughter.”

Yeah, man!”

“The one who got in trouble for reading?”

He shrugged, which signifies concession.

*

We didn’t go anywhere at all the first few days. Bean fell asleep on the New York to Miami leg of our flight, so I did too, which was great, because I’d barely gotten three hours of sleep the night before, and terrible, because when I fall asleep in cars or on airplanes, I don’t move, and I wake up with molten fire in my knees and ankles, the residue of my battle with Lyme Disease in high school. 

Bean was a good sport about Mommy’s feet. I had new DVDs and books, fresh magic markers, and a sketchbook that I wallpapered in Buzz Lightyear stickers. We drew frogs, houses with plants growing from their chimneys, and a dinosaur that looked exactly like the Loch Ness Monster. I restrung my red coral necklace, slipping in a turquoise bead every five chips. 

I’d promised that we would go the the beach the first day, and I meant it, but I had to let my feet - too swollen even for slippers - heal. 

The storm, when it came, approached slowly. Bean was exhausted from the day before, had played for *hours* in the ocean, and didn’t sleep late the following morning because he woke up hungry. He ate three hard-boiled eggs and some ham for hops and went back to sleep. 

“Mommy? Where is Woody? Did you pack Woody in the suitcase?”

“Yes, baby. He’s in the box with your Legos. See?” 

“Nooo.” He sniffs air out at me, hard, a horrifying expression of impatience I recognized he’d learned by watching me communicate with his grandmother. 

“Not THIS Woody. This is SMALL Woody. I want BIG Woody.”

“I didn’t bring Big Woody,” I reminded him. “We left Big Woody at Grandma’s house.. She’ll keep him safe for you. Also, sweetie pie? Big Woody didn’t have his hat. A cowboy can’t travel without his hat.” 

“I WANT TO GO TO GRANDMA’S HOUSE!”

That was the beginning of an epic - no, no, literally! epic. - tantrum. It lasted about sixteen hours. Highlights include: 

- This is not my house!

- I need space!

- I want to go to Grandma’s house!

- I want to go to the yellow house!

- I want to go to Hickory!

- WHERE IS UNCLE BOB’S DOG? 

- I want to go to the beach! 

- YOU ARE NOT MY REAL PARENTS! [blatantly lifted from Coraline, I realized later] 

- I hate the beach! 

- I HATE MY BED. IT IS NOT EVEN A REAL BED. IT’S LONG. AND MADE OF WOOD.

- I hate this house, this sink is OUTSIDE THE BATHROOM! TAKE ME TO THE AIRPORT RIGHT NOW! COME ON, MOMMY! WHY ARE YOU JUST SITTING THERE? 

- YOU SAID THERE IS ALWAYS A BEACH AND NOW YOU SAY THERE IS NOT ALWAYS A BEACH. YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO TELL THE TRUTH, MOMMY!

- Go out and get me some sunglasses that fit me! 

He’s yelling at me like third-year Harry Potter.

I know he got a whole lot of sun the day before. I also know he’s overtired and still catching up on hydration. That he has spent well over three days straight mostly stuck alone with me and my hurty feet. That some of the food is unfamiliar and that his daddy talks funny, funny enough that he doesn’t always understand.

Yet mostly I’m amazed at how quickly he just slides into Grenada. He drinks guava-kiwi juice and eats a breadfruit chip, and I’m relieved, because he can be very particular about food, and has recently declared that he does not like! chicken nuggets! any! more! So it matters when we don’t have Cheerios, his favorite, but we *do* have Alpen, a muesli concoction from Switzerland, full of peanuts and currants, and he clears the bowl and asks for and receives three refills.

His father makes him cocoa tea, and it’s not like the Ovaltine in our kitchen back at Amherst, it is not so processed, it is unsweetened; like real baking chocolate squares that you melt in a pan, fold with white sugar. The first cup is too hot and bitter, but his father quickly learns to let it cool, then add some sweet milk. Bean drinks it, gulping, and if he notices the bits of bay leaf, he doesn’t mention it. 

In this photo, he stands on the edge of his bed, his belly pressed against the painted concrete wall, his fingers angled against the bottom corner of the window. After I take the photo, I walk across the mattress on my knees, duck my head under the lace curtain, join him between it and the window. 

“What do you see, baby?”

“Kitties! There were kitties. Two.                 They might come back.”

The garden on the other side of his bedroom wall is overgrown and exotic, a sight with or without kitties, but Bean harbors a particular affection for felines. 

My head level with his behind the lace curtain, I watch my son’s face. His mouth is open a little bit, enough that I can see all his teeth. His hands are aflutter (twitter? atwitter? ha!) and his eyes are fixed on the green beyond the screen. 

He’s enthralled, delighted, eyes bright with the *possibility* of seeing the cats again. He’s riveted in *anticipation* - “they might come back” - of the sight. 

It’s a quality of his I covet, that ability to so effortlessly pluck joy from the world, and eat it whole. 

She has a special t’ing with one of them. He’s a Rasta in the fiberglass shop and he works with a piece of jersey tied around his head. It’s bright white and keeps the cutting dust from troubling his scalp and dirtying his plaits. 

She’s 37 and he’s 23, which is how she likes it. “The young ones,” she tells me, “are very… enthusiastic.” She draws out the sound. En-thus-i-as-tic. She laughs then and that’s when I hear her wordless confession, hanging limp in the grinding pauses between each syllable. That’s when she admits that every day - right before she serves lunch - she meets him in the concrete shower block by the rigging shop, and there he picks her up and frankly fucks her against the tile wall. I almost missed this because I am too new and too foreign and too literal. I am still learning to see past the unsubtle.

I’ve posted this photo before, but I usually crop it. The lady in the gorgeous green and gold dashiki is Cheryl, who took care of Bean and also my grandmother.

This was Cheryl’s wedding day. My mom made her dress. She didn’t use a pattern. She claims that the dress just sort of sprung organically out of the fabric, which sounds kind of wacky, but she’s not kidding. I was there. She has a gift for sewing.

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. 

and with good reason. Ironing your clothes / cooking your lunch / mopping your floor are activities best performed before the rise of the day’s heat. 

I sleep in on Sundays, until maybe 8:30. I get up to pee and while I’m in the washroom, he takes the sheets off the bed and puts them in the washing machine. So I have to stay up. Which is just as well, because half an hour after that, it’s too bright to keep your eyes closed.

Also I have to drink hot coffee. Hot something. It took me three years to convince Bean’s father that drinking diet Coke first thing in the morning wouldn’t give me a stroke. That coming from a cold place, my issue was the heat of the sun, not the ice in my drink.

Today is a working day, and so I bathe and then stand naked in front of a fan until I manage to dry my skin. The fan is set on high and I have to squeeze most of the water from my hair with a towel, because the water has nowhere to go. There’s no room for it in the moist air. I dress gingerly, trying not to get sweaty before I leave the house. I slick my hair back with baby oil and pull it into a high ponytail. I cover my hairline with a piece of batik. The top of my forehead is already covered with enormous, brown freckles. I don’t want it, or my scalp, to get burned, so I’ve got baby sunscreen all over my head. I wear a white sleeveless linen blouse and jeans that reach my ankles, because only tourists wear shorts, and I am not a tourist.

We walk down a dirt road, and then down the concrete road, to the gap that marks the intersection with the main road. We stand in the gap, on the curb. I watch the tethered goats, who are well into their daily verge-trimming chores and completely oblivious to the morning traffic. I know for a fact that these two goats can see just fine, and will also move out of the way if any genuine threat presents itself, but in the absence of external enervation, they might as well be blind, for all the reaction to visual stimuli they exhibit. I am wearing my prescription sunglasses and yet I’m squinting against the sun. I curl my neck, lowering my eyes and offering my shoulders to the heat. It’s heavy, like a just-ironed shirt, and feels like a vaguely angry massage.

There’s a man standing on the far side of the road. He’s butchering an enormous tuna. The flesh of the fish is intensely pink, and he uses a machete to cut it free from the dark grey skin. He holds the machete the way I hold a paring knife.

The bus crests the hill, and I signal for it to stop using a hand signal that announces - again - that I am not a tourist.

The main road is made of asphalt, and today they are patching it. The bus, which is really just a very big van, slows at the bend right before the Governor General’s house. I look to the right, where there’s a steep cliff and hundreds of feet of air between the vehicle and the valley floor. I think of Left-Eye Lopez, The story is she was the only one wearing a seatbelt.

We are packed tightly in the bus, with special cushions made to sit in the open spaces between the seats. The passengers are a team. We are efficient. We make the best possible use of the available space. I am sharing a row with three secondary school boys. They are fifteen, I am guessing, and narrower than my purse, so they fold themselves and sit two deep in the bench seats. They are in uniform, long pants that are polyester and forest green and white collared shirts that are awesomely stain-free. I am not good with bleach. I try to imagine the mothers of these boys, who are probably younger than I am yet quite good with bleach, and a million other tasks at which I do not excel.

Other days, when the bus is full, I’ll take a seat and squeeze myself into a space that’s smaller than I am. That’s just what you do. Then the bus drives for a few miles and you’re jostled around a bit. And you find yourself somehow magically sitting in that impossible-that-you-fit space.

The wet asphalt smells worse than burning tires. The scent is bigger and has more personality. It drifts softly past my face, and I think it’s not going to trouble me, but when it reaches my nostrils it grabs them with both hands and flows sharply, urgently upwards into my nose. I hold my breath rather than allow myself to inhale any more of what I picture as Tinkerbells of tar, flitting kamikaze fighters determined to interfere with the child growing inside me.

Bean started going to school in Grenada when he was about two and a half. He was the youngest kid in the classroom, which worried me a little at first, but it worked out well in the end, because the older boys made him their mascot. 

He loved school. He had a uniform, a yellow and white checked shirt and khaki shorts. His hair had never yet been cut, so every morning his father slicked it back into a neat (and manly!) ponytail. Then I we walked together the three blocks to a church with no roof. The roof had been blown off during Hurricane Ivan, and was being repaired the entire time Bean attended, and so the place was kind of like a construction site, which of course the child loved, because he gets almost as much glee from cement trucks as he does from chocolate. 

I say the roof was missing, and it was, but Bean and his classmates were well-covered, because the church was two stories, the school was on the first and the floor of the second story was intact. 

On Grenadian Independence Day, there was a class trip to Grand Etang, which is a beautiful natural lake in the rainforest that sits right in the center of the island. I tagged along, and it was a wonderful day. 

I took this photo in front of the school, in the morning while we were gathered waiting for our bus to arrive. The kids are all dressed in their “national colours”. Independence Day commemorates the end of Grenada’s time as a colony of the British Empire. It should not be confused with Thanksgiving, which celebrates the anniversary of that time some United States Marines landed on the island, sent there by Reagan in response to the (socialist) Grenadian Revolution. 

(A photo very similar to this one ended up in the inside cover of the Grenada Yellow Pages. Click here and here.)