Late one afternoon Bean and I were walking through downtown Amherst in search of whole wheat bagels. We passed the Food for Thought Books Collective. Those miscreants actually had a red Flexible Flyer wagon full of $1 books in front of their store. Which means that even in the unlikely event that I had been able to resist their wanton ways, they had Bean. (Wagon handle for pulling? You might as well ask an ant to resist high-fructose corn syrup.)

I picked out three books really really fast, as only a mother with a toddler in tow can. Next to the cash register there was a display of postcards, and I let him choose one because he was such a good boy. And THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is what he picked.

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Also, Throwback Thursday. 

imaveronica:

Ziggy Marley’s Love is My Religion. The original version of this tune isn’t bad at all. But I prefer the acoustic. It turns it to gold.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had once had about Bob Marley. It was maybe two months after I first got to Grenada. I was with Bean’s father and a few of his friends, hanging out on a beach at night. It was one of those things where he’d invited people to hang out with us specifically for the purposes of showing me off. So I was making an effort to be on my best, most impressive behavior.

So, this was very early in my time in Grenada. There were a lot of things I hadn’t figured out yet. And a lot of slang and speech I didn’t understand. This particular friend of Lyndon (yes, that’s Bean’s daddy’s name) was the kind of Grenadian you might meet in a hotel or restaurant or on a cruise ship. And by that I mean that he was used to working with foreigners, and was capable of what we call, for lack of a better expression, “talking like a white person”. So I could understand him easily, which was a relief for me, because at that point there were times that, no matter how hard I tried, and especially after a few beers by both the speaker and listener, Grenadian speech sounded to me like an unfamiliar dialect of French.

Anyhoo. Lyndon’s friend asked me lots of questions and we had a long and interesting conversation. I still remember relatively clearly the part about Bob Marley. He was a little surprised to hear that I was pretty familiar with his music, and that pretty much everyone I knew owned a copy of Legend. I told him that my favorite song was Stir it Up, and that for a long time I had completely misunderstood the Lyrics of No Woman, No Cry. (No Woman, No Cry is about comforting a mother who has lost her son, but I thought it was advice. Like, stay away from women and you’ll never have to cry.)

It’s pretty amazing, when you think about it, that 12-year-old white chicks in suburban New York were down with Bob Marley. But then you think about it some more and realize that these are the same girls who appropriated The Grateful Dead for their own capricious fashion use.

But still. I expounded at length about how I thought Bob Marley had a universal message. That his words can speak to a wide variety of people in a wide variety of situations. And then – and this is where I kind of cringe – I said that Bob Marley was a prophet, kind of like Jesus. I didn’t really believe that but I knew he’d get a kick out of it, so I said it. It was the first time I did that in Grenada but not even remotely the last. And it worked. The guy looked at me in awe and proclaimed me “rootsy”, which is a huge, huge compliment, especially considering how “fresh off the boat” I was that night.

No, YOU were baked like a cupcake.

The other day I overheard a conversation about energy-saving lightbulbs. It reminded me of a funny thing that happened while I was living in Grenada.

Now. Regardless of your feelings about Cuba, and/or whatever diplomatic issues the United States has had with Castro, historically… You should know that in the Caribbean, Cuba and Castro are generally seen as (for lack of a better word) saviors. Sugar daddy, even. Castro, apparently, has some brilliant PR. For example. The devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina got a huge amount of coverage in Grenada. It was a news trifecta for them. It was about the United States. It was about racism. And it was about suffering due to a hurricane. Shortly after the hurricane Castro made a speech in which he offered to send one hundred of Cuba’s very finest doctors to Louisiana to help with rescue efforts. The complete text of this speech was (translated and) published in one of Grenada’s two weekly newspapers. (There were no dailies.)

Many people, including Bean’s father, demanded that I explain why the United States had not responded to this gracious and generous offer. Why we were – and I quote – “ignoring the best-trained doctors in the world”. My only answer to this, because I was trying to be noncontroversial, and also because I’m not about to try to change anyone’s mind on this particular issue, was simple. We don’t need them, I said, and left it at that.

Several months later, the lightbulb business happened. Emissaries allegedly from the Cuban government arrived at our house. They were on foot. They were young, they were pleasant and one of them spoke English quite well. I offered them ice water, which they accepted gratefully. Then they asked us to tell them how many light fixtures we had in the house. We obliged. They left and went on to our neighbor’s house. They did this throughout the entire neighborhood, and, as far as I know, all over Grenada. (That’s what they told us. But I don’t recall ever hearing anyone mention it.)

A couple of weeks passed and they returned. They had lightbulbs for us. These lightbulbs, they declared, would last for seven years. All we had to do to get the lightbulbs, free of charge, was give them the bulbs we were currently using. This was, they explained, a gift from the people of Cuba to the people of Grenada. And so we obliged. We accepted their magic Cuban lightbulbs and gave them ours.

The magic Cuban lightbulbs lasted four months.

[Update: When I posted this story on my “real” blog, Letters from Grenada, I heard from a Jamaican reader who said the same thing had happened in his country and that it had turned into a major political scandal. Which I found very interesting. Because, seriously? What is the point of all that, Cuba? I would very much like for someone to explain this to me like I’m four years old, because I don’t get it. Is it just propaganda? Are you just shoring up your already stellar reputation within the Caribbean? Do you think that people will not notice that your lightbulbs suck? Or have you been gaslighting the world and your own people for so long now that you believe your own baseless stories?]

I think it has been at least three whole, entire months since I last posted this. 

Bean, honey, please eat your eggs. You said you wanted them.

I don’t like them. I’m not hungry.

But you said you were hungry.

I’m not hungry AT ALL.

Baby. You can’t go to bed with an empty belly. Please eat your eggs?

I’M NOT HUNGRY I SAY! (…) Can I have your bacon?

First ever photo of my Bean. 

(I explain the oxygen tubes in his nose in his birth story.)

GPOY “On The Beach in Hawaii: Also, Too Young For You” Edition

I peaked early. 

Once upon a time, I lived in a comic book. 

Mr. Tambourine Man // The Byrds

Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship
My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip
My toes too numb to step, wait only for my boot heels
To be wanderin’
I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade
Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way
I promise to go under it.

Sometime late last summer I discovered a crate of my parents’ vinyl and for a while afterward a record was usually featured in my GPOYW. Visually, my favorite album cover was The Rolling Stones “Sticky Fingers”, because HELLO REAL JEANS ZIPPER IN THE CARDBOARD. But the best photo overall was the one where I was holding a copy of The Byrds “Mr. Tambourine Man”. It’s one of my all-time favorite songs. One of the songs that I know so well it predates any of my concrete childhood memories, because my dad played it over and over the year I was born. With all due respect to Robert Zimmerman, I think it’s beautiful, the superior version by far and the kind of thing I could fall asleep to every night for the rest of my life. 

(Other songs I’ve known longer than I’ve known myself include Linda Rondstadt’s “Blue Bayou”, John Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy” and Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London”. I misheard and therefore always sang “London” as “thunder”, a mistake I didn’t correct until I was 26. I still think Werewolves of Thunder makes more sense, because don’t the piano chord sequences sound like werewolf thunder would sound if werewolf thunder were a thing?)

The “Mr. Tambourine Man” photo wasn’t particularly notable except that it was the first time in a very long time that I looked at a picture of myself and genuinely liked it. I liked it so much that I reposted it maybe five times over the course of a few months and probably because I kept sticking it in their faces three of my followers did fun photoshops of it. I think that stevewhitaker did this one, but I’m not certain and it could have been either ronbailey or nilszero.

This all happened more than six months ago now. In a way it feels much longer than that and in another way it feels like yesterday. And so it goes.

For Throwback Thursday.

“I Learned It By Watching You, Dad!”

For Throwback Thursday. This video was one of my first ever Tumblr posts, back when I was just getting started here. I think one person saw it.

It’s not super-special. It’s just me and Bean, chilling on the verandah at our house in Grenada in March of 2009, a week before we left to come back to the States, a.k.a. the land of ice and afternoon sunsets.

You’ll see that Bean looks way younger and had never had his hair cut, and that I’ve got a killer tan. It ends abruptly, but it does do what I hoped it would do, which is bring back in visceral full force what is was like there. Watching it now I can almost feel the sun and the breeze.

(via my vimeo)

Recently I posted two of the very last photos I have of my grandfather (here and here). This is one of the very earliest photos I have of him, and, well… Color me fascinated.

I’m pretty sure this is in Puerto Rico, partly because he looks so young, and partly because why else would there be a Puerto Rican flag? I suspect it’s at a boat yard or marina of some kind. I even wonder if this photo wasn’t taken the day he left Puerto Rico for New York, and I imagine it’s concurrent with this formal portrait.

(A month ago I shared photos of him circa WWII in his Army uniform, and in Belgium in 1945, and more recently I wrote a really emotional open letter to him. If you gather from this that my grandfather holds an exceptionally dear place in my heart, you’d be right. He is, after all, the man who confessed to me on his deathbed that he had not, in fact, invented the piña colada, he had merely PERFECTED it.)

For Throwback Thursday. Possibly my favorite of the old photos I found recently.

“”Baby girl glam.”“