Half Days (and Somalia)

Z has a half day today, an almost vacation.  Half learning, half play.  Half discipline, half indulgence.  She will make it through several hours of kindergarten, before returning to her patch of dirt in the yard, to sift for worms and un-plant scattered seeds.  

The afternoon stretches before us, half foggy half warm.  I will scatter sugar over caffeine and stir, as my mind creates a list of things to do:

Wonder  if anyone is opening schools in Somalia.

Sit, overwhelmed by the fact that only 25% of Somali women are literate.

Discover no new foreign efforts at education since 2002.

Roll the word Mogadishu around in my mouth for a few minutes.

Consider learning Somali or Arabic.

Settle on French. Starting tomorrow.

Read article on International Coast Guard idea to handle piracy issues.

Wonder how that can possibly solve the problem in the long term. Read more. Feel disheartened, disenfranchised, hopeless as history repeats herself and we are told to “steer clear.”

Order a copy of Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa.

Feel frustrated as I am told that my learning Somali or sending devalued dollars can do nothing.  

Pray as we make cheesy quesadillas and guacamole in anticipation of the folding point of our whole day.

Roots.

 

Hungry for the earth, I pick out a jar of Harvard beets in the canned veg aisle of the dimly-lit Shoprite, sweet and tangy from the shelf. We chop them into bite size bits of oozing dye. I throw hard-boiled eggs into the sugared root juice, and close the cap. 

The next morning, sun streams through the kitchen window, a window with a view of a concrete wall, and the top of the trashcan. A creeping piece of plastic, that inches itself ever higher, as each morning I offer up our bundle of waste. 

The greying refrigerator needs scrubbed, bleached to restore the purity of its appearance. A place for food would not be my first thought if I were to guess the purpose of the appliance in its current state. My hands will only add to the grime as I reach for the newly created delicacy. The red beet eggs are ready. 

I cut them in half with a child’s plastic knife, and the halves part with the indeterminate solidity that only an egg can possess. Eggs seem almost capable of attaining the status of H2O. Perhaps we are just several years away from such mutability, the transmogrification of hard boiled egg to raw and back again sans shell, I would assume, but in constant flux. The hard boiled egg is more rubber than hard, more akin to sponge or silly putty than solid. It does not have its molecules firmly under control, if you know what I’m saying. 

It desires teeth, to pluck it apart, to act as knife to it. I sink my teeth in, and it again suctions away from the rest of itself, perhaps capable of reattaching when the researchers and the scientists gain more understanding. For now, it needs nothing more than salt. My chair screeches back, as I reach for the salt hog, a pinch of sea salt across the top of the yellow-eyed, pink-shadowed eggs. These treats are ladies, ready for a night out. These treats are the opposite of their sisters, the beets that share their domicile. Housed together they make a funny pair of earth and birth, sweet and tangy, sugar and salt. Root and life.

 

Telephone

“So I heard your news.”   

“Which news?” she sputters, laughing, toying.  

We are all about 30, which means we are all about 35, and I hear someone down the coffee shop bar assume they are joking about another’s 40^th birthday until the other says, “Yeah, finally 40.”  

The news I have is worn.  I heard it like a kitschy game of telephone, of whisper down the lane, words passing and mutating as they travel mouth to ear, mouth to ear, to mouth.   

This news came via several five year olds, laughing jubilant five year olds.  It holds no more weight than a helium balloon.  

“You keep looking at my hand,” she says.  She  never shows me the ring, so I keep sneaking glances, as she punches the man next to her.  “He gave it to me.”  Like it’s the clap, a disease.  Maybe it is.  We say ‘I’m getting married.’ Do we mean it like ‘I’m getting sick/hungry/tired.’  This is a conversation for next year, a few years into the disease.  

For now she is jubilant, radiant, jauntily punching her lover-cum-husband.   

And so I pluckily respond, “Yeah, I thought so, I saw him taking out your trash.  A true sign of love.” 

Or maybe a symptom of love, of desire for cohabitation and codependence and a cosignature.   

It was only after I walked out that I heard her question, “Which news?”  I had had options in my discovery, a choose your own adventure ending.   

There will be coffee tomorrow and like a fortune in the grounds, more news will pass from mouth to ear.

The Honda

My foot cramps again, but I hold to the clutch, right hand grinding gears until I happen upon one.  Habitual eyes wander out the window, simply wanting to know if anything is coming up behind me and to the left, but the side mirror is gone.  Removed long ago by a slab of cement on the road home from New York.  I jerk my head quickly over my left shoulder, feeling the fear of driving again, remembering as I did at sixteen the complication of ignorantly controlling machinery.  I complain, loudly bitterly.  And hear my daughter’s chiding reminder, “Hate is a strong word, right?”

 

The interior is dark, though the street lamps in So. Philly allow for a perpetual night vision, so that if I leave the city I feel desolate, alone, vulnerable.  I hear the crack of a can of de-icer as it rolls along the floor, up the lip of the car towards the door and back under the seat, banging into the worn “The Club.”  I have been given no directions for this tool, a device intended to lock the steering wheel in place so that even as bandits might break a window and take all that is valuable from the car, the car itself will remain.

 

But this placebo club was simply set on the wheel, unlocked. And that is how I leave it when I retreat. With a feigned twist at the club’s lock, intimating that I am for real, don’t mess with me you who lurk near this abandoned house on a side street west of Broad.  

 

My gloved hands fumble with the keychain car alarm.  And I hope the double beep and the clicking of the locks truly signifies that I am guarding all that travels with my husband as he moves between our world and his.  That I have created a safe harbor for his traveling companions, his paper cups stained with caffeine and sugar, his empty plastic bags marked with ingredients lists and promises of savory beef jerky, his pile of sunglasses and the TomTom hiding in the glovebox that speaks to him softly in the night encouraging him home again.  

 

Hate is a strong word for the tin vessel that carries him to me.  And I pray a prayer of protection for it.  I walk in the door, grateful that my use of the car means he is home tonight.  Right there, sitting with his other favorite gadget. And the strong word creeps around in my head again, until he sets the laptop down and walks toward me.

2007 Word of the Year

So, locavore.  The hip new word of the year from Oxford University Press.  It stands there next to upcycle, hoping to encourage our general consumption of that which is sitting right next to us.  It says grow your own tomatoes, use the wire hangers you long to throw away as stands to rope your vines around.     

These are good things, aka Martha.  And remind me that blogs, particularly mine, require local lore.  I hope only to regale you with stories, of people shuffling through my park, of children sick in the night, of Philadelphia scrappy and tough.    

If all goes well, I’ll have provided myself enough insight to begin that carefully put-aside novel, enough story to know that story itself colors our world.  It is from story that new words become.  Locavore is defined more as an initiative, a story-in-process than a constant noun.  And here on the hip of South Philly, I and my tough Italian Market hub are just that, a story-in-progress  (which I will sometimes refer to as grace, and other times as detritus.)   

Hang on for the fairy tale ending.