Reunited

Family reunions are wonderful for any number of reasons. Finally, we’re all there together, can check stories and memories backwards and forwards with others. We can see how people have changed, how children have grown. Young cousins, who have a special kind of connection, can play and build memories that will last all the rest of their lives. And perhaps more than anything, we can feel our family-ness, can feel our connection through blood, through time, to those who have come before and those who will come next.

The Garvey family is doing quite a good job at moving through time. We were together, in part, to celebrate the beginnings of this grand family—my grandmother and grandfather, both dead now, who would have turned 90 and 100 this year. Their 7 children, with their 6 spouses, and 19 grandchildren with their 4 spouses, and the 7 great grandchildren are quite a legacy. We were all there, all except Mary Ellen, a cousin who died 15 years ago, and Christine, a cousin who gave birth to her second child less than 6 weeks ago. We made an impressive crowd.

We began our gathering with a dinner for the whole group. My uncle Bill took us back through time with a glimpse at what life was like in 1907 when Grandpa was born. My father told us about a relative who came to the US in the 1860s and what Dad had found out about this fellow’s service in the Civil War. (Patrick Ashe fought at Gettysburg but never came home from the war. We are descended from his sister.) So our reunion began as we thought of our great great grand uncle who died in service of reuniting this country of which he was a new citizen, as we thought of my grandfather, who was born in a world where most houses in the US didn’t have running water or telephones or cars. The idea of time, mortality—the shadows of the past which fade in the daylight of today, of generational layers—these were what began our reunion.

The next night, dinner was complete with birthday cake for my grandma and grandpa. We stood around the cake, my aunt Patty (the eldest) holding her grandson Liam (the youngest present) and blowing out the candles on the cake which represented the genetic lines which connected us all. Then, after a night out at the campy resort, we headed back to the golfcourse McMansion where we were staying to watch old family movies on a flat-screen TV that was bigger than Naomi.

It was here that the movement of time sped up, that the generations marching were not the mythic forefathers long dead but the people in the room and the ghosts of people who had been in rooms like this at other family reunions. It isn’t just my great great granduncle who speeds through time with his horse and musket. It is me (only without the horse).

We watched my aunt Judy’s wedding, saw my Grandmother flirting with the video camera, heard my grandfather’s voice, which has been silent these last 15 years. We saw aunts and uncles--who would become the parents of my generation--as brides and grooms, as parents of babies. They were so young and beautiful and—oh my God—they were me. They were, in some cases, younger than I am now. My father has sleek black hair and beard and is years away from grey. My aunts and uncles are at the beginning of their adult lives. And there I am, in braces and awkward 80s hair. My cousin Kevin, laughing at the image of himself as a little tiny boy dancing at a family reunion 20 years ago, had to leave the laughter to comfort his own baby who was woken in the clamour. My little cousins—whom I remember as babies—stood around watching with their partners, grown now with careers and the beginnings of families of their own.

I was rocked, could feel the wind racing through my hair. I can remember those exact days, remember what I wore and what the weather was like. And now I was watching them on the screen, with my daughter on my lap, the anxieties and unhappinesses of my teens and 20s (and, er, most of my 30s) behind me—and the joys and pleasures, too.

And then a shining girl came onto the screen and the earth moved again, the loss pouring through me. There, dancing to break the tedium of a rainy vacation week, my cousin Mary Ellen moved with sprit and grace. In four years, she would be 19, and in her freshman year of college, and dead. Unlike her little brother, now watching with his own baby in his arms, there would be no growing through the scary early 20s, no finding a love and settling down. The children sat in our laps as we the adults who knew her wept, and she danced obliviously on the screen.

So this family reunion leaves me changed somehow. In the four days of solid work that I’ve done since then (am now in a hotel room in New York city after a gig in Delaware and a two-day workshop in DC), I’m still trying to figure out what to make of it all. There will be more on that another night, from another hotel room in another city. For tonight, St Patrick’s Cathedral glows outside the window, flanked by skyscrapers. It’s the new and the old, together in the same place in the way that buildings can be. It turns out people can be that way, too, only we can’t always know it. I’m flanked by Patrick Ashe and by Mary Ellen and, somewhere, by Naomi and Aidan’s children, too. Who says there’s no such thing as a ghost?

Liberty

Today we have been in Philadelphia, city of brotherly love, birthplace of the Liberty Bell. We took it easy, sleeping until 10:30 (!) and swimming in the hotel pool for a while before heading into the city. It’s odd to be in the US again—to be surrounded by the 6 lanes of traffic that cut through even these old city streets, to see the pale blue of the sky, the slow motion of the clouds. The people come in more colors here, and the colors are more segregated from one another than they are in New Zealand. It’s that segregation that struck me more than anything today.

We wandered around a little before we found the storytelling project—a series of 16 or so semi-circular benches with a storyteller sitting at each, waiting to tell stories to interested customers. We found the benches after 3, and the stories ended by 4:30, but we had time for three or four of them as we wandered around the city, bench to bench. It was a delight.

Less delightful was the fact that everything was either closed or sold out, or both. So we headed over to the still open and still free Liberty Bell (although all who had seen it told us not to bother). There, a large cluster of white people took turns being photographed beside an old bell with a famous crack. I wandered back through the nearly-empty exhibit to find out about the bell—when had it cracked, when was it made, etc.? There was an African-American series on the exhibit, about Philadelphia and slavery and abolitionist movements. A black man read pieces of the description out loud to his companions, his voice calm and matter-of-fact in the quiet hall. There was one panel about how many slaves the “fathers of liberty” had owned, and another about the abolitionist society in Philadelphia, the underground railroad, and the bi-racial membership of the society, illustrated in a picture with all white people, and a caption about how they allowed women in the society too. He read silently about the hall the society built, and the riots there, but he read out loud again when he came to the part that said the building was burnt to the ground two days after it opened. “They only left it alone two days,” he said, shaking his head. I stood next to him and read along, silently, my cheeks burning with shame as though I had thrown the rocks depicted in the sketch of the riot that burned the building down. I, who have done an awful lot of work on white guilt, stood there feeling as guilty as I have ever felt, just witnessing the calm reading aloud of a Parks Department sign.

I walked to the bell for a last look. I had discovered that it was cast with a fault, that the crack had first appeared when the bell was tested, that they thought to recast it but decided to repair it instead. It cracked again—time unknown—and they used it less. And when they rang it to celebrate George Washington’s birthday in the mid 1800s, it cracked so badly that it went horribly out of tune and they never rang it again. Standing in front of the damaged sign of liberty, the black man was taking pictures of his companions, two lovely black women. Then he swapped with one of the women and was in a picture with the other. I stepped forward (as I tend to do) and offered to take the picture of the three of them. His face lit up and he gathered together the women who had already started walking away. He stood with them, slightly hunched so that the bell would figure most prominently in the picture, and I snapped the shot on the throw-away camera. He took it back from me with a hearty thank you, and I felt tears well up in my eyes so fast that it took me by surprise. I walked in a teary haze to the excavation of George Washington’s house in Philadelphia, right next to the museum that houses the bell. The site is being examined for artifacts before a monument is built on top of it, a monument to the paradoxical nature the first father of this country had with liberty. He kept his family, his servants, and his slaves in that house. He made sure that the law which Philadelphia passed for the gradual releasing of slavery would not apply to him by rotating his slaves across state lines every six months so that they would not officially be citizens of Philadelphia (the law was never enacted anyway). He freed some of his slaves eventually, but only after his death, and only some of them. The father of our country. This makes me the daughter of slave-owners, although none of my family lived on these shores during slave-owning times. I carried that weight around for the rest of the day, trying to explain to Naomi what we had seen, trying to make her understand without making her feel personally responsible. And trying to understand my own personal responsibility.

And then, at the end of the day, walking back to the hotel on feet sore from their first day in sandals in months, we came upon another piece of Americana that also touches me personally. This one is a statue of An Gorta Mor, the Irish Potato Famine. I can’t find pictures on line but will post mine on line tomorrow. Here, in a large tableau, you see at one side a skeletal woman with a baby on her back weeping over a dead woman in a graveyard. Behind her, climbing up out of the graveyard, people mount stairs to what turns out to be, in the front of a sculpture, a ship. On one side of the front of the ship, worried faces look into the middle distance. At the other side, joyful families walk down the gangplank on to the shore, their faces suffused with wonder at the scene before them. It could be a clichéd series, or it could be very powerful, and today I found it very powerful. Here were my own people, dying in the fields of the mother country, leaving behind their homes, travelling into the terrifying unknown. The inconsistencies of the sculpture didn’t bother me so much (do you think people were really fatter at the end of the ship journey than they were in the beginning?) as the emotional tone captured me. George Washington—and others who began this country—owned slaves, wove inequity into the very fabric of this new nation. And they also wove freedom and opportunity into the fabric, too. One million Irish came here to live—and they were discriminated against and persecuted and made to live in Irish ghettos. And they were also alive, which their native land would not have supported. Like my grandparents and great grandparents, they became members of the society that eventually took them in as their accents dropped away. Those were my people, too, every bit as much as George Washington. Like the liberty bell itself, this country is forged with imperfect materials, and it is cracked through with near-fatal flaws. And today I saw glimpses of both the beauty and the horror in it, saw ways that I continue both lines—the racist lines of the white people who founded this nation and the hopeful Irish seeking of a better land across the sea. There is nothing simple here, nothing straightforward. I should have remembered that this country is far too big for that.

The longest day

4:25 pm 20 June 2007

I am drinking my last really good cup of tea. Or maybe I’ll have one tomorrow morning before we land in San Francisco. The tea on these Air New Zealand flights is lovely. The trip has begun. We have taken the train to the cab to the first plane. It seems quite a quiet beginning to such a long time away. I am excited and melancholy, happy and sad. I guess life is like that a lot.

Naomi has discovered, sometime in the last week or so, the futility of life. She has had another layer of development, has uncovered another piece of life to be sad about: that we’re all going to die some time. This thought has nearly paralysed her as it has nearly every human on the planet at one time or another. She is afraid to ride on this airplane, afraid to go to sleep at night, afraid to have a babysitter rather than have me home with her. We take deep breaths together and talk about how it’s possible to carry on with life anyway.

This sometimes leaves me asking: how is it possible to carry on with life, anyway? Here we have constructed a life that is about tearing ourselves out of the US context and planting ourselves in new soil around the world. This means that we’ll always feel a pang of jealousy when the next door neighbours have a big family bash, and we’ll spend more time than most folks travelling on airplanes across the Pacific.

1:50 pm 21 June NZ time/ 8:50 pm 20 June DC time

Now we’re towards the last leg of the trip. We’ve had the culture shock of the big San Francisco airport, the astonishing long lines that are everywhere in the US. It suddenly seems strange to be on an airplane for so many hours without filling out an immigration form. Now Michael is continuing an on-going conversation with the head flight attendant about the violence level in the movie that is being shown on every screen on the plane. Aidan is freaked by the movie, and desperately trying to keep his head down. The flight attendants are sorry, but feel helpless about this as the movie is being watched by quite a few people on the plane.

There is a brilliant sunset which I, in my aisle seat, can only see in the warmth of the light on the seats on the other side of the plane. I have to breathe through the frustration of an aisle seat (especially when the person at the window here has closed the shade) because I love watching the US go by on these west-east flights. And besides, it's not like I haven't seen any good sunsets lately.

One flight attendant, her thick make-up glossy at the beginning of the flight, now looks polished to a high-sheen. She is carrying a baby up and down the aisle, something you see on Air New Zealand flights but I’ve never seen on a US flight before. The baby, she tells us all, is a Korean girl, travelling with her chaperone (who is now asleep) and going to meet her new parents who will pick her up at the Philadelphia airport. I have these funky mixed feelings about the whole enterprise. On the one hand, the flight attendant is admiring and kind and loving about this baby, and it’s beautiful to be present right at the beginning of a new and lovely thing—we’ll see the new parents, and I can imagine the joy they feel right now, knowing their new baby is in the air on her way to become part of their family. And there is a sad arrogance about it which is characteristic of the US. People in the aisles around me talk about “that lucky girl” to come to a new life in America. And indeed, that could be true. But there’s something in the salvation of it all that bothers me just a little, and that little bothering turns bigger as the flight attendant gets more into the story, says that the parents have already adopted this little girl’s sister, and that the children share a mother but not a father, leading the flight attendant to think the mother is quite likely a prostitute. I don’t know about you, but probably half of the families I know have children who are half-siblings, and I don’t know a single prostitute. What is it about the assumptions we make about a Korean mother who puts two children up for adoption? How do those assumptions influence our thinking about our place in the world as Americans? Benevolent arrogance can be unintentionally harmful.

Other than probing the depths of the assumptions I see woven inside the culture (and watching my assumptions about their assumptions), we have had a trip that’s quite painless considering we’re now past the 24 hour mark and still with several hours to go. It’s hard to imagine that 25 hours ago, almost exactly, we picked the kids up and got on the train to take us to the first plane. It’s hard to imagine the depths of the changes that take place thousands of miles underneath us—topographically, politically, meteorologically. We have moved from winter to summer. We have left behind what today is the shortest day of the year in New Zealand, to celebrate what will be the longest day of the year in the US. We have had our lives brush up against thousands of strangers, and brush closely against those who have sat in the windows on these trips—Kath an 20 year immigrant to New Zealand on her way to visit family in Portland who was violently ill during the very bumpy first hours of the trip across the Pacific; the woman next to us on a business trip to Philly who grew up in Northern Virginia; the woman next to Aidan who also moved far from her family which bewilders them. On an airplane, you are thrown into fast and deep proximity with a stranger, sometimes for many hours, and then you separate forever. How do those people become part of the stories we tell ourselves into the future?

How will this trip weave itself into our assumptions about ourselves, our American-ness, our New Zealand-ness, our family-ness? These questions are all before us, and only the vista from 30,000 feet on the way across the world in the other direction will offer any clarity.

Planes and trains and...

It is getting really blustery here, in the New Zealand way. When D asked Michael how winter was treating him, she followed with, “But this is probably nothing as bad as the winters you’re used to!” Michael agreed, but noted that while the outside temperatures were more mild than winters in the Northeast US, the inside temperatures here rivaled the coldest we’ve ever known. In the house in front of the fire that isn’t true, of course. It’s lovely and toasty and wonderful. But leave the lounge area and wander into the hallway (or—worse—the bedrooms) and you’ll find icy floors and chilly rooms. Brrr. Life without central heating is centrally cold.

At the same time, there’s something really wonderful about having the fire bring us together in the lounge, something old fashioned and sweet. The whole family gathers in front of the fire quite a lot these days, reading and typing blog entries and generally hanging out. Whereas we used to mostly work in our own individual spaces, now we are together, quietly (mostly). I really like it. (And, as an introvert, I really like that I can also bugger off to my room when I want and be alone in the cold where no one is brave enough to follow.)

It’s a quieter house with Rob in LA. He left Friday afternoon, on a rainbow-filled blustery day, and emailed us today to say that he’s safe and sound in the city of angels. Even as we miss him and note how suddenly empty the house feels (which is odd, because when he was here it didn’t feel like he took up that much space), we’re preparing to leave this place too and follow him. Tonight we had dinner with P and J who will look after the house and the dog while we’re gone, and now we’re putting the final things in suitcases, deciding how much of which things we need to bring, etc. Tomorrow we’ll take the kids to school for most of the day, finish last minute details here, go and sign the papers on our new house, and then take the train to the taxi to the plane to the plane to the plane. It’s a weird life.

I am a bundle of conflicting emotions about this trip. Five weeks away from home is bad. Traveling to a place where the days are long and warm doesn’t sound so bad. Missing the people we’re building relationships here is bad. Seeing the people we miss from the US is great. And on and on. This week has been filled with connection, with people who want to work with me and are horrified I’ll be away so long. Dinner with my new friend M on Monday and finding someone right here in the village that I really really like. Talking to F who wants to make it her mission to make New Zealand the right place for me. Notes on my desk from D who will actually miss me and was wanting to say goodbye. And today, K from work, finding out that I would be away and then coming back said, “Ah, but you fit in so well here, you so clearly belong here,” with such warmth and certainty I almost kissed her. .

While I’m leaving behind new friends and new and growing connections, these 40 days and 40 nights seem filled with meaning on the US end, too. This is the last scheduled trip to the US until next March or April. It’s the last time M and the kids will see folks for a while (18 months?—until we save up the gobs of money this trip takes). The last scheduled time with my students. The last goodbyes to Elijah at his memorial service.

There are beginnings and endings all over the place. We begin the trip with a family reunion which celebrates what would be the 100^th birthday of my grandpa and the 90^th of my grandma, if they were still alive. I end the trip with a goodbye to my students (whom I love) and an indefinite parting from my friends and colleagues at GMU—all of us wondering if I’ll be back. I do not know what it’ll feel like, do not know who I’ll be during the trip, or afterwards. But tomorrow, we’ll begin to find out.

An All Blacks affair

Michael here, writing a bit about the rugby match that Rob and I went to last weekend. At the time, Rob was heading into his last week in this country. Our hope is that he’s going back to Oregon to collect his things, earn a little bit of money to get his affairs in order, all to prepare to come back for a more permanent stay.

Rugby here is like a religion, of sorts. A religion that transcends race, age, gender, socio-economics – a bridge that reaches across all differences. There are old people and young people, families with kids, couples, grandparents, Māori & Pakeha – and they’re all rabid fans of the All Blacks. It sort of feels like ice hockey in Canada (maybe even the Montreal Canadiens, for those of you who might know about that).

The game was an amazing combination of so many things. The crowd was big, even for NZ standards. But all friendly, polite, and civil. No drunks being jerks. No thugs causing trouble. Just people. A long, long train brought us in to town with K, J, and P, and we worked our way with the crowd into the stadium. Going in to the game was one of the numerous examples I come across here that blends modern efficiencies and technology with old-fashioned, a-bit-behind-the-times kind of feel. I had purchased our tickets on Ticketmaster for the low, low price of $100 each. The familiar interface and high prices left me feeling that this was just like tickets to a Capitals game in DC. By the time that we got to the will call line, things began feeling different. Will Call at the stadium here is a small office in the middle of a huge pedestrian walkway into the stadium, with glass windows on two sides, each with two or three ticket windows. The letters “A-F” and “G-M,” etc., handwritten, and taped above each window. In Office Depot envelope boxes were hundreds of pieces of paper, folded as though they were going to go into some missing envelope at some point in their future. Each folded paper had a paper clip on the end, and on the exposed front of the paper was a handwritten name. Each person who had purchased tickets from Ticketmaster for the game – and by the looks of the lines, there were thousands of us – had a similar paper waiting for him or her. High tech met low tech, and high tech decided to pick up some saucy neon MP3 player!

Next Exhibit – Concessions Line: We were a bit late coming in and, being swept in with the crowd, forgot to get dinner. No worries, we’ll just eat at the game. Being without Jennifer, Hot Dogs were on the menu. After standing in a not-to-long food line, we ordered 4 beers (the limit) and 4 dogs. The young kiwi woman filled up the tray with wrapped-in-paper corn dogs, or what us Americans would call corn dogs. Why is it that “regular” hot dogs are “American Hot Dogs” and what they call hot dogs are corn dogs? We sheepishly got her to switch the corn dogs for chicken burgers – grilled chicken breast, grilled onions, catsup (aka tomato sauce). Not too bad.

Sitting a row above us were four young guys from France cheering on the All Blacks’ opponents. They were very French, faces painted bleu, blanc, et rouge and all, yelling and putting up with a fair amount of playful ribbing from the kiwi fans around them. And sitting next to Rob was a lovely older couple – he on the aisle, she next to Rob – and she was the source of all things rugby and All Blacks, and all delivered from the person who should be your grandma or your great aunt. I kept expecting her to pull out her knitting basket, but she must have left it at home for a big a match as this one.

And then was the national anthems. For one, no one took their hats off. The French guys above us were screaming La Marseillaise as the choir on the field sang the anthem. Then the NZ anthem came on. I think Jennifer has written about it before in an earlier entry. Missing are the bombs bursting and the rockets red glare, and in their place are words about unity and freedom. It’s an interesting contrast, highlighted by the fact that the first verse is sung in Maori! (Admittedly, the Maori verse was a bit quieter than the English verses and many people were following along with the bouncing ball on the huge video screen, but still). It was at this point where I think that I felt my foreign-ness more clearly than I have at any other time on this adventure. This was not my game. These were not my people. This was not my country. As much as I have wanted to be French, Je ne suis pas la. So there we were, in the bright lights with this strange crowd – a crowd that is, nevertheless, beginning to feel a bit more familiar – listening to this strange anthem halfway around the world. It was interesting. And informative. And fun!

Of course, there can be no more powerful moment than when the All Blacks perform the Haka, which is a Maori war dance that they do before going into battle. (Another example is here, which is met by the Tongan war dance. One more here, for those, like me, who are awed by the display.). And while the Haka has more than one meaning, and has its roots in a place that’s less about war and more about survival, it has come to be a display to intimidate the opposing side. I imagine the first European settlers sailing with James Cook, landing in (what is now) New Zealand, only to be greeted by a tribe of screaming, huge, tattooed warriors dancing the Haka. It would not feel like a peaceful invitation where anything good would happen! The crowd got silent as the team captain began the ceremony. Watch the videos to get a really good sense of what it is like. It feel so unbelievably powerful and like a strong connection to a cultural past. Showmanship? Yes. Gamesmanship? Absolutely. But the All Blacks are perhaps the most famous rugby side in the world, and their Haka is the one to see.

By the time we headed back out for the long train ride to Paekakariki a few hours later, we had witnessed an absolute demolition of the French side. The All Blacks finished 59-10 (Rob had predicted 60-3 early on in the game). The French team was badly beaten by a superior team, although I later learned that the French rugby season hadn’t yet finished and a number of their better players had not yet joined the national team. The sense was that the All Blacks still would have won, but it might not have been so lopsided. It was a wonderful thing to have done, to have done with my friend Rob, and to have been a part of to deepen my experience here in this land so far from my former home.

And so it begins

Yesterday afternoon, I picked the kids up from school and we hustled into the village so I could get my hair cut. On the way, we chatted about our days and the kids told me about school. And Naomi was full of the news that the senior block (that’s the kids Naomi’s age and up) were going to be having a disco during term 3. AND she was excited about that. AND parents were invited. AND she and her friend F had decided that it would be totally embarrassing if their parents actually came, and so she was asking me not to come very nicely. I, of course, first needed to tease her about the “very nicely” there at the end of the sentence. That was, I was told, because she and F didn’t want to hurt their parents’ feelings, and so they wanted to ask us not to come because we would embarrass them very nicely. We talked for a few minutes about how asking someone not to go somewhere when they’ve been invited is just about never a “very nicely” sort of thing to do. Yes, Naomi understood that, but it was the best she could manage and were my feelings hurt.

And no, my feelings aren’t hurt. And somewhere, they probably are hurt a little. Naomi, who has been on the verge of adolescence since she was three, creeps closer and closer. If I thought that the move to the edge of the world would slow the creep, I was probably right. But slow isn’t stopping.

[An aside about this train ride. Today the wind is coming from the south and blowing out over the hills on to the sea. It’s a stiff and cold wind, but it’s flattening the waves and making the water lake-smooth. Just now I’m passing over the rock pools at the edge of the sea and I can see down into the bottom, seaweed dancing gently in the current. Wonder if the seaweedlets ever ask their parents not to dance so awkwardly while their friends are watching…)

I’m amazed, actually, at what it’s like to experience this transitional time from right here in the house. I taught kids who were just a little older than Naomi, and I gave minimal amounts of thought to what it would be like to live with those creatures who brought stuffed animals to school one day and talked about bras and lipstick the next. And yesterday’s question brings it all back to me and I realise that now I’m in that space myself.

Naomi flirts with independence. She pressed me really hard the first months we were here to be allowed to travel around the village on her own. She was too big to be walked to school, too big to be picked up. Finally I allowed those things and let her walk to school alone (with tears in my eyes about how she didn’t really need me anymore) and walk home from school alone (anxiously checking the clock until she was safely home). And of course it was at that point that she stopped asking. More than that, when it would be more convenient for me if she got herself (and Aidan) to and from school, she complains that she loves to be with me, and she doesn’t like to go places alone. Push me pull you. And I, who have seen the winds begin to mark the coming change in the weather, walk her to school proudly, holding her hand, and laughing, and kissing her, because it’s still allowed.

(For those of you who worry about Aidan and his development, I can say that he’s reading like mad, he’s learned to ride his bike, and he’s deciding whether he wants to learn to tie his shoes. “I’m learning too many new things right now, Mom—it makes me tired. I’m just not ready for the shoe-tying thing.” I’ll keep you posted for readiness.)

And a final aside about the train journey. Here, towards the end where it’s more urban and not so spectacular, I’ve put my head down to work on my book proposal, the next draft of which is due soon. Glancing up from the computer, I see a glimpse of rainbow. New Zealand, for some reason, has lots of rainbows. This one, which captivated me, is different from any I’ve ever seen. First it’s a rainbow that stretches inside a puffy white cloud and disappears behind a hill. Lovely—and unexpected, because other than a couple of those puffy white clouds, the sky is clear blue. Then, as the train moves, so does the rainbow, until it is a full arc, moving from as far as I can see on one edge to as far as I can see on the other. Nearly all of the rainbow is against clear blue sky. I didn’t know this was possible and had no idea how unexpected and beautiful it would be to see a rainbow on a full sunny day, no rain in sight. Would I call it something else? A sunbow? And in the sparkling sunshine, backed by bright blue, the rainbow’s colours are even more spectacular than I’ve ever seen. There is a message here in the rainbow, a promise of unexpected beauty, fulfilled on a train ride on a chilly winter Thursday in June.

Words about pictures

(Dad, you might not want to read this until your Father’s Day present shows up or else the surprise will be ruined.)

This week, I’ve been using my spare time to put together a photobook of the first six months of our transition. I’ve been pouring through pictures and the memories that come along with the pictures. It has been good work and also difficult. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, (which means I’ve likely gotten my proportions all wrong on this blog) but it’s also worth thousands of memories. For each of the pictures, there are a rush of thoughts and ideas and emotions. The party at Joyce and Mary’s house in the summer, feeling the joys of working and playing with fantastic colleagues. The trips to the Smithsonian—a world of art and culture and history at our doorstep. The layers of the renovation project on Belmont Road. The sparkling perfection of that house when we were through. The hundreds of dinners with family and friends that infused the dining room. The lovely neighborhoods we used to walk through. The day we feared for our safety in Rock Creek Park and figured Perry saved us. As I walk through my life here, I can almost believe that that other life is a dream, that it happened to a person in another time, another world. And when I see the pictures, I remember that that life happened to me.

And each picture holds for a moment not only the beauty of that picture, but also the fears and joys and expectations of that moment. I look back and see times when I wasn’t sure that particular pieces of my life would work out, and I feel the ghost of that nervousness even as I exorcize because I know better now. I want to reach in to my self in those pictures and whisper, “Loosen up, I’ve read the next chapter and you’ll be fine.” And I see other pictures where I had no idea that there was something bad ahead, and I’m blissfully thinking of something else. I’m interested that I have no warnings I’d like to mutter in the ear of an unsuspecting me, and there’s something to learn from that. Would it be better to know which things would all fall apart (“go to custard” is the phrase here, although I still don’t understand why that’s bad) or is ignorance bliss really? And, if I want myself to loosen up over the things that didn’t go bad and not to worry or know about the things that would go bad, what message does that send me here to the images of myself that were taken this week or last that I’ll put in a photo book months or years from now?

When I was pregnant, I’d look at baby pictures of my little brother and see in those pictures the big boy he was then. I was excited to peer into my little baby’s face and imagine the big boy or girl that would grow from these infant beginnings. When Naomi was born, I would stare into her wise old new face and wonder what she’d look like. There were moments when I’d feel a stab of fear in my inability to imagine my way into her future. Was that an omen?

But no, the new-mother hormones had just cut off that part of my brain that knows that the plotline is easy to trace backwards, and impossible to trace forwards. That’s what makes novels (and also life) worth the work. Now I look at her baby pictures and see the shape of her eyes, the curve of her laughing mouth. I look at Aidan, hugely fat as an infant, and can make out the gleam of fun he had even as a young baby. And so the pictures we’ll take this afternoon of the newly-painted lounge wall and the lovely sunny colour in the solariage will not hold any hints of what’s next for us this winter (or the US summer that will happen in the midst of it). And when I look back on this day, I’ll know where it sprung from, and I’ll know where it leads to. And today it’ll just be a page-turner.

(Pictures today of the kids three years ago and two months ago.)

Wine-ing

Are you tired of hearing about the beauty yet? Are you tired of hearing about the magical train ride and the fast-moving clouds and the pleated velvet hills? You might want to skip this entry, then.

Monday, to round out the Queen’s birthday weekend, we went towards the sun: east to Martinborough and to Greytown. It was supposed to rain all along the west coast, so we headed to the Waiarapa, the winegrowing country across the hills towards the other coast. This is how we’ve planned each trip: by consulting the weather to find out which direction we’d find sun. Even as we do it, we laugh about it—imagine trying to decide whether to go to Montgomery Mall or Pentagon City Mall based on whether it would be raining in Arlington or Rockville.

That morning on our sunrise beach walk, Michael and I had wondered together why we didn’t take these day trips when we lived in DC. Surely there were lovely things to see around DC, weren’t there? But the lovely things were often quite a long drive away, through ugly sludge of inner and then outer suburbs. And then there was the worry that once you got to whatever sleepy lovely little country town you were escaping to, you’d find that in fact it was mobbed, packed with other city dwellers also escaping one another to head into the country. (To be fair, we were also trying to make great use of living in Washington DC, one of the most wonderful cities in the US, where there were endless opportunities inside city limits. And we did fantastic things in the city itself.)

We have not yet found much suburban sludge in New Zealand, although we assume that we’d find it outside Auckland. We left Paekakariki at 10, stopping in Porirua to buy paint for the house and then drove through drizzle around the harbour and into the hills that separate the coast from the plains. Up up up we climbed, on State Highway 2, a tiny twisting major artery with a chicken wire fence separating you from the cliff-face that is your certain death. It was a terrifying and magnificently beautiful journey (and it is here on these narrow twisty roads that we have discovered our propensity for car sickness). There are pictures today from the summit at 555 metres. Then down down down and into farm-covered planes in the bright and warm sunshine, the cobalt skies stretching out forever over the grass or vine-covered patchwork. We stopped at the heart of the region, Martinborough, a place known for its cafes and chic shops. From the descriptions, you’d have expected something like Annapolis or Concord Mass or whatever your image of sweet boutique world might be. I had in my mind dozens of cafes, beautiful little shops, a day of wandering with perhaps the too-well-heeled Wellington set, all packing into little towns on the holiday weekend. HA! How North American of me.

Martinborough is a tiny village. It has a handful of cafes (half were closed for the holiday) and a scattering of shops (ditto). We crowded into the several open places with the dozens of other people (many of them on motorcycles) who had also opted for this day trip—or maybe we were just eating lunch with the locals there. It was, I suppose, everything we expected it to be, only shrunk by 90%--perhaps quite like the country itself, really. Next we headed to Greytown, which has the longest stretch of wooden Victorian buildings in New Zealand (now there’s a record to hold on to). Here we wandered through shops (all open for the holiday, but closing at the Sunday time of 4 or 5) and admired NZ art and Balinese antiques and lovely smells from French bakeries. On our way out of town, Rob asked us to stop at the Schoc chocolate store -- a tiny little shop by the side of the road just out of Greytown that was miraculously still open even as the late-autumn sun was setting. Rob picked up a book called Chocolate Therapy which he had sold in gourmet stores in Oregon and got excited that it was signed. He turned to the man leaning out of the chocolate kitchen and asked him whether he was one of the authors. And, because it’s New Zealand, he was. This man is a psychotherapist turned chocolatier, and he came out from the kitchen and began pulling out drawers of a tiny little spice or tea cabinet, each unlabeled box containing small pieces of one or another chocolate. He had us taste single varietals and name the different notes we found there (the South American chocolates were earthy but Eastern chocolates had more floral and citrus notes—or the other way around). He found out where we were from and talked about the talks he had given at the Smithsonian. So here we were, in this tiny little village in the middle of New Zealand, talking to a man who had travelled the world tasting and lecturing about chocolate, and who knew more about the subject than anyone I had ever met. We drove off into the sunset (literally), ready to climb the hills with excellent chocolate in our bellies. And then, in case you needed the story to have a happy ending, we arrived home to our big lump of a dog snoozing on the chaise, we lit a roaring fire, and fell asleep listing to the rhythmic sound of the sea. Happy queen’s birthday to us all!

The queen and I

It’s the first weekend in June, which means that in New Zealand, we celebrate the queen’s birthday as well as mine. It’s not her birthday, mind you (she turned 81 in April), but here we’ll have Monday off just the same. It’s Sunday afternoon here, a lovely crisp cool day. They say “winter has finally arrived” although it’s not winter like I’ve known winter. Still, after brunch with my friend Di from work, I’m sitting here in front of a popping fire in the woodstove, looking at the slanting light of the late afternoon. The bread is rising in front of the fire, and Naomi, just home from a friend’s birthday party, is cuddled next to me with Perry at our feet. That’s a pretty good way to spend some time.

It’s been quite a good birthday weekend, actually. My birthday eve, Michael and the kids had turned the kitchen into a papusa-making factory, patting the cornmeal dough into disks with the cheese and corn, and asking Naomi to chatter away in fast Spanish to make the process as authentic as possible. I sat on the couch and laughed at them. June 1^st here was a mellow and quiet day. I woke up after Michael left on the early morning train and Perry and I walked alone on the beach, watching the sunrise in front of me and the full moon set behind me. It was a feast of beauty.

Rob spent the day working on the chili, which turned out to be just about the best thing I’ve ever put in my mouth. He roasted some things and slow-braised others and finally combined it all into a taste-explosion that was even better than the superb cake he and Michael made. P and J came for dinner and we laughed a lot and ate this American (North and South) food with British friends here on my first birthday in New Zealand.

Saturday morning was perfect for soccer. Naomi’s team won 4-nil, and then she was off to play with her friend who currently lives at the house on the hill. We could hear the kids’ laughter from our back porch. Aidan, Michael, Rob and I stopped on the way home to sit on the sea wall and watch the surfers navigate the rhythmic waves in the sunlight. Then, chilled, we went home to light a fire. As the clouds came in, we braved them by heading to Battle Hill Forest Farm Park (15 minutes from our house) , where we got up close and personal with the sheep in the fields, and then went on a short hike through the lush rain-foresty bush. We marvelled at bright orange fungus, ancient nikau palms, and the lacy canopy of tree ferns. Dinner on my US birthday was graced by the wine Di gave me, easily the best Chardonnay I’ve ever had.

Today it was lovely to have Di over, my first work friend to head this way. We walked along the beach and through the hills, and we talked about the seminar and about life here in NZ and in the US and about the office and about nothing in particular. We watched Aidan ride his bike along the shoreline, and were astonished to see two dogs bother a seal pup who hustled into the sea as quickly as its flippers could take it and then finally dive gratefully into the waves. It was really good to have a friend come over and eat a meal and make a beginning.

Michael and I, walking along the beach this morning, talked a lot about making beginnings. In the plan we were assuming we’d follow one year ago, the one that had us here for six months, we’d be packing our bags and heading back to our Belmont Road townhouse. The memory of that plan made me ache for that lovely neighbourhood, the neighbours we loved, the hundreds of restaurants, the easy access to my mom and to Michael’s family, and my wonderful friends and colleagues and students on the other side of the world. If we had left things as we thought they’d be, we’d be going home. The thought of it brought a wave of homesickness over me.

And a wave of relief. I’ve just made a beginning here. Everything is still fresh. I’ve spent months in the neutral zone and am just starting to live here. The phone, when it rings, is sometimes for me (rather than just for Naomi). I see people I know on the beach, in the village, on the train. With my seminar last week people are just beginning to know what I do and how I might work with them to do something good. It is all new and unfolding, like the koru that I put on the powerpoint slides for the presentation. It would be terrible indeed to rush back to the US now without really ever finding out how I could grow in this new soil.

Here, the queen and I share a birthday weekend. Here the hills fill my heart with joy each time I see them—and here I see them dozens of times a day. Here I learn what it means to be a New Zealander—and what it means to be an American. Here my children are learning soccer and horseback riding and Maori. Here is where we’ll begin work on our new house in a couple of months. Here is where I’ll be 37. Happy queen’s birthday (observed).