Changing

It’s a crystalline day here. Something astonishing happens when the southerlies blow through. The wind howls and gets icy cold—was close to freezing last night, with snow on the far mountains of the South Island. But when the southerly blows through, the air has a kind of sparkle to it that a New England fall day can only dream about. The air crackles with the freshness of Antarctica. Each of my cells feels more alive.

That’s a welcome treat because it has been an exhausting week—with two more ahead that make me need the sparkles in this air. The house we currently live in is on the market—for sale sign up in front (to see the website, click here ). House we intend to move into is in its coming apart phase. This is disorienting to be fixing one house so that it is utterly beautiful and can be sold and ruining the other so that it can be ours. Hmmm. (There are piles of good metaphors here heaped amidst the wallboard piled in the lounge.) We have just elected the first gay or lesbian mayor in New Zealand to our district. We have had our new friend JL come and go. And we have had news that our oldest friend Rob (who came and went) is coming back to us. We are counting down the days until his arrival in the second week of November.

But the piece I want to talk about isn’t friends or houses or work. It’s family. This has been a week where the importance of family is close at hand and the family itself has seemed very far away. Michael’s grandfather died this week. He was 95 and had been in the hospital ailing for many weeks, so his death was neither a surprise nor particularly tragic. He lived a good long life and now his body was too old to make it anymore. Michael’s sister sat next to him as he took his last breath in his sleep, after an afternoon chatting with the granddaughter who loved him so much. May we all have a death so sweet. Still, it’s time to gather to mourn and celebrate the life of a good man, and we live on the other side of the world from that gathering. Michael and I went back and forth about whether he should go to the funeral, and ultimately a variety of factors made not going feel like the right decision. Our love for Charles Horowitz, 89 years older than Aidan James who has exactly his eyes, expands through all these miles.

So, for Poppy wherever he might be on the day before his funeral, an Aidan story.

At the Kapa Haka on Saturday, Aidan was a very small, very blonde audience member. He had a hard time seeing in the tangle of large adults. It was crowded and loud—with audience members occasionally breaking into fierce hakas of their own. At one point, we were in the middle of one, the teenagers around us yelling with bulging eyes and fluttering hands. By the time we had been there an hour, Aidan had had enough. He looked at me with tears in his eyes and insisted that we leave. I took his hand, leading him outside while the rest of our crowd stayed and watched the performance. Aidan and I threaded our way past proud parents and grandparents watching, past clumps of teenagers in school uniforms practicing, and out into the chilly afternoon. We crossed the street to sit in a rose garden and work it through.

I tried to get a sense of what was going on for him. He hated it. I wanted to know what he hated. Everything. I looked for what he wanted to happen next. He wanted us all to get into the car and go home (remember that we were there with JL from Chicago and MG and her daughter—all of whom were having quite a good time). He was firm. He hated it, wanted to go home, would never want anything else. I listened to what he was saying, tried to draw out things I might find unlikable if I were Aidan. Did he find the yelling frightening? Yes. Did he feel strange with all the different language around us? Yes. Did he find the chords and tunes foreign and confusing? Yes. We talked about how people are often afraid of the unfamiliar, how really normal and fine that was. Then I tried to build a bridge to what he might like. Did he find the costumes beautiful? No. Did he find it glorious that there were little kids there who were singing and dancing so well? No. Did he appreciate the generations of people doing this through the ages and connecting to their ancestors (Ok, so this was a long shot)? No he did not. He hated it all, would never like it, could we leave right now?

So then I appealed to his sense of fairness. I didn’t want to leave, the others didn’t want to leave. How long would he stay to be a good member of the group? 20 seconds. I told him I wanted to stay an hour longer, maybe more. His 20 seconds didn’t seem to be meeting me far enough along. Ok, he budged--30 seconds.

What would it take for him to be ok in that space? Nothing. He’d never be ok. He couldn’t change his mind. So, because the poor thing has a mother with a doctorate in changes in minds, this point was not going to go without a challenge. In the rose garden, Aidan got an introduction to constructivism and the way we create our own reality (for which others have actually paid money, and of which he didn’t seem quite so appreciative). And we began to chip away at his resolve. We talked about the benefits of controlling your own reactions to things. He allowed that perhaps it would be better if he hated it less (although he didn’t see that as a possibility still). We slowly crafted a plan. His job was to look for things he liked in the room—we wouldn’t leave until he had found at least 10 things. And since I wanted to stay an hour and he wanted to go in 20 seconds, we agreed that 25 minutes would be a fair amount of time to stay. He didn’t like that he couldn’t see anything, but felt like a baby when I lifted him up. A ride on my back seemed like a less obtrusive perch. We made a deal and walked hand in hand from our rose garden back into the crowded auditorium.

As we walked in, he saw the folks on the stage, doing their thing. “I love their costumes, Mommy,” he told me smiling. “That’s one,” I said. We met up with the other group and I boosted him onto my back. “I love the way their faces are painted,” he told me. Two. I told him I loved the way the smallest children—younger than Aidan—were so into it with their faces and their bodies. He loved that too. Three. He squirmed off my back to get at a little pile of reeds that had fallen off of the costume of one of the kids. He held the reed in his hand and we whispered about how it was made and how cool it was. “I’m holding something that was just in the performance, something everyone here has seen!” he whispered excitedly. Four. He liked the facial expressions, the singing, the guitar playing. Ten minutes into our timed experiment, he turned to me and said, with delight, “Mommy, you were right! I can love it here! We can stay the whole hour if you want!” (Of course, by that time everyone else was just about ready to go, so we stayed a few more minutes and we were out of there.) That night at dinner, as we went around the table to talk about things we were grateful for, Aidan said, “I’m grateful for the Kapa Haka, and that I learned how to change my mind.”

Tonight we walked to the new house with MG and her daughter (who is spending the night). We stood in the ruins of the kitchen and talked about hope and healing and building and growing. At dinner we lit the candles and sang the blessings and thought about Poppy and hope and healing and building and growing—and dying. We are clothed in blessings, bathed in the crystal air and the sun setting over the South Island. And as good as all of that is a little boy who has learnt to love a thing he was afraid of, and to change his mind.


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Pictures today:

Rainstorm at sunset over Mana island to the south

The new house in various shades of disarray

The house for sale, blessed by a rainbow

Kapa haka

The last days have had the consistency of fudge—dense and sweet and with more calories per square centimeter than any other substance. Who knew how much could be packed into these small spaces?

There is the entire world of getting the house ready to go on the market. This is boring and tedious, and is now finished. Our house goes to auction in mid-November (auctions being one stressful but apparently lucrative way to sell a house). I’m grateful to all of you who have wished us luck. The real luck comes on November 15, auction day.

And, alongside the selling of one house is the readying of the other. That story will unfold on these screens, but the good news is that the demolition has begun. The bad news is that the other house is now a construction zone in the biggest way. We walk from the spotless house we’re selling to the nasty pit we’re moving into and think, What’s wrong with this picture?

Into this chaos came a new friend, JL a Chicagoan (this word passed my spell check) whom Michael met at a conference in Australia a couple of weeks ago and to whom he issued the general, “If you’re ever in New Zealand…” offer. And JL (unlike nearly all of the rest of you blog readers) actually CAME. So we had a new friend in our pristine house and on Saturday night when MG and her daughter came for dinner, there were seven Americans at the table, maybe a record at our house (and much fun and laughter, too).

But the pinnacle of the weekend was the kapa haka competition, a Māori performance of singing and dancing (for more on that, click here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapa_haka ). A work colleague/friend whose children were performing invited me to come, so, once JL arrived, we piled into the minivan with MG and her daughter, our kids and Naomi’s friend JA, who was ours for the day.

The competition was a couple of towns up the coast, and there were school busses and teenagers and school children wandering around in school uniforms or jeans and t-shirts. We paid for our tickets and walked into a gymnasium, filled to bursting with hundreds of people. We stood out strongly in the crowd of brown-skinned people, my family doubling the number of blondes in the room (I counted).

I’m not sure I have any words to describe the intensity of the performance. The ones we saw were groups of children—perhaps ranging in age from 6 until 12 years old. They were dressed in traditional costumes, the girls in silk dresses, the boys in grass skirts and bare chests. The Māori are famous for their tattoos, and these children were painted to resemble the traditional tattooing. The girls had blue lips and scroll-work down their chins, and the boys had full face paints—scrolls and swirls all over their faces. They were so beautiful and so utterly different from me. I was captivated.

And the performance itself was amazing. The children danced and sang and chanted in te reo Māori, each group performing for 20 minutes or more. They were at times graceful, at times peaceful, and at other times violent and fierce. We stood (all the folding chairs were full) and watched, captivated, as the children changed the mood from song to song, each iteration with a different set of motions and meanings, none of which we had access to at all. There were sweet songs led by the girls with melodic harmonies. There were fierce hakas led by the boys with wild chanting and jumping and beating of chests and arms. And there were songs in between, call and response inside the group, the boys leading parts and the girls leading other parts and warrior energy zinging off the walls.

The first group finished, and the crowd—wildly intergenerational—burst into applause. And then, in the midst of the clapping, another current rose up. From somewhere in the audience, another chant—a haka. Four teenagers in jeans and sweatshirts screaming in perfect rhythm. The audience stopped clapping to watch. Then, as the four boys finished, a school group, in demure plaid uniforms, took up the charge and began to yell out their haka. And suddenly, the group of teenagers standing around us began to call out too—their eyes bulging in traditional style, their hands fluttering by their side or at their faces in synchronized movement, their faces fierce and focused as they chanted.

It as awe-inspiring. These kids were so intensely charged, so present in the moment. I found out later what I guessed then—that these calls—so aggressive and loud—were not meant to threaten or challenge the other group, but rather as an appreciation, a gift in return for the gift the group had just given. After each performance, the audience would respond this way—mostly with groups chanting a haka, but sometimes with individuals singing a keening song. It was like nothing I have ever seen before, an audience so fully engaged in the process that they joined in, but each joining contributing to the largeness of the whole rather than being a look-at-me attention grabbing that distracted from the performers. The community was creating and naming itself right before our eyes.

And it was the community that was perhaps the most rich presence there. Kids in rumpled jeans slouched into the room, laughing with their friends and texting during the down times, ear buds dangling from their waists. They could have been any kids anywhere. But at some point, they would shed all these trappings and slip into face paint and costume and sing and chant. And before that time, they would watch the children in front of them and call out their support. I have never felt a sense of place so strongly, never felt what it means to follow in your mother’s footsteps and her mother’s and hers. This was not a performance put on to gratify tourists; this was a community sustaining itself and keeping its traditions alive, and not even alive but thriving, breathing, living, growing.

And even through all that, through the clear Māori-ness of it all, even though we were so out of place in a room filled with the distinctly beautiful brown fullness of the Māori and Pacific bodies, there was no hostility directed at us at all. These people could have been angry about these interlopers who reminded them of colonial domination—and the songs were so full of aggression that you could imagine that an angry crowd mentality might mount. But there was none of that as far as I could tell. The forceful singing and chanting wasn’t filled with hate, it was filled with dominance, power, majesty. The strongest emotion was pride—not with arrogance, but with strength and community. There was no need for violence because the songs themselves were so powerful that they held the emotions for us all.

There will be more for me to write about this experience, because it circles around me and through me. I am more of New Zealand for having seen it, and more aware that I will always be foreign here, that I will never be as rooted in this place as these people. I was jealous of what they shared together, but more than that, I was joyful that such places remain in the world, that this is possible, that children can sing and dance and be painted like their grandfathers, that grandmothers can hold babies and croon ancient songs, that there are generations gone and generations coming and the haka still sends shivers down everyone’s spine. Tomorrow I will tell Aidan’s story, but tonight it is enough to know that here in New Zealand, there are possibilities you have probably never considered, and some of them could be found in the Memorial Hall on a windy spring Saturday.

House selling, again

Ok, exhausted, but here are some of the fruits of our labour--the lovely house which goes on the market, looking more beautiful than it has ever looked before! Wish us luck!

The first swim

On Saturday it was beautiful and I gardened in a tshirt. On Sunday it was freezing and I struggled against the wind in my parka. Tuesday I came home from work to find a roaring fire in the woodstove. And today, Thursday, it dawned cold and rainy, and ended up warm and beautiful. Typical spring in New Zealand, we're told. This video will bring back memories for those long-time blog readers of last January and February, when the blog was covered with pictures of children frolicking in the waves. Here, though, in early spring, it's an amazing sight--the first swim of the season. As Naomi said to other children wading in shallow water, "It's only cold until your legs go numb, and then it's great!" Ah, the wonders of childhood...

All black

Saturday was a beautiful day; Sunday was dark, with driving winds and rain. It was a day the whole country rose early to watch the All Blacks play in the quarter finals of the Rugby world cup. They were playing France in Cardiff and were favoured to win that game—and the whole tournament. This is the best All Blacks team in memory, and people have been talking to me about the chances to take an international title for the whole time I’ve been here. Our neighbours left their kids with a babysitter for three weeks to fly to France to watch from the quarter-finals on. Our real estate agent said that we had to schedule our auction date carefully because a house would never sell on a week that the All Blacks lost. There is a sign on the church I pass on my way to work that says, “Jesus loves the All Blacks.” This is a big deal.

K, who is TVless (like ourselves) found a house with a TV, and invited Michael to watch the game, 7am start to the pre-game stuff, 8am Haka and game beginning. Michael rolled out of bed into the dreadful weather, and he was off. When the kids woke up, they wanted to see the game too, so, house primping be damned; we trudged up the street too, through wind that made me hold Aidan's hand tightly, just in case it was possible for him to blow away. At rugby central, we found the mood excited but relaxed. K had brought along a visiting French fellow, who was morose about his chances in true Gaelic style. “Zey do not deserve to win,” he told us, “because the All Blacks are zee better team, no?” The 13-3 score just after half time seemed to bear out his opinion. Aidan chattered away about how much he knew about rugby and if anyone had any questions they should ask him (sometimes I wonder how to generate a self-esteem problem in my kids). The French fellow talked politely about how much he has loved his 10 months in New Zealand, although, alas, his masters in medieval history is useless here (in a country without one). He tried to swear very quietly under his breath in French as his team made a mistake, and when they scored a try (what a touchdown is called in rugby), he jumped up and yelled with delight and then quickly sat down and apologised to the rest of us for his happiness. In that second half, though, he had much call for apologising, as the French slowly dominated the All Blacks and eventually pulled off the impossible—a win against the tournament favourites. In the stands the French fans donned wigs of blue white and red, and stunned Kiwis (who had spent 36 hours in a plane to watch their team lose) wept openly.

There are any number of things that are outside the US context about this. And feeling the loss of a team I’ve never seen in person, as they played a game I don’t understand, turned out to be incredibly powerful for me. In the US, we do not have a national game. In the south it’s football (high school and college). In parts of the country it’s baseball. For some folks it’s basketball. But there’s nothing that pulls us together as a country. In the US, we do not play international sports much (women’s soccer is an odd exception to this rule). The country does not line up all together against another country on the sporting arena. Even in the Olympics, it is the metal count rather than any particular sport that we find most interesting as a country. We want the most overall medals, the most golds, rather than really wanting to win the decathlon or the ice dancing.

But maybe more than anything, in the US we don’t have the experience of being the small guys, the Davids on a field of Goliaths (Michael would say that a major exception to that was in the 1980 Olympic men’s hockey game where we beat the Soviet Union). If the US isn’t good at something sporting, it’s mostly because we’re not that interested, as a country, in the thing (like hockey). There are enough people and enough dollars for us to be competitive in just about anything the country really wants to support.

New Zealand is a tiny country in both land mass and population (smaller in population than land mass). We are far away from everyplace else. We are a funky, niche country, better known for our beauty, our sheep, and the hoped-for hobbit sighting than for any major political or educational achievements (although all sorts of wonderful things were started here—the first country to give women the vote, innovative educational system, nuclear free country, etc.). Rugby gets us on the international stage. Rugby gets us the attention of larger and more powerful countries. Rugby is something the whole country will get up early on a Sunday morning in order to watch.

And now, the rugby world cup leaves a bitter taste. The All Blacks posters which plaster buses and billboards in Wellington are reminders of what isn’t to be. The team flies back home today, worried about the reception they’ll get at the airport. Apparently New Zealand fans can be rabidly supportive and, when disappointed, can be rabidly mean. On the radio this morning, some official rugby spokesman talked, with joy in his voice, about the very few truly nasty letters he’s gotten about the All Blacks compared to the supportive and loving letters that have come. The news commentator concluded, “The outpouring of support following Sunday’s loss shows that our country has matured as a sport-loving nation.”

What is it like to pin your hopes on just one thing and find those hopes dashed? What does it mean for a chance that comes only once in four years to be suddenly and inexplicably gone? Individual athletes, sports teams, and even regions of the US have been asking this question for all of US sporting history. Here I am finding how a whole country makes sense of those questions. In the US, we band together as a nation to recover from terrorist attacks and go to war. In New Zealand, we band together to support giant men with thighs the size of my whole body as they crash into one another in a violent ballet. The differences between these countries continue to unfold in endless layers. Come home safely, All Blacks. New Zealand has matured as a sport-loving nation.

(You can read about their arrival home and see whether NZ has matured here.)

Celebration

Today the sun came out and we shed our fleeces and gardened in t shirts and sandals. We flung open the doors of this beautiful house we are readying for the market, and we planted and weeded in the hot southern sun. A coincidence that it rained the whole time Michael was in Australia and today, his first day back, it was sunny? Or perhaps the sun was shining on my tenure portfolio, now sitting closed and finished next to the door to be copied and then mailed to the US in plenty of time for the end-of-October deadline. I finished it this morning to the cheers of my husband and children. Every tab is now cross-referenced and double-checked, and the three inches of letter-sized paper (all imported from the US) nestle snugly between covers with pictures of colleagues and students I love (and, er, me teaching).

We celebrated this accomplishment by going to dinner in the village at Finn’s, the new café. Downtown Paekakariki is booming now (in the way you boom when you get a second café to add to the first one), and Finn’s is open for dinner—which the regular café is not. It was delicious, too, fantastic vegetarian food for me and assorted carnivorous bites for others. After dinner, we walked across the street to St. Peter’s Hall, a the same place where we have yoga on Thursdays (or did, before my life exploded into busyworld). Tonight it was packed with people coming to see the film archives presentation of Paekakariki in film—old snippets of movies from the 20s to 2007 which took place in Paekakariki. There were road races up the steep Paekakariki Hill Road (lots of pictures of that here on the blog—beautiful and treacherous in our minivan but terrifying as a dirt road with circa 1920s cars), three-legged races in Campbell Park, women in odd 1940s bathing suits lying on the beach, their children splashing in the waves or eating ice cream near by. K had told us to look out for our new house, and there it was, in the clip of a 1940s picnic, the backdrop to all the races high on the hill. The house next to it wasn’t there yet, nor were the houses up the hill behind it, so it stood at the top of the hill, newish and gleaming in the grainy black and white. The first half of the montage was from the days of silent films, and, like those films, ours was enlivened by a piano player. It was like stepping into another time in that hall—people on ragged and unmatched chairs (my family perched in the back on an old sofa) watching a silent movie in the dark as a piano player followed the mood and the texture of the movie with his music. It was such fun!

Then the newsreels started to talk, and lots of what they talked about was war. Paekakariki was home to US Marines training—and resting—during World War II, so there was lots of footage of US soldiers marching up country roads and setting up camp in what would become Queen Elizabeth Park. There was a really moving newsreel of the ship’s arrival in NZ, the homesickness of the California troops upon seeing topography that reminded them of their landscape, the pure joy of drinking fresh milk for the first time since they took to sea (and who knows how long it would take to get to NZ by ship from the US!). And somehow in that footage, all the juxtapositions of my life swirled around me. I was watching a movie in New Zealand about an American coming to New Zealand. I was celebrating my finishing of the tenure portfolio 8500 miles away from the university at which I seek tenure. I felt myself watching these boys on the beach who would have been my dad’s age, and searching for my dad, who still hasn’t ever been to a New Zealand beach. I was watching New Zealanders watch Americans who were talking about coming to New Zealand. It all swirls around.

We raced home along The Parade because the tide was too high to walk on the beach, and because Naomi’s summer outfit—chosen when the sun was warm—was too light for the night time winds. Aidan and I held hands and laughed and talked about the little children who had played in the park before Papa and Grandma Catherine were even born, and we found that we stayed warmer if we jogged all the way home.

So, to continue the unreality of my life, tomorrow we’ll carry on with our task of making it look like magazine people live in this house—because people will pay more money for a house inhabited by fake folk. We’ll display things carefully instead of our usual careless clutter, pack up half the books and half our clothes, and make this beautiful house feel polished and perfect. And every once in a while I’ll think about soldiers who walked these streets, so far from home, and what life must have been like for them. And I’ll think about me one year ago, packing boxes to prepare another house for market in another world. Wonder where I’ll be next October.

ps I see from the blog map that my cousin Michael--who has just been posted to Alaska after a few years in Miami--is checking in (unless there's someone else in Alaska checking?). I thought of you a lot Mike, watching these soldiers so far from home. I hope your new life is fantastic.

Flat out

It's been a cold and often rainy spring break week, and, with Michael in Australia this week, I am STRESSED. The kids are home, the house has to go on the market, the tenure portfolio is coming due, there are two books to deal with, and there's also the whole job of building my business and doing my work. That's why I've been so quiet. But here's a picture of a morning walk last week
and the reminder that, at least in New Zealand, the rainstorms very often bring rainbows.