Angels in America

Within our midst, ever cheerful, is the American saint. Not the soft-voiced shuffling monks and nuns residing in isolated valleys and snowy caverns and hushed high rock. She whirls quickly past you, carafes of coffee sailing and sloshing over your head. Diminutive in size, but a commanding presence, she is ever attentive. You know her hairdo, timeless. Mention of her can be found in fragments from the Biblical era to the Bible-belt. Depending on the climates of translation, she is variously known as "Waitress of the American Diner" but you know her by Flo, or in our case here in Atlanta, Rhia. We've been in Georgia a few days for an International schools job fair, and found The White House diner, the real deal, unflashy, been here 60 years and hasn't changed a day. Why is Rhia and her bevy anointed with sainthood? For the simple but essential act: she's there with coffee refills before you have to flag a skinny airhead down to ask. Rhia was born at 55 years old and has remained and will remain to please and accommodate and call you "sweetie" long after you and I settle in soil and mingle with leaves and gnarled plums for a worm's banquet. Photos of presidents lined the walls of this venerable diner. After we sat down and immediately had coffee served, I lunged from the booth to find us a newspaper. A southern trucker with the Saturday edition piled on his table spied me searching. "Looking for a newspaper?" Scanning inside and out, I said yes. "You can have this one." You sure? "Yeah I'm done with it. Let me just check my horoscope..."

Blurbs O Burbs - Unexpected Exotic Travel!

The making of coffee in the early morning is a ritual for ordering your world. Sleep is Chaos: dreams and nightmares swoop down into our souls we know not whence (frighteningly, those nocturnal imaginings our fevered minds create, but the reason why that new guy in Payroll was flying over the backyard silver maple as your Junior High science teacher looks on, while you pile a wall of bricks around your ex-wife’s wedding dress simply escapes you). When we wake crawling into consciousness we immediately desire to reestablish control. I relish all the measured steps to build that first cup: grinding fresh beans into fine powder, the spit, hiss, and gurgle of brewing, and the machine’s final steaming exhaling to signal coffee is ready. You know, traveling to exotic places is worth writing about. But sometimes those places aren’t traditionally exotic. At present, sleep’s fantasia has evaporated, and I am sitting in a comfortable porch bench in a gated community called Rancho Murieta in the Sierra foothills of California, having arrived the day before to visit my brother and wife and two nephews. Some quiet reading time before the nephews stir (“Uncle Tim, you want to play catch with these darts?”) in the carefully tended neighborhood before the terrible heat of the day. Brother and family live on a cul de sac, and it’s not unpleasant sitting here, but I know if I lived here I would surely die. It occurs to me that the garish realism of Desperate Housewives and The Truman Show is less digital effects than documentary: my god, look at this place. Every trim and trimming is planned to adhere to a model of what a perfect neighborhood should look like. Each address is a small isolated complete minor kingdom, the homeowners strung together with shared understanding of the need to upkeep one’s own province while respecting the sovereignty of other kingdoms. From my vantage on the porch (and I must say on every visit I’ve never seen anyone else ever sitting on their porches) I’m pleased to see great oaks towering into the pale blue that the community planners blessedly allowed to remain, and the homes built around them. Beyond that small grace, the unruly spread of original wild nature is checked, and instead the august spirit of perfectibility that sustains the dream of the suburbs reigns—or I guess this is technically the exburbs, and I suppose what differentiates the original town from the frontier’s outlaying exburbs is the degree to which a center does or does not exist, a localized gathering area where all citizens come together (creatively, economically, politically, socially). I think my kingdom metaphor is not misplaced: nothing escapes royal attention to order. Like palace grounds, lawns are sculpted, carefully edged. Gardens are designed to rise and fall and flow as though natural, but instead appear obsessively tended. But I’ve never seen anyone gardening. The color you paint your house is ordered from a narrow spectrum, grays, beiges, milky salmons, ash blues. Ironically, though a kingdom in your own right, you are not to stand out. Conformity is the rule (and here’s the weirdest observation: every golf cart that hums by in this community is driven by guys that look dead-on like my brother, or my brother looks like them: it’s the stocky build, the close-cropped hair, the blank face of driving, the golf shirt, the sporty baseball hat…everyone the same)(and don’t get me started on the shiny muscle trucks these guys parade around in: the Dodge Rams, the Ford 1500s or whatever, you ride around on your bike and every other driveway has a behemoth stretching to the sidewalk, because, yeah, they need a huge truck to haul a carton of milk four blocks away, or they need to make sure we use up the available fossil fuels as quickly and inefficiently as possible, thereby ushering in all the quicker the Armageddon I suppose in their born-again hearts they thirst for). I don’t know this, but it wouldn’t surprise me if lawns were required, as model neighborhoods advertise them (irrelevant that they are unnatural, water-intensive, and require fertilizers which drain off into the environment). You couldn’t grow high stalks of corn in your front yard, say. And front yards are not given to use, it seems. These are family homes designed for Family in the strict cultural and politically specific sense of the term, but I rarely see actual families on their lawns. Growing up in the suburbs of Sacramento, on a summer morning like this with school out, we’d be outside running around, tossing footballs around, scrimmaging, over one lawn and across another. I look around: where are the children and their wild imaginations? We created great assemblies of adventures on summer mornings and evenings, but it seems these yards are for presentation, not play. And this sprawling rosemary bush to my left: does anyone clip a few stems to season their own tomato sauce? Not if Costco has a 25-lb. of dried rosemary on sale (it’s out in the garage on the shelf below the gallon jug on Mama Walmart’s “Homemade” tomato sauce). But wait! My quiet is disturbed: across the street a king has emerged. He’s wearing gray shorts, white socks, sandals, a T-shirt culturally referred to as “wife-beater”, and he is pushing a lawnmower. The grass seems to have grown overnight, and his Highness has come to quell the rebellion before the unrest spreads. I notice, as the mowing commences, that the homeowner chooses the outside-borders-first style, rather than the consecutive straight rows style. Halfway through his lawn, he turns off the engine to empty the trimmings. Just then I hear someone scream inside a house down the block. But like birds startled make for the sky then immediately float gently back down, the neighborhood returns to ordered silence. What goes on within each kingdom is the king’s business. Mowing accomplished, all is quiet, and I return to reading. Suddenly, a voice! The king speaks! He says good morning to his neighbor who has emerged. What ensues is the perfunctory exchange we all carry on. First, the weather is noted, and the king says he wanted to get the yard done before it got too hot. “Yes,” the other king replies, “the days are getting just too hot.” “Well, it’s all about enjoying life,” retorts the first king (I have to pause, but I guess he means enjoying life after work is done). “Oh yeah,” says the second king, “you gotta enjoy life." "What are your plans for the Fourth?” “Oh, you know, we’ll walk down to the parade (walk? Not drive his Dodge Ram the torturous three blocks?), then there’s a barbeque, then you know, we’ll have some friends over and then, yeah, we’ll go see the fireworks." “Hey that’s great,” says first king: “I notice you have a lot of flags in your yard there.” “Oh yeah, you know, it’s patriotic and kind of…fun…you coming to the barbeque?” (Here the first king pats his round belly) “Well, too much eating!” (In his defense, the second king pats his own belly, though he looks pretty fit) “Hey, none of us need to eat more!” (It’s worth noting here that through this whole exchange neither king has moved any closer to the other. Banal formalities occur across distant lawns, and not even kings would dare tread upon their own lawns let alone trespass on another’s) First king brings up the block party, says he might drop by for a drink. The second king pauses, then with mild enthusiasm encourages, “Oh yeah, come by for a drink, there’s gonna be LOTS of food” (Was the first king only formally included in the invitations? Was he not expected to show?). The first king acknowledges the abundance of food, pats his belly to demure. Sitting here, I’m getting uncomfortable, for the hot yellow foothills sun has found me, and I’m slowly warming, but I feel locked in place, the foreign observer. A column has blocked my whereabouts, and my presence if noticed might alarm them. Conversation is winding down. As we all experience, these exchanges have no natural end. Limping from one generalization to the other, finally someone offers a “Well, don’t work too hard!” which receives the easy forced laugh and the “Oh, I won’t!” The ceremony is now officially finished, and the kings withdraw. “Have a good day, Louis,” the second king offers. Louis! How perfect is that?

A Memory of Sri Lanka

A rambling rocky train ride to Hikkaduwa, Sri Lanka, a week before Christmas 2009, passing shanties tottering amidst ruins left by the 2004 tsunami, remnants of prior ruins, it seems, foundations of earlier shanties whose residents either moved on or were swept inland on great foaming currents. Same dogs, different day. Embarrassing to scratch prose while children fumble in the earth. 

Perfumed paradise is Sri Lanka’s beach resort, a gem glittering in dust shadowing the breath and laughter of poverty. Shacks nestled against one another, spilling into rain blue Indian Ocean. Our hotel smiles upon the beach: delicately arranged deck chairs, tables of flowers, white tablecloth. Sea winds dance. A thin, hatted dark man approaches shouldering a baby monkey. The narrow leash whips as monkey leaps and scales the nearest wide-eyed blinking tourist. Jumps shoulder to shoulder, scurries around your neck, amused and kindly nibbling your flesh with tiny rubbery teeth, harmless. The man asks to pause for a photo shoot. “It’s my job, sir” he pleads as you demure, withdrawing your eyes. 

Looking over the railing, I watch a man and woman lying on their stomachs on the sand, propped up on their elbows, murmuring to one another as the gentle ocean ascends their legs, then shyly retreats. From the woman’s tanned neck dangles a crucifix. With little effort my eyes drift over her shoulder to alight on her magnificently sculpted posterior, bikinied. I shift in my chair, then consider again the couple: they wile away the time like children in quiet tropical bliss, how reduced are our intentions. Vacations gild long empty hours, fulfillment attained just snuggling on coastline. If the breeze sweeping off the ocean is cool, you slowly bake until brown. If the winds cease, you overheat. The equilibrium is upset: you rise and dunk your body in the water…. 

Travel is strange. It’s imagined and anticipated to be stopping daily grind, stepping into a wondrously alternate universe. Familiar patterns are suspended midlife, and the journey begins: the world alights with magic. Contours are tinged with starry glow. You can cross through a large bustling city like Columbo clogged with traffic, dulled commuters, sneering shopkeepers, beggars’ outstretched dirty palms, but in your born again glee the city bursts with vibrancy. Your unforgettable experience is their daily grind. But travel isn’t passive: you have to do things and see things and pay money to visit things to insure your experience is meaningful, and the more exotic, the more memorable. To completely fulfill your travels you must experience anything and everything a city has to offer, you think. 

These words originally were penned in a notebook at six in the evening at an open window of our hotel in the village of Kegalla adjacent to the Pinnawela Elephant Orphanage. Carrie naps behind me. Directly below my window drifts a shallow brown river. Boulders span its width like submerged mountain ranges, gentle rapids swirling around them. The opposite bank is peopled with coconut palms, banana trees, mounds of thick lush grasses. Running dark green hills beyond are heavy with trees and darken as the sun quietly sails west across a damp sky. I move to our balcony where earlier in the day a gentle stampede of elephants rolled through the narrow street by our hotel. Crowds had gathered at the restaurant porch above where packs waddle into the river from the orphanage at the other end of the village. We had leaned over the railing and watched them saunter into the currents, and with lumbering grace the elephants submerge in the cool waters. Initially, the herds tightened, stand knee deep milling around. Their rhythms are measured like puffed astronauts strolling the moon. Then they relax, flap their ears gingerly, contentedly. 

At one point a small contingent of elephants, after deliberating a few minutes, breaks off and ventures toward the far steep muddy bank. Murmurs of concern rumble through the remaining herd, a mix of censure and admiration for these renegades. The breakaways rush the far shore with the spirit of Luther with hammer in hand. Ashore, each finds loose dirt to scoop up and spray the sky like orange rain, or they just plop and roll gloriously in muck. They’ve returned to the wild, coated in war-paint, and the rest of the herd knows it. A complete breakdown of order ensues: new converts, trumpets blowing, storm across. The original rebels parade victoriously across the far shore in shades of rich golden mother earth. Ears flap happily the same way I imagine the ears of Crusaders did returning from Jerusalem. But the second and third fronts go beyond: they’re up there rustling the tall grasses and carrying out surveys of jungle terrain. Most of the original herd has joined the new congregation, and only a few old stalwarts carry on the old faith by remaining in a deeper pool and shower and bathe. I glance down the river. A woman wading near shore slaps her laundry on boulders. One family of elephants, including a very small one, after finishing necessary explorations, make for the river. The rest of the family bounce down from the high bank through a gully cut out of the side. But the young one missed the exit. He frets back and forth along the high bank. Most of us closely follow the developing story, cautiously sipping our beer. The young one runs wildly, he can’t get down. Concerned, an older midsized elephant trots toward the high bank, catches the young one’s attention, then with a signal head nod sprints back toward the river, glancing back to see if the young one took the hint. The young one begins to worry, and so do we. He keeps rushing back and forth. So the older one again goes through the same ritual, head nod, jump turn and race for the river. Finally, the young one finds the gully, and rushes to join his family. Cheers erupt all around. 

As the afternoon wanes the handlers call out to the community to return home. Pleas are ignored. One large bull elephant is on the other side committed to ripping bark samples from a banana tree. Finally, resigned, the families begin booming up the path as we wave a fond farewell…. 

As I said, travel is strange. There’s something both welcome and troubling when the afternoon winds down, as these words are penned. You may or may not have slept well, may or may not have drank festively the night before, and so the giddy energy of coffee and new adventures pumped into your recovery starts to slump. Nap beckons. One thought is that this downtime is wasted; travel’s exotic spell dissolves under a dull grinding sun, but you aren’t doing anything, and you’re supposed to be (paying for) doing something. Nevertheless, if you nap, seeping into your rest is the gnawing suspicion that you’re not getting your money’s worth. You leap off the bed, grab the Lonely Planet, determined to find something to do which you wouldn’t ordinarily do back home, however mundane. So a crowded, muggy, smelly 40-minute bus ride later you’re buying a guided tour through a factory for handcrafted shoelaces made from dried coconut palms.... 

Isn’t it odd getting to a town, dropping your bags at the hotel, then wandering toward the center of whatever it is you expect to experience in the town? Like the “essence” of a city, for instance. Walking and walking believing that at some magical moment a flash of memorable experience will seal your commitment, time, and money’s worth. You head for the main square, say, and the beautiful architecture and cathedrals and outside café tables and people ring your soul’s bell. But still, it’s never the essence, whatever that may mean. I suppose it’s like walking into the center of a forest. After walking in awhile, you begin walking out the other side. Life is like this. I suppose death and the afterlife are too. Back on the river in Sri Lanka, standing at the railing with glasses of wine in hand, Carrie and I welcome the soft warm evening. There’s something strange upriver. We peer and wait. Thousands of dark large bats are fording the river. They spread across the twilight sky and swoop over our hotel for a solid fifteen minutes, silently. Cut out of night's black veil, they quietly sing the end of day. And the desert blue stars blink, recording their song.

Toilet Bowl Blues - Leaving Sri Lanka

Is there a respectable way to solve the horrific problem of a backed-up toilet in a hotel room? Last few hours in Colombo, frenetic and dreary capital of Sri Lanka, tail end of Christmas holiday. My wife, Carrie, was—newsflash—shopping. We chose as our last night in Sri Lanka the Gulle Face Hotel (re the name: don’t ask—I have no idea), which is a square U-shaped old hotel opened onto the Indian Ocean. Dark wood interiors, 19th century colonial detailed exterior painted proudly British white. Everybody’d stayed here, illustrious guests’ names inscribed on a plaque in the lobby—that kind of place. I remained during the morning at the hotel, preferring to read and sit in the shade and listen to the gentle Indian surf. But of course before relaxation gets underway one must relax the tension in one’s bowels: morning achievements, shall we say. I’d finished, folded up my New Yorker, flushed and…the gurgle and filling, the swirling and chilling. My question: is there any respectable way of dealing with this in a hotel? Meaning of course your backed up toilet in your room. What you first must establish at all costs in your own mind and also the world’s is that the back up is absolutely not your fault. You give to the toilet, the toilet receives and spirits away. But once in a while that reciprocal agreement is broken. Enthroned, you fulfill your end, so to speak, often exceeding expectations, wipe clean, flush and rise (or visa versa). But instead of sucking and swirling down, the terrible waters rise, wayward contents nudge each other lethargically, the waters continue rising to floodstage, the murky currents anticipating a joyful overflowing as they glimpse the bowl’s rim and break into song at only sky beyond, while you and any other mortal and even the very gods could only gaze on helplessly while holding your pants at the swirling happy waters hoping to rage onto the tile. If that strumpet Fortune kindly glances your way at that moment, the waters cease their rise; the murky swirling slows thank goodness but remains at floodstage. As you’re left wincing, biting your lip, you hear the toilet audaciously refilling itself to await the next appointment. And you realize you’re on your own now. The toilet actually believes it’s fulfilled its obligation and turns away unsmiling like your flight attendance at a hotel bar whom you begin chatting up because she seemed so nice on the flight over. Besides being alone, so very alone, you’re stuck: you don’t dare flush again, for the toilet possesses now twice normal capacity, though best of Irish luck getting the toilet to acknowledge this, let alone remedy the critical imbalance; let’s not mince words: the toilet doesn’t give a rat’s arse. So, there isn’t a plunger in the room, unfortunately. The gallant hotel staff is paid to serve you, cater to your whims, redress the tiniest grievance. But you do not want the hotel staff to fix this. You do not want the hotel staff to help. You do not want the staff or anyone else on the planet to know. Why? Because the floating shit, the drowned toilet paper, the fetid flotsam and jetsam of the morning and night before all reflect somehow on you. Inexplicably, it just does. Like a great artist his epic mural, you made this shit. A sudden vision of Hell crosses your mind: you need to remove the apocalyptic logs. But how? In the name of all that pukes and writhes, how? Quickly you realize the action would only compound the problem, and create dreadfully new ones. If you had committed any other heinous act in your hotel room, you wouldn’t hesitate to alert the hotel staff. Perhaps you very deliberately sailed an empty champagne bottle through your beautiful glass window overlooking a Spring meadow dancing with wildflowers: No problem, sir, we will replace the window and the champagne…will a 1998 Brut suffice? You may have slept with one of the bridesmaids at a co-workers wedding, and the next morning she’s dead: No problem sir, we will take care of the body. Ah, tis a pity when such a lovely young girl dies, isn’t it? But leave shit floating in your toilet and have the staff discover it? I shudder to think. I deliberated in my hotel room 105 (see, this “you” wasn’t hypothetical) whether to be present after I’d called the front desk and explained the dire situation. Instead, I decided to flee to the anonymity of the poolside lounge, floppy safari hat lowered over my face, reading until the coast was clear, hoping the staff never pasted a room number to a face. If I had remained in the room, I imagined the worst: the lowly cleaning guy would peer into the flooded bathroom, flinched, then slowly turn to fix a disgusted stare: “My god man [sneering with horror and pity]. You were so kind to when I greeted you in the hallway yesterday evening. You looked me in the eye, and I felt in your gaze acknowledgment of our common humanity. My heart swelled, and I was uplifted. And now…this. How could you…” He turns away embittered, bewildered. My imagination then flew to the front desk. Word would have reached the entire staff. We go through a cold ceremony of paying the bill in silence. The manager—someone tipped her off that “he” was checking out—would then flatly announce that, speaking for the entire hotel industry and all of Sri Lanka, I am no longer welcome. I then lose it. “But it was your toilet!” Unmoved, her growl measured and severe, “But it was your shit!” As though hit with mallet, I’d stumble a few steps back, turn and flee before the first tear quivers on eyelid. Yeah well nothing like that happened. I should hasten to add that when I did return after a few hours the problem was not solved; in fact, the bathroom floor was flooded! Detritus, toilet paper, a fetid film of water spreading. And perched dead, legs in the air, on the back rim of the toilet, was a cockroach. At first I wasn’t surprised. I mean, it’s like going to see an Elton John concert: with the lightshow and music and stage antics, you’re also paying for the tacky Dr. Seuss glasses. So there’s the cockroach. And I realized that earlier when I’d been sitting there calmly reading, I’d felt a tickling in my undergroin, and my initial response was that I was leaking somehow. I looked down and saw nothing, realizing, well, of course you’re not leaking. Now I know the tickling was the fated cockroach scaling the varied cliffs to escape. Ironically, the flood propelled him up, up, up and away. And now he lay, perished, upon the rim of the bowl, free at last.