I’m heading to Zurich tonight to spend a week hunting my future happiness.
On the agenda:
- Finding the one school that will be perfect in every possible way, thus resulting in perfectly joyous and perfectly well-adjusted children who will grow up …. perfect.
- Interviewing prospective friends. I’ve got meetings (and by meetings I mean, social engagements) lined up with people who are Italian, American, Dutch and Swedish. Some of them are couples with matching names.
- Ferreting out actual Swiss people in Switzerland.
- Changing W’s name so it matches mine.
- Consuming my weight in cheese and hot chocolate mit schlag (even if I have to pretend I’m in Vienna for the “mit schlag” part).
- Oiling the rusty chain on the bike of my college German.
- Contemplating Jungian psychology, Dada and the ethics of a banking system that condones hiding Nazi war loot.
What am I missing?
My uncle Takeki died last week.
I didn’t know him really. He and my aunt were missionaries in Brazil; our peripatetic paths seldom crossed, usually once every ten years at my grandparents’ house in rural Pennsylvania, where we’d lurch awkwardly at picnic tables laden with hot dogs, relish and fresh-picked corn, struggling to think of things we had in common.
Talking to Takeki was never easy. English was his third language, one he never quite mastered. He was a Japanese war orphan, shipped to Sao Paulo in his early teens, after the devastation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. My aunt met him when she was teaching English as a second language in a missionary bible college. He was her student.
How did he lose his parents? Were they burned in front of him? Did he come home one day to find his house still and quiet, the dust motes shivering in the single tragic beam of sunlight that stabbed the gloom?
And why Brazil? How did he travel there? Maybe he endured a long and rocking voyage by sea, crammed into below deck bunks, sharing fetid air exhaled by people breathing loss. Perhaps he climbed up a shiny new plane, gasped with an unexpected admixture of terror and delight as the wheels shuddered off the ground. I don’t know how he got to Brazil. I don’t know what he did when he arrived. I don’t know if he lived in a refugee camp, if some family–perhaps gracious, perhaps petty and greedy and grasping–took him in. I don’t know his stories.
*****
Takeki wasn’t my aunt’s first love, however. She had already been smitten with a little Brazilian boy rescued from the favela. She took him home with her, fed him and held him and fought off the demons of his cursed childhood. Tried to refit the pieces, tried to love him back together.
Sometimes there just isn’t enough love to make a broken thing whole.
But I don’t know my cousin’s stories, either, not really, only ever hearing snatches whispered among grown ups in corners, loaded words like drugs and theft and satanic possession.
*****
I mourn the passing of my uncle in the detached way one apprehends a death that is so far removed. My aunt lost a husband, my cousins their father; surely that is sad. And I am sorry for them.
Because I love narratives, however, what I mourn more–selfishly–is the loss of those potential stories. Someone, a real writer, should have collected them all before he died, I think, written them down. Given them to me, even though they are not mine. I have no claim to them. Still I covet them, hungry for the myths and adventures and allegories they could contain. What might they have meant to me, if only I knew more than the vaguest of details?
When I was in grammar school, I loved books about children who had escaped or survived the Holocaust. My favorite was When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. How I wanted to be poor Anna, driven from her home in Germany, forced to leave her beloved stuffed animal behind. I longed to be Jewish, to suffer like she did, and then, ultimately, to triumph. I thought I wanted to be in a story about suffering.
Except I already was. I was far away from my parents most of the year, haphazardly cared for by people who were mostly well-intentioned but overwhelmed and who believed in a world where children should be spanked for dropping pencils, for not brushing their teeth, even for hateful looks. I’ve been known to throw a hateful look. Or two.
It wasn’t the suffering I wanted, then. Not really. It was the nobility and courage, the rising above that I craved. Or the validation that I was truly, underneath all the rebellion and sass and anger, lovable. Worthy. Good. In some small dark place in my sad little 9 year old heart I half believed that if I were presented a big enough challenge, I would finally be able to prove myself to the dorm parent who told me that he loved my sister like his own daughter but that I was something else all together. To the mother who wrote that I was “bad” on the back of a picture she sent to my grandmother. To all the missionaries who looked sideways at my wild and wicked self and shook their heads. Tutted. Tsked.
I never quite achieved that approval, no matter how I tried. Because the girl who wanted to be sweet and compliant, the girl who yearned for approval, was too often over-ruled by the one who hungered to escape the forced homogeneity and the hypocrisy and the robotic thoughtlessness that fitting in required.
For so long I’ve rejected that tensing kid in the time out chair, her defiantly swinging legs scraping out a black rhythm on the wall. She caused me so much trouble, made boarding school so much harder than it had to be, I’ve thought. I’ve wanted her gone, utterly. If she disappeared, I would finally be graceful, charming. I would fit. I would fit wherever I go. So I cringe when I am reminded by someone of her, become defensive, prickly. I kick her in the face: begone you little devil child, get thee behind me. But she is resilient, that one. She’s lost some teeth. Her right eye is a thundercloud of bruises. Her nose is crooked. Yet there she sits, swinging and grinning and daring me to hit her one more time.
She is resilient. Just like all the other me’s. The one who secretly admires her. The one who pretends she doesn’t exist. The one who pulls out a crisp piece of paper and scrawls it full of fresh spring stories.
Remember that scene in American Beauty, where the plastic bag is moved to joy by some inexplicable force? It cavorts, tumbles, flips, its spirit unhampered by the dreary blight of its concrete stage. It billows, bursting with whatever air it has found to breathe. It spreads its crinkly petroleum wings, constrained as they are by unwieldy physics, and floats. And flutters. It lands, vibrating gently. But wait. There’s more, more gusts to ride, more bliss to find. It dances down the street, and we are left strangely bereft.
The leaves on the running trail were inspired by a similar music today. They twirled and twisted, whirling in the breeze, celebrating their one last flight before winter and ice and darkness descend. They dropped only to flourish– once, twice, again–before collapsing, finally, to rest with their sisters.
Oh, to dance just so. Simply because a bright yellow breath commands it.
Welcome home, Mama. We sure did miss you. Let us prove it by having 14 screaming matches before noon, scattering every scrap we own over each inch of real estate showing approved home space and/or falling out of our chair and flinging our whole bowl of pudding all over the rug.
*****
What my husband cannot do: laundry, dishes, stay in one country for longer than seven days at a time.
What my husband can do very well: everything else.
So we’ve seen each other for exactly 14.7 hours in the last three weeks, but each one of those 882 minutes has been a slice of angel’s dream pie dripped from the honeyed heavens.
*****
I think I’m experiencing a post-Awesome plunge.
And what happened in Vegas will mostly have to stay in Vegas, not because it was so lewd, degenerate and the the antithesis of everything Siddhartha would do, but because the parts of my brain that choose words and make order have been both pickled and fatigued. They are stamping their little gooey gray feet in defiance, refusing to create coherent narrative arcs out of chubby men doing splits (or is it The Splits?) in the middle of a casino floor at 4 AM and inappropriate fondlings at the Craps table* and old people fashioned out of equal parts plastic and gin posing like Silicone Barbie at the pool. Or maybe it’s all the steamed guts and fried octopus balls I ingested at the least Vegas restaurant imaginable, one that was overheated and in the middle of nowhere, guarded by youths in black who promised a dance-off after dinner but then rudely disappeared, leaving us with no entertainment at all because the nearby Asian karaoke bar was shuttered, a victim of either the recession or a lack of fine singers like me who know all the Indonesian pop tunes and their corresponding dance moves by heart. There went that dream.
What I really need is the deft touch of someone like TheBloggess, but I think she’s too busy weaving her own post about flaming vaginas and getting stabbed in dark alleys. And Deb’s all involved in her new business plan to open a Pussy Casino, one for women only, staffed by well-oiled and very very friendly young men, a casino whose entertainment may or may not include swarthy hockey-playing religious icons juggling flaming animatronic cats and whose buffet will definitely carry an assortment of heart-stoppingly delicious cupcakes**. Which I will refuse to eat because the least pleasant side effect of being currently slightly sick in the head is an intense and utterly perplexing vomitous hatred of all things sugar.
*****
If you can understand any of this, please explain it to me.
All confusion aside, I will declare unequivocally that it was my favorite trip to Vegas of all time, excepting that one time I got married, which was also kind of cool.
*****
*A game at which I won money without comprehending any part; but as I also cannot do simple arithmetic and BlackJack was still my best friend, I’ve decided that skill, intelligence and strategy are highly over-rated. Also, math. Math is over-rated. I plan to spend the rest of my life being quite dim. And therefore rich.
**We’re taking investments right now, so if you have 10s of millions of dollars which you would like very much to see turned into ones or twos of dollars, contact lildb at iwilltreatyou.com.
