I'm on the road, again, a path that I must thoroughly enjoy, given how much time I spend there...
This time, with Barack's "Dreams from my Father" in tow, I've flown down to Janakpur in the Eastern tarai, along the Indian border, to travel east visiting various community groups and NGOs to solicit their thoughts on a civil society outreach strategy for writing Nepal's new constitution.
I've been asked by UNDP to assist their Constitution-Building Project with this while they are putting their team together. It's a good team of people from Canada, Sri Lanka, Japan, Kenya and a diverse range of Nepalis who are assiduously preparing a Resource Center (for Democracy Dialogue), located near the Constituent Assembly, where CA members and civil society can both learn about issues related to their responsibilities in drafting a new federal, democratic constitution for Nepal by May 2010, as well as engage each other in an open space to discuss the sensitive and serious topics that the writing of a 21st C. constitution for an often 19th C. country.
Sila, my Kenyan colleague, and I are on the road to listen to people from the antipodes, the districts, the villages, the hinterlands, whose voices are sometimes lost in translation. Before we finalize a process by which the UN can effectively support the CA and civil society to engage on these substantive issues, we wanted to come out among the dusty trails, the broken roads, the silty streams and dangling hopes of rural Nepal to hear directly from some of la vrai countryside.
Shocking, I know...
Yet it's so easy to get caught up in the importance of the Center, ignoring Mr. Yeats' advice about centers..., and lose track of the realities that Nepalis outside the Ring Road (or moat, as we affectionately call the road that encircles the world of Kathmandu) live.
Like many places, it often seems of two worlds, the fast pace, congestion, wealth of the capital city and the ox-cart pace, dirt roads and agricultural world of rural Nepal. Although we travel in the relative luxury of a UN landcruiser with driver and radio communication, such imbalances dissipate once we are sitting on the ground in a rough schoolyard with a bevy of Maithali women or around a wooden table in a local NGO office with a dozen representatives of local civil society.
At such times, my years of life in Nepal swirl around my thoughts and the passage of decades seems minutes as I recall countless such meetings and discussions with people of all hues, languages, religions and political affiliations. From my earliest strolls in the middle hills of Gorkha out to ridge town of Takukot or up the mountains to Big Gurung Village (as it was identified on the map) of Barpak to our first explorations of the tarai in Siraha, more than a world apart from the pahadi (hill) folks we'd known so well. Then, the elegant, ebony Tharus in the Inner Tarai of Mid-Western Nepal, so detached, it appeared, from the currents of their own country, cut off from their own history by the machinations of modern legal codes and government authority. To the isolated valleys of Nuwakot, north of Kathmandu, where the Tamang, Buddhist in nature, subservient in character, lived in remote settlements so close to the capital city, yet so far away in their knowledge and opportunities...
Now, decades later, in a different guise, for a different agency, serving a common purpose, I'm back again sitting with women who may not have been born when I first came to Nepal, their dark, eager, shy faces peering from below the skirt of their saris held above their heads to shield the sun and cover their faces.
As always, the men sitting on benches while the women (et moi) sit on the blankets on the ground, start in with their political rhetoric and ideas.
Although the feeling is different from years ago, some of the men are more aggressive and challenging... demanding to know what the UN is doing for Madhesi (tarai) people and quoting figures (real or not) of how few Madhesis are working in the UN. This is not the more innocent Nepal of the 1980s and early 90s. The mood has changed throughout the country. There is a determination, harder, more focused and more responsible than before the ten year war. Each community, in a nation made up of scores of different identities, has begun to claim their rights and opportunities promised first by the Maoists at the start of their People's War, then later by all the major political parties through the Comprehensive Peace Accord (signed in Nov. 2006), through the 'New Nepal' that is forming around us.
There is strength and risk in the swirling tides of these rising discontents. One can hear it in their voices, their intensity, their insistence and, occasionally, in their threats. There is pride in their newfound local identity, geographic, linguistic, cultural, ethnic, often mingled together in a consistent challenge to the Center, to Kathmandu, about what they are demanding from the new constitution. New energies have been unleashed by the end of the 240 year old Shah dynasty and the promises made during the ten year civil war. Promises that may not always be easy to fulfill or find accomodation with differing perspectives on what exactly was promised and to whom an entitlement is due.
Although we are in the tarai, the flatlands bordering India, at times it feels more like we are walking a narrow ridge with steep cliffs on both sides. Emotionally, historically, in these conversations I feel like I'm trekking high in the Khumbu where each slight step can be precarious and the valleys below distant and forbiding.
At night, I retreat to my solitary hotel room, pink walls, a hard bed with a cotton comforter, plastic chappals ('sandals') outside the aging bath, a small color tv with a dozen channels of Indian movies (which I occasionally indulge...) and a mosquito or two to remind me that I'm far from the cold, dark nights in Kathmandu where the winter winds have already descended on the Valley and years of mismanagement often leave us literally in the dark without electricity when we get home.
The quiet of the room gives me time to reflect upon the days' conversations and thoughts. The images of Nepal that always charm and entice me, even still. The languid life of the village contrasted with the noisy motorcyles and tempos in the towns. Children drifting on the buffalos across the fields in the countryside while other children are paid to stand holding neon lights on their heads, late into the night, while adults celebrate their own child's wedding.
This world is nothing if not contrasts. Here, there and everywhere.
Then, as I lay on the bed collecting my impressions, I pick up Barack's "Dreams from my Father" that Shaku encouraged me to read after she finished it. I'm only half way through, but touched already in so many ways. To imagine that the man who wrote these pages, the sensitive struggling soul who labored to put his life on paper, the young lawyer, the black and white man, the cultural orphan, the child of his parents' dreams, the man who would be president, spoke so honestly and so understandably about himself, his peers and the societies around him...
A community organizer become president. Imagine that! The man who took time to find his own uneasy balance in American society before seeking to change the balance for all of us.
As I hear the sounds of Nepal outside my window, the swell of voices coming from the street, the aspirations of a country churning and unbound to their past, I think again of America, my America, the source of my origins and the future of my children. I laugh quietly to myself as, for the first time, I see my own work as another lonely community organizer out in the villages of an adopted country.
Barack, son of an intellectual Kenyan and an itinerant American mother, raised in Jakarta and Hawaii, dug deep within himself to find his home in urban America. I come of 1st and 2nd generation American stock, Eastern European immigrants who sought security and sanctity on those new shores.
Yet here I am, another night on the road, Dharan, Sunsari, now, at the foothills of the Himalaya, among the Limbu liberationists, amid the rapid cultural transformation of Nepal, collecting ideas on how best to write a new constitution, with a younger Barack over my shoulder, reading his stories of engagement with an America he barely understood while I work in someone else's country, at times, I barely understand...
Still, I'm smiling as I write...
This continues to be a remarkable, if not always easily understandable, world...
Ps: Oh yes (if anyone listens to these distant stories...) when I fly home on Thursday morning I'll see the dark pyramid of Mt Everest glistening on the nearby horizon outside my window?!!? Who wud have thunk...
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Thursday, November 20, 2008
What We Learned Was Truly Important on 9.11... Ian McEwan
"The mobile phone has inserted itself into every crevice of our daily lives. Now in catastrophe, if there is time enough, it is there in our dying moments. All through Thursday, we heard from the bereaved how they took those last calls. Whatever the immediate circumstances, what was striking was what they had in common -- a new technology has shown us an ancient human universal.
A San Francisco husband slept through his wife's call from the World Trade Center. The tower was burning around her, and she was speaking on her mobile phone. She left her last message to him on the answering machine. A TV station played it to us, while it showed the husband standing there listening. Somehow, he was able to bear hearing it again. We heard her tell him through her sobbing that there was no escape for her; the building was on fire; there was no way down the stairs. She was calling to say goodbye. There was really only one thing for her to say, those three words that all the terrible art, the worst pop songs in movies, the most seductive lies, can somehow never cheapen: 'I love you.'
She said it over and again before the line went dead. And that is what they were all saying down their phones -- from the hijacked planes and the burning towers. There was only love and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against the hatred of their murderers.
Last words placed in the public domain were once the prerogative of the mighty and vain and venerable -- Henry James, Nelson, Goethe, recorded and sometimes edited for posterity by relatives at the bedside. The effect was often consolatory, showing acceptance or even transcendence in the face of death. They set us an example. That these last words, spoken down mobile phones, reported to us by the bereaved, are both more haunting and true.
They compel us to imagine ourselves into that moment. What would we say? Now we know."
A San Francisco husband slept through his wife's call from the World Trade Center. The tower was burning around her, and she was speaking on her mobile phone. She left her last message to him on the answering machine. A TV station played it to us, while it showed the husband standing there listening. Somehow, he was able to bear hearing it again. We heard her tell him through her sobbing that there was no escape for her; the building was on fire; there was no way down the stairs. She was calling to say goodbye. There was really only one thing for her to say, those three words that all the terrible art, the worst pop songs in movies, the most seductive lies, can somehow never cheapen: 'I love you.'
She said it over and again before the line went dead. And that is what they were all saying down their phones -- from the hijacked planes and the burning towers. There was only love and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against the hatred of their murderers.
Last words placed in the public domain were once the prerogative of the mighty and vain and venerable -- Henry James, Nelson, Goethe, recorded and sometimes edited for posterity by relatives at the bedside. The effect was often consolatory, showing acceptance or even transcendence in the face of death. They set us an example. That these last words, spoken down mobile phones, reported to us by the bereaved, are both more haunting and true.
They compel us to imagine ourselves into that moment. What would we say? Now we know."
Sunday, November 16, 2008
A Quote from Aeschylus
"And,
even in our
sleep
pain that
cannot
forget
falls
drop
by
drop
upon the
heart;
and,
in our own
despair,
against
our will,
comes
wisdom
to us
by the
awful
grace
of
God."
even in our
sleep
pain that
cannot
forget
falls
drop
by
drop
upon the
heart;
and,
in our own
despair,
against
our will,
comes
wisdom
to us
by the
awful
grace
of
God."
Friday, November 7, 2008
The Obama Nation, 1968-2008
"Yes, we can!"
The words echoed down 3rd Avenue after I left dinner w/ my college friend, Paul, and his friends. It was after 10 pm and the results had already begun to flow in across the cable tv networks.
As I strolled in the balmy early November NYC weather down from 77th St. to Aunt Eileen's apartment on 20th, I could see into many restaurants and bars I passed the totals as they began to pile up on the Democrats' column. Even before dinner, CNN had called Vermont for Obama with exactly 0% of the vote and 0 votes in! But then we know the intuition of our seers in Vermont...
Then, as I watched from window to window, with Pennsylvania and Ohio soon falling on Barack's side, followed by Virginia and New Hampshire, it clearly looked, as my friend, Larry had advised a month ago in Kathmandu, like the final fruition of an historical landslide for Obama, and our country.
It's hard to explain to our children what this means to those of us of a slightly earlier generation. For me, this election of 2008 is the completion of the fatally truncated election of 1968. The year of my earliest political education and, tragically, the painful loss of innocence or honest belief in the possibility of redemption in the American political process.
How well I remember that night in early June 1968. I was all of fourteen years old, full of the enthusiasm that youth and youthful ambition can bring to its inchoate hopes and dreams. Already it had been a momentous, agonized, deliberate and decisive year.
Only a few months before, I'd come into the kitchen to forage for breakfast behind the refrigerator door when my father came down and said to me, "Did you hear Lyndon Johnson's speech last night?"
"Yes, I heard the start about the halt in the bombing of North Vietnam..."
"Did you hear the end?"
"No, why?"
"You didn't hear him say he wouldn't run for president?"
"WHAT?", as I slammed the refrigerator door and looked at my father in astonishment.
From LBJ's near-defeat in New Hampshire to Bobby Kennedy's announcement that he, too, would run for the Democratic nomination against both LBJ and Gene McCarthy, through the brutal murder of Martin Luther King in Memphis, 1968 had already been a year of profound agony, anger and loss in American politics.
Then, as I lay in bed on Brockway Lane in Upstate NY, late in the night, with the small B&W tv at the foot of my bed, I woke with some sense of dread, disbelief and confusion. I'd fallen asleep after midnight waiting for the results of the Democratic primary in California.
Although RFK had won in Indiana, Gene McCarthy had defeated him in Oregon and all knew that the winner of the winner-take-all California primary (so different from this year's Democratic primary rules) would be the 1968 Democratic party nominee, and most likely win this turbulent election to lead the country out of the self-inflicted, devastating war in Vietnam and, hopefully, toward a fulfillment of the civil rights movement that had sputtered, then burnt on the streets of Watts, Washington, DC and most major cities in America.
As I woke staring w/ disorientation at the tv, the phone upstairs rang in my parents' bedroom. As I watched, I realized that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after Bobby Kennedy had accepted his victory in the California primary. There were people weeping, crying and screaming on the screen. As I ran upstairs to my parent's room and opened the door, one of them said, softly, painfully, "Robert Kennedy has been shot."
Forty years later, that scene and that pain still fill my sorrow. The scars of that election, sundered by assassination and violence, still wound. The end result, as we know, lead to nearly seven more years of war with a presidency that ended in the eventual resignation of both the vice-president and president for corruption and abuse of authority. The nadir of American politics in our lifetime.
So, today, forty years later, I deeply feel that the souls of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy are looking down with joy and pride on their beloved America of Atlanta, Georgia, Hyannis, Massachusetts and each of the many states these two noble men visited in the course of their civil rights movement and political campaigns.
Today, with the election of Barack Hussein Obama, a black-white man, a dignified, eloquent, intelligent, compassionate man, with a wise wife and lovely daughters, who represent the best that America can offer, I feel that the ghosts of 1968 are, at last, laid to rest.
The incomplete campaign that meant so much to me as a fourteen year old young American has come to its natural goal, its honest achievement, an arc of accomplishment, an ephipany of sorts.
We are a better country than we sometimes imagine. We are capable of change. We are capable of chosing the best candidate. No matter how Obama governs in the coming four years (and I believe it will be for the best...), a long period of American history is now put to rest.
Now, when our children's children read "To Kill A Mockingbird" or listen to Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, much less memorize Lincoln's own "Gettysburg Address", they will know intimately and finally that, although it took a literary and imaginative 18th C. Constitution, a great and cruel Civil War in the 19th C., generations of suffering and non-violent demonstrations in the 20th C., the fulfillment of that noble national enterprise -- that ALL MEN (yes, WOMEN, too!) ARE CREATED EQUAL -- has come true in the first decade of the 21st C. And we are here to witness that celebration.
Maybe it is time for me to put to bed, as well, those bad dreams of 1968.
When my family sat together in Kathmandu to watch the exquisite movie, "Bobby" a year ago, about RFK's assassination, I was surprised to hear Ezi say afterwards, "That movie made me proud to be an American!"
Later, I understood Ezra was speaking of all of the individual lives in the film who found a purpose and meaning through Kennedy's inspiration and movtivation. That his message touched so many lives at that time, gave Ezi hope and, possibly, a greater determination to do something meaningful with his life, as well.
Maybe today, again, Barack Obama has offered the whole beloved nation this opportunity, as well...
I believe it has.
The words echoed down 3rd Avenue after I left dinner w/ my college friend, Paul, and his friends. It was after 10 pm and the results had already begun to flow in across the cable tv networks.
As I strolled in the balmy early November NYC weather down from 77th St. to Aunt Eileen's apartment on 20th, I could see into many restaurants and bars I passed the totals as they began to pile up on the Democrats' column. Even before dinner, CNN had called Vermont for Obama with exactly 0% of the vote and 0 votes in! But then we know the intuition of our seers in Vermont...
Then, as I watched from window to window, with Pennsylvania and Ohio soon falling on Barack's side, followed by Virginia and New Hampshire, it clearly looked, as my friend, Larry had advised a month ago in Kathmandu, like the final fruition of an historical landslide for Obama, and our country.
It's hard to explain to our children what this means to those of us of a slightly earlier generation. For me, this election of 2008 is the completion of the fatally truncated election of 1968. The year of my earliest political education and, tragically, the painful loss of innocence or honest belief in the possibility of redemption in the American political process.
How well I remember that night in early June 1968. I was all of fourteen years old, full of the enthusiasm that youth and youthful ambition can bring to its inchoate hopes and dreams. Already it had been a momentous, agonized, deliberate and decisive year.
Only a few months before, I'd come into the kitchen to forage for breakfast behind the refrigerator door when my father came down and said to me, "Did you hear Lyndon Johnson's speech last night?"
"Yes, I heard the start about the halt in the bombing of North Vietnam..."
"Did you hear the end?"
"No, why?"
"You didn't hear him say he wouldn't run for president?"
"WHAT?", as I slammed the refrigerator door and looked at my father in astonishment.
From LBJ's near-defeat in New Hampshire to Bobby Kennedy's announcement that he, too, would run for the Democratic nomination against both LBJ and Gene McCarthy, through the brutal murder of Martin Luther King in Memphis, 1968 had already been a year of profound agony, anger and loss in American politics.
Then, as I lay in bed on Brockway Lane in Upstate NY, late in the night, with the small B&W tv at the foot of my bed, I woke with some sense of dread, disbelief and confusion. I'd fallen asleep after midnight waiting for the results of the Democratic primary in California.
Although RFK had won in Indiana, Gene McCarthy had defeated him in Oregon and all knew that the winner of the winner-take-all California primary (so different from this year's Democratic primary rules) would be the 1968 Democratic party nominee, and most likely win this turbulent election to lead the country out of the self-inflicted, devastating war in Vietnam and, hopefully, toward a fulfillment of the civil rights movement that had sputtered, then burnt on the streets of Watts, Washington, DC and most major cities in America.
As I woke staring w/ disorientation at the tv, the phone upstairs rang in my parents' bedroom. As I watched, I realized that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after Bobby Kennedy had accepted his victory in the California primary. There were people weeping, crying and screaming on the screen. As I ran upstairs to my parent's room and opened the door, one of them said, softly, painfully, "Robert Kennedy has been shot."
Forty years later, that scene and that pain still fill my sorrow. The scars of that election, sundered by assassination and violence, still wound. The end result, as we know, lead to nearly seven more years of war with a presidency that ended in the eventual resignation of both the vice-president and president for corruption and abuse of authority. The nadir of American politics in our lifetime.
So, today, forty years later, I deeply feel that the souls of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy are looking down with joy and pride on their beloved America of Atlanta, Georgia, Hyannis, Massachusetts and each of the many states these two noble men visited in the course of their civil rights movement and political campaigns.
Today, with the election of Barack Hussein Obama, a black-white man, a dignified, eloquent, intelligent, compassionate man, with a wise wife and lovely daughters, who represent the best that America can offer, I feel that the ghosts of 1968 are, at last, laid to rest.
The incomplete campaign that meant so much to me as a fourteen year old young American has come to its natural goal, its honest achievement, an arc of accomplishment, an ephipany of sorts.
We are a better country than we sometimes imagine. We are capable of change. We are capable of chosing the best candidate. No matter how Obama governs in the coming four years (and I believe it will be for the best...), a long period of American history is now put to rest.
Now, when our children's children read "To Kill A Mockingbird" or listen to Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, much less memorize Lincoln's own "Gettysburg Address", they will know intimately and finally that, although it took a literary and imaginative 18th C. Constitution, a great and cruel Civil War in the 19th C., generations of suffering and non-violent demonstrations in the 20th C., the fulfillment of that noble national enterprise -- that ALL MEN (yes, WOMEN, too!) ARE CREATED EQUAL -- has come true in the first decade of the 21st C. And we are here to witness that celebration.
Maybe it is time for me to put to bed, as well, those bad dreams of 1968.
When my family sat together in Kathmandu to watch the exquisite movie, "Bobby" a year ago, about RFK's assassination, I was surprised to hear Ezi say afterwards, "That movie made me proud to be an American!"
Later, I understood Ezra was speaking of all of the individual lives in the film who found a purpose and meaning through Kennedy's inspiration and movtivation. That his message touched so many lives at that time, gave Ezi hope and, possibly, a greater determination to do something meaningful with his life, as well.
Maybe today, again, Barack Obama has offered the whole beloved nation this opportunity, as well...
I believe it has.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Autumn in America
The boys are partying at the "Tron Bon", a halloween bonfire that their Overton dorm hosts every year. Last year Josh dressed as a roman warrior with face paint, ala William Wallace. Tonight, he's dressed as an arab sheik tonight, but i don't know what Ezi is going as. I'm sure they are having a great time already, as they seemed keyed up for this event.
This afternoon both boys had football/soccer games. I first drove down to Deerfield to watch Ezi, Mo and Suraj play in their JV game, as it started a half hour before the varsity game and Deerfield is only 20 minutes south of NMH. I'd never been there before, although I'd passed the signs to "Historic Deerfield" a few times. I can say now that on a late autumn day like today the well-preserved town of Deerfield is one of the most exquisite I've ever seen in New England. It's an absolutely charming, undisturbed 17th/18th c. village under a canopy of magnificent street-lined trees.
Fortunately, even within my reverie, I got to the game just minutes before it startedm meandering down rural backroads, across great steel spans over the Connecticut and Deerfield rivers with one eye on the road and one eye simply absorbing the waning color palate covering the hillsides. There's a deep contentment in such a landscape, cool, distant, decadent with an array of yellow, rust, reds, burgundies, and the occasional bright damask, that soothes and comforts the mind, before the reality of winter.
Oh, yes, back to the story... Ezi was on the pitch, playing midfield, where he loves to direct the action of the game. Unfortunately, Deerfield quickly went up 2-0 due to some defensive lapses that hurt NMH early and long. Therefore, before the first half was over, Coach Derr sustituted Ezi back into the goal to make sure Deerfield didn't score again so NMH would have a chance to get back into the game. Then, on a stunning reversal of fortune, a minute before half-time, Ezi launched a massive goal kick down the pitch that bounced before the other goalie, giving Suraj and a teammate the chance to quickly handle the ball for a goal! Not too bad for Ezi as goalie to get an assist on an NMH goal!
But at half time, I had to drive back up to NMH as Josh's game started half an hour after Ezi's and it was Josh's last home game of the year. All the varsity seniors, including Josh, were starting as it was their last NMH home game. I missed the beginning, but NMH was up 1-0 and Josh was still on the pitch. In fact, five minutes after I got there Josh triumphantly grabbed a header, hitting it twice by himself to put the ball in the back of the net. NMH was up 2-0 at the half!
Josh was having his best game of the year, possibly his career. The whole team was playing (what many said) was their best football of the year. Josh even scored again in the second half with a surging, powerful header from a lovely cross by one of his teammates. At the end, NMH put Cushing Academy away with a convincing 5-0 win.
Alas, although Ezi's JV team (Ez & Mo have been named the captains for the rest of the year) looked ready to capitalize on Deerfield's weakness when I left after the first half, they just couldn't find the equalizer in the second half and lost 2-1. Ezi, I'm told had some solid saves in the second half, as well as 'great distribution', but when I was w/ him at dinner, Suraj was still trying to calm him down from the loss...
But, with the Tron Bon(fire) on the evening schedule, knowing Ezi's innate resilience, I don't think he was going to stay in a funk very long. In fact, he was back to his adorable self, getting his friends in the party mood over dinner.
I ate in the dining hall w/ a couple of Josh's teammates' parents talking about the team, the school and our kids. Colin's dad married a polynesian from New Zealand, so Colin's half mixed up, too, as well as the best footballer on the team (some day, New England...). The other boys' parents were gentle quakers from Vermont who are proudly on the Parents' Advisory Council for NMH. Sweet folks all around.
I'm beginning to feel the weariness of the constant travel, but there's so much joy in being w/ and near the boys that I only feel it when i'm away from them. After all, this is rare & precious time poised between two generations in my life.
In truth, I feel incredibly fortunate that at this stage of my life, in my mid-50s, I can be spend such time b/n the two. Although it is painful to watching one's dearly loved parents age, yet, concomitantly, I am able to see Josh & Ez, so strong, vital and alive in their late teens, playing their hearts out. As one generation begins to pass, another one (ours) is able to look forward and back, while this younger one is growing faster than my beloved bamboo, rising higher, becoming more ambitious and ever more radiant.
It's such a gift to be their parent, to have been such a part of their childhood and youth. I'm so happy to have come back up this w/end to see them play, again. Their joy and fulfillment is so rich, I feel even more the purity and sanctity of parenthood on this late autumn day amid the western Massachusetts forests and farms in every direction. There is a quiet calm of nature that seems to have descended on the land. a shimmering light as the sun wanes on the horizon and the softly rolling hills catch that light and reflect it, as if they were ponds of colored water dazzling the unprotected eyes.
I feel blessed by these hues as the days spread out the beauty of nature through late October and early November. The waning of the tenderness of the earth as it prepares for the long, dark months of winter. So I stand, prancing a bit in my sneakers as the late afternoon chill seeps up from the earth, watching our sons gain their manhood and maturity in such a boy's mere pleasure in racing, chasing a round, colored ball up and down a lush, green, trampled field amid the tumble of bodies, sweat and competition. They leap with joy and today they are victors at home in front of their friends, fans and parents. there is exhaustion and contentment for them.
They know not of the message that the natural world is reminding us behind and all around them. We know. We have been through these years before. I have just spent a week with my parents in their 80s. I can see what these autumns portend. But, there is happiness in seeing, as well, the innocence and frivolity of our children. these are perfect days for their games. As we may have offered to them, they, too, inspire us with this love of life, of play, of pushing themselves out beyond their limits before they come back to earth, one day, as parents themselves and see what we now see of nature's meaning.
The constant travel, alas, is a bit desultory, wearisome, but the joy of being in time & place w/ some of my most intimate family --parents & children -- as you can appreciate, is profound.
More than i know how to say...
This afternoon both boys had football/soccer games. I first drove down to Deerfield to watch Ezi, Mo and Suraj play in their JV game, as it started a half hour before the varsity game and Deerfield is only 20 minutes south of NMH. I'd never been there before, although I'd passed the signs to "Historic Deerfield" a few times. I can say now that on a late autumn day like today the well-preserved town of Deerfield is one of the most exquisite I've ever seen in New England. It's an absolutely charming, undisturbed 17th/18th c. village under a canopy of magnificent street-lined trees.
Fortunately, even within my reverie, I got to the game just minutes before it startedm meandering down rural backroads, across great steel spans over the Connecticut and Deerfield rivers with one eye on the road and one eye simply absorbing the waning color palate covering the hillsides. There's a deep contentment in such a landscape, cool, distant, decadent with an array of yellow, rust, reds, burgundies, and the occasional bright damask, that soothes and comforts the mind, before the reality of winter.
Oh, yes, back to the story... Ezi was on the pitch, playing midfield, where he loves to direct the action of the game. Unfortunately, Deerfield quickly went up 2-0 due to some defensive lapses that hurt NMH early and long. Therefore, before the first half was over, Coach Derr sustituted Ezi back into the goal to make sure Deerfield didn't score again so NMH would have a chance to get back into the game. Then, on a stunning reversal of fortune, a minute before half-time, Ezi launched a massive goal kick down the pitch that bounced before the other goalie, giving Suraj and a teammate the chance to quickly handle the ball for a goal! Not too bad for Ezi as goalie to get an assist on an NMH goal!
But at half time, I had to drive back up to NMH as Josh's game started half an hour after Ezi's and it was Josh's last home game of the year. All the varsity seniors, including Josh, were starting as it was their last NMH home game. I missed the beginning, but NMH was up 1-0 and Josh was still on the pitch. In fact, five minutes after I got there Josh triumphantly grabbed a header, hitting it twice by himself to put the ball in the back of the net. NMH was up 2-0 at the half!
Josh was having his best game of the year, possibly his career. The whole team was playing (what many said) was their best football of the year. Josh even scored again in the second half with a surging, powerful header from a lovely cross by one of his teammates. At the end, NMH put Cushing Academy away with a convincing 5-0 win.
Alas, although Ezi's JV team (Ez & Mo have been named the captains for the rest of the year) looked ready to capitalize on Deerfield's weakness when I left after the first half, they just couldn't find the equalizer in the second half and lost 2-1. Ezi, I'm told had some solid saves in the second half, as well as 'great distribution', but when I was w/ him at dinner, Suraj was still trying to calm him down from the loss...
But, with the Tron Bon(fire) on the evening schedule, knowing Ezi's innate resilience, I don't think he was going to stay in a funk very long. In fact, he was back to his adorable self, getting his friends in the party mood over dinner.
I ate in the dining hall w/ a couple of Josh's teammates' parents talking about the team, the school and our kids. Colin's dad married a polynesian from New Zealand, so Colin's half mixed up, too, as well as the best footballer on the team (some day, New England...). The other boys' parents were gentle quakers from Vermont who are proudly on the Parents' Advisory Council for NMH. Sweet folks all around.
I'm beginning to feel the weariness of the constant travel, but there's so much joy in being w/ and near the boys that I only feel it when i'm away from them. After all, this is rare & precious time poised between two generations in my life.
In truth, I feel incredibly fortunate that at this stage of my life, in my mid-50s, I can be spend such time b/n the two. Although it is painful to watching one's dearly loved parents age, yet, concomitantly, I am able to see Josh & Ez, so strong, vital and alive in their late teens, playing their hearts out. As one generation begins to pass, another one (ours) is able to look forward and back, while this younger one is growing faster than my beloved bamboo, rising higher, becoming more ambitious and ever more radiant.
It's such a gift to be their parent, to have been such a part of their childhood and youth. I'm so happy to have come back up this w/end to see them play, again. Their joy and fulfillment is so rich, I feel even more the purity and sanctity of parenthood on this late autumn day amid the western Massachusetts forests and farms in every direction. There is a quiet calm of nature that seems to have descended on the land. a shimmering light as the sun wanes on the horizon and the softly rolling hills catch that light and reflect it, as if they were ponds of colored water dazzling the unprotected eyes.
I feel blessed by these hues as the days spread out the beauty of nature through late October and early November. The waning of the tenderness of the earth as it prepares for the long, dark months of winter. So I stand, prancing a bit in my sneakers as the late afternoon chill seeps up from the earth, watching our sons gain their manhood and maturity in such a boy's mere pleasure in racing, chasing a round, colored ball up and down a lush, green, trampled field amid the tumble of bodies, sweat and competition. They leap with joy and today they are victors at home in front of their friends, fans and parents. there is exhaustion and contentment for them.
They know not of the message that the natural world is reminding us behind and all around them. We know. We have been through these years before. I have just spent a week with my parents in their 80s. I can see what these autumns portend. But, there is happiness in seeing, as well, the innocence and frivolity of our children. these are perfect days for their games. As we may have offered to them, they, too, inspire us with this love of life, of play, of pushing themselves out beyond their limits before they come back to earth, one day, as parents themselves and see what we now see of nature's meaning.
The constant travel, alas, is a bit desultory, wearisome, but the joy of being in time & place w/ some of my most intimate family --parents & children -- as you can appreciate, is profound.
More than i know how to say...
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