Poem for the Holidays

I asked my Secret Santa for a poem for Christmas.  Here's what I got from Ben:

Montreal Meander Poem

(a line drawn from each day of the blog)

About an hour out of Portland

Kai asked how much longer it would be

before we got to Rhode Island

When would the extraterrestrial memory wipe kick in??

Fortunately Las Vegas had a brothel-free Starbucks.

Then on to Albuquerque (thank you spell-checker).

I feel confident that Kai will not put his new knowledge

about balloon piloting to use.

We are returning the favor by leaving half of the kids' dirty socks here

It was like drinking beauty from a fire hydrant

A long-expired sheriff oversaw our meal from his frame on the wall

I don't know what happened to Granny

Where the GPS insisted her spirit remained, our grosser senses detected only a muffler shop

We also passed up "How to Spot a Bastard by His Star Sign."

It was like feeding a baby bird with no neck muscles.

Our window offered a fine view of the gaseous output of an industrial plant

White chocolate jalapeño fudge that melts in your mouth and then sets it on fire

We've started stacking the kids on top of each other to save space

Kai has never had much use for the boundary constructed between customer and merchant

One kid carried an electronic friend-attractor. 

My mother would have been mortified

She managed to turn our backseat Franz Kafka into a relatively pleasant if a bit antsy little boy

We have left socks in every region.

-Juliet

Silver Spring, MD to Westerly, RI

Wednesday morning, after a hopeless attempt to return Amber and Vivek's house to a modicum of the state it had been when we arrived, a quick photo session, and masterful dodging of questions from Liam and Kai about why we weren't staying longer to play with Jonah, why they hadn't seen enough of Noah and Vivek, why we didn't live closer to them, when we were going to see Amber again, why didn't we know, and whether they could take the leftover chocolate-chip pancakes with them in the car, we left.  Amber pressed a bag full of food and car activities into my hand as I was walking out the door.

  We racked up the states on our way north: Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York.  I was afraid to 

fall asleep for fear of missing one.  Traffic rescued Kai from sleeping all the way through Connecticut.  After flying up most of the Eastern Seaboard (I get the "sea" part but where exactly is the "board?"), we screeched to a halt on the Merritt Parkway at the first of a series of accidents so numerous and prolonged that Eric and I lost count.  On Route 95 (pronounced "route," as in "to rout your enemy," not "to pull a kumquat up by its root"), we had been traveling between 3 and 8 mph for so long that Kai began to despair of ever reaching Rhode Island ("We have been in traffic forever and we will never never never ever get there").  In desperation, I handed him my cell phone and gave him permission to call my mother.  I don't know what she said, but she managed to turn our backseat Franz Kafka into a relatively pleasant if a bit antsy little boy.  As we passed the scene of the accident, Eric and I saw a figure lying on the tarmac covered by a white sheet.

The lights of my parents' house were a welcome sight.  So were they.  It was worth driving 4900 miles to see them.

I have sand from Death Valley in my socks, wintered arroyo grass from Albuquerque stuck in my running pants, cross-country crumbs all over the back seat.  We have left socks in every region.  When I close my eyes the road still pulls down and forward and there is a red flash of a truck curving up a hill.  The New Orleans sun has a warm fragile hold under my skin, and my fingers remember the freshness of the Georgia flea market taco.  I regret now giving my stinging mouth the veto on the rest of that Pakistani lamb chop.

Eric says we don't remember what people look like or what they did as much as we remember how they made us feel.  Jean and Paul and Sam and Joe and Vivek and Amber, the ranger at Carlsbad Caverns, Dave the Balloonist, the ticket seller at Birmingham, the shopkeepers at Roanoke: thanks for letting us drop into your lives and for everything you did to make us feel so welcome.

We didn't bring a DVD player or an electronic game player with us, and I was apprehensive about how that would be.  It meant that I traveled in the back between Liam and Kai for large chunks of the trip, having "school" by making up math challenges, learning French, U.S. geography, bits of history and the sociology of the civil rights movement.  Reasons came up to read books and signs and maps, to write letters, journal entries, and thank you notes.  We met a ton of people.  We didn't kill each other.  We had wonderful luck with weather and mostly with traffic.  The car didn't break down, and the dog and most of our possessions arrived with us.  Each of us, I'm sure, knows more and better ways to push each other's buttons, but by the end of the trip the tendrils that connect each one of us to the other are thicker and more abundant.  I'm content to be enmeshed with these people, my family.   

Signing off, til the road trip to Montreal,
Juliet

  



 

Roanoke, VA to Silver Spring, MD

Driving north toward Washington, DC, I was kicking myself for leaving Roanoke so late.  We were heading to Silver Spring, Maryland where Liam's godparents, Amber and Vivek, live.  Shopping had cut into the sliver of time we had with them.  I had promised my mother we'd be in Westerly, Rhode Island by Wednesday evening, over seven hours from Silver Spring.  By my calculations, that left us with time for dinner, an overnight, and an early morning start for the sprint to the finish line in Westerly.  I called Amber to tell her we'd be late, and my friend Jenny to tell her we wouldn't be able to see her at all.

It's very difficult to keep up with the way people keep re-naming the day every time the sun sets and rises.  Eric said something to the kids about it being being Monday.  Which was odd.  I'm the one who usually confuses these things.  I gently let him know that it was Tuesday.  He gently let me know it wasn't.

It came to me in a flash that yesterday was Sunday.  And that people usually put Monday after Sunday and before Wednesday and Tuesday.  Which meant two things: Eric was right (the universe re-aligned itself). It also meant we had an extra day.  It was like daylight savings time on steroids.

So instead of having us overnight, the Chopra-Khans found that a family of four (plus a dog that Amber is allergic to and Jonah is afraid of) had moved into the guest suite.  My mother would have been mortified (right, Mom?).  We spent our time with Vivek and Amber the way we usually do: eating and talking to the wee hours.  Amber's chicken and basmati rice, chocolate chip pancakes, amazing Elaiki tea.    

The next day we took Liam and Kai and Jonah to the Natural History museum.  At the entrance there's an Easter Island statue which anthropologists think served the function of watching over and protect the community.  Here are the three of them protecting their community:

We finally saw some wildlife:

I finally saw a mountain goat.  Or whatever this is:

We took the elephant very seriously:

 We had dinner Tuesday night at Kabob N Karahi (I ate the lamb chops until I couldn't stand the heat).  I was a little late getting a shot of our repast:

There was another family with kids the same age as Kai and Jonah.  One carried an electronic friend-attractor.  

If Kai's parents loved him more, they'd buy him one.

Here are the godbrothers, Noah and Liam, with Amber the Godmother:

 -Juliet

Roanoke, VA

Liam and Kai awoke as usual at dawn (using I can only assume some form of prehensile solar sensors, as Eric nightly draws three layers of curtain over the hotel window to ensure that not a crack of sunlight can pierce the room, and yet still they defeat every effort at lightlessness and arise at dawn and spring upon us and lay heavily upon our sleep-enfeebled bones and poke us with their sharp elbows and chins until Eric succumbs and rises) and we made an early start for the Roanoke City Market -- 11 am!  Our children find holiday shopping scintillating.

Kai has never had much use for the boundary constructed between customer and merchant.  He poked his head through the half-propped door into the storage room at the back of the storefront where the salespeople had disappeared.  Spying him, one asking whether he wanted her to put him to work.  We laughed in that adult he-he-he way about the unlawfulness of child labor.

Here's Kai about ten minutes later, expediting the cashier's line using the bar code reader:

And confirming the accuracy of the total on the computer cash register:

They told him he had a future in retail.  "I'll be back" he said. We took our little Terminator across the street.  The gift wrapper at La De Da needed some assistance.

At Fair Trade down the block he ferried a freshly unloaded cardboard box to the dumpster - no pics, as all I would have gotten was an image of a floating box.

We hightailed it out of Roanoke before the Department of Labor showed up.

-Juliet

New Orleans to Roanoke, VA

We spent the night in Fairfield, which is neither fair nor field: our window offered a fine view of the gaseous output of an industrial plant.  Then to Birmingham and the Civil Rights Institute which houses a permanent multimedia exhibit telling the story of the Civil Rights Movement.  I sat in the car for a few minutes before going in, knowing that it could be very hard for the kids to see and understand what happened here 50 years ago.

Jim Crow came alive to them when they saw the difference between the two drinking fountains and the two schoolrooms.  When I asked why it makes a difference to be in a classroom with fewer children per teacher (stacks of books of different heights showed ratios of 1:24 for white kids and 1:48 for black kids), Liam said it would be harder for the teacher to get around to everyone.  We did the math for the student-teacher ratio in their schools.  

Then on to the Civil Rights Movement.  It struck me how much of the story was told through the eyes and words of children, though perhaps I’m sensitive to it because of my traveling companions.  Those were the exhibits where Liam and Kai paused longest, pressing the button to hear one child ask her mother to explain the bus boycott after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man, amazed that thousands of  children marched in protest against segregation and that hundreds were arrested and jailed.  Kai asked how old you have to be to go to jail.  The Freedom Riders were there on film, telling the story from a hospital bed just after their bus was firebombed.  And there was the bus itself (at least the front half), blackened on the inside, its windows long-shattered, leaning heavily on its blown tire.  You could lean on its fender and watch it play a starring role onscreen: the angry mob surrounding it, the open door, later the smoke roiling from its punctured roof.  

Over and again throughout the story of the Civil Rights Movement we saw people who decided to go ahead and do things like march or vote or drive a bus or speak, knowing there was a pretty substantial risk of getting hurt or at least arrested (and possibly sent to prison for a week on a chain gang, as happened to "Clarence" and his fellow students).  It also brought home how many people and institutions took part – some 450 Freedom Riders, hundreds of thousands of protestors, the Supreme Court, the National Guard, several Presidents, international intervenors, students, each in the multitude around the Reflecting Pool who listened to MLK’s I Have a Dream speech.  For me the bus drivers were the unsung heroes.  They did things that they might have considered to be beyond the scope of their duties, like driving into terminals where the mobs awaited, or stepping in to let Fred Shuttlesworth escape. 

Across the street from the Institute was the 16^th Street Baptist Church, then the largest African American community church, which was firebombed during the height of the Movement.  That event was the reason for my greatest reluctance to bring the kids to Birmingham.  I wasn’t sure I wanted them to know, just yet, about the four girls who were killed there.  But Liam can read, and he saw it before I did, on a small placard at the last turn before the exit.  He knew how close the church was to where he stood.  It struck him.  I think it scared him a little.  My own mind shies away from it.  Is seven too young to see all this? 

Afterward we went to Mrs B’s on 4^th for some real southern comfort food.  Wow.  Meatloaf like that should be eaten by each of us at least once in a lifetime. 

But only once.  With an EMT standing by.  Least you'd die happy.

We drove through Birmingham center and out of the city to the far side of Atlanta to the best La Cuenta Inn we’ve encountered – worth every penny.  One of the reasons I like it so much is that it is the place where I FINISHED MY LAW REVIEW ARTICLE!  Not timely, not in any time zone we’ve passed through.  But done, for now.

On the way to Charlotte we saw an enormous billboard advertising an enormous flea market.  And then another and another.  We took it as a sign.  What could we do?  We have Xmas presents to buy. 

We flung ourselves off the highway. 

The place was packed with people and with stuff which looked to be mostly made in China.  It was also one of the most diverse places we’ve been since the start of the trip.  The population of Latinos and Asians has soared in the South over the past decade or so, and the flea market is where everybody goes for their holiday shopping.  After a couple of tasty tacos and burritos con frijoles y queso at the food court, we picked up a few consumables as gifts, including a white chocolate jalapeno fudge that melts in your mouth and then sets it on fire. 

Dinner in Charlotte at Amelie’s French bakery.  Kai discovered two guys playing chess. He informed the one playing black that there were only two black pieces left on the board and that the player was going to have trouble winning if that’s all he had left.  Then he started to "watch" while telling them how each of the pieces moved.  Instead of escorting Kai firmly back to his table, the chess players seemed amused and waved off my attempts to lure Kai away.  I returned from ordering my coffee to this scene:

Kai learned more about chess from that dude than he’s ever learned from me.  Off through the Blue Ridge Mountains to Roanoke, where our beds awaited.

The car has been getting a bit full what with all the holiday shopping, so we've started stacking the kids on top of each other to save space:

-Juliet

     

Winnie, TX to New Orleans

New Orleans drew us like a magnet. What would you do when friends you haven't seen in 10 years emailed to tell you they are less than 24 hours from your doorstep and wondering whether they might drop in?  Them, that is, and their two kids, a carload of luggage, two garish yellowy bicycles on their failing car-rack, and a hair-expelling dog.  My mother would be mortified (hi Mom).  Yet Sam and Joe still gave us the correct address to their house in New Orleans.  Sam even opened the door when we arrived.  It was so great to see her.

There was a soft sucking sound as Ella, who is 7, and Jake, who is 5, vacuumed Liam and Kai into the house up the spiral staircase and into the playroom.  We didn't see them for about two hours.  Sam opened a couple of beers to lubricate our tales of the ten years since she and Eric were in physical therapy school.  When the kids came back down, they made edible menorahs: graham crackers for the base, frosting for the background, pretzel sticks for candles, candy corn for flame, and M&Ms and chocolate chips for ballast.  Liam and Kai aren't even Jewish and yet they were clearly having a religious experience.  

The next morning we reclined on the porch in the 79 degrees and bright sunshine while Ella, Liam, Jake and Kai jumped in the jumpy house and made general havoc around the house. We spent a wonderful couple of hours chatting with Sam and her Mom, Mimi, while Eric expelled the rest of Moose's hair to everyone's great satisfaction.

After we completed the task of who would sit next to whom and in which seat of the car (the back seat and Ella were the most desired), Sam gave an hour tour of some classic local architecture and Tracy's, one of the classic po' boy sandwich shops on Magazine Street.  I (Eric) would swear that I picked up a sandwich full of roast beef, but none of it reached my mouth.

Sam gave us a gift: she took the kids back to the house in the car and Eric and I walked home, just us, down Magazine Street.  The people at Simon's Antique Store

told us to go to Aidan Gill For Men to look for a present for Eric's father.  That store is amazing. They'll sell you just the right tie, cologne, and also cut your hair in the barber shop in back.  They have a sign that says "Ladies and Gentleman Do Not and Others Must Not Use Cell Phones in the Store."

It also sells books.  Three of them.  We thought "How to Be a Gentleman: A Contemporary Guide to Common Courtesy" might be taken the wrong way.  There was "How to Raise a Gentleman" -- but we worried that he might see it as a comment on his parenting.  We also passed up "How to Spot a Bastard by His Star Sign."  At this rate we might have to explain to Dick that getting nothing for Xmas is sometimes better than the alternative.

Sam survived her two hours with four kids and a dog.  We cut short Ella, Jake, Kai and Liam's plans for us to live together forever in their house (one more hour and they'd have won me over), and threw everything and everybody in the car.  Kai started to fall asleep as soon as the car started moving.  Like good parents, we careened to a Vietnamese restaurant and shoved noodles in his mouth as his eyes were closing.  It was like feeding a baby bird with no neck muscles.

I loved New Orleans.  Sam and Joe told us so much about the way the community pulled together after Hurricane Katrina, working out how to rebuild the city beyond its pre-disaster baseline, finding equitable ways to share the money for schools, discovering that the act of rebuilding inspired more and deeper renovation until the pride of the people in their city became infectious.  On our meander down Magazine, with the sun enriching the colors of the houses, art and music spilling out of windows and doors, and every shopkeeper up for a chat, I was primed to believe it.

I left a tether there.  I'll be back.

-Juliet & Eric

Carlsbad to San Antonio to Winnie, TX

After Carlsbad Caverns we dined at the Velvet Garter Saloon, where a long-expired sheriff oversaw our meal from his frame on the wall above our table. On the table some thoughtful person had placed a small white sign with the sheriff's biography.  It listed the names of all the people he had killed with their expiration dates, and noting that he had himself been killed under suspicious circumstances (though everyone thinks Jim Miller did it).  Kai has been teaching himself to read, since his parents keep falling asleep when they read to him, and asked me why the sign said "The Kid" (expired approx. 1859).  Parental dilemma: disclose that the uniformed police officer on the wall shot The Kid, or create a distraction by inserting a ketchuped french fry in your kid's mouth and asking whether he'd like another?  Truth or cholesterol?

We spent the night at a La Quinta, which Liam insists on calling La Cuenta perhaps because you get what you pay for, and then shot down Route 10 to San Antonio to Chong and Myunjia's house.  Our kids instantly got down to business playing with their kids, Yeawon and Taejun. Greg drove down from Austin with his daughter and Lauren drove in with Im and their 4 year old daughter.  We kept losing Chong under large piles of small children.

Lauren and Im brought Texas barbeque and Chong's mom had made a fried rice dish and cheesecake.  As the adults sat down to eat, our exquisitely-trained and well-mannered dog sidled over to the kids' table, stole a pork rib, and dropped it on the carpet so he could get a better grip.  Fortunately the kids thought that was hilarious -- our clue that we'd best waddle over and rescue the pork rib was the screaming about the doggie throwing up on the floor.

Despite Yeawon's generous invitation to stay another week or at least leave her the dog, we headed east through Houston, home of my favorite employment discrimination case from my stint at the Justice Department (the employer allegedly called his Iranian employees "camels"), to Baytown where the GPS promised us mouth-watering ribs at Granny's BBQ.  I don't know what happened to Granny.  Where the GPS insisted her spirit remained, our grosser senses detected only a muffler shop. Maybe you really can see some things better from the heavens.  We departed in respectful silence and consoled ourselves with creamed corn and ribs at King's Barbeque.

It's a half hour from Baytown to Winnie's Lodge and RV Park in Winnie, TX, where I am making a sorry attempt to complete the edits to my now untimely law review article.

-Juliet

Albuquerque to Carlsbad, New Mexico

We told the kids to say goodbye to Jean and Paul’s family when they went to bed because we planned to leave at the crack of dawn before everyone but Jean was up.  I don’t know how it went for the mice, but the best laid plans of Eric and Juliet turned into seeing Eliza off to the bus, seeing Blaise and Emma Lia off to the car, seeing Paul got off to work, and seeing if we could still fit in the car after all we’d eaten. 

Then we booked it out of Albuquerque and drove like the wind to Carlsbad, NM.  Last chance to enter the Caverns on foot is at 2 pm.  We entered its yawning mouth at 1:59. 

I haven’t given any travel advice on this blog (knowing no rational traveler would follow the advice of people who go from Portland to Montreal via Texas), but here’s some for free: Drop what you are doing and go to the Carlsbad Caverns.    

It takes about an hour to walk down to the Big Room, and it was just us four on the way there, winding down into the mouth of the cave, on under the bat-hung ceiling (we could hear sleepy chittering), and then around and ever downward along a dimly lit path past clear pools and giant boulders, glimpsing geodes and ducking through arches.  The Big Room floored me.  It’s a millennial playground for minerals and water.  Rocks do things in that Cavern that you can't imagine when you see them up top of the earth all staid and proper.  Down below us, rock flows like water down walls, builds fairylands of gnomes and trolls, swims in the air like jellyfish, illuminates the rocky sky as a chandelier.  It ripples like curtains along walls, assumes the form of a lion’s tail, curls its tendrils above the pools like the coyest anemone.  

I’ll upload some pictures, but they are the palest of reflections of the place.  I came away transformed.  It was like drinking beauty from a fire hydrant.      

-Juliet

Sunday in Albuquerque

Last day in Albuquerque with Jean and Paul's family.  Jean has plied us with toys and clothes that her kids have grown out of and ours will love.  I think we are returning the favor by leaving half of the kids' dirty socks here - can't find 'em anywhere (sorry Jean.)

I went running this morning up the arroyo (that's Spanish for 'arroyo') and met Jean and their dog Karma out for a walk.  Karma is a slim, sweet-faced, occasionally exuberant mutt from Alaska.  She came bounding out of the brush in response to our calls, looked me in the eye with that sweet soulful expression, and wham! - took me out at the knees at top speed.  I think I was the "dogma" in that old expression.

Jean landed us some tickets for the tram that goes up to the crestline of the Sandia Mountains, which I can see from our beautiful room atop their house.  She also dressed us all from head to toe in warm clothes for the 15 degree windy weather on top.  The LiamKaiEliza unit spent the ascent with its noses pressed against the glass looking at the canyons and ridges drop away and predicting imminent collision with every nearing rockface and tower. Up top, it used its many eyes to identify fossils, threw snowballs at us with its six arms, and built a couple of snowmen along the nature trail.  We passed the first diminutive snowman on the way back, its bottom pinned by gravity to a rock, its mouth a tiny O, its twiggy arms open to the sky, eyes beseeching the sun to stop all that harrowing shining.

I'm a little concerned about how the surgical separation of Liam and Kai from Eliza will go tomorrow morning. We may end up leaving little bits of them here and taking little bits of her with us.  -Juliet