Sweet Time

Time, for most New Yorkers I know, is a source of anxiety. Many of our interactions follow a simple, looping script. “Shit, I’m going to be late…I am late…I’m sorry I’m late…I really wish I had more time…Oh dear, I have to leave soon…Damn, I should have left sooner…Shit, I’m going to be late…” For adults, time is a rigid and unyielding affair. Little black lines, tick marks of progress, shape our days into a relentless sameness that dulls the senses. But children measure time in increments of desire. I remember so clearly when I was young, how the two weeks before my birthday stretched into something that felt like seven years, while I waited to see what presents my parents had bought me. I remember how each week I dreaded the arrival of Sunday, unbearable Sunday with nothing to do, and how as it approached I would always marvel at its ability to last longer than any weekday ever could. And I remember being afraid to go to sleep at night and how those eight hours, alone in the dark, felt each and every morning, as if I’d survived an eternity.

But what got me thinking about time this week was a paper bag full of smarties and blow pops. I was trying to get rid of the proliferation of uneaten candy that threatened to take over our pantry. These leftovers, the remains of countless birthday party goody bags, were edging out space for real food. So we dumped the bags onto the kitchen floor and each child pick out a few pieces to keep. I intended to throw out the rest but looking at the pile I felt remorse. It was all so colorful. I thought, why not unwrap those smarties and make a collage with them? Then my son suggested we save the blow pops to make a sculpture. The kids got to work and I watched from the sink as my daughter carefully arranged the hard sugar dots onto a red piece of construction paper. First she laid down a line of blue sky with a multicolored sun in the top right corner of the page. Then came an A-frame house, landscaped with a single green bush, dotted by pink smarty flowers. My son created a sculpture of a little man, with a lollipop body and Starburst limbs. It took a long time to accomplish all this and they never once looked up from their task.

My kids can’t tell time. They’re six and as far as they’re concerned, the clock is just a green, plastic decoration that hangs among a variety of other equally bright items on our kitchen wall. Sometimes I feel bad I haven’t taught them to tell time, as if I’m shirking some sort of parental responsibility. But watching them work reminded me that to do things right takes a certain amount of freedom. They were oblivious to the fact that we had a playdate that afternoon, that I wanted them to clean up their worktable before we left, that we hadn’t eaten lunch yet. And therefore, they created beautiful things.

We are in such a rush to teach kids adult concepts. We mark their progress by noting when they have mastered skills that make them more like us. Telling time is a sign that they have the ability to understand the abstract constructs that our society depends upon. Counting money, I’m sure is next. But in agreeing to the system, something profoundly intuitive is lost, something we spend much of our adult life trying to reclaim. The right amount of time is the time it takes to finish the job, not the time we have left before the next thing we’ve committed to.


**Note, the photo in this post is courtesy of astrogirl529.
I found it by typing candy clock into flickr.com.
If you'd like to see more of her sharp, colorful photos, follow this link:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicolehastings/

Waking Up

Last night, when the horns and screams overwhelmed the barriers of my city windows and I finally tore myself away from the television, I went downstairs to see what was going on, and caught sight of something I’d never quite seen before, my children.

I had my twins after 9/11. It seemed an incredibly selfish thing to do - to actively seek to bring children into a world I no longer trusted. The notion that I was ever safe or secure was always an illusion, but it was a pretty convincing one for someone with no personal memory of the war in Vietnam and no first-hand experience living in a nation at war until Desert Storm. For almost six years now, I have been raising children under the surreal haze of George Bush. I have been trying to nurture values of honesty, kindness, open-mindedness and fairness. I have placed a premium on creativity, cooperation, thoughtful behavior and the ability to listen. I have tried desperately to maintain my own sense of hope, faith and dignity. To do this, has basically required a complete disassociation from reality. Until last night.

When Barak Obama was declared the president-elect of the United States, a friend who was watching with me said, “I feel like I’m waking up from a dream.” And so it was. When I opened the front door for the first time, at 12:00 am, I was in my pajamas. My neighbor screamed to me from across the street and I went running into the road, barefoot, to hug her. When I opened the door a second time, at 1:00 am, I saw things I’ve never seen before. The most incredible sight was a group of young, african-american women shouting with glee, and giving the thumbs up to an officer inside a police car who was leaning out the window to return the elated gesture. Both parties were laughing, with cell-phones clicking to capture the moment.

This desire to be outside and to find a way to express the overwhelming emotion of having elected Obama president, was responsible for the curious site, a block away, of crowds gathered on four corners of a busy intersection with no purpose, it seemed, but to cheer and take pictures of one another. Countless automobiles, taxis, garbage trucks and police cars drove by honking their horns and everyone roared some more. My husband said it was as if we all needed to go outside and howl at the moon.

That is why my sleeping children looked so very different to me when I descended the staircase. I had put them to bed in one world, but I knew they were going to wake up in another. The haze had lifted. The world looked much more like the one I had hoped to bring them into: a complete mess, yes, but a place I wanted to live in.

I'll take sugar with that, please.

Bourbon Coffee is the brainchild of Arthur Karuletwa. Karuletwa has an unusual dream – he wants to use his product to re-brand an entire nation. Bourbon, which is in the midst of opening stores on three continents, showcases regional coffee products from the hills of Karuletwa’s native land, Rwanda. I just finished editing three pieces about Rwanda and I can be included in the category (very large I imagine) of people who have one, and only one association with Rwanda: genocide. My grasp of the subject could have been summed up as “A distant memory of something horrible - Hutus and Tutsis and machetes.” The genocide took place fourteen years ago and until I started this job, I knew nothing else of Rwanda. My image of the place was frozen in 1994, its memory roused only by the events in Yugoslavia and Sudan - nations whose unraveling caused the international community to quibble over the term genocide.

So you can imagine my surprise when I found myself working on a story not of despair, but of hope. Rwanda has undergone a remarkable transformation. It is a country striving, against enormous odds, to bring itself into the middle class. The change is being led, in many cases, by a generation of returnees - the children of Tutsis targeted in previous waves of genocide in the 1950's and 1960's - who have come back to rebuild their country. Many of them have chosen the path of creating socially responsible businesses that will raise the standard of living for all Rwandans. Arthur Karuletwa is one of them. He grew up in Uganda, went to work in the west, married an American and then came back to Rwanda to try and find a way to bridge the terrible ethnic divisions that ripped his nation apart. Arthur is a Tutsi but ninety percent of the farmers who work for him at Bourbon Coffee, are Hutus. His coffee chain, which helps Rwandan farmers switch from producing commodity coffee to specialty coffee, is creating a measurable difference in their lives.

Editing these pieces changed my view of journalism. It clarified that we have a moral imperative to report when human nature succeeds with the rigor and intensity that we report when it fails. If our knowledge of Rwanda ends with the genocide, where is the imperative to help in Darfur? How can we care about Africa when the tale always ends the same way – not because it has to, but because we lose interest once the familiar narrative of desperation has reached its climax? The story in Rwanda is just beginning – but who would know? It isn’t splashed across our screens or our papers. It is lost in a cynical notion of what makes news. We live in a bombastic culture which floods us so completely with accounts and images of our failures that we have come to accept this as practically the only criteria for good journalism – to expose corruption, to bear witness to violence and to doubt success. People have a right to be deluged with images of cooperation, determination, inspiration and salvation. Without this, I believe that editors and journalists are complicit in the actual making of the terrible events they think they’re only reporting.

***To see the pieces I edited, which were produced by Janet Tobias for Frontline World, follow the link below*****

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2008/10/rwanda_after_th.html

Arthur’s story is titled: Rwanda’s High End Hopes for Coffee and clicking the title will take you to the video. There are two other wonderful stories titled: Protecting Rwanda’s Gorillas, and Rwanda: Millennium Village. Click their titles to see the videos and read more online.

The Savages

I usually watch movies I want to see, but recently I watched one I didn’t - The Savages. The movie tells the story of a brother and sister, Wendy and Jon Savage, who are called to Arizona to fetch their estranged father, Lenny. They arrive in Sun City to find that his girlfriend has died, her kids are taking the house, their father is in the hospital and he may have Parkinsons disease. They haven’t seen him in twenty years. Wendy and Jon (played by Laura Linney and Seymour Philip Hoffman) decide to bring him to Buffalo, New York and they set him up at the Valley View Nursing Home close to Jon’s house. I have avoided watching The Savages because the details of the plot hew a little too closely to my own life in which my father, divorced for the second time after twenty years and living with Parkinsons himself, is moved by my sister and me to an assisted living facility four blocks from my apartment.

After Jon and Wendy put their father in Valley View they visit him almost every day but they never broach the subject of why Lenny abandoned them. Wendy decorates his room, Jon watches old movies, and the rest of the film is filled with scenes of the siblings struggling with their own failed relationships and unrealized dreams. The Savages is incredibly frustrating to watch because it assumes that you can make a movie about a father dying in which the father is just a prop, an excuse for a brother and sister to come together. The siblings argue with each other, lie to each other, attempt to support each other and ultimately to redeem one another, but never, never do they include their father in their drama. He dies quietly as they rage and suffer in orbit around him.

The night I watched The Savages, I was in a strange mood. It had been a long, confusing week. Under the specter of our country’s economic collapse, I suffered my own crisis of confidence. My children have been in kindergarten for one month and they are flourishing. For three weeks I reveled in their success and in my new found freedom. Then, I began to flounder. After spending five and a half years preparing them to step successfully into the world without my guidance I find myself overwhelmed at any hint they might be struggling. They take bumps in the road in stride, but I get thrown off balance. I am cranky and upset. I overreact to small things. I am tired, my face is breaking out, and the other day, I cried on the street. This behavior goes against everything I know to be true about myself. I believe so fiercely in their independence and yet, I seem remarkably unprepared to handle it. Allowing them to try new things, to experience life without me, to succeed and fail on their own terms has turned me into an emotional wreck and this infuriates me.

So it was in that defeated state, I turned to The Savages. I figured I had nothing to lose because although I’m shocked at my inability to deal with a new stage in the life of my children, at least I know I am not good at handling the care of my ill father in his old age. I can’t seem to catch up with the changes he’s going through. I want to be with the person he is now but I often find myself acting like a teenager, responding to a man I knew twenty-five years ago. I can be unkind and short-tempered when I visit when I mean to be patient and helpful. I’m often confused by his behavior. Is he acting this way because he’s sick or because he’s old or is it just his personality? And which do I want the answer to be? Then comes the worst of the questions, the one raised by the mere act of having to visit him at all: How can I let my father be institutionalized? Why aren’t I taking care of him myself? It is hard to admit to the selfishness that is at the base of that answer. I am not taking care of him because it means changing the very things I value most in my life - my marriage and my home. I’d have to leave Brooklyn, move to the suburbs and would have a fourth person’s feelings and needs to consider in every decision I made every day. I am afraid to add my father to the equation of marriage, motherhood and career because I am unsure of the result.

I thought I might recognize myself in what the Savages are going through, but I didn’t. When the movie was over I wanted it returned immediately. I had an irrational fear that its cold, sadness might somehow infect our house. But after a while I began to feel sort of grateful. The movie had the unexpected effect of assuaging some of my guilt. The needs of my children and father might require more strength and humility than I currently possess, but at least I am engaged in a meaningful way with the people I care most about. All week I have been miserable because it seems to me that my emotions have run roughshod over my intellect. Now I have more respect for the ability to feel deeply. What a deadening of the soul the Savage children must have suffered from being abandoned. They can touch their father, kiss their father, provide for his physical care, but they can’t interact with him. I may be off kilter right now, but I at least I am alive. On one end of the spectrum there is a closeness so suffocating it clouds your reason, on the other there is a detachment so profound that even death can’t shake you awake, somewhere in the middle is a happy family.

Hooking Up

Page 126. That’s the first time an article appears in the October issue of Seventeen magazine. By article I mean anything longer than a paragraph, and by paragraph I mean any one or two sentences formatted in the shape of a paragraph. In the forty pages that follow, there is only one other entry that could qualify as a bona fide article. I wish this was the most upsetting thing in Seventeen magazine, but it wasn’t. The most upsetting thing was on page 101 in Seventeen’s “ultimate COLLEGE guide!” under the subheading “all about GUYS.” Written by Lauren Metz, who can’t possibly have children, it’s called “rules of dating” only “dating” is scratched out and replaced by “hooking up.”

Here’s a peek:

It was rule number one that got me, “Skip being exclusive.” Ms. Metz advises teenagers that, “No-strings-attached hookups are way more common in college than serious relationships. With tons of new people to meet, no one is rushing into a big commitment.” Really? So dating is out of fashion and therefore our daughters should just go have random sex with people? Well, not totally random because rule two is “Be selective.” If I step back I can appreciate rules three through five (“Recognize a booty call,” “Know the signs” and “Protect your heart”) because they at least could be construed as helping girls to recognize the signs of a hook-up without actually advocating them.

Nowhere is the word condom mentioned.

It’s not that I’m out of touch. I’ve heard of hook-up culture. I know about friends with benefits. I’ve read the shocking statistics on sexually transmitted diseases among teenage girls. I just didn’t realize that it had become so mainstream that Seventeen was providing how-to guides. And yet, I have to admit the article had a perverse effect on me; it crystallized my role as a parent. Without thinking I turned to my husband and said, “We both have to talk to both kids about sex.”

I’d never thought about it that way before. I think I always imagined myself talking to my daughter about sex and my husband talking to my son. Now that seems quaint. If the narrative the dominant culture is providing is that sex is a transaction that requires no emotional exchange we have to provide a different narrative. Our daughter needs to hear men talk about love and relationships and our son needs to hear women talk about them too. Hook-up culture requires that we go beyond modeling a good relationship in our marriage. Our children need actual words floating in their subconscious that tell them a different story than the half-drunk text messages they can expect to receive in the middle of the night according to Seventeen’s rule # 3 (When a guy starts texting you after 1A.M. he’s interested in one thing: late-night hooking up!).

I picked up Seventeen magazine for research. I had an idea for a story aimed at teen-age girls and I thought Seventeen might be a possible outlet. My idea seemed to have no place in a world where teenagers routinely wear 3” stiletto heels, but I am grateful that I read Seventeen. It killed my sentimentality. In the face of hook-up culture my instinct is to want to protect my children but that is a true fantasy. My role is to prepare them and preparation requires enough sangfroid to see the situation clearly. Thank you Lauren Metz. I hate what you’re saying but I’m glad you said it.

Hijacked

I didn’t want to write about Sarah Palin. I’ve been avoiding it all week. I had a purpose, in titling this blog iklektik ink. It was to set up the expectation that you could find anything on these pages. I imagined that if you were avoiding work or the laundry or your children, you might just check your bookmark, read a post to kill some time and be surprised in the process. But given the stakes in this election, I have come to accept that my mind is totally consumed. I am unable to think of other things, even when I want to.

Last night I stayed awake to watch Charles Gibson interview Sarah Palin on Nightline. You will have to imagine me, in bed with my already large eyes open wider than normal and my jaw hanging ajar. Sarah Palin does not read the newspaper. Sarah Palin does not have a basic grasp of what has been happening in the world for the past eight years. To be in line for the presidency and not know what the Bush Doctrine is? It’s unconscionable. I don’t know whether to thank John McCain for giving the nation fair warning of what a “maverick” presidency will look like or to smack him for being so utterly reckless with our fates. It took me a long time to fall asleep.

Mostly what kept me awake was ruminating about how little we value intelligence and critical thinking in this country. These are not qualities we look for in leaders. In 2000 I was convinced that it was precisely Bill Clinton’s abuse of his own intelligence that delivered George W. Bush the election. The Monica Lewinsky scandal was a scandal not because of the sex but because of the extremes Clinton went to in order to bend language so that he could avoid telling the truth. Voters were furious and they wanted someone incapable of doing that. In loped Dubbya.

Haven’t we had enough of this experiment? Is it possible that eight years of George W. Bush has not made it eminently clear that “a guy you could have a beer with” was not a good criterion for choosing our head of state? Are we really so insecure as a nation that we need our leaders to be recognizable figures from our daily lives? Don’t we want our leaders to be better than us? What happened to the notion of greatness? Since when does being an ordinary Joe (now, Jane) qualify someone to lead the most powerful nation on earth?

Sarah Palin was chosen to deliver votes for John McCain. I think she can do that. She was not chosen to appeal to women like me. She was chosen to appeal to religious and conservative women who are thrilled to see their views (limited as they may be) represented. They are going to go to the polls, they are going to get their men to go to the polls, and perversely, they are going to feel proud doing it. I hope I am wrong. I hope John McCain has underestimated the intelligence of our nation. I hope he has fatally sided with a 20th century version of our nation as a white, Christian, nation that can ignore the rest of its citizens without consequence. I hope Obama is more than just a possibility of what may come in the 21st century. I hope we’re in the 21st century.

Hillary's Women

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Watching Hillary Rodham Clinton’s speech at the democratic convention I was struck by the contrast between the facial expressions of the young women in the audience and those of Hillary’s contemporaries. The women of my generation looked like this:

We were beaming, chipper, elated. Our guy won, and the woman who lost to him was rocking the house. We felt proud of her now that she was no longer a threat to an Obama presidency and we could take a moment to revel in the girl-powerness of it all.

This is how the women of my mother’s generation looked:


For the first time, I truly understood what they had lost. Hillary's women wanted more than someone who shared their opinions (many candidates could have laid claim to that territory) they wanted a peer, someone whose views were shaped by the same forces that had shaped their own. I am a die-hard Obama fan. My support for him began with the thrill of his oratory, a desire to stomp on the racial lunacy that divides this nation, and a steadfast belief in his integrity. But in the end, I've realized that my support comes down to a much baser sentiment. He is six years older than I am and I want to see him in the White House. I want my generation to have its turn to lead before we become the next generation.

In the faces of Hillary’s women I saw the disappointment of the entire feminist movement, the movement that has never quite seen its dream come true. If Obama becomes president there are countless members of the civil rights movement who will live to see that their struggle had value. That's all these women were asking for.

I watched Hillary’s speech not in Denver, not on television, but on YouTube five days after she spoke, something my own mother – who died 11 years ago today – could not have imagined. I am one of those young women, if at 41 I’m even allowed to call myself young, who has faulted Hillary for not being the kind of woman I wanted to see as a leader. She seems so uncomfortable in her own skin, so dogged by questions of cookies and headbands and pants-suits, so unclear about how to embrace her power. My generation demands an ease of presentation, a security of identity that Hillary could never pull off. Many of us, myself included, are missing a sensitivity chip when it comes to appreciating the battle wounds of the women who paid such a high personal cost to ensure that we have the opportunity to make choices about the kinds of work and the kinds of relationships we want for ourselves. It’s no wonder that these women, Hillary's women, wanted one of their own as commander-in-chief. They have suffered for a very long time, without reward, for the happy-faced blond waving an Obama flag next to them.