Dangermond.org

Four Women

One Fabulous Villa

Mexico is beautiful, proud, polite, full of murals, has tons of art and culture, bustling with commerce and activity, family loving – Mexico City has more museums than any other city on Earth – including Paris?

VIVA MEXICO

In Summary: In Cuernavaca, we stayed at the wonderful Casa de la Grúa. 

https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/20743463

We ate at Hacienda de Cortes (where tree vines form the roof of the restaurant and you can wander through the koi pond garden) and Las Mañanitas (where you have drinks on the lawn surrounded by peacocks, macaw parrots, and a giant tortoise before being shown to your table). In Mexico City we had cheap but delicious tostadas at the stand in the Coyoacán Mercado. In Tepotzlan we had a million-dollar view of the mountains while we ate at El Ciruelo. And at  Del Angel in Taxco, we drank Cuban rum while looking over a Santoriniesque vista. However, my favorite food came from our sweet and amazing housekeeper, Silvia, who made us delicious chilaquiles, and fresh guacamole every single day. 

DAY 1

Arrive in Mexico City and get picked up by a driver Delia had arranged for us to head to Cuernavaca, a popular vacation site known as the City of Eternal Spring because of its temperate climate and the profusion of flowering plants in its parks and gardens. it is the second largest city in Morales, a state in Mexico. We arrived at Casa de la Grúa to a welcome by Delia, the manager and Silvia, the housekeeper who had prepared a light meal for our arrival. We walked across the street to one of the largest grocery stores in Mexico to buy everything we could possibly need including homemade tortillas for the next day.

DAY 2

CUERNAVACA – the first day we explored Cuernavaca on foot – we walked to Centro, a mere 1.5 miles from the Casa de la Grúa. The Cuernavaca Cathedral was built in the 16th century on land donated from Hernan Cortés’s wife. Its purpose was for the evangelization and control of indigenous people after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. It also doubled as a fortress, with cannons mounted above the buttresses. It consists of one giant cathedral and two smaller chapels and only depicts Christ during his living years – not on the cross. It has been designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. 

The Robert Brady Museum was our favorite thing in Cuernavaca. Robert Brady was an Iowa born heir who was a textile designer and a huge art collector. He looked a bit like Freddy Mercury and was gay during a time when it was not socially acceptable. He hung out with socialites and artists such as Peggy Guggenheim, Rita Hayworth and Josephine Baker (who spent two months of the year at his home in Cuernavaca). At one point, John Wayne lived next door. His home was a former Franciscan monastery built in the 16th century and his greatest wish was to leave it as a museum after he died. His collection includes pieces from Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo (including the original self-portrait with monkey), Ruffino Tamayo, and many older pieces from places he traveled to, such as Papua, New Guinea and Africa.

We had lunch at Hacienda de Cortes (where tree vines form the roof of the restaurant and you can wander through the koi pond garden). There we were served the best margaritas and fresh juices ever! Then back to the Casa de la Grúa, our base camp, for mani pedis by Delia. 

DAY 3

TEPOTZLAN    

Wednesday, our driver took us to Tepoztlán is a small mountain pueblo south of Mexico City. It’s known as the reputed birthplace of Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec feathered serpent god, and for its new agey feeling, excellent craft market, and homemade ice cream shops with exotic flavors (rice, corn, tequila, cactus, maguey). A steep trail leads to the Aztec Tepozteco pyramid on a clifftop above the town, but we did not have time (or energy – the altitude difference caught up with us occasionally!) to do a hike. We came home to hour long massages in the spa room of the casita. 

DAY 4

MEXICO CITY

Mexico City (population 12 million) is HUGE! Like so huge that it can easily take you half an hour to get from one site to another. We started our day in the charming Coyoacan neighborhood, home to Frida Kahlo’s house – Casa Azul. If you go, it is important to buy tickets ahead of time, because they almost always sell out. You could buy a pass to take photos there. It was definitely a touching experience to tour her home and see her corrective devices, paintings, and braces. 

The Coyoacan Mercado was filled with beautiful arts and crafts, tostada booths, and fruits and vegetables. After exploring Coyoacan on foot for most of the day, our driver took us on a little driving tour of some of the major buildings in the downtown historical district. We ended our day with cocktails at the bar on top of the Torre Latinoamericana. This building was Mexico City’s tallest skyscraper for many years and was the world’s first major skyscraper that was built on a very active seismic zone. The skyscraper suffered no damage in the major 1985 earthquake, but many others around it did.

I really liked Mexico City despite its pretty awful traffic and hope to come back someday to go to the many incredible museums and archaeological sites. I needed about five more days to see everything I would have liked to see!

DAY 5

CUERNAVACA

La Mañanitas is an institution in Cuernavaca, with lush gardens replete with wandering peacocks and colorful macaw parrots as well as an attentive staff. After drinks in the garden, we were ushered to our table in the outdoor dining area and were well attended by a fleet of servers. 

The Borda Garden was a summer mansion built by a wealthy miner from Taxco, by the name of José de la Borda. A lover of botany and horticulture, he had a garden based on Versailles built, which had many species of plants, two pools, terraces, and fountains. In 1865, during the government of Maximilian of Habsburg, Maximillian and his wife Carlota used this place as their summer residence, due to the constant spring-like climate that exists in Cuernavaca throughout the year. Now it operates as a park, museum and cultural center.

DAY 6

TAXCO

The last day of our trip was spent wandering around the mountain silver-mining pueblo of Taxco. Our driver took us the 1.5 hours up 2000 feet to the mountains. Taxco is in the Mexican state of Guerrero, which has had a lot of crime related to cartels. Taxco is the only town in Guerrero that the U.S. State Department approves travel to. I will say that we felt very safe the whole time that we were on our way there and back, as well as throughout Mexico.  

Taxco is known for its proliferation of silver jewelry stores, its Spanish architecture with white stucco buildings and red clay roofs, its gigantic and elaborate cathedral, its narrow streets with rock designs embedded in them, and the fact that about half of its taxi fleet is VW bugs and busses (because of their rear wheel drive and ability to scale steep inclines)! It also has a scenic cable lift going up to a mountaintop hotel. We started off at a jewelry shop/silver mine that gave us a history lesson over shots of Mezcal and then Palomas and encouraged us to try on a replica of a silver Frida Kahlo necklace. We had a very picturesque lunch on a terrace here, as well as some yummy Mexican ice cream.

The Church of Santa Prisca, in Taxco, was built between 1751 and 1759, funded by José de la Borda, who was one of the wealthiest silver mine owners of the region. The construction of this church (for his son – who was a priest) nearly bankrupted him. It is considered one of the best examples of Spanish Baroque ornate stucco architecture. The church is named after Saint Priscilla (Prisca) who refused an order by Roman Emperor Tiberius Claudius to make a sacrifice to the god Apollo, because of her Christian faith. She was beaten, sent to prison, and then thrown to a lion in the amphitheater. Instead of attacking her, the lion lay down at her feet. We looked for a medallion representing her in many of the silver shops of Taxco and could not find a single one. What an oversight! Santa Prisca is overwhelmingly ornate, with its floor-to-ceiling altarpieces covered in gold leaf.

DAY 7

HOMEWARD BOUND

We had our last breakfast hand made by the lovely Silvia and said goodbye to the Sargent Thrush who sang to us every morning and lives in the tree near the casita. In seven days, we became so accustomed to seeing Silvia upon rising, taken on wonderful excursions by our friendly drivers, and having always at the ready, Delia, for any of our needs, we all shed a tear leaving this magical place and vowed to return. 

All of the photos of the Casa de la Grúa are by Ann Madden

Much of the narrative is compiled by Karen Aderer’s FB posts

For rates and availability – https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/20743463

There is nothing more constant than change. You’d think a worn out cliché like this one would lose its currency, but change – especially other people’s change – makes me incredibly nostalgic for the way things were.

Adella the Storyteller transitioned.

Tommy will sell his Bay Saint Louis house.

Tin’s buddy will move to Virginia.

Leo will not be cutting the grass at the Hall anymore.

Why is this news uncomfortable?

Cancelling, postponing, moving, saying goodbye fill me with nostalgia. Melancholy sneaks in despite my daily reminders that change is my only constant.

The headline of today’s newspaper reads PACE OF DEATHS RISING as New Orleans becomes ground zero again for the fourth wave of the pandemic.

I’m in New Orleans with Tin back in school here.

Why is my son still at a school that is failing him? Why is the school open, given that children are the ones getting hit hardest this fourth wave?

Why is being here in New Orleans, walking by the Lala, meditating by the fountain in City Park, seeing the large houses that have gone up overnight on sleepy Bayou St. John – houses that remind me of a greeting card that folds open to cartoonish cutouts of buildings too big, too jammed up for the surface they are on – registering differently.

I must be in a good place now.

The whys seem unimportant.

I feel no tug of yesterday and tomorrow is safely in the future. Good, right? Yet suddenly, without warning, I’m nostalgic for the way the gloaming glimmers on Bayou St. John and this hint of fall, which the slanted sunlight on the water hints at even in this insufferable heat.

Nostalgia laden with memories.

Memories of soft pajamas and shuffling feet through a house with adults, something warm to eat, cold to drink – a bed, a window, a porch – television murmuring. Is this my childhood or Tin’s?

Today’s meditation – anything created ends

– joy, laughter, sadness, life … .

Tin’s photo

by Marc Pagani

Since Tin was able to write, I’ve asked him to write me about his favorite day, our best trip, and to write me a letter about what he loves – and this has been his gift to me for my birthday or Hanukkah.

This year, he said he wrote a speech for me. There were several attempts that I caught on video, all bloopers till today.

Here is his SPEECH.

Today was one of those days, the sun warming the chill in the air, the hammock beckoning, and as always running short of time and short of years too.

Rare is the moment where you feel joy for a moment, sad for how fast other moments are moving, tight chested for all the tension that the present makes with your past and future, all in the same breath cycle.

Today marks the 11 year anniversary of my mom’s passing.

When you look at the world through a calendar mind you mark time as days on a page, joyful vs painful years, and every breath you have taken between the time your mother died and now.

A friend sent a note her mother had written and said her mom was unconditional love. I had the good fortune to have had the same from my mother.

I became a mother a week after my own had passed and because this happened late in my life, the three of us were not together at the same time. I could not look back at my unknowing and speak more wisely, more lovingly to my mother about who she was to me.

Because Patsy was my mother, I was raised with the mother lode of love and to this moment it remains my solid foundation.

After the 2005 Federal Flood, handmade signs started appearing on telephone and electrical poles around New Orleans that said: Think That You Might Be Wrong. There was a randomness to their placement, which added to the mystery. The signs were around long enough the word wrong was scratched out on one placed prominently on a telephone pole by the Dumaine Street bridge over Bayou St. John and now read: Think That You Might Be A Robot, which always tickled me. 

It has been 15 years from the time of the Flood, and one thing I’ve learned is a lot of what we think is wrong. In March of 2020, we entered the time of the Pandemic, and for the last seven months some friends of mine have voiced a desire for us to go back to normal. As if that were possible.

What if normal is not where any of us need to go? Normal for most of my friends was working like a banshee to afford a middle class life without any time to enjoy it. Or, for me, it was trying to connect one low paying project to the next to create a financial tightrope that even a pregnant flea would be nervous to traverse.

Normal was my son in a school that had 27 students, seven with special needs, and every year a teacher spinning off into the atmosphere – one had a nervous breakdown mid year and would sit at her desk crying (my friend’s daughter journaled about this one), one left after the school year because it was so untenable and unsatisfying that he couldn’t bear to continue the profession, one told me when I asked her if she thought my son belonged in this school that she wasn’t sure if she belonged there either. And then the Pandemic hit, and my son was home doing distant learning and for the first time in four years he was learning something.

Then summer came and COVID-19 didn’t go away and seven months in we returned to distant learning again this fall. Some parents decided it was much better to home school for three hours a day rather than follow the school’s criteria of sitting in front of a screen for seven and a half hours. Some parents are now working remotely for the first time, and have had an easier time accommodating distant learning. Some leave their children to their screens home alone and returned to work, some threw their hands up in the air and wished for schools to reopen. No family seems to want or need the same situation.

What if we are all wrong? What if parents who are now with their children at home are experiencing something most Americans never had – time with them? What if working remotely becomes a way of life for most and it engenders flex time for working parents? What if school isn’t where our children need to be spending the majority of their time? What if they are not missing much by being out of school?

All the ranting I’ve heard from some parents that kids need socialization seems off the mark as well, because it could be had with a smaller pod of friends in their neighborhood. Children could seamlessly move into the weekend without a need for parents to shuffle back and forth to organized playdates with students who live across town? What if bikes on the streets, meet ups on the porch steps, and running in and out of neighbors’ houses came back in style?

What if COVID-19 doesn’t miraculously go away at some particular date? What is lost by continuing to be cautious, open and welcoming the changes to normal?

The institution of school would like you to sit in your seat now.

They would like to teach you half truths.

They would like to prepare you for a world that doesn’t exist.

They would like you to be quiet.

They would like you to sit still.

They would like you to obey.

They offer pills if you cannot follow their rules.

To you, my boy, I say be WILD, keep MOVING, and do not ever forget you were born to LEAD, not to FOLLOW.

We cannot see the gift in what we resist.

Throughout the Pandemic folks have been wringing their hands about gaining Covid 19 pounds, and I was one of them. I can’t blame Covid-19 for my weight gain though, mine started two years ago. Well, let’s back up – more like four years ago because as soon as I started losing it, I started gaining it back.

I had gone to see my endocrinologist at Ochsner. He was not only the head of endocrinology, but also my friend and neighbor. He was the medical professional who put a name to my thyroid condition – Hashimoto’s disease – which explained the sudden loss of my hair.

I had been seeing him professionally for four years when he told me I needed to lose weight. My weight pointed to obese on his charts. For those four years, I would put him through the paces, asking all sorts of nutritional information, and I was frankly surprised he would not engage with me on this topic. He would hem and haw and then he would suggest I speak to a nutritionist if I thought it would help.

My questions concerned gluten, soy, walnuts and all sorts of other foods that I was suddenly having a reaction to and my autodidactic research kept pointing to Hashimoto’s necessitating a restrictive diet. The challenge was the more I restricted the more I had gut problems. It seemed that everything I ate caused my stomach to churn in turmoil.

After a lifetime love of eating, I suddenly didn’t want to go out to eat, cook, or accept an invitation for dinner from a friend. I had too many restrictions and inevitably something would trigger my stomach, and I would be miserable for hours afterwards.

What I didn’t understand is I was developing a new problem – which has a name – orthorexia. Orthorexia is an unhealthy attachment to healthy eating. Are you with me now?

So about this time a friend was starting to oversee an obesity weight loss program for the state and since she didn’t have any clients, I became her guinea pig. She put me on a restrictive diet – 900 calories – and I started to lose weight. It wasn’t a healthy diet, as a matter of fact it called for me to curtail any exercise.

In a span of three months, I lost 27 lbs. I was obsessed with my diet and when I traveled to see my family in Atlanta, I brought my own boiled eggs, carrot and celery sticks, and while everyone participated in meals together – fried chicken, biscuits, mac n cheese, I sat with my own sad little meals trying my best to adhere to my weight loss plan. I had lost the weight already, but now I lived in sheer fear I would put it back on.

And I did. I gained 30 lbs for the 27 lbs. Fast forward to the pandemic. I noticed people around me who had lost weight through a myriad of diets. Three were on Weight Watchers. One was on her own diet and exercise program. One did it through green smoothies. One did it via cutting out dairy, grains, and a multitude of other food items, plus a divorce. One did it through Whole 30 and intermittent fasting.

So I began to look at how I would lose weight. The pandemic had opened up more time for my walks, which had been compromised by going back and forth to New Orleans six days a week, so I began to walk three miles per day and some days would walk up to 9 miles. I rode my bike for an hour in the afternoons on most days.

First I started following one of my friend’s diets – the green smoothie and liver focus pills. I didn’t lose a single pound in a month. Then I looked into the intermittent fasting diet where you eat for six hours but not for 18 other hours of a 24-hour period. I thought I would go back to the small plate meals I had done with a nutritionist in San Francisco when I had lost 30 lbs in my 40s. I kept trying the small plates on my own, but it wasn’t leading to weight loss. I was about to check out Weight Watchers for the first time in my life.

Then one day while walking I looked for a podcast on mindful eating. I had become a daily meditator when I lost my hair in 2012, and I now sought podcasts for whatever I wanted to know and I knew nothing about mindful eating. So I searched the term “mindful eating.”

Only what I sought was not what I found.

I listened to one podcast and it opened the door to a completely different universe, one where dieticians were urging people to give up diets. Eating professionals were pointing to a diet culture that had pervaded the medical community and society and made us all sick. Authors, speakers, and medical professionals were saying everything you know about food is wrong, everything you tell yourself has been warped and manipulated, and everything your body needs is in your hands. One even spoke of Michael Pollan as a wrong headed person. [Note: he had been my guru.]

MIND BLOWN.

The first podcasts I listened to were hosted by Christy Harrison, who wrote The Anti-Diet. Next I listened to Isabel Foxen Duke about stopping the fight with food. Then I listened to Dan Harris’s 10% Happier where he interviewed Evelyn. This led me to Evelyn Tribole who wrote Intuitive Eating 25 years ago. I am on a roll – every day I go for my walk and listen to yet another dietician with a story to tell – one who was put on a restrictive diet at three years old by her pediatrician, one who sold diet products to doctors, one who went to school to be a nutritionist and almost quit because it meant she would have to have a weight loss practice.

During this discovery that I am still on, I began to envision a world where I am happy with my body. I thought about my 34-year-old niece who exudes body positivity and pleasure principles. She told me she follows Sarah Jenks and Taryn Brumfitt on Instagram because she loves their body sense. I realized that I was perpetuating this crazy messed up version of myself by carrying all the stress of wanting and trying to be the “thinner than my body wants to be” person, trying to lose weight to reach and hold an acceptable body weight for society and the medical profession, and that all of this self loathing that had gone into my body for 61 years was a sham!

If I asked a gal pal if she liked her body, 99% of them would say no. How much has the diet culture permeated, pervaded, perverted and punished all women into self loathing? I told all this to a friend on a walk the other day about how all of it – dieting, self-loathing, thin obsession, and body image challenges were all a product of everything else – patriarchy, capitalism, misogyny, and that it had infiltrated the medical profession to such a degree that headlines purporting fat people die from Covid-19 more than not-fat people are common (and statistically inaccurate). Even NPR blames higher Covid-19 mortality on Black folks who have high BMIs. It’s a lie!

Now what? Could you envision a world where you love your body? Does the idea of sitting down to a meal that includes all of your favorite foods turn you on? Would you imagine your body telling you when it needs food and when it is full? Could you imagine it without interference from a narrative that has been shoved down your throat your whole life while being upheld by everyone you know?

There are examples in my life where suddenly everything I knew to be true became false:

I am a woman, I had to learn that women are dismissed, undervalued, and kept out of locked rooms where important decisions get made.

I have a son, I had to learn that boys get a bum deal via the Boy Code, and realized that as a woman I uphold this protocol.

I am an American, I had to learn that the United States built racist institutions and as a white woman I have helped maintain a system that blatantly harms groups of people.

Why should it come as any surprise that the food we grow, the food we eat, the food we desire, avoid, prepare, crave, market, sell, and buy has been manipulated by avarice and misinformation?

I was speaking to a dear friend last night who had just come from her parents’ house on the corner of a street lined with tall sycamore and oak trees in Atlanta. The contents of the house were laid out on tables for an estate sale as the house is being sold. For more years than I can remember, I’ve called my friend just as she was getting ready to mow the large lawn for her parents. One day a week was devoted to that oversized lawn, and many more days to the help and care of aging parents who had now both passed away.

She was pulling into her own driveway when she said I’m about to cry and called you because I knew you would understand. I said it seems lately I fantasize too much about being a child again. The memories of wanting to flee my childhood and race towards adult notions have faded completely, and what remains is a certain longing to be a child again in my parents’ home.

My friend asked how I was doing with everything going on and said she had seen me on television with the listening booths we had at the Hall. She said she liked my hat. I told her the truth – on any given day it’s hard to know where I’m at.

On Saturday, May 30th, Tin and I drove to Gulfport with friends to protest the killing of Black people. Again. This has become such a common thread for us that I don’t remember when we weren’t protesting. Tin’s comment when we got in the car, “Do we have to go to another protest?”

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When Tin was young, I brooded about having to pierce the bubble of his innocent childhood with facts and fears about being a Black boy in America. I resented that my white friends didn’t mention Trayvon Martin to their three year olds; after all Tin and I had been to a rally, a teach in, a protest for the young 17-year-old Black boy murdered while holding a bag of Skittles. The gut wrenching knowledge that Trayvon’s murderer, George Zimmerman got off and went on to sign Skittle bags for white people as a memento is more than any of us should have to bear.

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I’ve spoken on Department of Justice panels about community policing and listened to police chiefs talk about the implicit bias training and racial equity training they are undergoing and listen to them tell us how far we have come. And I respond the same way, every time. “When I have to tell my son that he risks being beaten up or killed by the police because he is Black, we have not come far enough.”

I have ended the day from workshops that I’ve led or workshops where I’ve participated in racial equity dialogues and have crawled deep in my couch trying to find space to believe in hope that my son stands a fighting chance in this country. I’ve fantasized about elsewhere and have traveled outside of America with my son to introduce him to the world in case he has to escape in order to breathe.

And though I’ve had the “talk” with my 11 year old about the police, though I’ve introduced him to resistance and resilience, my heart sank the other day when we were having a conversation at dinner. I said, “You never want to get yourself in a position where you have to even speak to the police. Do you understand?” And he said, “Is this about George Floyd?” I said this is about everything. It’s about a world that is upside down and you need to walk the straight and narrow so you don’t even have to have an encounter. Do you understand?

“I’m not worried,” Tin told me. “I got you.”

It was at that moment that I just wanted to walk off the planet with him in tow. Uh uh, I said, my lips trembling as I watched him put a mouthful of pasta into his mouth, you don’t got me. Red spaghetti sauce dotted his cheeks, his tee shirt, his placemat while his napkin was folded right beside his plate. I can’t do anything for you if you are out there by yourself. Do you understand? [I heard myself breathing as I spoke to him.] My whiteness is not going to help you if a police officer stops you and I’m not there.

I was mad, pissed, vexed, angry at him. At my son.

I realized everything I had taught Tin in the past eleven years was negated by what he sees. He sees my privilege. He sees my whiteness. He thinks his white mother makes him invincible. What a sorry ass thing to think. Did I contribute to this magical thinking on his part? What have I done to contribute to his naive feeling of safety.

This is what I was thinking at the dinner table with my 11-year-old son on a Thursday night: I was thinking oh no, don’t you feel safe, don’t you feel invincible, don’t you dare think I could help you. Because I can’t, God damn it all. I can’t do a bloody thing to help you survive in this world. I can’t protect you. Don’t sit here blissfully eating your spaghetti and tell me I got you, because I don’t got you son. I don’t got you.

Watch this if you think that any white mother could save her Black son. Or even a white friend save his Black friend.

What was your dinner conversation with your child last Thursday night?

Over and over and over again, I hear George Floyd call out for his mama. No MAMA – black, brown, red, yellow or white – can save her son from certain death at the hands of a system that supports mostly white men determined to destroy him.

Who was my 11-year-old self that I fantasize about returning to? My son does not get that. No, I’m not only stripping away his innocence, I’m already denying him a fantasy about his childhood when he gets older. Tell me this doesn’t suck. Then tell me what you plan to do about racism today?

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“Don’t let your passion project bankrupt you.” These were the words spoken to me by Malcolm White, head of the Mississippi Arts Commission when I first bought the 100 Men Hall. I tried to heed the warning during the first year of resurrecting the nonprofit but found myself caught up in the momentum of potential.

Then a pandemic halted my momentum. The Hall’s St Joseph’s Altar was cancelled, Chapel Hart was cancelled, Alvin Youngblood Hart was cancelled, Cedric Burnside was cancelled. At the same time, the little bit of my 401k I was funding this momentum with was decimated. And my passion project was shelved to wait out COVID-19’s trajectory.

In the halt of it all, a small amount of wonder opened up as well as my old work – investigative reporting – where I have plowed my trade for the past decades. I tried to leave it behind, but the work clings to me me like ivy and I accept its tendrils because it pays my bills.

Lamenting its return, I spoke with a friend yesterday who was also in a state of pandemic inquiry about her own work. She asked, “Didn’t you like it at one time?” Yes, I said, I have a talent and skill for getting folks to speak to me and I was rewarded handsomely for it in its heyday.

Sadly, the work now pays mere shekels of what it did ten years earlier as journalism has been eclipsed by the culture of free the Internet created. And since we all need money to survive, I must gladly accept its scraps.

But I have been wondering what is it about money and work that come together to make a good life?

Yesterday, I was interviewing an elderly widower for a project. We were finishing up, and the man said, “I have a story I want to share with you.” He told me of his wife’s decline, and how the week she passed, she sat upright and began speaking clearly and told him, ‘I’m okay. Don’t worry about me.” Then the day she was gone, a pink rose bloomed outside his window, its petals were larger and a deeper hue than the roses that surrounded it, and he knew it was sign she was okay.

He said, “Roger took a photograph of the unusually large rose and put it beside my chair with ‘I’m okay’ written at the bottom. I’m looking at it right now.” So I told him about a similar event in my life. My mother had lay dying in her hospital bed, and I asked her how I would know her from beyond. She said, “Dog.”

I wrote about it a long time ago in an essay titled My Mother The Dog:

Right after Tin turned one year old, he needed to have surgery to open his tear ducts because his eyes watered all the time. I had grown up with a doctor for a father and a nurse for a mother, so I had always entered the medical world with a knowledgeable person by my side. Now with both parents gone, in the post-operating room, as the nurses strapped my son’s little body down, and inserted into his thin arm an IV drip, I started panicking without my parent’s support. When the nurse wheeled the gurney away, I was ushered into the waiting room where I went to the window and began sobbing. “Mom, please, if you’re out there, please show yourself,” I whispered. 

The window looked out to fenced backyards in a nearby subdivision. The yards had gas grills, patio furniture, soccer balls, and bicycles. I felt sure I would spot a family’s dog, but there were no dogs to be seen. I sat down in the dull orange fiberglass chairs and stared vacantly at the television screen turned to a daytime talk show. One after another commercial came on, and not one had a dog in it. I kept repeating under my breath, “Mom, where are you? Please take care of him. Please be with him.” 

I went around to each table and thumbed through magazines. I grew a little alarmed because there was not one image of a dog on any page. How could this be? I was starting to think that no dog was the sign. By the time the nurse came through the doors to tell me Tin was fine and now in recovery I was tied up in a knot of worry.

When we arrived home, Margarete, his nanny, was waiting for us. Together we put Tin into his crib. She put her hand on my shoulder, and I almost started crying again from relief that this whole operation was behind us.

I stood by the video monitor outside Tin’s room watching him as he lay quietly in his crib.  

“He’ll probably sleep for a few hours,” I told Margarete. 

I went upstairs to my desk. I let out a few deep breaths that I had been holding onto since before dawn when I had gotten up to take him to the hospital. I set about my work, turning on my computer, opening emails, and then began my phone interviews. 

An hour passed quickly, and I hadn’t heard anything, so I went downstairs to check on Tin. Margarete was sitting at the dining room table with her sketchbook open. 

I walked over to the video monitor. Tin was sleeping peacefully on his stomach.

“How’s he doing?” I asked.

“He’s fine,” she said.  

“Good,” I said. “Whew! I feel like I need a nap after that ordeal.” 

Margarete smiled and continued sketching in her book. 

I refilled my water bottle, and started to head back upstairs. 

 “It’s funny,” Margarete said as I opened the door. “After you left, Tin barked like a dog for about 20 minutes before he fell asleep.” 

I told the widower about how I had been trying to adopt a child and my mother was dying in ICU, and she died on a Monday and the following Monday I met my son. He said he and his wife had adopted a son too – Roger, the one who took the photograph of the rose.

When I hung up the phone, my eyes glassy with tears, I realized this work I have dismissed has always paid me handsomely in stories. If you listen to stories, you could piece together what makes a good life. And then you too could suss out a life that even the rich aspire to live.

• 

Yesterday, the casinos opened back up in Hancock County. Half the information I hear is that we are moving too fast into more trouble ahead. Half the messages I read is that we are returning to normal.

I keep my guard up for normal’s arrival. It’s only now in the long morning walks and evening bikes rides that I have come to realize why normal is elusive. I grew up out of step, out of time.

My father moved us around as if we were military. Packing us up and flying us off to Managua, San Salvador, Panama, Puerto Rico, and driving us through all hours of the night towards Manhattan, the Bronx, Atlanta, Pensacola, and back and forth and in and out of New Orleans too many times to count.

He did this because he could earn a living anywhere as a doctor – with my mother as his nurse if it was his own practice. I lived in hotel rooms, my aunt’s rooms, my Maw Maw’s rooms, and many apartments, rooms and houses that we occupied as a family.

I never once experienced a life like my friends, where their father, mother or both went off to work at a certain time, and came home at a certain time, and they vacationed at a certain time, in a certain place. Our time and places dwelled in uncertainty.

I stumbled into a career as an investigative reporter, helping to build a company, with a regular paycheck, benefits, and a certainty and one day it imploded. I’ve spent nine years trying to claw back to that steady paycheck, the knowing what my days and months and years would be, the certainty that what I produce would be rewarded.

I spend a lot of time trying to make money out of my gifts and talents, trying to assuage the fear of not being able to pay my bills. And just when I thought I might master this puzzle, a pandemic hit, and whooshed away any thoughts of actually making money and instead offered me a sea of time.

Time to meditate, walk, take bike rides by the waterfront, not think about the mastery of money or schedules or work but instead time to contemplate a whole world reduced to a collective breath and uncertainty. It feels like home to me. And I realized I have been chasing the wrong currency all along.

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