NY missive no 188 - Thankful

What I’m most thankful for this thanksgiving is the Hiraldos in my life. First and foremost for being my World, of course, but also in some very specific ways that reflect each of their timeless uniqueness, as well as ingredients of our recent days. 

JNH, for the way that he has rolled with the epically involved high school application process here in NYC. A process that parents fret over, but then we really do need to check ourselves, as where else would you have options from 700 programs in several hundred schools across five boroughs, from focuses that range from STEM, to film-making, to marine conservation, together from the opportunity to learn from being in a city like this. 

The various essays and audition materials that JNH submitted have brought out marvelous nuggets of his creative, thoughtful self (proud mama-bragging alert here, but hey, it’s been a while). Like an essay on a moment that’s challenged him intellectually, for which he wrote about how he felt on finishing the last page of War and Peace. He said that while the story absorbed him entirely, he found Tolstoy’s inter-woven philosophical holding forth tedious. Or as he put it – and as I doubt anyone else would - the “brilliance of the story made reading the chapters in-between even more painful. Every word regarding the definition of ‘power’ and whatnot filled me with a longing to return to the story.” He described how, despite the challenge of reading the book, Tolstoy’s view has shaped his way of seeing the World, particularly Tolstoy's belief that we shouldn’t focus on individual leader-figures but on the masses, the “force that really moves history”. 

And CMH, for his perennial hutzpah and un-bragging leadership. How he’s already assembled a new crew at middle school, and is hustling on the basketball court alongside eighth graders two times his height. And how at a soccer club talent center he’s been attending on Fridays, his response to a coach testing him by saying he wasn’t taking the practice seriously enough was to quietly get back to playing, and to score three goals, to show that yes, I’m taking this seriously. 

Tia Z, who comes on most thanksgivings including this one. (She didn’t make it last year as I came down with Covid, and the previous one was when we visited her in Vegas). With sporadic visits you can’t predict when there will be moments of reconnection but there always are. For me and her this time it was when we were both up earlier than the others on the Friday after thanksgiving. As I had my morning coffee in pajamas she mentioned the sustenance she’s been getting from the stoics – prompted, perhaps, by the fact that the day before, after hitting up Central Park, we’d hunkered down on the sofa to watch Gladiator, which opens with scenes featuring Marcus Aurelius, who’s one of them. 

I remembered how much stoicism had resonated with me when I discovered it – through Seneca I think? – in the car park-style sprawling library at Edinburgh University. The conversation provided a much needed re-grounding reminder of the tenets of courage, temperance, justice and wisdom (and whatnot, JNH might add). 

And C, for believing in us, and in me. When I take leaps I have tendency to assemble doubts around them (hence the need for stoic courage!), and without a flicker of doubt from his side he will just say “I know you are going to do this.” And well beyond that belief, is a knowing of me. He included in our wedding vows ‘let me be patient in learning your ways’, which has that nailing-it dimension that C has when it comes to the things that are really important in life – accompanied, I hope, by my knowing of him, and accompanied by our openness to continuing to learn together.

NY missive no 187 - Oysters on Sosua Beach, and Anuk Arudpragasam's Passage North

 

At the end of our Summer visit to see tía D in Dominican Republic – our first time there since the pandemic began – we spent a Monday at Sosúa Beach.

It’s a stunning beach, but also a party beach, so being with the kids, early on a Monday morning was a good time to be there. It was one of those moments when the present and past are meshed together thanks to intense sights, sounds, smells, for me tracing back to my first visit when the boys were smaller and I was first blown away by its beauty, and for C, tracing back to his many visits as a child and teenager.

The sea is shallow for a long way out. And clear. JNH with his imagination in full-gear as it often is explores the “nothing”, daunted by the thought of that sea stretching on for what seems like forever, and taking some solace even delight in the “something” that he encounters about 20 meters out – a little cluster of rocks on the seabed. 

CMH dives in and out near the water’s edge, getting sunburnt on his bare back having neglected to put suncream on. C and I go back and forth between swimming and sitting on the green plastic loungers with a small “Presidente"-branded table between us holding a bottle of rum, our sunglasses, and the sun-cream that CMH should have put on.

Then a man comes along the beach selling oysters. C has talked many times of the oysters on Sosua beach, and here they are, so we order a plate: the seller cracks them open and squeezes lime over them and because of the time, and the place, and who I am with and their sea saltiness they are more than delicious, I can still conjure that taste to this day.

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The past three Fridays while JMH has been playing soccer on Astoria field I’ve walked along Shore Boulevard by East River in the dark (with enough people passing by in pairs or jogging that it feels safe). Each time I’ve spotted a heron down by the water’s edge, blurry as a feint ghost, his body like a stone and neck like a ripple as he steps along looking for fish. The grays merge and diverge – concrete wall, stones, sea-glass, winter tree branches, moonlight and city lights on the water’s surface, and heron. 

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On a recent journey back from a work visit to the Netherlands I bought a copy of Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam. Through a simple train journey from Columbo to the North of Sri Lanka the book speaks of the layers of the civil war, or more precisely the war's aftermath as lived by people who did and who did not experience it. 

It has a style of writing, not exactly stream of consciousness, but stream of related-ness perhaps you could say, with a third person narrator and without quotations, that reminded me of Teju Cole’s “Open City”, a style that has a thinking-while-walking rhythm to it that I like a lot. Arudpragasam was glad when on a World BookClub podcast conversation with Harriett Gilbert (who happens to be one of my former journalism teachers – each time I listen to those podcasts takes me right back into those classrooms in my 20s) – one of the callers asked him to explain more about his style. He said his style is a lot about the ability to control and shape time, in ways that day-to-day life, particularly hyper-distracted day-to-day-life, doesn’t allow.

“Part of what I want to do in writing is to give moments in life that are deserving of time, the time they deserve, time that life doesn’t actually give them.”