Sunday, February 26, 2017

NY missive no 146 - Change, venomous soup, windowsill and Lemony Snicket

Change as opening up new doors

After 13 wonderful years I'm moving to work at a new organization in mid-April, shifting from international human rights to community organizing in New York City. Of course there are mixed emotions but I'm excited about the opportunity to help build alliances between labor, social justice and environmental groups in this city that I've loved since it became home in 2007 - all the more so in the current political climate.

Through the process of letting people know about my move and reading their responses, I've been reminded of Jhumpa Lahiri's beautiful New Yorker essay on shifting from writing in English, to writing in Italian. It's not about a change of career per se, but a change in context, and the way in which this has implications beyond the change itself:

"One could say that the mechanism of metamorphosis is the only element of life that never changes. The journey of every individual, every country, every historical epoch - of the entire universe and all it contains - is nothing but a series of changes, at times subtle, at times deep, without which we would stand still. The moments of transition, in which something changes, constitute the backbone of all of us. Whether they are a salvation or a loss, they are moments that we tend to remember. They give a structure to our existence. Almost all the rest is oblivion."

I like the emphasis on change, rather than progress. As Trump's administration is reminding us pretty much every day, social "progress" is ephemeral, and in response the fight for justice has to be continuous.

CMH's soups

While I cook in the kitchen, CMH likes to make "soups" in a saucepan on the floor. The base is water, then he adds all kinds of things. Last weekend, he was making a soup for Barack Obama who was apparently coming to visit at 6am the next morning. Today, JNH got involved too and they got creative with a "venomous soup". The ingredients included lumps of green watercolor paint that quickly dyed the whole thing, salt, peppercorns, butter, flour, turmeric (the yellow wasn't strong enough to influence the bright green), blades of grass, peanuts, pieces of a blue sponge, and a floating cork.

We thought it could inspire a story called the "Venomous Sea".

The carefully-planned windowsill

Only important things get placed on JNH's windowsill.

At the moment, there's his cup of water (a permanent fixture), along with a Chinese china tiger (he was born in the year of the tiger), a wooden cat, a spider robot that M and D bought him at the London Science Museum last year and that he re-discovered today, and a couple of superhero masks. The items on the windowsill apparently help to protect him while he sleeps.

Only so dark for children

JNH loved the first book in Lemony Snicket's "Series of Unfortunate Events." It tells the story of three children who are orphaned when their parents supposedly die in a fire, and their lives proceed from bad to worse as they move from one crazy guardian to another. In the same way as with the Roald Dahl books, the fact the story was interspersed with humour, vivid characters and imaginative adventures kept him engrossed and unfazed by its underlying darkness and devastating happenings.

Then he spotted commercials for the series on Netflix. But after three episodes it was clear the bleakness was too much and poor kid said he didn't want to see any more because it was giving him nightmares. C and I went from loving his engagement with the story to feeling like bad parents for freaking him out. It reminded me of when I saw Nightmare at Nine Elm Street when I was 10 at a friend's house. I spent the rest of the Summer thinking that Freddie Kruger with his long metal fingers was coming up behind me to grab me. Minor trauma in the bigger scheme of things.

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