The silence between us

There is a silence that binds us all to each other like an invisible veil. Ever since I found out my downstairs neighbor was found completely decomposed in his apartment nearly three weeks after his death, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way we humans connect, or disconnect from each other. You may ask: “didn’t you smell his remains downstairs?” The answer is: no. I was away for nearly three weeks visiting my family in Europe. John (that was his name which I only learned after his death) was only 35 years old when he died. 35 and no one missed him for nearly three weeks. How does this happen? In fact no one missed him at all, except the person in the leasing office who finally called the police to enter into his apartment after the eviction notice placed on his front door two weeks earlier for non-payment was still there. I remember the notice during the days preceding my trip. I couldn’t miss it, given I had to walk up the stairs to my apartment and could see it with the glare of the Palm Springs eternal sun. How does a 35 year old man surrounded by so many people living within close proximity of his apartment die without anyone missing him? The answer: it happens effortlessly. We all live along side each other wrapped in a veil of silence.

I am plagued by guilt since the discovery of John’s death. I prided myself in the fact that (I thought) I knew everyone who lived in the courtyard at the heart of our apartment complex. I would boast to myself and sometimes to others: “I love all of the people in my complex. Everyone is so friendly. We all say "hi" and look out for everyone. Everyone, except for John. The thing is I used to say the formulaic “hi” to John on a regular basis. That is before he stopped going outside. I remember an early memory after I’d just moved into my apartment sitting in my bed with the window open and listening to him talk to someone on the phone about his life. He had just returned from the hospital after some health problem and he was complaining that he was living with very little money every month. I remember the conversation because I felt moved by his vulnerability. The truth is: I could relate. I had just moved to this apartment, to this town. I felt very vulnerable and for a moment, as I lay in bed enjoying the warm Southern California spring breeze blowing into my new home, John and I connected without ever speaking.

These thoughts have been circling around my mind for two weeks now since John’s death. I like to say his name because I never did when he was alive. John was the invisible man suffering alone in his apartment. There are millions of Johns in the world. We walk by them every day and avert our eyes. Or maybe we even venture into a formulaic ‘Hello” when in reality we all just long for so much more.

Tonight I watched the sun set over the mountains overlooking my apartment and I felt a deep sense of gratitude for my life. I felt joy for the breath in my lungs, for the beauty in front of my eyes, for the love all around me. Gratitude turned into motivation and I walked to my first workout in a long time. On my way, I passed a brand new neighbor sitting on his porch enjoying the warm dusk of Palm Springs. He was a young guy, all bandaged up after a nearly fatal motorcycle accident. I’d never met the guy and said the formulaic “Hello” and kept on walking. Then suddenly I remembered John and I stopped dead in my tracks and turned to him. We’d never met but I’d heard about his accident from my sweet 81 year old courtyard neighbor Miss E. who keeps track of everyone’s lives.

“Hey,” I said.

“I just wanted to tell you: I’m really glad you’re still here.”

His bright blue eyes lit up and his face warmed into the brightest smile. Both of his arms were in a cast and he seemed to have difficultly moving his legs.

“Is your girlfriend alright,” I asked about the girl who was with him on the motorcycle when a drunk driver took a sharp turn and hit their bike.

“Yes, she’s coming out of the hospital tomorrow.”

“I’m glad to hear that.” And I went off to workout.

I no longer want to be held by the silence between us. It’s not just the silence between strangers that plagues me. But the silence between us all. This morning I thought about the countless people who have changed my life with their generosity and their love spanning the four decades of my life. I thought about the innumerable words I have not spoken to these people to express my gratitude. Do they know who they are? Have I told them how grateful I am for their presence on this earth? For the way they have shaped me?

Or a grander scale, do we each know what we all mean to each other? In my case, I am pretty sure the answer is no. After I post this, I am writing a letter to an 81 year old woman who changed my life when I came to the US at the age of 13. A woman who became a catalyst of change in my academic life and who propelled me towards the path I am on today. I want to thank her. I want to tell her just how much she shaped me. The 13 year-old girl who did not speak a word of English when she met her could not find the words (or the awareness) to express her gratitude. But the woman I am today can and will.

I suggest we all take a moment and tell each other just how much we mean to each other. Let’s lift the veil of silence enveloping us all. I know I will. Don’t be surprised if you get a love letter from me in the near future. I have many love letters to write. Dozens and dozens of letters expressing the myriad forms of love I feel for countless people on this planet. People without whose love, support, generosity, and relentless loyalty I would not be alive today. I am breaking the silence starting now.

Blood on our hands

I am in the middle of a 3 week-run of CRY FOR PEACE: VOICES FROM THE CONGO at Syracuse Stage. I am one of 5 cast members telling my own personal story in the greater context of colonialism and plunder in the Congo. The experience is moving, humbling, and at times overwhelming. Each night, I am telling the story of genocide in the Congo. Each night, I say the line: "They made her beat the baby to death." It is no small wonder that I find myself zoning in front of an inane comedy almost every night after the show. Ironic that this post is my way back to this blog more than a year after writing about the pervasiveness of technology in my life. Electronics rule my world. But today, each time I use my phone, my computer, iPod or iPad, I think about the blood that was poured in order for me to be able to play Words with Friends or to send texts to my friends. Eleven years ago almost to the day, we lost 3,000 people in the attacks on the World Trade Center. 3,000 lives that were lost. More than a decade later, our hearts are still heavy with the loss. I cannot help but think about the death toll in East Congo which is staggering.Every TWO days, 3,000 lives are taken brutally the region as a result of the precious minerals we all need and want. That is 45,0000 lives a month. Difficult to comprehend. Almost paralyzing to think about the magnitude of these numbers. And yet, I can't afford to become paralyzed. I can no longer turn off the news and breathe a sigh of relief that my life is untouched by the atrocious events in ....(fill in the blank here with the words Syria, Eastern Congo, Libya, etc....) Tonight, as I say the words: "They made her beat the baby to death." I pray that someone in the audience will also feel motivated to create change and save lives in the Congo.

What’s App Brave New World?!

Midnight. A message pops up on my computer screen from my little cousin in Brussels. He’s 20 something and fun. This sudden message popping phenomenon is new since Facebook decided to link the message feature to chat and to make ‘connected to chat’ the default when you log in.

Translation: the 500+ people on my Facebook can pop into my life at any given time and begin a conversation with me. I don’t like this feature. I like to decide when and how I make myself available and to whom. David, my cousin is furiously typing one random line after another and by the time I am finished uploading a piece to my new blog, I have an accumulated clump of unread/ unresponded texts on my screen. Based on the inane nature of his comments and the higher-than-usual ratio of typos, he is clearly inebriated. It’s 6 am in Brussels and he admits to being drunk and having just walked in from an ‘awesome’ party.
“Do you have What’s App” he asks.
“No,” I curtly, answer, vaguely annoyed by his intoxicated state. Before I bid him goodbye, I decide to ask him what is What's App.
“It’s the coolest app. It allows you to text anyone in the world, for FREE.”
Now, he is talking. My entire family is split on three continents. Within a matter of minutes, I download the app onto my iPhone and resume our distorted conversation via texting. Quickly, I locate other relatives on What’s App. The next day, my niece, also in Brussels texts me she has a new boyfriend and wishes I could meet him. Now, I am in the know, thanks to this new app.

The ways in which I am connected to people via technology has become overwhelming and I don’t realize how just dependent I am on the zillion and one gadgets that have seeped into my everyday life until one day my iPhone slips out of the back pocket of my jeans, right into the toilet. For two weeks, I am relegated to using a flip phone. Remember those? With a tiny, microscopic screen, NO internet access and no keyboard.

The first day of my new flip phone life, I get completely lost on my way to a party (no more GPS on my phone, no more Google to find a new address, no more hundreds of phone numbers of people to call to help me out of my problem). I pull over holding the useless phone in my hand and realize I have to set it aside and actually use my own brain to find my way again.

Yesterday, I left my phone (glossary: when I say phone: you can now assume I mean an iPhone and would never use that term loosely to refer to anything less) in my car for two hours. This is an aberration and never happens but the heat wave has negatively impacted my judgment. (Side note: yes, I am that woman who is attached to her phone 24/7 except I’ve recently stopped sleeping with it and actually charge it a few feet away from me now because a friend told me she’s convinced the electromagnetic emissions are really killing us slowly. If she’s right, I am screwed.) By the time the scorching summer temperatures have fallen in my apartment and I’ve resumed the ability to think long enough to realize my phone has been away from me for two hours, I find a list of unresponded texts, voicemails, emails, Facebook notifications, Words with friends’ move and now What’s App messages that have accumulated in my absence.

Suddenly, I am overwhelmed with the task ahead. Identifying the nature of the missed calls comes first, followed by checking the unread texts, two of which refer to yet unheard voicemails. One friend texts me: "Well, I guess you don't want to talk to me." Technology has made all of us, whinier, and more dependent on each other. God forbid I leave my phone out of the bathroom so I won't risk losing it in the toilet.

I notice three of my Words With Friends partners have made a move in my absence. For those of you who have no idea what I am saying: I am playing Scrabble with friends and complete strangers alike from all over the world. This practice began when one of my former students told me I should download the app. Why not, I thought? How bad could playing a harmless game of Scrabble with one of your former writing students really be? I remember thinking the poor kid would be at a disadvantage. Why would we she want to play with her former Writing College Professor? Wouldn’t that be a recipe for a sure loss on her part? I accepted the invitation. From her first move, I realized I was in unchartered territory. She opened the game with something like Benames 7 letters with an extra 35 points for using all letters on her first turn. I was screwed. Dictionary.com definition of benames: “before 1000; Middle English; see be-, name; replacing Old English benemnan; akin to German benennen, Swedish benämna" What was happening here? I thought something was off but I kept on playing. Every word she used seemed well beyond her grasp. Granted she had been one of my best students and received a well-deserved A but clearly, she was beating me into the ground with one obsolete, esoteric word after another. After my first defeat, I text her these simple letters: W T F?! She responded with a ☺ followed by a confession that she was using an app to cheat on Words With Friends. “The app gives you the best words combo for your letters.” What kind of world was this?

Last spring, I attended a friends’ memorial on UStream, (http://www.ustream.tv/) a website that allows you to use a live web stream from an event. Unable to fly to California for the memorial, I was grateful for the technology that would connect me to this important event. I registered on the site two days before the memorial and looked around. Quickly, I became mesmerized with the live stream from an eagle’s nest in the Midwest. Overnight, I became attached to these eagles whose lives I could observe at every moment. The first morning, I simply watched the eaglets rest for a few minutes. The level of activity of eaglets in a nest is pretty minimal so I had to resume working. But before I went to bed, I checked on the page to see their little feathery bodies fast asleep, their wings covering their beaks, something I could clearly discern thanks to the infrared technology used with the cam. This was a beautiful thing. I checked on the eagles daily for almost two weeks before getting bored.

We live in a brave new world of constant interconnectedness. I can stay wired to my friends all over the world, some of whom were not even human.

The day of the memorial, I joined a few hundred others from as far as Australia and Britain and paid our respects to our friend who had recently died. We watched and heard the memorial while chatting with each other in a separate live chat window on the side of the screen. Thanks to the web, we were not going to miss a thing.

In a few days, I will be making my yearly trip to a music festival completely off the grid. This annual pilgrimage to the middle of nowhere Michigan where I have ZERO cell phone reception and ZERO internet access (for two weeks,) always brings perspective on every aspect of my life including my increasing dependency on technology. In those Michigan woods, I will have to relearn, as I do each year, to approach each and every one of my challenges with the sole use of my body, including my brain and let go of my usual reflex to any problematic situation by saying there’s got to be an app for that.

WIDE PEEP

WIDE PEEP

Why this blog?

As a memoirist, I am in the business of telling the truth, only what is truth, if not a slippery slope of reconstituted memories, which together, string us to each other in a process we call history. Since cancer came to knock on my door two years ago, I sharpened my truth-seeking lens until it became almost blinding. I want to live in all honesty. But being honest and seeking something, anything that is not an approximation of itself can become a full-time job, unpaid. Much like choosing practices as unpalatable as not wearing deodorant, telling the truth can come with some undesirable side effects like making people uncomfortable. Regardless of the collateral damage of telling the truth, I have wandered too far into its dangerous territory to turn back now and I am not quite far enough into it that I can find the solace or the comfort of a place I can even begin to call home. So why not blog about my thoughts on this mad world in which we live and see if any of it brings back an echo, a word, or another person’s voice. My prayer is that it does. Writing is what reminds us that we are not alone in the world.

Were not machines you know

Tonight I went to a fantastic reading astutely curated by Syracuse University's Krista Kennedy (in my friend Sparky's restaurant on Burnett Avenue). Another friend Janine DeBaise was reading from her wonderful upcoming memoir Snake Dreams, which explores her connection to the landscape of upstate New York. She was in great company with the well-known poet Minnie Bruce Pratt who read from her new collection of poems entitled Inside the Money Machine. Both were joined by Steve Himmer who read from his new novel The Bee-Loud Glad, about a decorative hermit. Each of these works ignited thought, evoked emotion in their interconnected theme of land and labor.

Minnie Bruce's opening lines "We're not machines, you know" in her poem All That Work That No One Knows moved me in remembering my mother's invisible labor as she worked for fifteen years as a custodian in a hospital. I remember watching her disappear in the darkness of a dawn yet undefined; her body swallowed by fog and Brussels' constant variations on rain. I grew up watching my mother rid the messes in other people's lives; she was the woman who cleaned the blood and the vomit of the sick. This witnessing shaped me. Watching the invisibility of my mother, hearing her tell me about the pain in her back, in her wrists from pushing the massive polishing machine across the shiny floors of the hospital has given me a specific lens of truth.

I remember knowing early on that my mother's life, the labor her body produced was something our world consumed without even noticing. I remember thinking there was nothing more precious than my mother, and yet nothing cheaper than her life.

This reading came at the back end of watching the movie Biutiful which affected me deeply. Oscar-nominated Javier Bardem's performance in this exploration of mortality, of the value of a life, against the backdrop of our global economy was rattling, to say the least. Bardem's character is dying from cancer and tries to make peace with the biutiful world which he is about the leave. Of course, the fact that I am a 'cancer survivor' as our society labels those of us who do not immediately succumb to the illness was all the more poignant. Having wrestled with my own mortality for the last two years has put my entire life into a sharp focus. All of this while looking for work for the last year...there is a line in Biutiful that says: "Never trust a man who is hungry." I have become that ‘man’. I am not yet hungry but I can taste the metallic tang of fear at the back of my throat as I look for work in a crumbling economy. I often wonder about the billions of unskilled laborers who are also seeking employment along with me. Here I am, with two graduate degrees, armed with the fluency in three languages, seven years teaching at the University level and a couple of finished manuscripts under my belt and I am wondering how I will pay my heat bill next winter. And yet, I fall in the world’s top 10% most privileged people, simply because I am not among those who are swimming across oceans to escape countries where there is no drinking water, or others still who are falling off barges on the river Congo to try to make a day's meal. I am not in their shoes. Not now, not anymore.

Pratt’s poetry tonight moved me back to those days when poverty ruled my every day life. And even though I am no longer that unskilled, powerless sixteen year old celebrating her birthday in the slums of Mexico City, the memories of those days syncopate my current search for work with a bitter-tasting fear.

We are living in a world where manual labor has reduced the price of a human life to that of a spoiling fruit at the back of a truck. We live in a reality like the one described in Biutiful where beauty is an approximation of itself, B I U T I F U L falling short of B E A U T I F U L. In the words of Minnie Bruce Pratt: "We are not machines, you know. There's only so much we can take, always more that we can, until we can't."