Mallory's Camera

For a while I was playing Monopoly with the Tibetans. You need a context for the English language, right?

The Tompkins County Learning Partnership recommends role playing as the best method for teaching English. Pretend you’re in the Social Services office applying for food stamps. Please sir, I would like to request an application for the Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program. Pretend you’re at the doctor’s office: Please sir, clear secretions come out of my nose when I breathe in the air that contains microscopic plant particles.

These scenarios did not appeal to me.

We played Monopoly twice a week in Baalorma’s living room instead. Baalorma has two living rooms. There’s the everyday living room, right off the kitchen, where the family eats and where Baalorma watches her Chinese soap operas and then there’s the special occasion living room with its tapestries and cedar altar, kept in reserve behind closed doors in case the Dalai Lama ever decides to pay a visit.

The Tibetans got Monopoly’s basic acquisitions strategy right away, but they found the fact that you couldn’t build houses or hotels on railroads or utilities confusing. “Well, railroads and utilities don’t have houses and hotels in real life, do they?” I would say heartily. But the Monopoly board was an abstraction that had nothing whatsoever to do with real life, so far as the Tibetans were concerned.

“Is this useful?” I asked Baalorma after we’d been playing Monopoly for a month. “Is it fun?”

“It is okay,” Baalorma told me. It is okay, is Baalorma’s all-purpose answer to everything. I have no idea what it means. The Red Chinese could show up on her doorstep carrying gasoline cannisters, matches and a helpful ten-point instruction manual, The People’s Guide To Self-Immolation, and as she was setting fire to herself, Baalorma would reply, “It is okay.”

So then I decided Monopoly wasn’t working, that the context it was providing was a necessary but insufficient condition. We’d watch videos instead. Much as I longed to introduce the Tibetans to the cinematic oeuvre of Federico Fellini and Werner Hertzog, I went with back episodes of Little House On the Prairie.

Did they like it? Again, I couldn’t tell. Baalorma cried real tears as Royal Wilder expired in Shannon Doherty’s arms and they recoiled in horror at the malevolent antics of Nancy Oleson. Our vocabulary list grew longer as it incorporated clichés masquerading as 19th century slang. But I had to admit to myself that there weren’t too many places in Ithaca where the Tibetans were going to get to use the word varmint.

“Is this useful?” I asked Baalorma. “Are you enjoying it?

“It is okay,” she said.

So now we’re back to English conversation. This puts a greater strain on me since I have to think up a lesson plan beforehand. Without a chalkboard, it’s hard to reinforce the difference between nouns and verbs, past and present tense. I’m not really sure that their English has improved at all in the year I’ve been working with them. I mean, I enjoy hanging out with them. But I think they are no less marginalized now than they were then. Baalorma in particular is very bright, so in a sense I feel as though I’ve failed her.

The week between Christmas and New Years always has that 13 o’clock feel to it, doesn’t it?

Did a one on one ESL tutorial with Tenzing yesterday at her home where she lives with her husband and four children, subsidized housing near Route 13. She’s a very plucky woman, I must say. Owned a retail business in India, had a comfortable middle class life. Here she does food service and house cleaning.

“I come for the children,” she tells me. “Here they have more – I don’t know how to say –“

“Opportunities?” I suggest.

“I don’t know that word.”

“When you can have a better life, you have opportunities.”

“Yes, yes. Opportunities.”

Tenzing first studied English at the Dalai Lama’s Dharamsala compound, so she speaks with a rather charming British colonial accent. She doesn’t speak badly within the limits of her vocabulary and inexpert command of verb tenses. But she doesn’t understand more than 30 percent of what’s said to her, possibly because American English sounds so very different from what she’s used to. So she actually has the opposite problem of most people who are learning a foreign language whose comprehension is much better than their speech.

It is true, isn’t it? The U.S. and Canada present opportunities that aren’t available in the rest of the world. They’re not for the immigrants who come over. They’re for their children, their grandchildren. If you have the humility to view yourself as a throwaway generation, your DNA has a chance. Hard work may net them the gold ring. May. A hundred thousand contingencies ride on that “may.” But, of course, in India, there was no chance at all.

Three inches of snow on the ground. Trying to psych myself into being domestic so that I start 2012 with a clean house. But it’s hard to jumpstart myself. I begin the credit union tax training shortly after the New Year, and start working with clients in three weeks.

“You live so much inside your head,” B told me last time I had a full frontal psychological breakdown that required motivational sermons. I’d never thought of myself as a cerebral person particularly. But I suppose it’s true, I am.

Over the past week or so, I’ve become very interested in brain chemistry – my own, other people’s. I’ve been reading Oliver Sacks’ An Anthropologist On Mars – lured, in part, by the fact that one of my operative metaphors for self is that I’m an anthropologist from Mars – and was very smitten by all the kindly doctor’s vignettes of neurological oddities, most particularly with his descriptions of Temple Grandin and autism. Clearly, I am not autistic. But there were some really strange things about me as a kid. For example: I used to rock for hours, and quite often succeeded in trancing out into an alternative reality that while not quite hallucinatory – I was fully aware that I was standing in a living room, furiously rocking back and forth – was almost hallucinatory, in that I would move through strange scenes and have long encounters with some very odd and never quite human beings. Cthulu, white courtesy telephone, please! I continued this habit well into my 20s.

Also I have some strange tensile needs. For example: I need to hold a stick in my hand at all times in order to think coherently. As a kid, these were actual branches but as an adult I’ve managed to subsume the habit until now it’s just a pen, which means it’s not particularly remarkable when other people watch me do it although they may be thinking to themselves, “Gee, she’s nervous.” There seems to be a surfeit of motor activity in me that expresses itself in odd ways.

Now, I always assumed these weird little behaviors were the legacy of being brought up by a neurotic mother who at regular intervals would decompensate into a dysfunctionality so profound that she would pee on herself and at age nine, I would be sitting there feeding her, telling her, “You have to open your mouth now. Okay, I’m putting cereal into your mouth. Okay, now you have to close your mouth and chew. Do you remember how to chew? It’s a kind of up and down movement with your teeth –“

But maybe it’s not a psychological deficit. Maybe my brain is wired in some way that makes me more than just another outlier. Who can tell?

And, of course, the light sensitivity has gotten worse as I’ve gotten older. Again, peculiar – I grew up in these northerly latitudes, in New York City as a matter of fact, so I should be habituated to it at a very deep level. Except I’m not. Bright light, bright light, bright light – it’s all in the lumens. Except it’s not. It doesn’t matter how bright the artificial light stimulus is, if it’s dark outside, I feel like the ceremonial virgin chained to Stonehenge’s highest henge-cliff, at worse I’m suicidal, at best I just want to sleep. But if it’s light outside, it doesn’t matter how cold it is outside; it’s immaterial what’s going on, how close to the edge my life is, I’m in a good mood. Go figure.

###

My poor Tibetans. On Black Friday Baalorma went out and dropped a lot of dough. A thousand dollars for a new camera. A $5,000 down payment on a new car. She and her husband, the former Tibetan monk, got up at 3am to join the line outside Best Buy so they’d be there at 5am when it opened.

Tenzin wasn’t quite as profligate, but did drop almost seven hundred dollars all told on a new laptop and clothes for her four kids.

Since these days, I have to second-guess a ten-dollar expenditure, all this spending seemed very grand and very exciting to moi…

On Thursday, they were both laid off.

Bad management, I’m thinking. Clearly Cornell must have known for some time that they’d have to lay off some of their food service staff. Why couldn’t they have told that food service staff before the much-touted Festival of National Greed?

Every parent of a bright, rebellious kid is constantly on the watch for what I call the Prince Hal Moment – that moment when potential seems as graspable as Excalibur in the stone because other people are finally seeing what you have always seen when you looked down on his sleeping face.

RTT had his Prince Hal Moment last night.

He presented a proposal to the New Roots advisory board for an open campus policy, an extremely well-researched, well-written and politically astute proposal; argued persuasively, respectfully and charmingly on its behalf; and organized a crowd of 60 or so students who showed up in support.

Long term readers may remember that last year RTT was constantly getting into trouble for leaving campus, particularly at lunch time.
New Roots is a charter school founded on the principle of sustainability. We live in the Dryden school district. Ten days or so after we moved here, when I finally roused myself out of my depressive stupor long enough to realize that RTT was technically a truant and I needed to get his ass into school, I enrolled him at Dryden High School – a bad fit I knew instantly. But what could ya do?

“I am not going to Dryden High School!” RTT announced when I announced the cheery news.

“You have no choice in the matter,” I hissed.

“Why can’t I go to the alternative high school in Ithaca?”

“Because we don’t technically live in Ithaca. We don’t pay property taxes in Ithaca, or more to the point, out landlord doesn’t pay property taxes in Ithaca.”

“Why can’t I just keep going to school online?”

“Because our circumstances have changed. We’re not wandering nomads anymore.”

“Well, then, why can’t you just home school me?”

“Right. That was such a success last time I tried.”

Even he had to laugh. But he was adamant. “I’m not going to Dryden.”

Gotta hand it to the kid – when he’s motivated, he’s motivated. Within 5 hours he had come up with Plan B: New Roots, a charter school that had just been started in Ithaca, open to any New York State resident, so long as he or she was fervently committed to the principles of sustainability! Robin and sustainability – now, that was kind of a hilarious thought. Robin and Ithaca – that was a bit more problematic.

The school is housed in the historic Clinton Hotel, right off the Ithaca Commons, a well known trysting place for homeless psychos, drug dealers and feral teens. From the start there have been Incidents – the most noteworthy being a 17 year old girl who disappeared from the Commons during lunchtime last year and was found a week later shacked up with an overweight, 30-something biker in the wilds of Groton. Liability is understandably an important consideration for the school administration.

The other complicating factor is something called Farms To School which is their school lunch program, The teens are served wholesome, healthful foods like whole wheat lasagna and vegetarian chili, and maybe all the other students except RTT just LUV it but RTT loathes it to such a degree that all last year Ben and I had to trade off bringing him pizza for lunch so he wouldn’t pass out from low blood sugar.

In fact the one person on the advisory board who voted against RTT’s proposal did so because she said it would have a negative economic impact on the Farms To School program. So what? I screamed internally. If the Farms to School serves such awful food that the only way it can stay in business is by forcing these kids to subsidize it then it deserves to go belly-up! But gotta hand it to the kid – he was smart enough to realize that Food to Farms is the New Roots third rail, mentioned it only in the most respectful and reverential of ways, even performed an economic analysis proving that the economic impact would be negligible. Way to Obama, RTT!!!

I was very proud of him Very proud.

RTT really can do just about anything. If he’s motivated to do it.

Also tutored yesterday. I’ve been going to Baalorma’s house to tutor which is strictly against Tompkins Learning Center’s rules but I’m glad I’m doing it. For one thing it’s given me the opportunity to get to know her husband a little bit. He’s a mild-mannered guy who spent the first 35 years of his life as a Tibetan monk, and is now some kind of computer analyst. For another thing, Baalorma works every single day of the week, so I’m just happy she’s got the energy to keep up with her English lessons.

Anyway, went there yesterday and Baalorma was in her sweats, looking quite drained. She had a large bandage on her left hand.

“I am making food for my husband and I cut myself,” she explained with a wan smile.

“Ouch!”

“And then I bleed so much that I pass out. My husband called 911 for the – how do you call it?”

“Ambulance,” I said.

“Am-moo-lets,” she repeats gravely. “I hear him calling because I wake up then and I say, No, no, I don’t need it. But he is very worried.”

“Well, yes, of course,” I said. “I’m so glad you’re okay!” We smile at each other and she reaches over and hugs me. “Did they have to give you a blood transfusion or did they just give you IV fluid?”

“IV fluid?”

I pantomime starting an IV and hooking up a banana bag.

“No, they don’t do that.”

“They didn’t?”

“They take my blood, they say I am ok. They send me home.”

“They sent you home! But they sutured your hand?”

“Sootcher?”

“Sewed it.” I mime stitches.

She shakes her head slowly. “They don’t look at my hand.”

“Unbelievable,” I said. “So they did absolutely nothing for you.”

“Nothing,” she says.

“Amazing,” I said. “You probably didn’t bleed that much when you were cut. I mean, unless you nick an artery and start spraying blood, you almost always bleed less than you think you do. It just looks like a lot. Still, it’s concerning that you passed out. I would think you were dehydrated. And you really passed out?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I was here. I was somewhere else. And when I come back to here it is like waking up from a dream.”

“Have you passed out before?”

“Never,” she said.

I look at Baalorma. Her lips are very pale, she could easily be anemic, I think. At the very least they could have lectured her about iron deficiency, urged her to eat more spinach.

I figure the reason Cayuga Medical Center didn’t do anything for her is because she doesn’t speak good English and Cayuga Medical Center ER is staffed by a bunch of racist shitheads.

It was only ten inches of rain total but it felt like more. It felt, in fact, like Days 1 and 3 of the storm that launched Noah. Day 2 it didn’t actually rain but the sky glowered — the Old Guy in the nightgown with the long white beard shaking his fist angrily from the heavens.

Behold the once tranquil and well dammed Empire of the Beaves… Of course, Beaves don’t mind floods. They know floods create jobs! The unemployment rate is close to zero in Beaver Land.

A tree came crashing down in my backyard. A perfectly healthy maple tree – the ground was just too saturated to support its shallow root system:



Wednesday was the remains of Tropical Storm Lee. God knows what Monday was – some barometric depression so obscure that meteorologists didn’t even bother to anthropomorphize it.

Me, I just holed up in the cement bungalow with the Petsers and tried to work. Behind on the Stegner stories. Way behind on the Stegner stories. Behind on the novel too. And behind on the paying gigs too, because it is actually very hard to write huge volumes of verbiage for pennies on the word I actually doubled my earnings last month and hope to increase them again in the next two weeks, but the paycheck after the current one is always the flat edge of the world that you’re careening off, you know?

I tried explaining this to Max who is one of the many people who called during the rainstorms. So many people called, in fact that I felt a bit like the protagonist of that morbid E.M.Forster story The Machine Stops who considers himself very sociable because he has all sorts of machine-mediated communications with dozens of people, even though all he does essentially is sit in a small room alone by himself.

“See the thing about the most recent recession,” I explained to Max, “is that it made approximately 20 % of the population economically obsolete. There are no jobs for us. There will never be jobs for us. Because this wasn't a readjustment at all -- it was... surgery... For the rest of you, life goes on as usual – you go to work, you buy cars, you go to the movies, you root for the Steelers. It wasn’t an equal hit so for most people, it’s kind of a puzzlement.”

“I’ve never heard it put that way,” Max said. “Honestly, you should write about that.”

Right! Poverty Porn: The Reader’s Digest Edition could be bundled with Barbara Erenreich’s Nickeled and Dimed.

On Tuesday, I did go into town to meet up with Balorma. “Aren’t you hungry?” she kept asking. “You look hungry!” Finally about the eighth time she said this, the light bulb over my head went off: She’s hungry. So she took me to a Tibetan Momo bar, momos being a rather delicious savory dumpling filled with meat, and wouldn’t let me pay for anything, “No, no – they my friend, they my friend,” and then we went window shopping at Trader K’s where I had to physically restrain her from buying me things. On Saturday, she announced, she is going to cook me a huge vat of momos because hers are better.



Here are the goldenrods that have been assembling as stealthily as guerilla soldiers in the field in back of my house all summer long. It’s supposed to be a bucket year for goldenrod – no one’s exactly sure why. They’re like the final volley in summer’s fireworks, the end of the season show. And they’re beautiful in their way but I dread seeing them because they mean winter’s coming and I’m so very, very, very dreading winter.

Did I mention I’m dreading winter?

Dreading it.

Writing so much in other venues that writing here is just not a priority these days.

The fiction seems to be going well.

I say “seems to be” because I honestly don’t know. The story is interesting to me, but would it be interesting to anyone else? And the writing itself seems – again – good to me: I’ve put a curb on my stylistic excesses but kept my own voice too so that although first and foremost it’s a commercial project, it’s written well.

If I can finish it by the end of the summer, possibly, just possibly, I’ll look back on this summer and think: Time well spent…

Else?

A week where incredible kindnesses were shown me.

A week where I felt wonderful every morning when I first woke up until it hit me: Oh, right, you’re here…

A week where I rode my new bicycle at least ten miles every day. You can bounce pennies off my butt, no lie! Gotta figure out something for those upper arms now and I hate gyms.

My obsession with the beavers continued. The Free Masons of the Animal Kingdom! I’d been very worried about them because a dead deer had washed up on one of the islands in the stream just upstream of the lodge. I could smell it decomposing. I hadn’t seen them in a week and I wondered: Had virulent microorganisms wiped out the beaver tribe? Though one has to assume that dead animals are just another fact of nature, and that other animals evolve immunities to any pestilence they carry.

But then yesterday when I was out hiking with Milo, I saw Papa Beave doing routine maintenance, and was vastly reassured.



I feel like Robinson Crusoe in paradise. No, this isn’t a desert island but it might as well be. Balormaa is my closest human contact because she clearly likes me, enjoys my company. We hug upon greeting, we prattle like two anthropologists comparing notes on the weird customs of a cannibal tribe we’ve both been studying – which I suppose in a way we are, she from the perspective of an outsider, and me from the perspective of an embedded secret agent. Yesterday we prattled about Tibet customs around menstruation and birth control and blood magic for an hour and a half. Quite fascinating…

I haven’t missed Robin in the slightest.

Got a letter from Susan. You scared me, she wrote. I had no idea… And I thought, Better you be scared, my dear, then hear about my suicide from Max. Mostly, you know, you gotta keep the dark stuff walled off from the world – it’s a permanent disability in most people’s eyes and you’re gonna need those people for job references some day. But apart from my sons, I don’t have a family and there’s gotta be someone who knows what’s going on behind the social façade. You have my love and friendship always Susan wrote, and I gotta believe her...

I’m more obsessed with the Rupert Murdoch scandal than the Casey Anthony verdict.

My iPhone camera is fucked – I think the shutter is malfunctioning – and I’m gonna have to book an appt with the genius bar. Closest genius bar is in Syracuse.

Crazy how fast successive generations of flowers have come and gone this year. I distinctly remember the Sweet Williams as a late summer phenomenon and yet they’re already gone. Miles of honeysuckle have turned into red berries, as lethal looking as an evil fairy’s poisoned apple. Current crops are the roadside chicory and those weedy orange lilies that droop at a touch. Great encampments of green thistles stand at attention in the dry marsh bed waiting to erupt into bloom.

At night I leave my windows open just long enough for a few fireflies to find their way inside. Every time I wake up in the middle of the night, they’re sparking and glowing.

I think I’m going to paint my bedroom a kind of peachy rose with that faux marbling texture thang.

So I haven't been able to afford to keep up the payments on the CA storage unit -- it's just too much money, and I'm always running weeks behind. And Marion called me to tell me that unless I can figure out a way to get $XXX quick, the unit was going up for auction.


I was at DeWitt park with Reuben when I got the call from Marion. Reuben was reading out loud to me from that YA book about Tibet. If I thought Bolormaa was having a hard time with sin and holy, it was only because I hadn't yet tackled the subject of reincarnation with Reuben.

Naturally the moment I got off the phone I burst into tears.

"What's wrong? What is matter?" Reuben asked.

I shook my head. "I can't -- I won't -- I don't --"

Eventually -- predictably -- I did tell him.

And just as predictably I suppose, he offered to give me the money.

"I can't take your money," I said. "That would be incredibly unethical."

"No, no problem. I have the money, you don't. It's no problem."

He kept offering. I kept refusing. And eventually his offers made me feel better -- no, not for the reason you might think, because (swoon!) somebody cared But because... Well. If I really, really, really wanted to keep the stuff, I would have taken Reuben's money, unethical or no -- honestly there were no strings attached, I would have been out nothing. Reuben just really likes me. The fact that I wasn't willing to do something unethical meant that I could deal with the loss. Because if it had been a survival thing, I would have done whatever it took, I would have stopped at nothing. Would have dined on shit and champignons at the very top of the Eiffel Tower; would have crept into the White House to stab Obama in his bath.

I'm sad. But it's just stuff

In other words, FJ tried to kill himself. M feels horribly guilty because a couple of months ago FJ -- well, not confronted him, FJ is not confrontational. FJ said, "It doesn't feel like we're friends anymore." And M said, "Maybe we're not."

90 Ativan.

I once wrote a paper about the difference between real suicide notes and fake suicide notes. Of course all the people whose notes I read had ended up dead so in the most important sense I suppose they were all real suicide notes. But see, not all those people had intended to end up dead. Many of them had intended to be found before they died -- only the supporting actors blew their cues.

Here's the difference: In a fake suicide note, every single reference is explained, almost to the point of footnotes. In a real suicide note, on the other hand, the crazy references just hang there, the writer doesn't give a fuck whether the reader understand them or not. He or she is writing for eternity's eyes alone.

Reuben and I spent our last tutoring session trying to track down one of these…

It’s a pipette used for harvesting (gulp) duck semen. I don’t even want to think about what he does to get the male ducks to ejaculate.

Reuben, you see, is a professional duck inseminator – no, he’s not the only one on planet Earth: There’s another one working out of Switzerland.

Still, I suppose you could call it an -- um -- elite profession.

The farm he works on prepares duck paté for expensive restaurants up and down the Atlantic Coast. They also make fois gras. They also raise exotic chickens with black feet that are all the culinary rage in Chinese restaurants.

Yes, yes, we have discussed the animal rights aspects of fois gras, those poor geese with their feet trapped in wooden boxes so they can’t move and a feeding tube jammed down their throats. And no, I’m not being facetious – I feel a genuine shiver of horror when I think of that, that the great miracle of life should be so conscripted, that any creature that feels pain should be tortured that way.

But Reuben comes from a very different tradition.

The Sanctity of Life tradition is a Western doctrine. One might argue convincingly that it made its first documented appearance in the pages of the New Testament – relatively late, in other words. I don’t know enough about philosophy or anthropology to understand anything about its antecedents. But it was a truly revolutionary concept.

For most of the world, however, human life is not particularly important so why should the lives of creatures lower on the food chain have any significance at all?

El Salvador is technically in the West but I think those hearty prehistoric Tibetans who first made their way across the Bering land bridge have far more influence on their descendents’ attitudes than the sugary veneer of Christianity.

“You know, the way they make fois gras is really cruel,” I tell Reuben. “Those poor geese!”

Reuben shrugs. “Is very good, fois gras. You put some between two pieces of piña, how you say –“

“Pineapple.”

“Pineapple. “ He kisses the tips of his fingers. “Heaven.”

So anyway, Reuben is down to his last three duck semen pipettes. He’s looking for more. We spent an hour and a half searching through online veterinary and laboratory supply catalogs. Nada. Finally, I said, “You know, you should call up the Corning Museum of Glass. They have glass blowers on staff there. You could probably bring in a piece and commission more.”

So thanks to moi, those diners at overpriced NYC restaurants can continue to pig out on hotdogs stuffed with the livers of tortured geese.

We spent the last half hour discussing Osama bin Laden’s capture.

“So, what do you think?” Reuben asked me. “Why they not take him alive?”

“I think they would have gotten into a bidding war with The Hague,” I said. “’He’s my war criminal!’ ‘No, he’s my war criminal!’”

Reuben laughed. “Is very stupid not to take him alive. In my country? No one believe he dead.”

I remembered how shocked I’d been by all the You Go, Osama! Teeshirts I saw on my 2002 trip to Guatemala.

“Was Osama popular in El Salvador?”

Reuben shrugged. “Lot of people don’t like the US. And if they’re going to kill him, it’s stupid not to keep the body.”

“Oh, they had to get rid of the body,” I said. “Otherwise it would become a destination gravesite. Graceland for Muslims. What happens next do you think? Will I ever be able to bring shampoo on a plane flight ever again?”

Reuben smiled cynically. “Things get worse. They always do. The US gets more and more unpopular. But you know, when people have to spy on each other, it makes jobs. So maybe unemployment goes down.”