Brother Red, Brother Blue

Posted on 10/20/2012 by paulefallon

The adage about the more things change they more them remain the same is particularly apt this election cycle.  I found this essay I wrote two rounds ago; after the 2004 Bush / Kerry election.  It is  as relevant, or even more so, in the partison sniping that characterizes our current election.  I urge everyone to participate in the process yet remain respectful to each other’s opinion, for that is democracy at its most sublime.

_____November 5, 2004__________

The electoral collage map from November 2 displayed the country as cohesive blocks of Red and Blue, more cleanly drawn than in any recent election.  Red claimed the center of the land, Blue held the edges.  Blue triumphed in the cities; Red prevailed in the suburbs.  Blue won the richest states while Red took the poorest.  The most highly educated states went Blue, the less educated went Red.  One can interpret this map of a country divided through reasoned analysis, or spin the division into shrill hyperbole.  Was this brawn besting brains, as the hard scrapple workers of the Heartland trumped the Coastal intellectual elites?  Did the fearful clinging to the land vanquish the urban hip?  Have the God-inspired core of this great nation beaten back the evil heathen fringe?

I don’t have to understand the Bush/Kerry electoral map to understand the division.  It thrives in my own family.  My brother lives in Oklahoma, a state with a fully Republican Congressional delegation and a 66% voter share for George W. Bush.  A state so Red, it has a river by that name.  I live in Massachusetts, a state with a correspondingly Democratic Congressional delegation and a 63% plurality for John Kerry, an enduring legacy for the term Boston Blue-Blood. The colors of the electoral map are mere abstractions of the opposing realities we live every day, my brother and me.

More than 40% of Oklahomans are Evangelical Christians, and my brother is one.  He left Catholicism some twenty years ago, found his true Jesus, and has lived by His Word ever since.  The Word has moved him into and out of several Evangelical congregations, spoken to him in tongues, prompted him to visit Creationist sites that ‘prove’ the world was made just 6,000 years ago, and inspired him to hose down his house to ward off the fire of Lucifer. The Word has also given him a firm rudder from which to navigate his life.  He is more stable, more productive, more complete since he found the Way.  He spends his Sunday mornings in church praising this vital force in his life.

Less then three percent of people in Massachusetts are Evangelical Christians.  When I left the Catholic church twenty-five years ago, I did not replace it with another institution to define my morals.  My life is governed by personal conscience and the Golden Rule, a system that acknowledges the grayness of human behavior rather seeking absolute truths.  I’m sure there is something out there bigger than us, but I don’t believe any religion knows what it is, or how it should be honored, any better than I can celebrate on a Sunday morning walk in the park.

Just over 20 % of Oklahomans have college degrees, below the national average.  My brother didn’t need one to build a successful cable television business. He started with a pick-up truck and a ladder and a quick shimmy up poles.  Now he has 20 contract installers.  He travels the country in his pick-up supervising their work, gets a cut rate for extended stays at Doubletree Suites, and always finds a place that has good draft and fast burgers.

More than 35% of the people in Massachusetts have a college degree, the highest percent in the nation.  I went even further, collecting a pair Master’s Degrees to become an architect.  I travel to major medical centers to design hospitals, stay at boutique hotels and after a day of travel I usually skip dinner to go to the gym.

Despite living in the state with the third highest divorce rate, my brother is married to a devoted wife who stays home and lends a hand in running his business.  When he’s on the road, they call each other five or six times a day.  When he’s home, they are inseparable.  They have five children and six grandchildren, none of whom graduated college, all of whom live in Oklahoma and are involved in the family business.

Even though I live in the state with the lowest divorce rate, my marriage failed.  My former wife is a physician and our two children shuttle between our houses.  We talk on the phone five or six times a month, coordinating our work, travel, and child care schedules.  We see each other at school concerts and baseball games with the ease of old acquaintances that have long since moved past love or rancor.  Our children plan to go to college, and it often seems the main criterion is that college be far from home.

Oklahoma spends $5,533 per student on public education. My brother bypasses the public schools and sends his children to a Christian Academy, where they learn how to live by the Bible.    Even though Massachusetts spends a whooping $14,840 per student, the most important thing my children learn at their urban public high school, is how to live by their wits.

My brother lives the American dream in a sprawling ranch house with a pool on a golf course.  But because Oklahoma has the lowest home appreciation in the country, he doesn’t have much of a nest egg.  I live a much older American dream, one born of immigrant families piling into multiple unit houses to gain their foothold. My old house is on a tiny lot, but because Massachusetts has the highest real estate appreciation in the nation, I am swimming in paper wealth.

My brother has one son who has traveled abroad.  He served our country with honor in Iraq.  My children have been to Europe, to Canada, and to the Caribbean.  Next summer we plan to go to Mexico.  We don’t know anyone from our town serving in Iraq.

My brother drives a full-size pick-up to work, his wife takes the SUV to Wal-Mart, and he has a Corvette in the garage for tooling around on the weekends.  I ride my bicycle to work, I’ve never been in a Wal-Mart, and do weekend errands in my Corolla.

My brother is a compelling storyteller and rock steady after a bottle of wine.  I can never remember a punch line and have learned that it’s wise for me to stop after the first beer.

My brother donates his money to his Church.  I donate mine to the Public Library and the ACLU.

My brother unwinds by playing golf and watching football, where screaming at the television is mandatory.  I unwind by running five miles and attending the theater, where the best performances are met with captivated silence.

We share the same genes, my brother and me, so science informs me that we must have something in common.  Our everyday habits reveal none.  But deeper down, the similarities exist.  We both love and support our families, even as he pulls his close and I set mine loose.  We both work hard, putting more into our country’s resources than we withdraw.  We are both patriotic, whether by offering our son to support our country’s policies, or offering our voice to question those policies.  And we both love each other, thanks to the bond of family.  Being brothers is more important than any shared viewpoints or interests.

When I go to Oklahoma to visit my brother and his clan, we talk and laugh and hug.  When his family comes to Massachusetts we do the same.  Sometimes we talk politics and values.  We never change each other’s minds, but we listen politely and even if I don’t believe what he believes, I respect his positions because I know my brother to be a man worth respecting.

My brother saves me from being an erudite Eastern snob.  Whenever I find myself in a circle of thin people in black clothes bemoaning how the East Coast should shrug off the rest of the country, I am the voice that argues we cannot dismiss the red center of our country.  I get the occasional jeer and have been labeled a defender of redneck religious extremists.  But none of these people have ever discussed the Book of Revelation with someone who truly believes, or stood hard against a red clay expanse so wide that it simultaneously humbles and empowers you, or savored the simple joy of a Sonic burger hanging off a tray from the driver’s side window.

I do not pretned to know how we might bridge the gap between the Red States and the Blue States.  The differences between us are fundamental. One side believes it knows the truth and the rest of us only need to embrace it; the other side believes in no single truth and is wary of anyone with such simplistic notions.  This doesn’t offer us much middle ground.  So we must look for what we share more than what divides us.  Our freedoms, our efforts, our heritage, our future.  These make us family and form the bond that can transcend political sniping. I am less worried about the differences between the Red States and the Blue States than I am about the animosity each holds towards the other.  I wish everyone in Massachusetts, or Vermont, or New York, or Connecticut could have a brother in Oklahoma, or Utah, or Idaho, or Nebraska.  Then it would be harder for each color to denigrate the other, because each color would be a part of us all.

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Death with Dignity

Posted on 10/14/2012 by paulefallon

The Awkward Poser is not inclined towards politics, but there is a question on the Massachusetts ballot in November that I believe transcends politics and goes to America’s core identity as a land of free choice; I hope that all eligible voters will support the proposed Death with Dignity law in Massachusetts.

A similar law, which allows people of sound mind with terminal illness to self-administer life-ending drugs, has been in effect in Washington state for about a decade.  During that time a few hundred people have availed themselves of the opportunity to terminate their lives in the face of debilitating and painful deaths.  There has been no evidence of anyone being coerced into ending their lives, or any cases where people who do not fit the strict requirements of sound mind have been allowed to access life ending drugs.  In fact, the majority of people who go through the process to qualify and receive the drugs never take them, they are simply a peace of mind placebo.

We Americans take pride in our individuality and the right to make our own decisions. For the vast number of Americans the provisions of this law violate their religious or moral code, but citizenship requires us not only to secure the freedoms we cherish, but also to safeguard the freedoms of others.  Even if conscience prohibits you from considering such a means to end life, please be tolerant of others with a different point of view and give them the opportunity to take control of their death with the same security with which we take control of our rights in life.

 

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The Magic Island

Posted on 10/06/2012 by paulefallon

Eighty years ago an adventurer in a parallel epoch arrived in Haiti with the intent to document his impressions unbiased by the polarizing attitudes of his day.  W.B. Seabrook is a little known member of the lost generation. While Hemingway was making his literary mark in Paris, the epicenter of Western civilization, Seabrook explored colonialism’s collateral damage; Arabia, Haiti and Africa, with a passion for the occult that led him well beyond the pale of acceptable taste.  One could craft a respectable resume for this gifted writer, a war hero gassed at Verdun and recipient of the Croix de Guerre, a New York Times reporter, contributing writer to Cosmopolitan and Vanity Fair as well as author of eleven books.  Yet a full reporting reveals a man immersed in life’s extremes however measured.  He indulged in cannibalism, sexual adventurism, and his books address witchcraft, Satanism, sorcery, and voodoo as well as a harrowing personal recount of his extended stay in a mental institution.

In the 1920’s Seabrook inculcated himself in Haiti’s culture at the time when this ‘free republic’ was under military rule of the United States.  He travelled easily between the American power elite who lived as princes in the impoverished country, the black and mulatto aristocracy stymied under the thumb of Washington D.C., and the country peasants whom he befriends with warm affinity.  He infiltrates each sector to explore how the pulse of voodoo and black sorcery resonate in thatched huts as well as the Presidential Palace and recounts his experiences eloquently in The Magic Island.

I am hesitant to draw too many parallels between Mr. Seabrook and myself.  I have no intention of eating human meat, seeking a psychiatric commitment or committing a drug induced suicide, which Mr. Seabrook did in 1945.  Nor do I presume to turn a phrase with his insight and grace.  Still I find a consonance of perspective in our adventures here.  Both Seabrook and I come to Haiti to witness rather than to judge; to accept the country rather than try to change it, to value what Haiti has to offer rather than condemn it for what it lacks.

Although the names and details change, Haiti vs. US circa 1920 and Haiti vs. US circa 2012 recount the same story.  Fiercely proud of its independence, Haiti is reduced to the pitiful embodiment of that well-worn lyric, ‘freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose’.  Set apart from a world run by white men, Haiti is so racked by poverty and corruption that it becomes their ward.  At the beginning of the last century the marines played governess here; in this century it is the hundreds, thousands of NGO’s and missionary organizations who keep the dependent nation afloat.  Like medieval fiefdoms of goodwill they each lend a hand, but lack the encompassing ability to teach Haiti to swim on its own, let alone discover the wind that could fill its sails. Seabrook’s succinct summation of the American occupation ends by acknowledging, ‘Our attitude now in Haiti is superior, but kindly.’  Unfortunately that same sentiment is widespread today.

The Magic Island includes fantastic descriptions of Voodoo rites and customs which Mr. Seabrook, simultaneously reporter and ready participant, presents with the same legitimacy of any world religion.  The climax of his night long blood baptism centers around a young virgin and a goat channeling each other’s sprit, chanting in each other’s tongue, merging their identities before the sacrificial knife slashes through the goat’s throat, sparing the girl, to release the baptismal fluid.  Anyone who knows the Old Testament tale of Abraham and Isaac must recognize the parallels.  The point for Seabrook is not whether Christianity or Voodoo is ‘correct’ but in acknowledging that each satisfies a fundamental craving that eclipses mere survival.  Humans are driven to link our past, present, and future selves; to bond with our ancestors, to shape the context to our existence and envision continuity for those to follow.  “I believe in such ceremonies … in some form or another they answer a deep need of the universal human soul.”

As Seabrook describes the details of Voodoo practice, which include dedicated ritual structures, elaborate vestments, long simmering concoctions and sacrificial livestock, I marvel at the sacrifices poor Haitians make to expend their meager resources for spiritual pursuits. They remind me of the medieval serfs who lived in squalor while erecting Gothic Cathedrals.  Those with the least among us are the most heavily invested in the life after this.

Seabrook accepts everything he encounters at face value, he explains what he can through reason, ascribes the faith to the rest, and does not speculate on motivation simply to present a tidy tale.  When the Haitian President Antoine-Simone installs his daughter, a Black Sorceress, as First Lady in 1910, legend describes a midnight rendezvous where a military guard presents itself for inspection and after a convoluted dance, she anoints one soldier to have his heart removed, which she carries off on a silver tray.   The story is reported without the soldier’s perspective.  Is it a tragic story of an unwilling victim or, the celebration of a Jihadist-style martyr destined for eternal glory?  We have no clue.

Seabrook is a man ahead of his time yet trapped by it.  When he describes Voodoo rituals working themselves into frenzy through ethereal spirits, sexual passion, drugs and hypnosis, his hallucinations are straight out of the 1970’s.  Yet, he is appalled by the sensuality of male dancers and admits a deep personal discomfort with male sexuality.  Ultimately he does not differentiate energy derived from drugs and alcohol from energy bestowed by the spirits, for he does not want to elevate one and diminish the other.  “We live surrounded by mysteries and imagine that by inventing names we explain them.”

As a person always seeking to find Haiti’s contributions to the wider world, perhaps the most surprising discovery in The Magic Island is that zombies originated in Haiti.  The tales of the walking dead are fantastic, most serving in chalky silence, a few fomenting a path back to eternal rest. Yet, in the context of this extraordinary book the idea that zombies exist in a parallel reality plane is not too wide a stretch.

Voodoo is not a regular part of my Haiti experience, the evangelical crowd does not tinker with it.  Riding home one midnight with Gama we come upon a group of eight people draped in white, standing in a circle around an altar of flowers and objects and candles at a street intersection.  I am reminded of those altars people erect in the US to commemorate roadside accident victims, though this is both more elaborate and more ephemeral.  Gama acknowledges it is voodoo, but he does not want to discuss it.  “Have you ever been involved in voodoo?’  “No, I am a church goer.”  “Do you have any interest in it?”  “No.”  When you are Gama, when you believe the direct channel to God runs through the prophesies you accept and the tongues you speak, there is no need for other paths to the supernatural.  But when you are me, a heathen voyager on this magic island, all forms of mysticism are equally fascinating, and equally welcome.

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A Tale of Two Babies Delivered

Posted on 09/29/2012 by paulefallon

A few months ago I considered the different circumstances of my pregnant yoga teacher in Boston and the pregnant woman who lives at the bottom of the hill from Be Like Brit in Grand Goave, Haiti. I am happy to report that both of them delivered healthy offspring.

Isamu, which means brave in Japanese, is a flawless one month old. His dad paces the studio and cradles him while his mother, Tomo, teaches my usual Monday morning class, while the baby nurses quietly in the massage room when his dad teaches on Sunday morning. During Brad’s ninety minute dialogue he always tosses in some quip about his son and fatherhood, Brad’s lack of sleep, Isamu’s abundance of gas.  After class Tomo brings Isamu out for everyone to ogle and some of the women take turns holding him.  I have a trio of nephews with Isamu’s same Japanese-German-Irish ancestry.  They are remarkably varied in their looks; one is blond and blue eyed, another has distinctly almond features while the third is a burly boy who looks Hispanic more than anything.  It is too soon to tell exactly what Isamu will look like.  His skin color is the perfect amalgam of his parents.  He is a bit Asian, a bit Caucasian, an ambiguous ethnicity that is characteristically American.  As he moves placidly from arm to arm after class, it is easy to envision him at home most anyplace the world.

Back in Haiti a pitch black bundle sits in the alley where her mother used to moan.  Since delivery the mother is more social; other women share her breeze.  I am happy that what seemed a very difficult pregnancy is past; I am gratified to witness the child’s tender calm.  Neighborhood children peak into her blankets and tickle the newborn as children are prone to do the world over.  The little girl, incongruously named Sandy, has found a welcome home, firmly routed to this particular patch of dirt and shelter.

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Cambridge Ladies

Posted on 09/22/2012 by paulefallon

Cambridge is a fine, fine place to live; its shortcomings barely worth mentioning.  We have efficient and clean government and excellent municipal services, even if there are a few odd positions like a Ranger and a Peace Commissioner that seem indulgent.  Our tax rate is lower than all of our neighboring cities, yet gleaming civic buildings sprout everywhere, including an immense teen center in my neighborhood, where adolescents are scarce. We have bustling urban centers, though Harvard Square has forfeited quirkiness for high rent chain stores. We have two remarkable universities that elevate our civic discourse, though provincial forces discourage their development so much that the city denied Harvard’s proposal to build a Renzo Piano museum along the river and built a (very fancy) housing project instead. When I ride to work, underwear dries in the huge glass windows where perhaps something more uplifting might have been displayed.  Most famously, Cambridge has a reputation for left leaning politics that earned it the moniker ’The People’s Republic’.  Unfortunately we suffer the same political dizziness that affects any far left point on the political compass when the peoples’ voice grows so shrill it becomes fascist

The guardians of our left leaning reputation who are most likely to adopt police state tactics are not Cambridge’s men and women in blue; they are uniformly cordial.  The watchdogs are the Cambridge Ladies, a distinct breed of women.  Mostly single, mostly greying, mostly energetic and fit in sensible shoes and scant make-up, Cambridge Ladies patrol our fair city enforcing their strict vision of what is allowed in paradise.  These women won their liberation and weathered its backlash, they got what they wanted by being aggressive and smart and they refuse to accept the intolerable result of their effort- that we are privileged enough to leave each other alone.

There is a saying that academic arguments are so virulent because so little is at stake, and Cambridge Ladies pick their battles the same way.  My house mate Paul’s lovable, chubby chocolate Lab, Silas, is friendly to every creature along the path around Fresh Pond.  Most people ignore his heft, a few call him a bear or a koala, but this fat and happy canine gets under the Cambridge Ladies skins.  “Your dog is fat,” the least articulate will say.  “Your dog is too fat.” is the more common scold, implying they have the authority to monitor how hefty Silas should be. Some comments ooze superiority.  “That is the Botero of dogs,” one woman proclaimed, obviously proud of her knowledge of both art and obese pets.

I received a memorable Cambridge Lady lashing last weekend, riding my bicycle along Brattle Street en route to yoga on a brilliant Sunday morning.  Nothing could detract from the splendor of the moment as I approached the intersection of Brattle and Fayerweather.  There is a light here, but no traffic on Sunday morning.  The light was red for Brattle but the pedestrian walk sign was green.  I slowed, looked both ways and headed across.  No cyclist worth his salt will stand at an intersection with no one moving in any direction. “You have to wait for the light!”  A sharp voice called from the brown Volvo station wagon idling on my left.  I smiled at the cliché of a Cambridge Lady in a brown Volvo station wagon.  The light changed, she pulled aside me, and as I anticipated, slowed her vehicle to continue the rant. “You are supposed to stop for the light!”  I did not respond or even look her way.  She accelerated and then cut me off with a right turn onto Channing Street. I continued down Brattle, laughing out loud at the ridiculous woman.  She was right of course; I am supposed to stop at the light.  Cambridge Ladies are always right, right to the point of being miserable.  I am not a reckless cyclist; I stop at lights when there is oncoming traffic or any question as to right of way.  But I refuse to stop just because it is the rule. Rules are necessary to guide our behavior and make things run smooth, but they are also made to be broken.

I saw a wonderful production of The Mikado recently; I love that operetta, in particular the Mikado’s ‘object all sublime…to make the punishment fit the crime.’  I thought of my law break and my Cambridge Lady and decided that each of us got a punishment well fit to our crimes. I disobeyed a law; a law barely relevant on a quiet Sunday morning.  I got scolded but ultimately found a great laugh in the whole thing.  The Cambridge Lady did not violate any crime scripted into law, though I consider being a sanctimonious prig in a hulking gas guzzler on a beautiful day a crime of sorts.  Her punishment is self-evident; she is sentenced to being a Cambridge Lady, petty and frustrated.

My punishment vanished the moment her car turned the corner. Her sentence, I fear, is for life, though the optimist in me would be generous on parole.  I hope that one day she might loosen up and realize that her unsolicited direction is unwelcome and unkind; it brings no positive energy to her or the object of her rebuke.  The beauty of life in a liberal city does not come from telling others we are wrong; it comes from a generous allowance that so long as we do not harm others, we have the privilege to do what feels right.

 

 

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Full Body Burden

Posted on 09/17/2012 by paulefallon

People who die young long have a long half-life.  They linger in the hearts left behind for years, sometimes longer than they walked on earth.  They are youth frozen in perfection, and cautionary specters that we humans can falter well before our time.

My college roommate and fraternity brother died twenty-five years ago.  He was thirty two.  John was a solid guy even in his teens, a hockey player with a comforting roll around his waist.  He used to grab it with both hands and shake, look down and greet his fat, “How are you today, hockey gut?”  In the body obsessed 1970’s when so many of us were trying to resculpt ourselves, John loved his girth.

John brimmed with kindergarten energy.  We sat at the huge partner’s deck in our room, studying opposite one another; he building carbon models with his organic chemistry kit, me building architectural ones.  When his big hands grew frustrated with the thin tubes he had to connect to illustrate various bonds, he would jump out of his seat, shout that the world needed bigger molecules, and erupt into a wild dance that illustrated molecular attraction at a grand scale. If Monday night house meetings got boring, John would jump out of his seat, sing ‘Little Bunny Foo Foo’ and designate some wary upperclassman for a bop upon the head.

John was enthralled with Rock‘em Sock‘em Robots, he clodded his way down the hall with tight, muscle bound fists, and sang the jingle more than I could endure.  One Christmas I cajoled our fraternity brothers to ramp up John’s Secret Santa gift; we pitched in and gave him his own Rock’em rink.  No one over the age of six ever loved a toy more.

What really set John apart from the rest of us was his girlfriend.  He did not loiter at Wellesley or Simmons mixers and date eager coeds.  Somehow he met a secretary a few years his senior with perfect blond hair and a husky laugh.  There was something exotic about this creature with a regular job and plenty of money slumming around the fraternity house, or sometimes having us to her tiny Cambridge studio for drinks.  Marilyn never cooked. She said she ate one meal a day at lunch, though I believe she thrived on daiquiris.  Marilyn loved John and put up with the rest of us, and he loved her in return.

In the years after college, the only delight John took in the consulting firm where he was ‘terribly bored and terribly overpaid’ was to develop a detailed algorithm of how to alternate trips to the drinking fountain and the men’s room so that one biologically necessitated the other at the utmost frequency.  He was generous with his wealth.  I have never been so indebted to another as when John and Marilyn, my wife and I spent a Saturday evening ambling the North End and dining in a chic restaurant.  We ordered specials with no prices attached, drank too much wine, and when the bill arrived I realized I did not have enough cash to cover our share.  I was still building models, albeit larger ones, in graduate school.  Before I could even contemplate working off dinner in the dish room, John swooped the bill away and announced, “When you make as much as I do you have to pay the full bill.”

John broke up with Marilyn. He wanted children and she did not.  There is no compromise to that dilemma. From that moment a leaden sadness gripped the man. He met a beautiful, conniving women sunbathing herself on the Esplanade.  Five months later they married.  Many of us flew in from wherever our first jobs had taken us and to a person we knew there was something wrong about Deborah.  A few of us debated whether we ought to say something to John, but we were too young to know that sometimes friendship involved hard conversations.  We stood by as he walked down the aisle in the arms of that manipulative woman.  My silence then is one of my greatest regrets; I hope that should I ever go so off track my friends will intervene and say, hey guy, open your eyes.

I didn’t see John for two years.  Deborah got pregnant, John got tired and listless.  Deborah had a baby, John got cancer.  I don’t remember what kind and it hardly matters, it spread so fast.

I returned to Boston in 1986 and saw John my first week back, a gnome of a man, four inches shorter, with a hunched back where radiation brittled several vertebrae until they crushed, and an enlarged skull sprouting a the few spare hairs that had not fallen away from chemo.  He spoke the jargon of the sick and held out some hope for remission.

Remission occurred, which only made things worse.  Deborah had tended John in an acceptable way while he declined, but once she understood that he might live for years instead of months, her true fangs emerged. Her golden boy with deep pockets had turned into a liability and she wanted nothing to do with him. She physically abused him, pushed him down the stairs one night and broke more bones.  She filed for divorce, he moved out.  She took me to lunch to plead her case, but I did not believe a word. She filed a petition of child abuse based on nothing, and for a year John could only see Katie in supervised visits.  Deborah is the most evil person I have ever known.  I doubt I could have influenced John before he married the witch, but I have to live with the fault of not having even tried.

They got divorced, John got to see Katie again, but he deteriorated. He could not live on his own and so moved back to Arvada Colorado to live, and die, with his parents.  The romantic in me always thought that John was too rich a child to be a satisfied man; that the grown-up world irritated him so much it festered a tumor.

I travel to Arvada every year.  My brother Tim lives there, in the far northwest part of town just before the houses give way to a high plateau and the foothills of the Rockies.  I usually go in July to ride in the Courage Classic, a cycling fund raiser for the Denver Children’s Hospital.  Tim and I take practice rides through the wide open areas, past the wildlife refuge around Standley Lake.  I think of John whenever I go there.  I hope that his soul is content in the wide spaces.

But on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, I am forced to reassess.  I recently read Full Body Burden, Kirsten Iversen’s cautionary tale about growing up in Arvada in the shadow of Rocky Flats Nuclear Arms Facility.  It is a perceptive memoir woven into a disturbing description of how we built plutonium devices with cavalier disregard for human safety and environmental devastation.  It is a story of a young girl and her family living in ignorance and denial, government support of corporate malfeasance, people dying too often and too young, with a very unsatisfying end, for though Rocky Flats is now closed, the patterns of destruction to people and the environment never receive acknowledgement. Our own land and our own citizens were just collateral damage of the Cold War.

Riding my bicycle around Standley Lake I would never guess that the refuge exists because the ground is too contaminated to be disturbed by construction or that while the boats skitter across the water’s surface, no one is allowed to wade along the shore and upset the bottom sludge.  Breathing in that fresh mountain air, I would never imagine how many thousands of pounds of radioactive material Rocky Flats lost to the atmosphere, the soil and the water around Arvada.  We absorb radiation cumulatively, and when we absorb so much it affects our metabolism, we reach full body burden.

Did John die too young because he grew up in Arvada, drank its water, and breathed its air?  We will never know what combination of karma and chemistry constituted his full body burden.  We do know his body gave out well before he should have gone.   He is twenty-five years along in my memory, and I hope to keep John fresh in my memory for a least twenty-five more.  He was a great and true friend; I wish I had been a better one to him.  But he was not the kind of guy to bear a grudge, especially against anyone who appreciates Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots.

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Fire Burning Within

Posted on 09/09/2012 by paulefallon

Bikram yoga is designed to upset our thermal regulation. When we spend ninety minutes in a 110 degree room, we invert our customary condition of internal body temperature.  The outside world is actually hotter than our internal temperature.  This allows us to warm the body ‘from the inside out’ as the dialogue states. It makes us more flexible.  One would think that by class number 805, on the day I plunk down the annual membership fee to start my fourth straight year of this yoga, my body would be pretty used to that inversion.  But today everything conspires against it.

The rain falls hard this morning, the humidity saturates, so instead of bicycling to Harvard Square’s big, glass-filled space, I take the subway to South Station and attend the small brick and wood studio within walking distance of my office.  We are only seven, all regular practitioners.  I get my favorite space, in the front corner where sometimes a slight breeze filters through the bottom of the door to the adjacent mat room.  For all that I love Bikram, I do not love the heat and I make no apologies in seeking out the coolest spot in each studio, if only measured by a single degree or a slight increase in the breeze.

Tomo, our teacher, is tough today; she runs the class hot and never opens a window or door for relief.  Some masochist installed new weather-stripping under the door, so that does not help.  Class starts hot and only got hotter.  By the third posture sweat drips off my nose, by the water break my towel is a swamp. The main reason I dislike extreme heat is that when the heat overwhelms it dominates my head space and I cannot set my mind in other, calming directions.  Today my mind is completely occupied by this heat, I am destined to count every pose and every breath until I can escape.

Even when the heat is intense, it usually levels off during the last third of the class, the floor poses. But not today.  It just gets hotter and hotter until the final sabasana, when I slouch myself off to the bathroom and stick my head under the cold shower.

One of the ways Bikram yoga tunes me to my body is through more delicate fever regulation.  I used to get fevers when I was sick.  Since I started Bikram I have never been sick, but I get fevers, tiny spikes, if I am fatigued or very hungry or stressed. They are useful reminders that my body needs attention.  This morning I have such a fever.  As I shower and wash my skin does not feel hot, but my insides are burning.  So much heat is built up inside that even as cool water splashes over me I continue to sweat.

I think I have come to stasis; I change into my street clothes and walk to work.  I have a rubber raincoat and an umbrella and the rain is not heavy.  I ought to stay dry.  But when I arrive at work I am drenched.  My white shirt is a wet rag, my undershirt is soaked.  I realize that while my poncho kept the rain off of me, it trapped the sweat emanating from within, far more moisture than the sky sent my way.  My breath is hot. Thirty minutes after class and I am still expelling the fire.

Eventually my thermostat settles down, though my shirts are damp all day. The usual looseness that comes from yoga is exaggerated; I am floppy as Raggedy Andy. I chalk up my extreme internal heat as an example of ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’, though I am in no rush to burn quite so hot anytime soon

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The Same Moon

Posted on 09/02/2012 by paulefallon

Life’s most sublime moments occur when least expected.  It is Thursday night in the construction shanty, my last night this trip.  There is a cosmic electrical dysfunction occurring throughout Grand Goave; for the past twenty-four hours we have had power at both Mirlitone and BLB but no lights.  Go figure.  As dusk settles into night computer screens provide our sole illumination.

Gama is writing the daily report; I help him with spelling words like ‘entire’. His vocabulary gets more ambitious all the time.

Jenison and his brother Jerry are perched on the cooler top, where we relegate children who loiter as we work.  I met Jenison two years ago when he appointed himself my helper building temporary shelters after the earthquake.  He flits in and out of my Haiti life, and this trip we spent lots of time together.  Three days ago I happened upon him in the dentist chair at the medical clinic the Sri Lankan UN troops were running at MoHI.  The dentist wanted to pull two teeth but needed parental permission.  Jenison has no parents; he camps with his uncle, a laborer for BLB, but otherwise lives by his wits.  He reminds of the Artful Dodger, he is a lovable rogue.  I sought the uncle out, got permission, held the boy’s hand through anesthesia and extraction and when the pharmacist handed over two packets of pain medicine, I realized that a street kid without pockets would be hard pressed to comply with three pills three times a day.  I gave Jenison water and his first dose and amused him enough to keep his gauze packed mouth shut the requisite forty minutes.  Then I gave him some bread.  I kept the pills and told him to return to MoHI that evening.  To my surprise, he did, and each morning, noon and evening since.  Maybe he has been in pain; maybe he simply wanted the food I provided with each dose.

On each visit Jenison and Jerry stay longer.  Tonight they draw houses, a square base with a triangle roof and a rectangle door in the middle, exactly like kids in America, although Haitian houses look nothing like that.  Now they watch and giggle in the dark.  They know I am leaving tomorrow; their three squares will be less dependable. They don’t have anywhere else to go but I fancy they like it here. I like having them here.

I am sitting next to Gilbert, a young BLB worker brimming with potential. At the crew meeting before the concrete roof pour, a quiet voice came from behind and translated Gama’s words into my ear.  When Gama was finished I turned to thank the voice and encountered a shiny young man I had never seen before.  Like everyone here, the earthquake changed Gilbert’s fate.  He speaks impeccable English and French, had some university training and an accounting position in Port au Prince, but returned to Grand Goave when no one was left to care for his aging mother.  Family runs thick here.  Two years later he found his way to BLB and demonstrated ability beyond a standard laborer.  He has risen to clerk of the works; he tracks each worker by trade, task and location, providing Gama the necessary data to measure productivity and generate payroll.  Every day Gilbert draws a lined chart and fills it in with data. I asked him if he would like to learn how to use a computer so he could work better.  He leapt on the opportunity; tonight is our first lesson.

Gilbert proves a model student, an eager sponge already familiar with a keyboard. Still, explaining rudimentary concepts like what is a document, a file, a row and a cell proves a challenge; the elementary language of computers is second nature in my head and utterly foreign in his.  We use one of his hand drawn charts as a guide and create a facsimile of his daily work. He is good at data entry; I show him how to copy and edit.  At one point while Gilbert types, Jenison catches my eye.  I look up as the waning twilight outlines the hill rising beyond our shanty. Jenison flashes me a smile.  Thankfully the void from his yanked teeth is in the back.  An aura of contented fulfillment washes over me.  We are an odd yet cohesive band of brothers.

Once night falls, our eyes strain under the computer monitors’ glow.  Gama finishes his report and sends it out, I teach Gilbert the save command, Jenison and Jerry run off down the road.  By the time we step outside a silver dollar full moon floats over the mountain and pixilated stars span the galaxy; the billions upon billions of rewards we receive for living in a land of dark nights.  “Do you see the same moon in Boston that we see here?” I am startled by Gilbert’s question, perplexed by the knowledge gaps of a well-educated Haitian yet enchanted by the child-like innocence of his query.

I hold his hand in front of his face and press it into a fist.  “You are the earth.”  I make a fist with my own left and right, “Here is the moon; here is the sun.”  I rotate my hands to demonstrate the interplay of sun, earth and moon.   “We all see the same moon, but how much we see depends on how much sunlight strikes the moon’s surface and reflects it back to earth.”  I explain how three spherical bodies, one rotating around another and another, create complex geometries that result in a full moon only once a month.  Half-moons and slivers form as the angles change, and the moon seems to disappear when it has nothing to reflect.

I am not an astronomer, but I get the gist correct.  Gilbert seems satisfied with the essential information. This guy is hungry for more than Grand Goave can offer.  If we had light, if I could remain here another day, he would gobble up more lessons.  But we are in the dark and I must be gone.  So I promise another lesson, maybe more, before the moon cycles through and displays itself full again.

Reentry to the United States is always hard for me, much harder than reentering Haiti.  I am baffled by our hurried brusqueness, yet I am immediately hurried and brusque myself.  On Saturday I find a wonderful little book, The Moon Seems to Change at the Harvard Coop.  It is aimed for 5 to 9 year olds, but it seems the right level of graphics and description for Gilbert to get a better idea of why the moon comes and goes so much.  I dine out with a friend; have a lavish dessert that satisfies my sweet tooth.  We see an outlandish premier of Marie Antoinette at the ART, a scathing yet comic diatribe about the 99% versus the 1 %.  Marie is both victim of her station and utterly vile in her deliberate ignorance of the world around her. I know a thing or two about leading a bifurcated life, though not enough to conjure empathy for Marie Antoinette.

I come out of the theater and stop short.  I begin to cry.  My friend thinks perhaps I’ve gone fou or am going to faint.  Nothing so dramatic is happening.  It is just the moon that takes my breath away, hanging over Harvard’s deeply endowed steeples in full splendor, the same moon that is shining on Grand Goave’s tenuous shacks, binding our two disparate worlds together.

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Finished…

Posted on 09/01/2012 by paulefallon

Architectural design is a process that begins with grand concepts and evolves into tedious minutiae.  It is not always linear, we often circle back to ensure that the part and the whole work together, but in general architects work from the global to the specific.  A $300 million dollar hospital that takes three years to design starts by analyzing potential building forms in relationship to topography and highways, prevailing winds and solar angles, until we whittle down with increasing detail and draw in fractional inches the sealant joints at wall flashing and the handrail profile that thousands of fingers will grasp over the building’s lifetime.  The rush to complete construction documents involves hundreds of ever more detailed tasks until, all of a sudden, every item on the list is crossed off.  All of our analysis and coordination are translated into piles of ink on paper or a single disc.  The inspiration ends with a whimper.

We experienced the construction equivalent today at Mission of Hope.  We poured the second floor slab, forty-seven hours straight of sand and stone and cement and water and guys with buckets.  When the concrete begins to flow I have very little to do; I must catch the gaps in the formwork and the errant piece of steel reinforcing before it gets cast for the ages.  I move among the crew to lend support and check the quality of the mix, but I am superfluous among eighty strong men tossing concrete with fury, grunting and chanting in a language I still cannot understand.

The first overnight I remained on site and napped a few hours just to feel the pulse of the work. The second night I went home and logged a solid sleep.  On the final morning I set up the curing tarps and directed the water boy but spent the rest of the day at Be Like Brit, detailing the metal spiral stair and laying out the medical equipment in the exam rooms.  When I stopped by MoHI on the way home, Lex exclaimed. “We did it!”, and it took me an instant to register what he was talking about.  My mind had already moved on.

Mission of Hope’s new school is fully built.  In the United States completing the structure represents only twenty to thirty percent of construction; our internal systems and finishes are elaborate.  But here the structure is key; and the school stands at its full expression.  The rest will come together in a typically messy Haitian way – we will add power and plumbing and plaster in and around people using the building.  The cooking ladies have already taken over the kitchen; it won’t be long for other uses to squat in the solid but unfinished structure.

There is still much to do, remove the forms next month after the concrete is strong, pour the ground floor slabs and steps, trench the drains, install windows and doors.  I can help, but this is stuff Lex and his guys have already done before, albeit on a smaller scale.  My unique offering, the stuff they could not do without me, is finished.  In time the satisfaction will settle in, but right now the grandeur of our feat eludes me. I am still swimming in all the little attentions I have paid to this building over the past eighteen months as we took our big idea and made it real, right down to making sure the last burlap curing tarp is in place.

Two hours to go and everyone is working on top of each other

Time to Sleep

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Everybody is Here!

Posted on 08/31/2012 by paulefallon

Haiti has nine million people. I often say that if you come here for a week you see half of them; everyone lives outside and people love to spend their time parading the streets.  Any activity brings hoards of onlookers and today, a big chunk of them swarm Mission of Hope because it is all happening here.

At seven in the morning the throngs outside the gate bleed onto the highway. Word is out that we are hiring laborers for the second floor slab concrete pour.  Inside, a hundred or so high school students move sand and gravel from the front of the site, where the truck dumps it, to the rear, where we are staging the pour.  This is day four of moving 20 tons of aggregate by bucket 200 feet uphill.  Before 8 am another crowd forms, as the Sri Lankans arrive to run a clinic and hundreds of mothers and their children add to the mix.

Everyone claims we can start pouring concrete first thing in morning, but the first bucket dumps around 10 am.  The interesting thing is not that is took three hours to get rolling but that never once did I raise my voice about it.  To settle the question of whether Paul will change Haiti more than Haiti will change Paul, Haiti wins hands down.

We have a typically Haitian hiccup in the activity as Route 2 is closed by a protest in the Fauchon neighborhood of Grand Goave.  The main bridge was damaged by the earthquake.  The government cleared an area and built a temporary bridge.  The original reopened a while back, but Isaac wiped out the temporary bridge and due to the clearing and the storm’s fury, a number of houses that used to stand firm got washed away.  The victims want restitution, so they close the road, and we cannot get any sand or gravel until Lex calls the mayor and prods a resolution.

By eleven everything is humming.  The high schoolers tote gravel up and down the alley along the new building, the soldier-dentists fill teeth of local children, record their fevers, clean their infections and distribute medicine, while up above it all, eighty labors pour bucket after bucket of concrete.  We figure it will take about 60 hours to mix, transport, dump, vibrate, and trowel about10,000 buckets.

This is where the action is.  Come on down!

Clinic at one end of the site.

Construction at the other.

 

 

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