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A wonderful evening

2008-09-10T22:36:00.002-04:00

Wonderful night. After work, I walked over to the I got to lay on my back as the sun set, enjoy the purple and orange light in the western sky, then watch the stars appear. They don’t just pop out, they drift in and out of sight so that you wonder if you’re imagining them into place. The moon stayed right over my sister’s right shoulder.

Bats overhead flew through the beams cast by the stage lights. A red-tailed hawk flew from behind the Hatch Shell directly above us – beautiful bird. The air was cool enough that I was glad to be wearing a sweater, but I was comfortable. What may be the best part of all, though, is that the whole time I was enjoying my surroundings, the Boston Landmarks Orchestra was playing Verdi’s Requiem.

It’s a wonderful piece – the person who introduced the piece said that a criticism of Verdi’s Requiem is that it’s rather dramatic for a requiem, which tend to the peaceful, somber side of things. Well dramatic it is, but not to any detriment! I found it rather moving. Nights like tonight are why I’m so glad to live in the city.

Requiem aeternam, dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.

An afternoon in the garden

2008-09-08T20:48:00.001-04:00

I'm delighted to announce that I've got a poem up at Qarrtsiluni. It's "an experiment in online literary and artistic collaboration", to use their words, and I've been a fan for some time. The theme these days is Transformation, so I submitted a poem inspired by the works of Frida Kahlo, whose diary I read last year. You should pick it up. And don't forget to check out my poem and all the others. You can even listen to my nasally voice reading it.

* * *

So yesterday I engaged in some backyardsitting, enjoying a late summer late afternoon. We're in that post-September summer that everyone forgets to reckon. Labour Day is the ritualistic end of the season in our secular calendar defined by measured by three-day weekends.

But everyone who uses their own senses can heard the cicadas, feel the breeze, see the waning summer light, smell the vegetation. The tomatoes on the porch are still going, the yard is pretty robust.

Looking from the balcony to the garden, don't those two chairs look inviting?

Oh yes, on closer inspection they still do. They're old but have character, and they were salvaged from trash day. It's alarming how quick people are to throw out stuff that definitely has a few good years left in it!

Looking from my afternoon perch to the drive way. I need one of those wooden rakes them zen gardeners use.

Trevor has managed to turn the yard into a garden, with birdbaths and chairs and brickwork. Our neighbour contributed river rock pebbles, and that with the tree trimming really brightened it up. This is the first summer in the almost four years I've lived here that I sat down and enjoyed the back yard.

Tropical Storm Hanna poured and poured on us Saturday night, but by daybreak yesterday it was beautiful. I know because I was awake for it. I can see why people like getting up early. We walked to Cafe Ula and had our breakfast outside, as we've been doing on some Sundays this summer, and realised we still had lots of day left.

* * *

From Thoreau's blog:

Some hours seem not to be occasion for anything, unless for great resolves to draw breath and repose in, so religiously do we postpone all action therein. We do not straight go about to execute our thrilling purpose, but shut our doors behind us, and saunter with prepared mind, as if the half were already done.

Emerald Necklace

2008-09-01T21:15:00.009-04:00

Kalends September

A lovely Labour Day spent walking along the so-called Emerald Necklace. One of the pleasures of living in Boston, especially Jamaica Plain, is that I can walk through parks all the way from my house to downtown. So this morning Trevor and I set off with Isaac. Our path took us through the Arboretum, along the Arborway to Jamaica Pond. From there we crossed into Olmsted Park, which does straddle the Boston-Brookline line, though it seems to be much more on the radar of Brookline residents. Every time I've come to Olmsted Park, I feel like I'm wandering in the ruins of some lost civilisation. In some ways I suppose I am.

See? Throughout the park there are the remains of lampposts, benches, walking paths. If you sit at the shore of Ward's Pond, you could be forgiven for thinking you're in the middle of a far-off forest. The sensation of being far away and yet in the middle of the city has always been very intriguing. Beaver Lake in Vancouver's Stanley Park came to mind.

Can you spot the hobbit?

This is a bend in the Middy River, right near the Museum of Fine Arts. It brought back memories, walking this stretch. There are so many colleges in the Fenway area, the streets were swarming with U-Hauls and students burdened with their various new belongings. It's fifteen years that I've been here now. Tempus fugit.

This is a rose garden that I'd no idea existed. I took this picture because it makes it look like the gate leads to a garden that has skyscrapers growing from it. Which it does.

This is one of the many gardens in the Fenway. The Victory Gardens were started during the Second World War to encourage people to grow vegetables since there was extensive food rationing. Now people grow mostly flowers. You can see that some of these gardens have been well attended for years.

After a leisurely picnic on a bench along Commonwealth Avenue, we came upon our destination, the Public Garden. I suppose the necklace would include the Common, but we were meeting Soma, who was fresh from the Boston Harbor Islands to share blackberries that she and a friend had picked.

This is the pond the Swan Boats ply.

Willows are probably my favourite trees in the world.

Waiting for the T. If you thought we were going to walk all the way back to Jamaica Plain after all that, then you crazy.

All in all a perfect day.

Just money

2008-06-02T00:39:00.001-04:00

I've been finding money everywhere lately. I have lost track of how many dollars I've picked up off the ground in bits and pieces since January. So I've started either giving the coins I find to people or leaving them in tip jars so I can spread some of this luck around.

I found the penny in the picture the other day by the busses at Forest Hills. It's pretty mangled up and you can even see the zinc beneath the copper layer has been exposed. It's barely a penny any more, and I can't put my finger on what's so strange to me about that. When I picked it up, my first thought was, "Is that all money really is?" A symbol, a set of agreements, a collective hope, a zinc plug with a super thin layer of copper for show.

Sunset from my bedroom window

2008-04-29T22:44:00.001-04:00

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Franz Kafka

Ponkapoag

2008-04-20T12:02:00.004-04:00

Yesterday T & I decided to take a walk around Ponkapoag Pond in the Blue Hills. The forecasters had been predicting a rainy day, so the sunny blue skies were a welcome surprise for the morning. One of the numerous advantages to living in Jamaica Plain is our ready access to so many great outdoor areas. Then again, metro Boston is brimming with great green spaces.

I was rather taken with this rock right away, when we'd come down the hill closer to the water. I feel like I just need to know the right language and I'd be able to read whatever it's trying to tell me. The grooves do seem to tell of water that flowed along some mud, but why do they also make me think of flames?

This is the reading stone's neighbourhood. We're still in early spring, so the splotches of green are really vivid against the grey. Mind you, in places like the Arboretum, many of the trees are in full flower.

This was basking in the sun right in the middle of the path. Somehow I'd walked right past it without noticing, so I guess it decided to notice Trevor and lunge at him. And yes this picture was taken using the zoom feature. It's not until we got home that we broke out the Audubon Guide and identified the snake as a Nerodia sipedon, a Northern Water Snake. Not poisonous, but who wants to be bitten by a snake?

Here is the attack victim recovering and reflecting on his luck.

And here's some joker who drags himself about the region wearing funny hats and orange, pondering the meaning of the word isolation, which comes from the Latin word for island, which makes said joker wonder what's so bad about islands & what's with the negative connotation?

This was marked on the trail guide as a boardwalk through the bog at the east end of the pond. I had pictured something a little more substantial, that wouldn't soak my new sneakers in Atlantic Cedar tea, but still found myself captivated by this little path. The boards were mostly steady, but occasionally sank under our weight. I'm looking forward to seeing how all this scenery changes over the seasons.

Daffodil morning

2008-04-15T21:50:00.000-04:00

I've been watching the new North Point Park in Cambridge emerge over the last several years. It's tucked away behind the Museum of Science Bridge at the very eastern tip of Cambridge - you can see it when you are on the train to Lechmere. Last fall it looked finished, but they hadn't gotten all the rails up along the water.

Well, it's finally open and I'd been meaning to go and today I decided I had a few minutes before work started to make a detour.

So this is what it looks like when you walk under the bridge. I'd walked along the bridge numerous times, countless times, but never under it.

And this is what greeted me as soon as I walked in: daffodils! They have planted daffodils all over the park. It was very quiet and the nicest surprise was all the birds chirping about. I think it would be a good thing to stop at a park and sit in the sun listening to birds before going to work in the morning. It would certainly be a nice antidote to the deadening effect the train sometimes has. And I imagine it would do wonders to ease the agitation of driving.

The rest of the day was coloured and lightened by my morning detour.

Nones of April

2008-04-05T21:18:00.001-04:00

So Trevor found this branch on the ground and decided to stick it in some water. I relocated it to this spot by the window on my dresser. It was popping into bloom when I left for Florida last weekend. The flowers were, shall we say, past peak when I got back. Still it was a magical thing to have happen.

Today D, T and I met Sat and event called Evolving Traditions at Wellesley College. It was put together by S's friend, and now my neighbour, who is a professor there. The dancing and music were top-notch, as was the food. I had never been on the campus before, and was quite impressed. I always find it a good sign when an older, established institution is unafraid to bring on some modern architecture.

* * *

I finished the book Three Cups of Tea, after reading it for one of the book clubs I belong to. I strongly recommend it not because it was great literature, but because it is an inspiring story, and a counter to all those who say that one person can't make a difference. Though it did make me wonder why I didn't start schools in Haiti or something. I've gotten to a point where I realise that it's more productive to see what I can do than to beat myself up for what I haven't done. Greg Mortenson, the subject of the book, is doing good work and I only wish that all the money we have poured into the abyss of war had been given to organisations like his instead.

Like any good depiction of a person who does such good work, it steered away from hagiography by illuminating some of Mortenson's flaws, though not as much as Tracy Kidder did Paul Farmer's in Mountains Beyond Mountains. If such people are portrayed as saints, it makes the regular folk think that they are too small to emulate them. Three Cups of Tea doesn't do that. Still, anyone who thinks education is some pie-in-the-sky idea that we can deal with after "security" is established, well, the two need to come together.

* * *

In other book news, I just got a whole bunch of poetry translations from Action Books. One of the editors was at Harvard at the same time I was. They have a focus on Scandinavian poetry, which is a fascination of mine. And luckily most of the books are bilingual.

It's poetry month, but instead of writing a poem every I think I'm just going to read one every day.

Happy New Year!

2008-04-01T21:08:00.003-04:00

Well, in the old (really) old days, this would have been the start of the year. What better day than today to start a new year? It's spring, despite the bare trees and gray skies. This morning as I walked up the hill to the cemetery, I noticed that the brambles have gone from being stick brown to having just the faintest ghost of green hovering about them. When you look directly it's hard to see, but there nonetheless.

I came into the office this morning after a long weekend away. It was nice to be back. I like the hubbub and the interactions. Apparently our society has reached the point where most people hate their jobs, or so I read somewhere. Thankfully I am not among those people. I love my job as much as I love a nice crispy apple. Really, there aren't many things lovelier than a crispy apple, especially if you've grown up on St. Thomas, where crispy apples are heartbreakingly rare. I don't know how I came to deserve such good fortune, but I'm going to enjoy it as long as I can. And what do you know? They had crispy green apples at the gym today!

But enough of this giddy exultation. The sky was moving today, rainy but warm. Momentous. I lost my uncle on Easter, one of my dearest friends lost her father on Good Friday. It's sad, too sad. So no resolutions for this new year, just hope.

Boox!

2008-03-21T20:01:00.000-04:00

So these are the little beauties sitting on my shelf. I used to have a lot more, but I, unlike many other bibliophiles, found that I was quite able to part with books. Maybe moving every year had something to do with it. Or maybe moving in with L & M back in '99 did it. They were able to move all their belongings in a few trips in a VW bug (an old one!), whereas I needed like three trips with a U-Haul van.

So I pared down. Maybe a little too hastily at times. There are a few books I miss, but I do live in a part of the world where I’m never too far from a library.

This is what’s left. I have read every book I own (except for the four I’ve acquired in the last month). It took years. There are a few I’ve been looking forward to re-reading, but most of them are just kind of sitting there. And it’s become less a matter of them taking up space than a matter of letting someone else have a turn at reading them.

In other news, yesterday was the first day of spring. I decided to stroll along the river at lunchtime the other day, for the first time in a long time. Everything I could see was a watery sort of blue-grey.

Back to school

2007-09-09T22:04:00.000-04:00

Tonight it's cool out. The leaves are changing early this year because it's been so dry. Last weekend every moving truck in the city was occupied. It was a good summer. Highlights included the free classical concerts at the Hatch Shell, Shakespeare in the Common, my new job, the Garden in the Woods, among many, many other things.

Always so much left undone, but that only means there's plenty left to do! The Brookline Poetry Series started back up on Friday, and was delightful as always. I'm looking forward to one of dearest friends visiting at the end of the month. I signed up to be a host for two first years at Harvard, so I look forward to showing them around the area. And I am planning to learn Swedish.

Delight of delights, the Thoreau blog seems to be daily again.

The Dirdy Birdy (full version)

2007-07-21T12:16:00.001-04:00

Hiatusing

2007-05-09T22:26:00.000-04:00

I think I’m spending too much time looking at screens. Instead of trying to update this blog three times a week, I think I shall cut it down to once a week, at least while I’m finishing this project. I’ll keep updating my St. Thomas blog daily, though. Well, until next Friday when I fly back to Boston.

Oh yeah, so it was funny: my Mom had saved all my Harvard papers from back when I was applying. It’s a funny little time capsule. You know what I said my plans for the future were when I was seventeen? I would study social sciences and work at a multinational company. So I guess I haven’t actually gone too far from that.

One last thing – go to wiggle worm and check out my doppelganger.

Third World?

2007-05-04T14:31:00.000-04:00

So there was a very interesting discussion that erupted the night I was watching the fireworks. Somehow it was brought up that there are people who consider St. Thomas to be part of the Third World. Well, I have long counted myself among those people, but I refrained from joining the conversation because people seemed rather indignant at the proposal. But then again, I suppose that many people think "Third World" has negative connotations, whereas I find it more neutral and certainly less insulting than "developing world" or any other of the other alternatives. And it means at least we don't number among the nations that went out and colonized others.

Later on, though, I mentioned it to my cousin who had been at the party and another friend. My cousin asked me how I can consider St. Thomas Third World when I've been to a country like Haiti. But what about all the countries that are far better off than Haiti, but still considered Third World? Then I brought up the fact that we have neighborhoods like Savan, Nadir and Smith Bay. Then the power outages. But those are all aesthetic.

I remember when I worked at the law firm one summer in college and I looked at some demographics for the Virgin Islands. That's when I realized what part of the world I was in. Poverty levels, birth rates, infant mortality, distribution of wealth, it all points to the fact that we are not on par with the industrialized world. My friend decided that we are a Third World society with First World amenities. I can accept that. I'm sure they said the same about Suriname when it was still Dutch Guiana, and look at it now.

Funny then, that we had a power outage the other night and this picture occurred to me. I'll title it "Third World but with First World Amenities".

otoliths & meng-hu

2007-05-02T23:19:00.000-04:00

The online literary journal Otoliths has launched its autumn issue (it's based in Australia), where you can find my poem in memoriam to Russell Jones. They have published some great stuff in past, so I'm looking forward to reading it myself. Check it out.

* * *

So over at the Hermitary the other day, Meng-hu was critiquing the book The Secret, one of the latest best-sellers about leading a better life. I haven't read it yet, but my mother seems to be enjoying it. I'll have to check it out myself. I am always suspicious of, well, anything popular, but especially pop spirituality because it always seems to be watered down Buddhism or Sufism but without the hard parts. Still, I'm not going to judge the book until I see for myself, especially since I know my Mom to be pretty sharp.

But what I did like most was his own secret:

What do I really want? Well, I already have my own "secret." I call it the "law of disengagement." It, too, is a universal law, as far as know. It simply states that peace of mind, habits of simplicity, the company of the wise, and disengagement from the rush of society, culture, and the crowd, is the source of happiness. Maybe that is the real law of attraction. I don't know, but it amounts to all the wealth I want.

It's not a road map, but it's a good summation of what I aim for, I think. Whether or not I'm actually on it or even whether it's a good thing remains to be seen. I'll say this much, though, I don't really miss pop culture at all.

Carnival

2007-04-30T10:35:00.000-04:00

It's been sixteen years since my last Carnival on St. Thomas. I loved Carnival as a child, going up and down the street, following troupes I liked, walking past troupes I didn't. As I got older, though, Carnival started to sour. There was a lot of crime and animosity. "Kill the Rabbit" kind of ruined Carnival for me. I don't want to go into it, but anyone who was on St. Thomas in the mid-80's should know what I mean.

I'm not the biggest fan of crowds, or people for that matter, so I never made it a priority to come back for Carnival. Over the last few years, though, the more parades I've been to in the States, the more I appreciated what we have here. It's really a coincidence that I'm here for Carnival this year. I hadn't really planned on going to the parade, but my cousin Hans called this morning. I didn't know he was going to be on island, so it was a nice surprise. Anyway, I decided to go with my cousins and I'm glad I did. I ran into lots of people I know and it was entertaining as hell.

I love that there are no barriers, so it is really more like a moving party. I love that even the fattest women on the island get into skin-tight outfits with sequins and feathers and dance down all of Main Street. I love how people of all classes and nationalities can join together for a good fete. Carnival really unites us as a people in so many ways. I think if more Americans had the experience of wearing sparkly costumes and dancing down the street with a beer in their hands, they wouldn't be so uptight.

Things have changed since I was a child, everyone's telling me that Carnival was smaller this year, but I thought it was wonderful. I'm glad I brought my camera.

Dreams

2007-04-27T22:38:00.000-04:00

Today I was reading Naguib Mahfouz's The Dreams and really enjoying it. It recalled a lot of surrealist poems I've read and really nicely blends elements of the fantastic and the quotidian - just like dreams. It's a book of short shorts, though it's sad to say that more happens in them than in many longer short stories I've read.

In the introduction it said that relating and interpreting dreams is a big part of Arabic culture and literature. I thought, though, of all the times someone would bring a poem about a dream into workshop. Some people generally dismiss anything labeled as a dream. I suppose you could say that it's because dreams only happen in one person's head and thus cannot be shared. I don't believe that though. And in reading Mahfouz, I could relate to some of his dreams, not because I'd had similar ones, but because the syntax, so to speak, was the same. The way you can "remember" something in a dream that isn't real either, the way dead people appear and you forget that they're dead, the way people turn into other people and it all seems normal. I think dreams are also a way of approaching a subject you don't want to talk about. Reading the dreams of Mahfouz put me as a reader into the very interesting role of being the interpreter of dreams. Funny, I just remembered that the etymology of interpret eventually leads back to trading.

Thank goodness some of my classmates ignored the whole "tell a dream, lose a reader" dictum and went ahead and wrote fantastic dream poems.

soggy

2007-04-25T21:44:00.000-04:00

Yuck. It’s amazing how soggy everything is. It has been raining heavily for days. There is so much water in the air, all the paper in the house is limp: my books, cash, loose papers on the desk. There’s absolutely nothing crisp in this house, possibly even the whole island.

Still it’s been nice to drive through clouds every day on the way home from work. And we have waterfalls now.

Celtic Living

2007-04-23T21:38:00.000-04:00

I’ve enjoyed listening to the radio in Gaelic and Welsh the last few days. I have been home alone working, so the radio is good company, but I don’t want to get distracted. Listening to radio in languages I don’t understand is a good way to fill the silence at home but stay focused on the tasks at hand. It gives some people a headache, I’ve heard, but not me. I find it more effective than music, and I love the sound of the languages. I picked Gaelic and Welsh because those were the two I knew I could find easily in a pinch the other day.

Gaelic. Welsh.

My mother and I used to spend hours watching news in languages we didn’t know. There was a great channel on St. Thomas where there would be soap operas in Tagalog and news in Amharic and Greek.

I'm afraid of Americans

2007-04-20T23:25:00.000-04:00

I'm afraid of Americans. I'm afraid of the world. I'm afraid I can't help it.

There is a moment in the video where David Bowie has a look of dawning horror as he begins to sing, “God is an American.” It made my spine tingle then, and it does so now. I live in America, true, but I also grew up in an American colony. The anger I’ve encountered when trying to talk about the gap between the way Americans perceive themselves and the way others perceive them has always unsettled me. It’s that same anger that has fuelled the invasions of country after country.

“I’m afraid of Americans” came out in 1997, but I’ve often wondered how it hasn’t come to be the new national anthem. Besides the bombings and invasions, how about the school shootings and the hostage situations and the like? I think of the song now, though, not in response to events abroad, but rather to events on the Mainland.

I’ve been told that my problem is that I will make these criticisms, but that I don’t hold myself accountable for any of it. Foreigners aren’t allowed to criticize, apparently, and citizens have to say the mea culpas on behalf of everyone else. But where do I fit in? I’m both and neither. I may have moved to the mainland, but it can be argued as to whether I really had a choice.

Still, I’m willing to accept responsibility. I accept all of America’s sins as mine. Everyone who has benefited from any injustice is responsible for that injustice. How does that sound?

What consoles me in all this is how rare events like the Virginia Tech killings are. After all, it could happen a lot more, but doesn’t. Somehow we manage not to require a police state to keep things like that from happening every day. Not that more compassion in the world would hurt anything.

Spring

2007-04-18T23:21:00.001-04:00

Even though I am enjoying the sunshine and the cooling breezes of St. Thomas, I do miss my beloved New England. Sure the weather there has been harsh of late, and the winter is lagging on longer than usual. But I looked at this picture taken a year ago at the Arboretum, and it's easy to remember why I love Boston.

For everyone up North, remember that this is coming. This is special. Where I am right now, there are never days like that. I'm sad to be missing it.

Town

2007-04-16T23:22:00.000-04:00

It's funny, you can grow up somewhere and not realize that it is brimming with architectural treasures. Charlotte Amalie, better known to us locals as Town, was founded in 1671, but most of its buildings date from the nineteenth century. I always knew that the downtown area by Main Street was old, but I hadn't realized even the streets at the edges of town were laid out in the 1760s.

This weekend I read The Royal Three Quarters of the Town of Charlotte Amalie by Edith DeJongh Woods and Historic Buildings of St. Thomas and St. John by Frederik C. Gjessing and William P. MacLean. The former is a gorgeous book - the illustrations alone make the book worth having.

We are finally seeing some appreciation for Town, a lot of outsiders are fixing up some of the old buildings. Actually, a lot of the old local families never left and still live in their townhouses. It's too easy to zip through town on the waterfront. It's very easy to avoid town altogether, but it would bear a good walking-through. It was laid out when cars were unimagined. Indeed, the only way to go on the step streets is to walk them.

It turns out that St. Thomas has been a cosmopolitan trading center right from the start. Even though I grew up in the relatively rural Northside, I suppose the kernel of urban appreciation was placed in my young mind by going to town every day after school. I feel cheated that it's not until I was an adult that I learned our history. I don't get any indication that our schools have gotten any better on this front since I left. Still, I think awareness is growing, so I'm optimistic.

Lazarus

2007-04-13T20:20:00.000-04:00

Back among the living, it was nice to leave the house today. I wondered if anyone would mention that today is Friday the Thirteenth. We used to make a big deal of it when we were children, I think because we hadn't lived long enough yet to realize that it's not actually that rare an occurrence. You know how it is for kids, everything is happening for the first time ever.

Nobody mentioned it at all, though, which sort of surprised me. Not that I believe in silly superstitions like that. Even if I did, I would just use my jumbies to protect me, right?

So all today I had that washed-out feeling one has when one has been sick enough to lose track of time. Also, there is always that faint suspicion that, no, life can't possibly have been going on without me. They're all kidding, right?

The Caribbean Writer

2007-04-11T15:05:00.000-04:00

The Caribbean Writer is a journal put out by the University of the Virgin Islands. They have published some real Caribbean luminaries like Kamau Brathwaite and Edwidge Danticat, among many others. And now they've decided to publish me.

It's very fitting that I would get notice of acceptance while I'm down here. It was a bright light in a day made otherwise gloomy by this lingering flu. Also, they pay their contributors in copies, but that still means that this is my first paying publication!

2007-04-09T15:05:00.000-04:00

I am sick today, so I will not post.