Fields of Rain

Twenty eight years ago I rode my bicycle out of Kasane with my new wife and crossed the border into Zimbabwe. I remember that day pretty clearly, just after Christmas in my home village of Nata, two weeks with our friend Trevor and his family, even a colonial send off by Trevor complete with tent and food and British pomp, all in good fun and very Pythonesque. The day we crossed I remember seeing an awfully large herd of cattle just inside the treeline, dark shapes looking up at us and a herd that stretched for a half a mile inside the forest. I looked closer and recognized the unique horn of Africa's most dangerous animal, the cape buffalo. We quickly moved to the other side of the road.

On our way to Victoria Falls that day, I didn't realize that it would be twenty eight years until I'd return. I was only 26 and there was so much life in front of me. Botswana had been my home for nearly three years and I really couldn't have understood why I would be away for so long. I'm here for just three days this week, but as I think about some words or stories to tell to guests of my university's reception tomorrow, and there are many tried and true stories of elephants and crocodiles, life in a small village and life in a large village. And then, crystallizing in my memory is one that I haven't touched in nearly three decades.

Tshimoyapula. That was the name of the village I was headed to after two weeks of Peace Corps language training in Setswana. I didn't know it at the time, but Tshimo ya Pula means Fields of Rain in Setswana; the irony of that name for a village squarely in the Kalahari wasn't lost on any of the ten or so volunteers after six weeks living with our families.

So many memories now. My family was a compilation of two. I never found out where the fathers were, but the two women, one of them my host mother, made me feel welcome. And the children, well there were enough to field two nearly complete football teams after dinner each evening. My bag of food supplied for the duration of my stay by the Peace Corps, cabbage, dried soup, beef, chicken, etc, lasted a few days. After that, I ate the traditional diet of bhopi jwa mabelle (sorghum meal) prepared with goat milk for breakfast, prepared with cream of tartar and goat milk for lunch and prepared with oxbow soup mix as gravy and cabbage for dinner.

My host mother would wake early and cut wood for the fire to cook the porridge in a black, three-legged pot. The smoke would drift throughout the compound and mix with the rooster banter and the first rays of light. We would eat sorghum porridge, with some goat milk, adults first and then the children, and I would ply them with my broken Setswana. Laughter, learning, some headaches and struggle, but that's the way learning works.

My mother was a shebeen queen, which meant she was the village brewer of chibuku, a barely fermented distillation of, of course, sorghum. As far as I could tell, it would take about three days to brew in an open 55 gallon drum. Flies would land and meet their demise and then need to be scooped off the surface in great globs of fly and foam. I don't think the Peace Corps knew that my mother was a brewer, but it made my compound the center of village life. After hours of studying Setswana verb declinations and noun classes, I would stumble home with a headache, eat, play with the kids and then sit under the tree on a small stump of wood and pass the gigantic copi of chibuku around the circle of increasingly talkative men.

A few days into my second week, my mother was alone with me. We were chopping the marble-like wood she used for cooking. Her serious eyes looked at me, "When are you coming home?" At first I thought I'd confused coming and going in Setswana. "Oh, it'll be at least two years." "No," she said in English and pointing to the ground, "When are you coming home here?"

Twenty eight years, my mother. Twenty eight years.

rumination in the dark at fifty three

in the end
at last
in the simple dark
between closing my eyes
and sleep's release
is all i am
what i've done
the sum total of one

the only fear i've had
was losing something i didn't have
a worry that wasn't real
isn't that what love is
needing what we don't have
seeking what isn't
in places that aren't

in the dark, i see
and smile
at what i am
when the fear is gone.

vin chaud

a night's wind in montmartre

pushes past the doors, the patrons

squeeze hip to shoulder 

gripping mulled wine

letting songs roll off

in french I don't always understand

there's a vague beauty

a monet would understand

seen through memory

and eyes half wide.

Remembering Sappho

To find a tree in the forest

One must have an old dog

To sniff every bush

And look over each rock

And not walk in a straight line

Or with a map

Or even with a straight memory

The time to spend all day

Is what's needed.

new years wishes

are like a breeze on a January morning
pushing brown oak and faded red maple leaves
in circles sliding on the snow:

clarity
when the wind stops and reveals the silence
behind the clutter of action and forms

beauty
as the sun clears the morning cloud
and not from without, but inside it comes

love
of all varieties as the wind warms in months
and buds the trees with new life.

June 18th

'I need to tell you, the US State Department doesn't allow its employees to undergo general anesthesia without specific permission.'
'I understand,' and she drove the needle into my arm.

I was in Johannesburg, South Africa, a few days into a two week visit to the city, all expenses paid by the US government, to find out why I was sick. It was March and I'd already dropped fifty pounds off of a fit twenty five year old body and I was sleeping most of every day, too exhausted to pedal to my teaching post on the edge of the village. My Peace Corps doctors, a pediatrician and a cancer researcher, were overmatched and gave up after a few months of blood tests and hitchhiking forays from my village in the north of Botswana to the capitol of Gaborone in the south. The last visit was the clincher.

'Chris, how is your marriage going?'
'My marriage?' I saw over his left shoulder a framed picture of him with one of his patients, a research monkey at the University of Florida.
'Fine. Do you think my high white cell count, anemia and severe weight loss are psychosomatic?'
Pause. 'I think we need to send you to a specialist in South Africa.'

I woke up in a hallway. Dim lights and dull beige painted walls. I was looking at the ceiling and the last thing I remembered was the nurse giving me a shot. My throat was sore. What time was it? I had joked about them doing the proctoscopy and colonoscopy in the correct order. Now I was worried that they hadn't. One has to be careful about what one jokes about in Africa.

I told this story to my colleagues in the office earlier this week. I had turned fifty back in January and I had been delaying the required colonoscopy for months, mainly because of the last colonoscopy I'd had twenty five years earlier in Africa. I knew it would be better, easier, more prepared, but the memory of waking up disoriented in a hallway a few hours later, with a sore butt and sore throat, lingered.

And the doctor's office suggested June 19th for the procedure, meaning that June 18th was going to be a day of fasting and awful purging with the 'kit' they'd assembled for me. This June 18th was the fortieth anniversary of my afternoon spent making time stop back in 1974 and for some reason I figured that time would slow down again, perhaps for different reasons, and this seemed to fit the day very well.

For the last forty years, this day has been for stopping and thinking of important things. And, except for one occasion, in a German philosophy class when we were discussing Nietzsche and existentialism, I've spoken about it only to a very few people. As an older adult looking back at that ten year old in the bedroom staring at the ceiling, coming to grips with mortality before life had really begun yet, I smile at his earnestness, his need to think and talk about important things, his desire to live as much as he could in such a short time. In six years he would fall in love for the first time. In fourteen he would travel to Botswana. In fifteen he would get married and in twenty three and twenty five years he would have his children.

Somewhere during that time he figured out that life wasn't about the number of years (or the number of breaths, if you are a yogi) that one received. That was a random number, factored by genetics, dumb luck and a few life choices. What was important was being awake for the ride and conscious of the beauty flying by in every moment of joy and pain. What is important is seeing the colors and understanding how the light of the morning is different than the light of the late afternoon. What is important is that one embrace all of it, that one loves.

Last post San Diego

The road meanders with the shoreline, past sailing ships and a museum devoted to their history. I try to remember the difference between a sloop and a schooner; is it the number of masts? The slant of the sails? Sean's father used to remember with us when we were young, his days racing sloops on Lake Michigan with only sail power and the magical skills of docking a sailing ship without a motor.

This is the way I ride. Memories churn into my quadriceps, pumped into my blood, thoughts move from synapse to muscle twitch and the memories tied to a place, or smell or the feel of a cool breeze, or the rot of fish in the morning, seep into my consciousness.

A seagull and I think of reading my mother's copy of Jonathan Seagull for the first time when I was ten, the year Christopher crystalized into the essence of who he is now. 1974, the month of June, on the 18th, the year, month and day I first became aware of my mortality and all its ramifications. I suppose the seagull was a part of that, a questioning of 'going along' with the flow of time and expectations. I closed the door of  our room, my brother absent somewhere, and stared at the ceiling.

Why was it that time seemed sometimes to move fast and sometimes slow?

It wasn't linear after all. I thought about that. Then a fearful thought grabbed me: I was ten and I'd already lived a seventh of my life. What had I accomplished?  A seventh of an ice cream cone was a significant thing; my life was being consumed unconsciously, without intention or purpose. I was being wasteful!

What if I could slow down time and make my life last longer? I knew how it worked in Sr. Rhodilia's math class at St. Mathias; those 45 minutes lasted at least as long as an entire trip to my grandmother's on the west coast. For an hour I made time move slowly and then decided that a life like that might be indefinitely long but not actually worth living. At ten years of age, I decided the best thing to do was to remember how quickly time was passing and, with that awareness, decide to live as fully as possible.

What I knew then as a ten year old was that I was still needing to learn what living fully meant and those milestones came later and much later. Experiments with love and pain, commitment and betrayal, sin and goodness; each step in my life, each friend met along the way, further helped me develop the idea of what it meant to live fully in the few moments that we have.

These thoughts course through my veins and find their expression in the wheels turning. I feel them when I grip the handlebars with my hand and the exquisite pressure in my legs as I lean into the pedals and gain speed.