Oh, there's the Range!

A long number of years ago, after a very difficult and traumatic passage in my life, I mounted a plane in Brownsville, Texas.  My parents had bought my ticket, and I learned as the day went by that it included nine stops before the eventual arrival in Denver, Colorado.

It was a beautiful Texas June day, sunny and clear, and as we journeyed northward, and went down in every possible stop we could take in Texas, and a few more, it became afternoon and we were flying I guess over Kansas, and I was becoming more and more frazzled from the unfamiliarity of travel and so many landings and take-offs. I felt nervous and fatigued, and wondered if we'd ever arrive in Denver, Colorado.

In midafternoon an older lady boarded the plane and sat next to me by the window. I'd been looking out all day at oil reservoirs, square planes of fields in greens and yellow and browns, so wasn't interested in the window seat.  She was pleasant and chatty, and it turned out that she was the mother of the rector of the Episcopal Church in Colorado Springs, our next to the last stop. She was so nice that I positively began to enjoy my trip, and as we talked I began to unwind a bit, distracted.  After a time, she looked up from her knitting and remarked with pleasure, "Oh, there's the Range!"

I looked out the window and had the surprise of my life.  Up from the flat terrain  that we'd been flying over all day, sprang--the Rocky Mountains! All of a sudden, just like that!  Vistas that I'd never imagined!  Huge, spiky, rocky, jutting up into the sky in blues and greys and whites, for the afternoon had turned cloudy now...They sprang up out of nowhere, for me. I didn't know what I'd expected of Colorado, but the reality of the huge prospect was truly overwhelming.

The lady got off the plane in Colorado Springs, her family with son in clerical collar and straw hat, looking just like Robert Morley in The African Queen, teenagers standing by too...for airports were very different things in those days and greeters would wait outside by the fenced gate for the arrivers...and I never saw her again.  Off she went, leaving me with one immortal phrase of pleasure and discovery: "Oh, there's the Range!"

When I left Denver 3 days ago, I had the great pleasure of flying over the snow-covered peaks of the  Range again on a clear bright midday. And I remembered the past and the old lady.  Lesson learned: we never know what's going to turn up for us to know, to learn, to love, to wonder at. 

That was the great gift of my trip this month.  You never know.  There's a range I have not even imagined before me. There are choices to be made, but nobody is hurrying me.  I came home calm, ready to make the decisions when I have to. YAZZYBEL

Stranger in a Strange Land

Here I am, ici, (I say ici because I can get the radio in French at some place on the dial at night)...anyway, at this moment, ici in Cedar Rapids am I.

I have been a stranger ever since I left my house in Chula Vista nearly 2 weeks ago.  It's strange. I have never traveled and felt to be in a strange place, just because I wasn't at home. I think now it's different because there is no home; no person at all waiting for me or holding down the fort. I was kind of single in the eighties but I had the kids in and out to tie me to something.

Now I am eager to go home but who will be there to say HI?   The teenaged boy next door who's coming over to feed the cat and water my kale plants.  Perhaps. The cat Himself, perhaps. He'll be offended and not want to be friendly.  Perhaps. He's had about all the abandonment he can take this year.  He nearly went bonkers when Theo went to the hospital and didn't return.  I hope he's glad to see me and forgives me and lets me brush him.  The bite he gave me on my hand before I left is hardly visible. (He couldn't help it.)

Will a different person walk into the house than walked out of it? I won't know until I do.  I have passed time in two houses as different from each other as houses could possibly be. I have related to my sister, her husband, my son, my daughter in law, and my grandchildren. I am ready to take my burden upon myself again, by myself again. I hope. Lots of decisions to be made. Lots of new possibilities on the horizon. 

I am physically a bit weaker than I was when I left home: not good. That's because I have not been doing anything but loll around and watch TV or read, since I came to Cedar Rapids.  There are things out there to do perhaps but I have not done them.  Note to self: next time, rent a car whether you want to or not.  I need to stop writing for a while now so I can walk around in a circle through the LR, front hall, DR, and kitchen and back here again.  So will sign off.  Someone will sign on and write this blog after I get home.  Exciting to see who will do that!  I'll let you know. YAZZYBEL

Movies and Memories

Yesterday, Cyclo arrived in the mail. I watched it, and I need to watch it again as I was in my exhaustion phase and fell asleep during my nap. So I did not see it all, but I saw enough to know that it is the "dark" side of life as compared to the other two films in the trilogy. They are about home and family and love and relationships.  Cyclo, about a poor young man who has to drive a bicycle-taxi about the streets of Ho Chi Min City in order to support his sisters and grandfather, shows the other side: street life, gang life, prostitution, illness, and violence.  It is hard to watch and I will watch it again.  Just not today.

I love the other two films because they reminded me of so many things about my childhood, and show me again why I feel such a closeness with the older Indian films too. People live simple lives.  They make life beautiful where they can do so, with gardens, and their possessions if they are lucky enough to have any.  Old people look old, like the Aunty in Pather Panchali, so old you wonder how they can make it, creeping around from day to day trying to find something to eat. The weather is hot.  It rains, huge tropical rains with drops the size of fifty cent pieces like the ones I used to watch falling onto the canna lilies when I was little.
     In the Vietnamese movies, there are always people coming around. Coming around to sell things, to borrow things, to bring things, to take away things, knock knock knock...in our world we'd hear the sound of a little man who went in a truck to sell vegetables and fruits...toot toot on the corner and you went out to see what he had to sell.
There was the piruli man, who had a big cone of paper and stuck into it were little cones of paper-wrapped candy, sweet and soft.  We loved pirulis and I would like to have one this minute.

There were bakers who would come and knock and take you out to their cars where there were trays of breads and rolls..and how good they were.
And at night--the serenaders!! Bands of strolling musicians, usually four violins, would come around. You'd hear them softly playing in the front yard, and you'd all go out front to listen in the dark, while someone in the house grumpily scrounged around for change to give them.  If you gave them something, they'd play another tune; if not, they'd move on.

In Mexico City, there was a huge enormous music box, a beautiful and complicated machine, that used to come around in the Colonia where we lived. I'll never forget the main tune it played, and just thinking of it transports me back to those evenings. 

And in Vietnam, in the movies I saw there were so many animals in the gardens of the houses...little lizards, and different kinds of frogs and toads.  We had them too...we had Mediterranean geckos (though nobody in my family knew the name of them then) which actually sang a beautiful little musical call...they were shy sweet creatures with big eyes and soft bodies with little tubercles all over.  I was sung to sleep by them many a night when I was very small.

Nowadays nobody hears those little animals or is very aware if they are around. Perhaps children are...I am told that the geckoes are no more, finally finished off by the deep winter freezes that Global Warming has produced.  But I'll bet somebody has them still.  Lucky them.

You have to go outside and forget the air-conditioning for a while in order to find out. You have to look for the vacant lots in order to find the tortoises that we used to encounter by the dozens as kids...and the water turtles too, big lumbering creatures.  But now they all have less natural habitat to proliferate in.  People have chopped down lots of the mesquite brush to use for BBQ wood.  The resacas are tamed in the City of Brownsville, I guess totally.  It isn't raining as much lately and the winters are colder. 

But there are parrots! Lots of little green Mexican parrots took a tip from their 2-legged compatriots and came across the border illegally.  There are flocks of them all over Brownsville, Texas, or so I hear.

And there are alligators.  Really, there are.  I am just going to have to go back to visit, to see if there really are any alligators, or little geckos, or strolling musicians left in this world, outside of old movies.  YAZZYBEL

Two Beautiful Films

G'day.

The two films I am writing about are by Tran Anh Hung, and they are The Scent of Green Papaya, and The Vertical Ray of the Sun.  There is  a third in the set called Cyclo, about a person who runs a taxi-bicycle.  The two that I've seen are bittersweet, very true to life family scenes. I have the feeling that Cyclo is a darker theme, but will tell more about it when I've seen it.

In The Scent of Green Papaya, a little girl goes from her village to become a servant in a large prosperous family in Hanoi.  When I looked up Hanoi, I was shocked to see that it's indeed in North Vietnam and so foreign to our American imaginings.  The customs, household, and family are so cultured and beautiful that they are set apart from our US standards by all measures.  The large family is unhappy because they had the tragedy of losing a daughter years before, from illness. The father thinks it was all his fault because he is a man who takes the family money periodically and goes away from the house to spend it all. His wife is devoted and loving, and has three boys, an almost grown teenager, a moody pre-teen, and a little demon four or five year old.  These are all portrayed with beautiful accuracy as to their emotional reactions to what's going on with their parents.  There is an old grandma, too, traumatized by the loss of her young husband years ago and her granddaughter who would have been the age of the new maid Liu.
      We follow along with Liu as she learns from an older servant the ways of the well-off household.  It is hard to believe the sophistication amidst simplicity of their beautiful lives.  I was fascinated by the cooking lessons, of course.  I was enchanted by the beauty and order of a large household that covered the grounds of a large compound indoors and out.  But I read in Wikipedia that Hanoi has existed on the  Red River for a thousand years...that swamps our little three hundred year old country by far.  And as my hairdresser used to tell me, they were occupied by the Chinese "one thousand years...the French, three hundred years...America--(grimacing)--forty five years...!"
     Anyway,   the beauty and order of the household, its furnishings and objects, its gardens and water features (as they are now called in landscape articles), is simply astounding.  Every inch is thought about, ordered, cared for;even the many wild little creatures, ants and lizards and frogs, seem to have a role in making the whole a beautiful place to live in.
     The next film, The Vertical Ray of the Sun, is about three beautiful daughters and their brother and their husbands and lovers...very modern, in its topics...with lovely children and, again, beautiful backdrops of home, garden, and sometimes dramatic coast scenery.  How easy it is to identify with these people, simple in some ways, deeply complicated in others...and how they deal with the cards life deals them. 
     Of course, even though these lives are portrayed as they were lived in the nineteen fifties, all would be different now.  Everyone would have a cell phone device in their hands, and the children would be rude, and TV's would be blaring.  So these stories would seem a fairyland to someone born after 1960, say...but I can remember all the way back to 1929 and I can tell you that it was not fairyland here in the US or over there in unknown Vietnam.  Things were different. People were the same, but things were very different. YAZZYBEL