30 December

Three years ago yesterday I attended Khmer Heritage Night in Portland, Oregon, USA. I was feeling blue and I didn’t really want to go, but I had a story to write, so I picked myself up by my bootstraps. I was, and I am, ever so glad I did. The people at my table on that chilly, rainy night – so different from Cambodia’s delicious December weather – taught me my first word of their language, and I ended the article I wrote about the event with that word – ah goon - which means “Thank you.”

“I think Cambodia is one of my twenty countries now,” I wrote in my journal. “For all they’ve been through, the Khmer are just about the nicest people in the world. I’ve never felt so welcomed.”

I followed through on that intention three years ago. I’ve been living in Cambodia and studying the Khmer language for three months now, and my impression that the people of Cambodia are the nicest in the world has only deepened.

Yesterday evening I recited a rhyme in Khmer for my students. I’m nearing the end of my first-grade reader, and this rhyme was my first group of lofty, not to mention cohesive, thoughts, after pages and pages of letters, then words, then simple yet excruciating sentences. I have always loved learning to read, and here again it is one of my life’s joys to tentatively sound out squiggles and realize I already know their sounds and their meanings. (The first word I discovered this way was the Khmer word for “language.”)

My students are generally as polite and attentive as can be expected of twenty teenage girls at the end of their school day, but when I read that rhyme to them, they were rapt. Afterward, they burst into the kind of applause usually reserved for rock stars. They insisted on two encores. “Can I read it tomorrow?” I asked, intending to convey by implication instead of again today. “You can read it every day!” one student squealed.

Among the privileges of my nomadic life is the opportunity to observe people’s ferocious and tender love, all over the world, for their first languages. Far from inciting xenophobia, this love seems to me to predispose people to love second languages, and third, and on and on.

Khmer is my fifth language. With the exceptions of long-distance running and stone carving – neither of which I have any natural talent for – it is the most challenging project I have ever undertaken. It has 33 consonants, 32 of which have separate subscript forms, 25 dependent vowels, 15 independent vowels, and at least three diacritical marks. The majority of these neither look nor sound like anything remotely familiar to me, and many of them look and/or sound a great deal like each other. The consonants change their appearance and the vowels change their sounds depending upon their attachments to each other. Vowel sounds also change based upon a number of other conditions that I, at this point, can only take on faith and repeat as corrected.

I am unlikely to achieve anything commonly thought of as fluency, especially as I plan to be here only two more months. Khmer is not a widely spoken language. Why, I ask myself when my head swims, am I doing this? It’s not a rhetorical question. I am doing this because I can’t think of anything else I have ever done that has made so many people so happy.

Here is my translation of the rhyme, which, as they left the classroom, a number of my students were reciting:

We are children; we go to school to learn.

We learn to see, we learn to read, we learn to draw and write.

We are good at it, but not really good. We can practice sport.

Well-being.

28 December

NUCLEAR RUINS

WORMWOOD

December 28, 2008

Chernobyl is the strangest, the most recent and most clearly preventable of all my ruins, the one with the farthest-reaching and longest-lasting implications, the one which will not simply and slowly sink into the earth which accepts all gifts. Yet Chernobyl is a ruin. I hadn’t quite seen it that way at first, since most of my ruins are peaceful, benign. Chernobyl, after more than two decades, is tending toward tranquility, the reminder that time really does heal all wounds, but it hasn’t reached it yet. Chernobyl still feels haunted, perhaps by so many heroes who lost their lives there, and saved the world.

A Ferris wheel out back of the Palace of Culture and Sport in Pripyat has never been in use, scheduled as it was to open on the First of May, 1986. The earth is taking back a hotel and a swimming pool, as it has perhaps already taken a church I read about but never saw. A school was by far the saddest of these remains, with bookshelves tilting crazily and books piled in heaps. I was momentarily seized with an urge to take a souvenir – there were no signs forbidding it – but I didn’t act on this brief lunacy. The photographs I took are suffused enough with the magnitude of this catastrophe.

Leaving the site of what may be the worst thing my species has ever done, I had to walk through a radiation detector. It was only an instant of terror. The rest of the world that waited for me on the other side was, and still is, a miracle.

HALF-LIVES

August 6, 2001

The wind called Termination blasts and scours

the shell of a ghost-town schoolhouse where children

of farmers and ranchers learned their ABCs before

the government gave these residents of Hanford

thirty days to pack their things and go.

I listen for the padded footfalls of bobcats

stalking sparrows and voles in the cool

shadows of abandoned reactors

that punctuate the bluffs above this surreal stretch

of the Columbia River that plutonium saved.

In the slow but unrelenting current, two mule deer swim

toward the riverbank where a bright red sign

warning Construction Site: No Trespassing

guards the future tombs of nuclear tailings.

A third of the river’s salmon start and finish

their unlikely lives on the gravelly bottom

of these fifty miles of the Hanford Reach,

but the seep of irrigation from the cropland shore

is threatening to erode the stone above their spawning beds.

I linger in plutonium’s slow legacy, half-grateful, half-afraid.

16 December

Everybody gets a second chance, nobody gets a third.

15 December

Teacher Josephine is laughing.

It’s late at night. Teacher Josephine is looking at her watch. Her neighbors are making noise, and Teacher Josephine is laughing.

Her neighbors downstairs are watching a program on television: the people are yelling and the music is loud. Her baby neighbor across the courtyard is crying and screaming. The dogs outside are howling.

Why is Teacher Josephine laughing?

Yesterday, Teacher Josephine taught her English students a story about Arthur and his noisy neighbors. Arthur’s neighbors were dancing, vacuuming, playing the drums, listening to loud music, barking, and having a big argument. Arthur was very angry.

Teacher Josephine is laughing because Arthur has six noisy neighbors and she has only three. Arthur was angry, but Teacher Josephine is laughing. She can’t wait to tell her students this story.

13 December

Temporary Cats

I couldn’t forget the day I found Oodacha: her name means “Lucky” in Russian because she arrived in the hall outside my second apartment in Blagoveshchensk, the Russian Far East on December 13, 2002. It was a Friday. I wrote:

Someone knocked on the door but didn’t answer when I asked “Kto tam?” There, miserable and scared, in the far corner of the hall, was a small tiger cat. While I watched, she pushed the door to the elevator room open, then huddled in the tiny corner by the elevator.

She and Skaska, “Fairy Tale,” a polite Siamese abandoned the previous winter with her sister at the school where I taught, became friends, though, like a number of my friends and me, they had little in common but proximity.

What I had forgotten was that, a decade earlier to the day, a feral tailless tuxedo kitten I named Pica Milagrita, “Little Miraculous Magpie,” began keeping company with someone I was also keeping company with. I wrote:

So we have a kitty for a little while. His kitty, in that he has the last word, and so far, pays the bills. But we’re acting like giddy adoptive parents, perfect timing for this latest cycle of mourning for a child I’m trudging through. It helps. I’ve never been all that particular about species. Here we have the best of all possible worlds, a tiny being who won’t turn our lives upside down, but will keep us company, entertain us, give us focus for our nonspecific tenderness.

Three years and a winter later, he said he wanted to be friends. I figured that included giving me a picture of Pica, the only thing I asked for. It didn’t. Eighteen years later, I’m still trying to give up hope.

As for Skaska and Oodacha, when I returned late to Russia, other people I knew nothing about were living in my apartment. They thought my cats were a nuisance, and when I got there, they were both gone. At least I’d taken photos of them.

People laugh at the idea of temporary cats, but it seems to me it’s all temporary, every single thing.

4 December

No one has ever been able to force me to do anything, including give up on them.

2004

27 November

Days to forget

I was standing over his mother’s grave and his friend – who makes enemies unnecessary – took that opportunity to interrogate me about my own mother’s death, calling me a bad daughter because I didn’t remember the exact date. I said nothing. I was much too polite, making my usual excuses for people whose manners are inexcusable. Four years later, he wouldn’t get off so easy. Today, the seventeenth anniversary of my mother’s death – a date I remember nowadays, though I’d just as soon forget – I would address him in English, my native language, which he doesn’t understand, and pretends he isn’t sensitive about not understanding. It wouldn’t matter what I said – The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog? – but I might just tell him the truth, that I had resolved things with my mother before she died, and that will always be a significant difference between us.

I expect I’ll forget the date of this anniversary again. I don’t recall which day my grandmother died, or Boris was murdered. I know what time of year it was when those deaths took place: my grandmother in mud season, Boris in the full of summer. It was earlier in summer when Steve and Vallie ended their lives on consecutive days, later in summer when Linda and Ernie, also on consecutive days, succumbed to illnesses. Jessica and her family were murdered in false spring.

I have not yet forgotten the date my best friend died, but I hope to. I can imagine a decade from now, musing that it was winter - it had snowed just a few flakes the evening before - but it wouldn’t be winter for long.

25 November

I never did call home, whatever that is.

I’m temporarily annoyed that there is no space to leave a message, as opposed to my permanent annoyance at the crackly, barely intelligible greeting from Skipper’s Copy Shop, whatever that is, welcoming me to the garage-sale answering machine in the house filled with other people’s cast-offs that he’s annoyed I can’t seem to call home.

Small families, small homes

We’re a small family, my adoptive father’s long-time companion begins, then makes note of my smaller family. This is it, I reply with a sweeping gesture toward the small dining room and the stragglers still at the table after brunch. She is speaking of blood; I am speaking of history.

Two days later I’m visiting my second-oldest friend; we’ve known each other since we were 14. I’m telling her that this trip to the land of my origins seems to be gravitating around family, not my family of blood so much as my family of history, the people whose genetics I may not share, but who know not just who I am at the moment but the trajectory that landed me here. I think that history counts for more than blood, I muse aloud the way you can with the people who have already forgiven you anything. Her response is witty and wistful: I sure hope so.

Russians have a word, rodina, which I used to translate as “homeland” before that term began its unfortunate association with “security.” There are no other translations I’m willing to use, so everyone who has a conversation with me on this subject gets an easy word in a new language and an explanation that is mostly story:

I was not born in Vermont and neither were any of my ancestors, but from age seven to 27 I lived in seven communities not far from the western half of the state’s major north-south highway, immortalized on bumper stickers that read, “Pray for me; I drive Route 7.” It is the place I think of as rodina, the place I tell people about when they ask me where I come from. A few years ago when I told my Russian sweetheart that my rodina is very small, he replied that all of them are. A few days ago, when I spent an afternoon with my oldest friend - we’ve known each other since we were 11 - she talked about how well she remembers the geography of her hometown, Rutland, where I lived for a decade. I had never heard her say this, but I wasn’t surprised that she remembered not just McKinley, but McKinley Lane, where we used to ride our bicycles when adventure was something already tugging us to the outskirts.

Away from home, whatever that is

I’m forever claiming tiny little tracts: a seat in an airport, a corner of a coffee table, half a grapefruit. In the van on the way to Thanksgiving dinner, I realized that the foot on my armrest felt like an invasion.

He tells me what a great time he’s having with me gone, making delicious peanut butter cookies - they probably come not only from a sausage-like tube but from a surplus tube the refugee neighbors gave him because they couldn’t figure out what to do with it - in my absence. I don’t say a word. If there are any left when I return, I will decline politely. Maybe I won’t return at all.

I dared myself to speak a little Spanish in the line for the red-eye bus to Richmond, Virginia. There were three of us middle-aged women - strangers before we met in the bowels of Port Authority at gate 73 - gossiping and giggling, and I could tell that another woman in the queue wished she could join the conversation. “De donde es?” I asked her. She told me somewhere in Tennessee. I wanted to know her country of origin, but decided it was more important to know where she thought of herself as from. Then suddenly I was remembering all the languages in which I’ve been asked the same question. All the languages in which I’ve answered, “Where do you think?” All the guesses from Latvia to Costa Rica.

Provoking reality

In my dreams the same action endlessly repeated as I made away - I was going to write “ made my way” but I like this mistake with its fictitious echoes of escape - across a landscape wrecked by flood: a series of waist-deep depressions filled with muddy water, separated by brief spans of land. I trudged through each pool repeatedly telling myself, as I gazed toward the bank to my left with small trees and scrub growing right up to the water’s edge, that my route was safer. I was wearing waterproof clothing and don’t recall any intimate contact with the muddy sludge, but I couldn’t shirk my yearning for terra firma. I reminded myself that along the landlubber’s route I could puncture my garments on the undergrowth or erode the bank as I tried to scramble along it; I was not as well prepared for the terrain I preferred as I was for the terrain I chose.

That same day, back in waking life, a friend called to tell me there’s a disaster up towards Alleghany, Oregon - mud a foot thick - in case I was thinking of visiting.

Rock paper scissors

In the archives of my experiments, I’ve come across two rocks wrapped in paper. The first would be a passable skipping stone in a very small, still pool. I can’t tell what kind of paper I wrapped it in way back when; it’s brittle now, yellowed with the years, gnawed. Blue thread holds the paper in place, originally wound tight like an eight-pointed star, slack now. It must have been the prototype, because the other example is a significant improvement. The second rock is larger, rounder, but with a flat bottom. Wrapped with transparent iridescent paper, maybe more than one layer, it’s tied with a gold ribbon, the ends of which are curled. It probably looks the same today as it did when I finished it long enough ago to have forgotten just when that was. Back when I was making paper, I wondered about wrapping rocks in newly-made paper before it dried, but there’s no evidence I ever followed through.

I still pick up a lot of rocks. Rock paper scissors would be a good name for a rock-wrapping business, especially an international one. When I suggested using this method of decision-making in an English-Spanish language exchange group, the Spanish speakers knew it as Piedra papel tijeras. I wonder how many other cultures resolve their minor disputes this way.

Green kin

I was craving a particularly robust example of a succulent known as lithops or living rock at a garden store in Hadley, Massachusetts the other day, but I was a long way from home - whatever that is now that I’m living in 20 countries in 20 years - and I didn’t know if it would clear airport security. (It might be worth the couple of dollars the plant cost to find out. You can carry on lobsters, after all; I’ve listened to the scritch scritch scritch of their claws against cardboard on more than one airplane.)

I started thinking of all the plants I have loved and lost over the years, most recently the mango, lemon, and cashew trees in the yard of my house in Nicaragua, as well as the tiny epiphyte given to me by a park ranger on Mombacho Volcano because he couldn’t remember the word for it, and the English, which I knew, turned out to be similar to the Spanish epifita.

A reverse chronology: Before I left St. Johns, Oregon for Nicaragua, I asked a friend to take care of an orchid and a lucky bamboo and another plant with waxy green and yellow striped leaves whose name I didn’t know but eventually saw growing wild in the tropics. There were complications.

A probable Euphorbia - its Russian name made reference to the milky sap which is a common feature of this genus - in Blagoveshchensk, Russia, not to mention the entire vegetable garden on the balcony of my 5^th storey apartment disappeared along with my two cats and half of my belongings in mysterious circumstances.

I never knew what happened to the bonsai larch I left in the care of the people who rented my Brooklyn bungalow while I got to know the Russian Far East.

I don’t recall the fate the palm tree I used to sit under in the northeast corner of my Spanish-mission apartment in Coos Bay, Oregon or the Christmas cactus that bloomed every election day for a decade on various windowsills of the wet Pacific Northwest.

I sometimes even wonder about the purple passion plant I had when I was a querulous teenager in Rutland, Vermont. It’s possible that my green kin are all still thriving in someone else’s care; I wish them well, wherever they ended up. Their roots are the only ones I seem to have.

The end

Strange things in me surface in the presence of reminders of mortality. This year it’s Sammy, my second-oldest friend’s 13-year-old cocker spaniel, who’s circling the drain. (My friend would never say that, though she’d laugh at it, and it wouldn’t be one of those polite, nervous laughs, either.) The dog is blind and deaf and even smells of decomposition - a dinner or two with Sammy under my chair must have cut my time in Purgatory by half - but I can’t help but feel moved when I find her asleep with her feet in my shoes. (I also can’t help sliding them out of her reach once she has relinquished them.) Sammy reminds me that I am not nor will I ever be in Mother Teresa’s league. My friend, on the other hand, cleans up the results of Sammy’s incontinence on a fairly regular basis. As long as the dog gets such a kick out of leftover turkey, she points out, Sammy is still enjoying her life. Hope they treat me so well, I think but don’t quite have the nerve to say.