Wanted: an Ideal Place to Live and a Home

Kent and I, with Fyo, and our two duffel bags, two backpacks and my black rolling carry on suitcase were walking to the subway station to go to the airport. It was our last walk through Singapore where we had lived for six months, and we were going to Bali for our last two and half weeks abroad. With Singapore and Bali now under our belts, we - as a couple-  have lived in six cities and three countries in six years.

            As we waited to cross a street, Kent turned to me and asked, “Do you miss any of the places we’ve lived?”

            I said, “I miss the snow in Denver. I miss full moon nights where fresh snow has fallen, and the moon reflects in that smooth surface of freshly fallen snow and the sky is that gorgeously illuminated navy night. And I miss standing in our old kitchen watching the snow fall while making my morning coffee.I miss our friends in Denver and LA.”

            Kent agreed with these. We kept on with our lists. I don’t miss anything about living in Las Vegas. Boulder was nice, but I don’t miss anything about living there either. I miss the light in Portland and Seattle, but especially Portland in the fall. I miss year round farmer’s markets in Los Angeles and the museums. Denver, I think, has the best weather of any place we’ve lived. But between the two of us, there wasn’t a place that we have lived, that we miss enough to want to go back to. Which is why, we are currently in search of a home.

             We want it to be hip, progressive, international. We want it to have seasons and farmers markets. We want a garden and places we can go on bike rides. In Europe, we think our home would be Amsterdam. In the states, we think it will be San Francisco, but it could also be Brooklyn.

            In September, we land in the states in Los Angeles – where we lived last stateside – and will spend a couple weeks there, and then we go to Portland. The plan at the moment is to stay in Portland until the end of the year, and then we think we’ll go to San Francisco. But we don’t know.

            Several people when they hear of our going back to the states, they ask us where home is. Kent and I shrug. “We don’t have one.” We say.

            “How exciting!” they usually say. Yes, it is. But this seems the kind of thing that tends to be more exciting when it is in somebody else’s life. At the moment, I look into the future and see several more months of living out of suitcases and transition after transition after transition. Or of getting to Portland and spending the time that you do to settle in, finding a nursery school for Fyo or babysitters (we have loads of family for actual babysitting; it’s the day to day so we can get some work done babysitting we’ll be figuring out), getting library cards and so on. It’s been over ten years since I last lived in Portland. There’s a lot of the city I have to get to know again.

            And it is exciting. I realize again and again that the notion of having a “home” is something we tend to take for granted. Most people simply settle where they were raised or where they went to school. A few move for a job and then settle, and a few others do like we are doing: spreading the map out before us on the table and trying to figure where we want to go as well as figure out the qualities we want in the city where we live.

            We do occasionally still have to explain our selves to our friends in Bali about why Bali is not the place to be our home. Yesterday, my friend Ginny looked at me and shook her head, “You guys are so funny. We come here and stay for the luxury.” It’s true; in Bali you can have a higher quality of life – especially with kids -  for less.

            But it’s not it for us. We decided cheap child care is not reason enough to make a place home.

            So we’re looking, and while there are some adjustment stressors, we do feel fortunate enough to have the opportunity to really figure out where we want to live and what kind of lives we want to create for us and for Fyo. It’s rare, we’re realizing, that while we have met a lot of people like us, who have taken time outs of their lives to reevaluate the choices they’ve made in terms of home and career, most people don’t. And we don’t want that. Just because we want to settle down for a bit (Kent doesn’t settle for long) doesn’t mean we need to settle. Now as we make our lists of the kinds of qualities we want in our potential city, we give into our inner Polyannas and believe that our ideal place exists - or that it exists and we can have the kind of life we want there. 

      We have our dissenters. The ones who hear San Francisco, and comment about how expensive it is. Or the cost of child care or of schools. Blah blah blah. I say. Other people make it work. Other people have what they want, so surely we can too, right? That can't be too Polyanna, can it? To believe that we can have what we want? 

           

Patriotic Surprise

I am not America's proudest citizen. While I admire the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence for their eloquence, their rhetoric, and their ideas, I don't understand patriotism. It seems dangerously close to nationalism to me. Admittedly, there are some perks to being an American, and especially, I have been discovering over and over again the last year, to being born white and in the middle class of America. 
         Generally, my issues with being an American stem from traveling with other Americans. I discovered while living in France in the nineties that the French are right to be rude to us. We deserve it. When Americans travel, they're big - either their actual physical size or because of all the luggage and crap they carry with them. When the French travel, they keep their entire person and their luggage contained to the foot width of the seat they are traveling in. Americans, instead, act like they own the whole train, and treat all neighboring seats as their own: the one across for their feet, the ones next to them for their numerous bags. 
         It's a negative psychological side effect from being raised with the notion of manifest destiny. 
         And yes, I'm grossly over generalizing. 
        Kind of. Not so much that generally when I travel, I wish for a Canadian Maple Leaf patch to attach to all my luggage, like the Canadians do - so that people don't assume they are American. 
          This doesn't even begin to get into the atrocities of the first decade of this century when it was a terrible time to be American. Or that when Kent and I traveled to Africa in 2005, a near homeless man in Dakar told us how sorry he was about President Bush and how he may be poor, black and in Africa, but he considered himself better off than anyone living under Bush. Ouch. 
           Thanks to Obama, I am relieved that I can now travel and not be embarrassed by my passport, yet I am still occasionally embarrassed by fellow Americans. I still have moments when I'm in a cafe, and there, inevitably, is an American, wearing bright red, and loudly asking the waiter if he knows how to perform functions on her computer. Or a rather large woman yells across the restaurant for the waiter. I just want to crawl under the table.
         But I don't. Instead, I tell Kent, dear God, Americans, the obesity, the entitlement, the arrogance. Sometimes I don't know if I can take it. 
         Or during our last Visa run to Singapore, we stayed in a place with American cable. We were watching the travel channel. Anthony Bourdain sat in a Chicago pizzeria, with a piece of pizza the size of a casserole in front of him. He asked his host, who on earth eats a piece of pizza this size? The camera panned the room; it was entirely full of people who fit into the increasing percentage of America's obese. I had never seen so many big people in one place.
         Kent, I said, we can't go back there. 

         So I found myself rather surprised the other night, when a woman from Europe started loudly making fun of America's obese. I felt like I did as a child on the playground and some one else started picking on my little sister, like it's okay for me to make fun of America's bad traits, but who the hell do you think you are? That's my country. But I didn't say anything. I was speechless, as much by my surprised response to her accusations as by her, well, whatever that is. Also, I knew I couldn't say anything without coming across as a total and complete bitch. Tempting as it was to point out that I'm American. I'm a size 2, and what size is she again? No, nothing good would come of it. 

But it is a conundrum, obesity in general, as well as America's increasing rate and the UK's, Australia's is on the rise too. And eating crap is not unique to Americans. Though I do suspect we are the ones who started it. When I lived in Singapore, I so rarely saw a woman over a size 6, that if I did, my neck cracked because I turned my head so fast. They stand out there. At least if they’re Asian or Singaporean. Whereas, for white women – from the US, UK or Australia – a size 6 was the norm, or even on the smaller side.
Yet, despite claims at home that America no longer exports products, when you walk into any grocery store in Singapore – or Indonesia, Cambodia, or Thailand – you can find all the American junk food you’ve never wanted at home. You can be in a remote village in Cambodia and still have sour cream and chives flavored Pringles potato chips. Or Coco-cola. Or Oreos.  I guess obesity was an idea America thought worth exporting.
            Or not. As I could not walk into a store in Singapore without having a stranger offer my infant – then toddler – son candy. I understand now why the rest of the world has bad teeth. It’s not just Americans who are addicted to sugar. Even the people I’ve met traveling who have claimed to be grossed out by the increasingly staggering obesity, I’ve also seen desperate for Oreos and cherry flavored Coke.  However, while Asia suffers from other health issues that result from nutritional deficiencies, they remain thin. Kent and I wondered often how is it that one group of people on the planet end up so much bigger than another? Or do white people just have bad metabolisms? Except the French are white and their women are thin. There goes that theory.
            Anyway, America’s fat and getting fatter, and while we can pat ourselves on the back for inspiring Australia and the UK to follow suit, we’re still the biggest ones in the class, and the fat kids always get made fun of – even if they act like bullies from time to time.
            So while I kind of resented said European lady poking fun at the uglier side of America, as if we were the only ones who had health issues (Kent muttered, "Can't think of the last time I saw someone from England glowing with health." But I pointed out Gwyneth Paltrow - but she's kind of a hybrid, but Richard Branson glows.) I have to admit that it can be hard to be proud of being from a country where fat is the first thing they think of when they see your flag. On the other hand, I remember that when Obama won the 2008 election, there were celebrations all over the world, yet when the UK got a new prime minister in the form of David Cameron, half of its own citizens didn’t even notice. Not that I want to get into a tit for tat kind of contest. I just realized that there is something kind of cool about being part of an election and a country that literally impacts the entire world. When companies in Asia want credibility, they stamp “Meets US standards” on their products. Or that while Americans may be obese, other countries still envy our dentistry.  I remember too, that I talked to a man in Cambodia who desperately wanted to go to the US for the sake of his daughters, that if they stayed in Siam Reap, they had few options for their futures, but if they went to America, they could have a college education – even if it was at a community college. And finally, Kent and I pulled into our house, and saw that our gardener had an Obama sticker on the back of his motorbike. I decided that was pretty cool. 

On Boredom

It is a terrible thing to be bored, if only because there is so much to do in life. Plus, when you're bored, you can't help but think of those smart alec-y catty things your mother said to you when as a child, you announced you were bored - that being bored is a personal problem, or that you were just bored because you lacked creativity, and surely you could find something to do if you went outside (and quit bothering your mother) or that only boring people were bored.
          (It's funny to me that mothers say such things then wonder why their children grow up to be smart alec-y and catty.)
         
           Nonetheless, over the weekend, we were tying to figure out what to do, and we realized we were bored, and that we were bored with Bali. Not that Bali isn't nice; all of it is beautiful, and we've seen a lot of it. We've seen temple after temple after temple, we've seen the museums - all of them - in Ubud, we've hiked Mt. Batur and walked through the Monkey Forest, we've done the walks through the rice fields. I've crossed streams by hanging from a tree with my toddler strapped to my back,  we've downhill cycled,  and I've cycled up hill. We've driven to the coast to see a temple. We drove to the opposite coast to see another temple. We've visited neighboring islands and gone snorkeling. We've seen Barong dance, Kecka Fire dance, and Balinese dance lessons; we've witnessed Cremation Ceremonies, and good luck ceremonies, seen the cremation processions, Galangan processions,  and the processions where we have no idea why people are proceeding.

        So we did what you do when you're bored; we decided to see what our friends were doing and if it was something that would entertain us as well. They were thinking of seeing another temple. I told Kent that with all the temples, I felt like a Religious Art History student in Rome, where if I saw another painting of Jesus, I would nail myself to the cross. But Kent replied, "We're bored, so any opportunity to buy a sarong and a Bintang tank top is exciting!"
         They responded that they were now unsure of the temple plan. Kent told them that we were so bored, we'd go to the petrol station with them. He suggested that we could all sneak into the Monkey Forest and count the fat tourists wearing too small shorts.
 
       We discussed that our main issue is that we have a toddler, that if we didn't have a toddler, essentially this limbo time of being in Bali until our departure date would be like a Balinese writer's colony where we would just write and read and write. On Friday, we ran into a friend of ours who is moving back to Scotland with her husband and five year old daughter. With her, we talked about the things we're looking forward to getting back to, the things you can do with your child in a city. I especially miss taking my son to free story hour at the public library, or puppet shows or other stage productions at the Children's Museum, or having picnics at jazz in the park, or exhibits at the science museum where my son could bang on other people's property.

        I do think some degree of boredom is good in life, that generally in transitions from one project or phase to another, it can be helpful to allow yourself to get bored, that after boredom comes the stage where you realize what you miss, or what you really want to do with your time.

       With our boredom, we realized that while Bali is beautiful, we are ready to go home. We don't have a home, but thanks to our time in Bali, we have realized that Bali or the tropics are not it. So really, it's not so much that we're bored; we're just ready to continue our search for the perfect place.

The Battle Between the Gecko and the Cat

The gecko lost. We found the carnage all over the living room one morning. It is true: geckos lose their tails when scared. Apparently, at times, they also lose their heads, or the cat left the head as a warning to all the other geckos in the house. Geckos, we also learned, do not close their eyes upon dying. They stay open and beady. We’re assuming the battle was with a cat, though we don’t actually own one. The neighbors down the way do, actually I think they own two. I’m not sure, but I’ve found two cats in our house before when I come down in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.

            Kent volunteered to clean up the battle remains (good thing, because I would have just left them there and avoided the room all together until the cleaning lady came), while I distracted our son, Fyo. Fyo asked to watch a movie. We had started a video yesterday, one that Kent found at the de Young museum in San Francisco called The Way Things Go. Essentially it is a video of chain reactions using household items (ladders, tires, buckets, tea kettles, water, fire) and chemical reactions. Despite the lack of soundtrack, Fyo finds the video absorbing, as he watches one thing impact or set off another. The film is 30 minutes of pendulums knocking over glasses that set fire to plywood ramps that set off a tea kettle and so on. It's the kind of thing that inspires Kent about the possibility of home school and the kinds of things he could do with Fyo if we had a garage (or spare warehouse).

            After we finished the morning’s viewing, I suggested we get dressed. I let Fyo pick out his clothes – actually, there’s not much option these days, either he wears what he wants or he doesn’t wear anything and I’m not one for power struggles. I don’t see the point in demanding him to wear what I want him to, except he often picks out his 100% polyester Dr. Seuss swim shirt (I surrender to this, but I worry that he gets hot). To go with his Dr. Seuss shirt, he also picked out his Power ranger underpants. Shorts were extraneous this particular morning.

             Kent offered to take Fyo for a walk, while I made breakfast. Since having a child, I think it is lovely to occasionally make breakfast by myself.

            Kent and Fyo were gone a long time. I had time to make breakfast and write in my journal. I didn’t think they could have gone that far, as Kent was in his plaid pajamas still, and Fyo in his swim shirt, Power Ranger underpants and his orange crocs.

            The magnificently dressed duo finally returned. Kent, it turns out, had taken him on a short motorbike ride Balinese style. Generally, on the motorbike, Fyo is strapped to Kent’s back in his ergo carrier, but the Balinese, with kids Fyo’s age will often let them sit on their laps or let the kids stand between the driver’s legs at the handlebars of the motorbike. Fyo rode standing – in his Dr. Seuss swim shirt, Power Ranger underpants, orange crocs and now brown helmet – at the handlebars. Kent meant to just take him around the neighborhood, up the road to the nesting place of the herons. He thought he would be able to turn around at the end of the road. He couldn’t. The road took him into the middle of Ubud, past the supermarket and up the main road towards home, all the while driving at parade pace with our magnificently dressed toddler honking the horn and singing. I said they looked like something out of Richard Scarry’s Car and Trucks and Things that Go.

In the world of things that go

            The three of us were on the motorbike, on a narrow little path that bordered a rice paddy. Kent cut it kind of close and at one point, sandwiched my right foot under another bike’s tailpipe. Some people, I hear, can contain themselves in vast amounts of pain. It turn out that I am not one of them. At first, I thought he broke my toes. I thought at the end of the month we are supposed to trek in Lombak and there is not enough gin in Bali to have me trek a mountain with a broken foot. I realized, however, that since I could walk, that he probably didn’t. Really, it’s just bruised. Nicely. It’s nicely bruised.

            Poor Kent felt so bad he bought me two kinds of chocolate at the grocery store.

In the world of the battle of the gecko and the cat

            Since the battle of the gecko and the cat, and finding gecko carnage spread across the living room, there has also been a drowning of a rat in the rice paddy. We see it when we drive or walk down the path to our house, the rat, belly up, paws in position ready to dog paddle before it realized it didn’t know how.It is one of those things that you don't want to look at, but can't really help looking anyway.

            Yesterday, we came home and found a small – small enough to be mistaken for a snake – eel in a plastic water bottle on our porch. We think it was dead but this we never confirmed. Apparently, Fyo was playing with the neighbor kids, Wayan and Kadek. Fyo saw the eel in the rice paddy, and Kadek got it for him. Generous fellow. We never learned who put it the water bottle for preservation.

           

In the world of cremation ceremonies and days of the dead

            Kent is beginning to wonder about all the dead animals that have showed up around our house. He wonders if it is symbolic of something or a forewarning of something - maybe, the death of one phase, so that another can begin. Our time in Bali is coming to a close, and we’ve been talking about how it will be good to get back to the states, as well as the things we look forward to doing there (mainly stopping by Trader Joe’s, buying all the truffle cheese that we can get our hands on, a nice bottle of wine, and cartons of half & half for our coffee). I wonder if all the dead animals are meant to give us pause, to have us stop and look where we are, to be present as they say in yoga or meditation.

            Or it doesn’t mean anything, except a gecko met its end in our living room, a rat drowned, and the neighbor kid shoved an eel in a bottle as an offering of friendship.

Adventures in Leaving

 When you move a lot, you develop some rituals in preparing your departure from a place. One of ours is to make a list of all the things we want to see in a place, and then cram all of them in a short period. This morning's activity was the Klungkung market aka Ikat heaven. I can't say I know much about textiles, but nonetheless, I would not be able to forgive myself if I left this part of the planet without some Ikat in my possession. I bought two pieces. I'm having them made into dresses.
            The Klungkung market is notoriously cheaper than the main market in Ubud, but they have a smaller variety of inventory, mostly, it's fabric, the masks like you see below, a very few antiques, and fruits, vegetables, and odd things you find in the local markets.
         

 There was just so much fabric. Am still kicking myself that I didn't bring my designer sister here when she visited.

 Of course, this is the difficulty in not having a home to actually go back to - it's not like we have  rooms mid-process in decorating to pick out fabric for throw pillows or duvet covers etc. I do have an aunt who would pick out one piece and decorate her entire house around it, but we're more the types to round up things, and then curate it all once we find a place.
          But today, inadvertently, ended up about being about my potential wardrobe.

Cremation Season

Shortly after we moved into our house, we learned from our gardener, Wayan, and housecleaner, Nyoman that our village, Bentuyung, was preparing for their Cremation Ceremonies. We would learn more about the cremation ceremonies in the weeks to come, as Wayan and Nyoman had to take occasional days off to help with the preparations. Cremations ceremonies take place once every five years, they are, as we would discover,  a big deal.

           

 In the weeks to come, we watched the progress of the preparations, without really knowing what we were watching them build or prepare for. Women put together stacks and stacks of offerings. Men built platforms for offerings, and life size piñata like horse and bulls covered in brown fabric, with gold horns and other accents. The faces of the horses and bulls have grotesque exaggerated features like many of the traditional Balinese masks, large red lips and white teeth, flared nostrils, and their mouths shaped into a seemingly happy but devilish kind of grin.

            Our gardener, Wayan, informed us, that cremation and ceremonies are expensive, so they used to exhume the bodies and cremate them all at once in a big ceremony. But now they just do a symbolic cremation, because they were having a problem with witches in the village stealing bones and pieces of hair for the evil spells they cast on people.

           

            The Cremation Ceremonies takes place over several days, but Wayan invited us to the main day, where they would parade the horses and bulls down the main road into the sacred site around the Banyan tree. My husband and I, dressed in our sarongs, along with our toddler son, walked up to the road for the festivities moments before the parade started. The street was closed to outside traffic and full of families all dressed up in traditional sarongs and sashes. We saw Wayan playing the cymbals of the gamalan along with other men of the village, while our Nyoman’s husband, Ketut, helped direct crowds but stopped to say hello to Fyo. 

            As the music of the gamalan got louder and more intense, twenty men, acting as pall bearers of the life size horse piñata came charging down the street. The men stop and raise the horse up and down, then continue on as another twenty men come down the street with the bull. They stop with the bull and raise and lower it as if it was getting ready to charge. The intensity of emotion, sight and sound surprise me; without knowing why, I discover I am crying. 

            Later, we watched the families of the village load the animals with offerings of food, clothes, sarongs, and sheets, things you would find in a hope chest of an older generation. When the animals were full, they light each one on fire, burning the animals and all the offerings inside. The spirits then know to follow the smoke onto the next world. 

            The next day, we drove by the grounds where they burned the offerings, and we see black piles of ash still smoldering. For the first time in weeks, driving through the village, we saw no people. Some had taken a portion of the ashes to the beach, some had taken another portion to the mother temple, while others took some of the ashes home.

            Our understanding of the whole process remains kind of cryptic. Wayan's English is pretty good, but not good enough to explain all the cultural beliefs. We don’t quite know why the cremation ceremonies are only once every five years, nor what they do immediately after an individual dies.

         Not long after the Cremation Ceremony we were driving back from the beach at Candidasa, and we passed a smaller family procession, with six men carrying a body fully wrapped in batik printed sarongs. The image stuck in my mind the entire way home.

Talking to my friend Ginny, she tells me how her pembantu’s (aka nanny) father died and they were invited to his individual cremation ceremony. She described how the entire family washed his body, then dressed him and wrapped him in sarongs, and finally carried him in a procession to the sacred site in the village, where they cremated him in full view of everyone.  Ginny said, as I could only imagine, it was a bit intense. The body begins covered, but as the fire burns, it burns the cotton first, so you do actually witness the cremation of the body. 

            Ginny points out that in the West, we keep birth and death hidden. She thinks doing so messes with our emotional process of it.

I don’t doubt this and I’ve heard this argument before. But now, when Ginny says it, I think of my “process” and the death of my step-dad, Mike, who died suddenly of a heart attack over a year ago. Even though I was home within 24 hours of his dying, and even though I helped my mother make the funeral arrangements with the funeral home, and even though I saw Mike’s ashes, I never saw him dead. I’ve seen other relatives dead, and given that they look like they’re sleeping, but like they’re cold, I don’t know that it helps me grasp that they are dead. For me, birth and death remain a mundane yet surreal abstraction, as my head struggles to wrap itself around the notion that someone is there one moment, and not the next. (Or in the case of the birth of my son, not there, then there) Mostly, I reside in the place of denial. I haven’t ventured into any other stage of grief. It seems to me, that Mike is just on vacation, and that when I go home in September, he could just walk in the door, back from the dog walk that he started when he had his heart attack.

          

Check it out!

I am posting weekly at Positively Parenting and they have uploaded my first post! I even have a head shot (courtesy of Kent). I feel a little like the Oregonian columnists I admired as a teenager...