Animal You're Most Like?

I finally figured it out:  I'm a hermit crab.  Met the little buggars walking to the beaches of St. John.  I don't know what sets off their sensors -- perhaps changes in air pressure as you prepare to step on them?  They retract into their shells, and like infants, think themselves disappeared.  As you can imagine, it hasn't been working all that well for me either.

My vow this year is to do less.  That translates into less studying (but more learning), less eating (period), less worrying and less carrying the same old baggage in the same old ways.  Some days are different; others a repeat of the past.  No need to catastrophize, though, I must try again.

So, yesterday, in the spirit of Doing Things Differently I went to a workshop organized by New Haven's Just Moves and I danced.  You could say it was dancing for social justice, which doesn't make any sense if you haven't done it yet, but the longer I've lived here during a time where there has been so much violent death, the more the work of Elijah Anderson and others I've read, the longer I've been conversation with people who classify disfiguring and murderous violence as a public health emergency and a human-made disaster, the more I am convinced that smart policing alone is only part of the solution.  Part of the solution comes from the heart (connectedness) and the belly (having a primal hunger satisfied in communion with others).

So, here I am a self-professed human crab who cooks two times a year (if pressed).  This should be an interesting experiment.  to be continued ...

Ungrateful Wretch That I Am

It has been more than 5 weeks since I last wrote anything about anything or anybody here.  Not like there has been a shortage of news, horror, privation, misery and human comedy of late.  Not in the world; not in this house.  But, the truth is that depression often gets the upper hand with me and I've long since outgrown the need to show the bloody stump.  So, I will talk around it's margins with the expectation (and hope) that it will all make sense.

Firstly, I was on vacation for about 2 weeks in January.  Vacation is still an alien concept to me -- my parents were too poor and disharmonious to take any real ones with 4 kids (and I don't count the 20+ hours driving to South Carolina every 4 years avoiding the segregated diners and peeing on the side of the road as a vacation) and I'm from the mid-west and what's the point of livin' if you ain't workin'?  On the other hand, my husband, the continental, thinks it's in the American Constitution that each and every one of us should have no less that 5 consecutive weeks off every year (and twice on Sunday).  So we have had this strange dance for years where you have to pry my cold dead hands off the keyboard and he would, if it didn't have the taint of slavery, truss me on top of the truck and drive towards warm weather.  The latest outcome was a trip that we took with Fred to St. John, of the US Virgin Islands.

I lied a bit.  I left messages that I was out of the country, if only so as not to rack up a $500 cell phone bill from all the roaming charges, but St. John is technically part of the US, a poor relation who gets less attention than does Puerto Rico.  They take US dollars and put up with mainland tourists, their life's blood.

We went there because of the snorkeling; it is considered to be one of the premiere places on the planet, and they were not disappointed.  I, who hardly bathes, was the third wheel to 2 men who stayed in the water for hours swimming with barracudas, sharks, stingrays, jellyfish, and all other manner of spotted and benign life.  I snorkeled for about 60 seconds and when I reached the moment where I couldn't touch the bottom I had me a good ol' panic attack and promptly tried to separate Fred's right arm from his shoulder.  That's enough of that, and I spent the rest of my days sunbathing and reading David Balducci novels.

This is my second snorkeling vacation, and for me it has the character of a teetotaler going on a wine-tasting junket in the south of France.  Other than the location, what really is the point?  So much of what makes being in St. John worth it is in the water, a place I spent little time in.  Left on shore to my own devices I spent time watching people watch us.  For, you see, the 3 of us are like the opening line to a profane, but very funny joke:  A nigger, a chink and a paddy walk into a bar ...  We are so unlike the usual recreational colonialists who go there because tourist = rich white American on St. John, that, especially with the absence of any identifying jewelry, no one could figure out what our relations were.  It was obvious we weren't swingers nor siblings.  But, it was ambiguous if any of us were married and, perverse bitch that I can be, I wasn't going to make it any easier for anybody to figure out.  (I'm reminded of that weight loss pyramid scheme where the slogan was Lose weight how?  Ask me now!!!!!)

As these things go, being the black one of the trio and a woman to boot, people will say things to me that they wouldn't dare say to 2 men who could jackhammer them into the ground with one hand tied behind their backs.  The best of the worst was from the dreadlocked fireman.  Each day we drove down from our vacation villa passing the firehouse on the way to the beach, and waved a greeting to these guys who have the easiest and best job on a land mass completely surrounded by water.  Each day they acknowledged us.  One evening in the car with Fred (the chink) on our way to see 2 friends who coincidentally were vacationing at the same time and spent most of their days laid up with the flu and ear infections, the fireman says to me:  I'm watching you.  I say to Fred, I want to stop there when we go back.  But, the evening was long and although I'd planned to get all passive resistance and gandhian with Mr. Race Man, I just let it go.

What was unsaid and unspoken between the fireman and I can be traced back to the long history of African bondage, colonialism, slave rebellion, class privilege (for St. John et al. used to be one of the playgrounds of the Rockefellers and their ilk), and supplicant status that is the Virgin lslands.  He and I will never have that conversation.  Like the Louisiana that I knew in the late 1970's, St. John is another place on earth that won't see me again.